Living in the South (USA)

Here are a couple of camera-phone shots I took this week. I’m super-tired of the quality standards around here. The other day I heard a couple of students complaining about how much they hate the smart girl in their math class—they hate her solely because she’s smart—which pretty much sums it up. Willful ignorance, related to superstitious religion, I believe.

This is a bank ATM, located next to a metal post designed to crunch your car (it did mine back in 1996). It looks this way year after year after year...

Life is complicated.

Wow! When my friend Randy Mack heard I was having trouble living in my house because of environmental sensitivities, he  loaned me a really cool tent. It’s called an “Olympic Village” and is 12 x 16 feet! My actual house is only 20 x 20!

This "Olympic Village" backs right up to the porch of my cabin.

My neighbor Rick and I erected the tent on the only flat spot in my yard, exercising brain cells we hadn’t said hello to since taking the SATs back in the 70s. (”Somehow these 7 “K” poles connect to these 5 “G” thingies….”)

I am super-pleased with the results. Doesn’t this look pleasant, lying on the inflated bed reading a book, as the fresh breeze wafts through? I’ll let you know what happens when it rains….

Fresh air and no bugs!

Presto!

The fairy on our wall has pointed her wand and manifested a cookstove. I had gotten rid of my stove last fall, because I didn’t have room for both a cookstove and a woodstove—and I chose to attempt to be warm, and just use a toaster oven and hotplate for cooking. But I ended up getting rid of the woodstove too this spring, since I couldn’t get satisfactory heat with it. And now a free cookstove I had called about months ago, and given up on, actually manifested today.

My neighbor suggested he could move the counter that’s currently under my stairs, to be next to the stove. That would be superb! Having a counter under an open stairway makes it too dirty to use for food preparation. We’ll see if the change happens. Meanwhile, I’m not sure the tub of potential plants, which I started in order to deal with the roof leak, wants to live next to a hot stove. I’m thinking what to do.

My bug excitement du jour: I was getting ready to wash dishes, clearing out the sink drainplug, when I felt something weird against my hand. Ah, it’s a centipede. A blue one! (We have blue crawdads here, too.) Here’s a video of the little guy/girl. I eventually got him/her to crawl onto a towel and took him/her outside. (Like I don’t have anything better to do.) You can see my centipede at:

Blue Centipede in My Sink

I didn’t have time to work on the house yesterday, aside from standard damage control, but I took a few minutes to give Molly’s wall angel some horns and a tail. It’s like a sand painting. Enjoy it and then transform it.

I arrived home this morning to find this sign (from my daughter) on my door:

I have a lot of holes in my house, and I live in the woods, and things crawl into my house all the time. I’m trying to fix it; see “Fixing My House” category in this blog.

But this wasn’t a tarantula. I think it was a wolf spider. They’re big babies. It’s sad to see how scared they get when you try to capture them. I’ve had big scary spiders just keel over and die when I was trying to help them get the hell out of my house. They have kind of cute little faces. But I do not like having spiders in my house. I want it to stop!

This guy/girl finally let me trap him/her in a bowl with a plate on top, and take him/her outside, up high away from the chickens. Once he/she was outside, he/she was like, What? I’m not dead? I’m outside? Everything’s cool? Weird! I could feel the happiness perking up from the spider. It’s what my friend Stephen calls “getting your donkey back”—from an old folk tale where some guy’s miserable, complaining all the time. Then someone steals the guy’s donkey and he becomes even more miserable. Then the thief brings the donkey back, and now the guy is super-happy!

I always think it must be like an alien abduction for the creature when we scoop him up and relocate him. Terrifying, loss of control and understanding, fear for one’s life, excess of novelty, etc. And then you end up miles from where you started, with your clothes on backwards.

Relief of the goddess Kububa, holding a pomegranate in her right hand and a mirror in her left hand; orthostat relief from Herald's wall, Carchemish ; 850-750 BC; Late Hittite style under Aramaean influence. Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, Ankara, Turkey

The Sumerian King List purports to list all the rulers of Sumer—the “Cradle of Civilization”—going back 400,000 years. That’s a really really long time. In fact, scientists generally agree that humans are maybe 160,000 years old.

And yet there’s also general agreement that the King List is historically accurate—except for the parts that predate what we know of history. Those are classified as myth. For instance, the King List begins thus:

“After the kingship descended from heaven … Alulim became king; he ruled for 28,800 years.”

Scientists have two problems with that statement:

1. Unlike the Sumerians, they don’t believe that kings came down from “heaven.”
2. They’re skeptical that Alulim ruled for 28,800 years.

And then it doesn’t help that Alulim’s successor, Alalngar, ruled for 36,000 years. Anyway, this kind of thing went on for a long time, if you can believe the King List. You can see the list here if you like.

And in all that time, in 400,000 years of Sumerian history, there is  only one known female ruler—so you know she had to kick ass. Her name was Kubaba, or Kug-Bau, “the woman tavern-keeper, who made firm the foundations of Kiš.” Yep, that’s right; she was a tavern-keeper. And she overthrew a nasty tyrant to bring peace and prosperity to the land. This was back around 2500 BC. The King List says she ruled for 100 years.

Her son Puzur-Suen ruled for 25 years, and his son Ur-Zababa (great name!) ruled for 400 years. Supposedly, Ur-Zababa lived to regret choosing as his cupbearer the guy destined to become Sargon the Mighty, but that’s another story. (A cupbearer, by the way, is a high-ranking, highly trusted official in a royal court, whose duty was to serve the drinks.)

I’ll raise my glass to Kubaba, the only queen in 400,000 years of kings.

Is this cute or what? Its builders call it a “hipitat” (as in “hip habitat”). It’s only one of the cool things I discovered a couple of days ago when I dropped my kids off for their summer jobs at the Farm Ecovillage Training Center near Summertown, Tennessee. I took a quick half hour to look around the grounds and was super-inspired by what I saw. There was way more cool stuff than I have room to put here, so you can click to see more photos if you like.

According to director Albert Bates, the Ecovillage Training Center (ETC) is a “whole-systems immersion experience of ecovillage living, together with classes of instruction, access to information, tools and resources, and on-site and off-site consulting and outreach experiences.”

Not sure what an ecovillage is? The ETC website explains: “An ecovillage is only different from a traditional village in its ability to be sustained indefinitely into the future. In all other respects, it may have all of the features people in the industrial world have come to expect, like electric appliances, refrigeration, and videogames.” And indeed, the ETC is a pretty comfortable place.

I especially enjoyed seeing the Green Dragon, a gigantic cob meeting hall reminiscent of Tolkien.

Yes, it’s made out of cob, but no, not corn cobs. “Cob” is clay and sand and straw mixed together with water and kneaded into “loaves” that are piled up to make a house or bench or oven or whatever. The super-cool thing is that you can basically sculpt your house, making rounded walls, built-in shelves and benches, arched doorways, etc. Some years ago I edited a great book on cob construction, called The Hand-Sculpted House: A Practical and Philosophical Guide to Building a Cob Cottage. The book was written by thegranddaddy of cob construction, Ianto Evans, and his partners at the Cob Cottage Company.

Building the Great Green Dragon is a learning project for students, so progress is deliberately slow. But I look forward to the day the place opens its doors and the dragon comes alive—the ETC’s diverse international group of students mingling, making music, and dancing inside this magical place they’ve built together.

To see more photos, go here.

A window in the Green Dragon, showing a pond beyond.

Can you imagine this massive fireplace with flames coming out of the mouth?

I have been sick for 13 years with a chronic illness diagnosed variously as multiple sclerosis, chemical sensitivities, fibromyalgia…. It’s some sort of autoimmune, neuropathic thing (there are hundreds of possibilities), with muscle aches and spasms, low energy, fevers, a slow brain. Kind of like having the flu all the time, with occasional flare-ups of serious pain and dysfunction.

Everything doctors ever did made it worse. None of my many attempts to cure myself—diets or environments or activities or mental work—made for consistent improvement.

But I knew I was healthy underneath. I can feel the river of chi—life force—deep and strong. Around it has been a layer of sludge infusing my brain and body, making me slow, making it hard to have energy, making it hard to think.

Fulvic Acid from Optimum Organics

Fulvic acid is changing all that for me. Within a few days of starting to use it, I felt like my brain had gotten a serious tune-up. I could think! I could think calmly and clearly, instead of the usual muddled frenzied attempts to grab onto a thought. It was like Disk Doctor had gone in and fixed my hard drive right up. And it continues to get better. I get smarter and more competent every day.

And my muscles like it, too. They say, “Wow, we have energy, use us! We’ve been gunked up too long.” I am actually able to exercise now instead of hobble from place to place, and it feels great; my muscles can move.

I had never heard of fulvic acid (not folic acid) until a few months ago when an underground chemist told me it adjusts your electrolyte balance so all your cells line up electrically so they can transmit impulses nice and clean and fast. I got super-excited because a similar theory was behind the biomagnetic therapy that gave me such world-class results a few months earlier.

I had gotten a wonderful biomagnetic treatment (involving laying on of magnets) in Cancun last January from Hector. All it took was one relaxing (fully clothed) treatment, costing under $25. After a few days of feeling not so great, I then felt reborn—I became springy with energy. As I returned home, I was like a new person, seriously on top of things. I could even play the piano as if I’d been practicing, which I hadn’t been. I could read music effortlessly, not my usual state. I became super-smart and undepressed and proactive about conducting my life. I had a ton of physical energy. And it all lasted for maybe a week. And then it was gone. I was sludge again.

So I was very interested in being able to get my cells lined up and firing electrically, without having to go to Mexico each time! So I did some research about fulvic acid. I discovered that fulvic acid is produced by symbiotic bacteria living on the hair roots of all plants and that the fulvic acid we take comes from plant deposits millions of years old. One site suggested that “fulvic acid is that substance that enables the life force to interact with inert matter in whatever necessary way to impose its specific ‘will to live’ to produce living organisms.” (My natural skepticism is tempered by the magical results I am getting!) According to one paper on fulvic acid:

Scientists tell us fulvic acid is one of the most powerful natural electrolytes known to man. These supercharged molecules balance cellular life and restore the electrical potential that was once normal to the cell by the charging, regeneration, regulation and the delivering of their living energies to the living cells. Fulvic acid maintains the ideal environment for dissolved mineral complexes, elements and cells to bio-react electrically with one another to cause electron transfer, catalytic reactions and transmutations into new minerals. Fulvic acid assists human enzyme production, hormone structures and it is necessary for the utilization of vitamins.  It has been found to be essential for living cells to carry on metabolic processes.

Fulvic acid is also one of the most powerful natural antioxidants and free radical scavengers known.  It has the unique ability to react with both negatively and positively charged unpaired electrons and to render free radicals harmless.  It can either alter them into new useable compounds or eliminate them as waste.  Fulvic acid can similarly scavenge heavy metals and detoxify pollutants.

Can it really do all these magical things and, according to various proponents, many more? I’m impressed with my results, for sure. Look around the internet, and see what you think. See if it’s worth trying for you. Some people think it’s the “Fountain of Youth” Ponce de Leon went looking for way back when. He was looking in Florida; maybe Missouri would have been more like it (where there’s a large, high-quality fulvic acid deposit). An interesting site suggests that fulvic acid is perhaps the secret behind Shangri-La. The site also tells the story of Buddha’s ancestor Lord Shiva giving a fulvic acid preparation called shilajit to his friend King Chandra Varma, who then became immortal (not clear where he is at the moment). Also, the Kama Sutra apparently suggests using shilajit as an aphrodisiac and restorer of youthfulness.

Well, this all sounds a bit much, but after my experience taking fulvic acid, I’ve got to say, “Thank you, Shiva, you are right on.” Fulvic acid gets your cells lined up and firing. When your body’s natural electricity, your energy, flows through your cells as it’s supposed to, it brings new vitality, new life.

I discovered credible-seeming studies saying things like, “Fulvic acid has shown to be a very powerful organic electrolyte which balances life at the cellular level. If cells are restored to their correct chemical balance life is restored where death and disintegration would normally occur.” People are saying it can fix cancer, HIV, all degenerative diseases.

At any rate, it quickly got rid of the dark circles under my eyes. Why not try it? Fulvic acid might transform your life. It’s cheap, the taste is almost nonexistent, and the only thing I found anywhere suggesting caution for anybody is that fulvic acid may help blood to coagulate, so if your blood is already too thick, or if you’re taking blood thinners, you’ll want to do some more research on the subject.

I buy my fulvic acid from Optimum Organics, who do an outstanding job (there’s no financial gain to me for referring you to them). I am mixing a partial dropper of their concentrate into the water I drink every day, and I cannot imagine being without it ever again. I feel that with the central core of healthy functioning it’s helping to restore to me, I can eventually do what it takes to fix anything and everything that’s out of whack with my health. Some days I even feel superhuman, like I could carry heavy weights effortlessly forever. That’s a way-new feeling for me.

The most that fulvic acid should cost you is a dollar a day. You can buy about a month’s pre-mixed supply, in a nice big brown glass jar, from Optimum Organics for about $25 including shipping. And you can also buy from them concentrated solutions for about $40 and up, that will let you choose your own dilution, at significant savings over the pre-mixed. You can even get half-pounds and up of super-concentrated fulvic acid powder, if you have a few hundred dollars to invest. Why not share it with your friends and see if you all get super-smart and effective and maybe start transforming your corner of the universe.

I’m taking my house into my own hands. My house is falling apart, I’m on social security disability, and I’m tired of getting useless advice—every time I ask men (or a library book) how to fix something wrong with the house, they tell me a solution that requires money, energy, and capabilities I don’t have.

For example, I have a couple of walls covered with walnut boards milled locally by the Amish. But they were put up green, and shrank as they dried, and now you can see right through the cracks between them to the four-inch poplar logs that make up the outside of my cabin (also green and shrunk)—and I can watch the bugs crawl right through both sets of cracks, right out of the forest and into my house. And in the winter, no matter how much I pay the electric company, I freeze. The problem is bigger than caulk and putty can fix.

The manly solution: “You need to take all those walnut boards off—although it’d be hard to do since they’ve been hammered up using nails with no heads, that have rusted in there. And then you’ll have to plane the boards on all sides so they’re nice and even, and then nail them all back up. Or, you could cover the walls with plywood, although that would mean you’d have to move the kitchen sink or cut around it. Plywood costs $40 for a 4 x 8 sheet….”

These are non-solutions for me. Who are they kidding? Do they know who they’re talking to? But I’m tired of being bug-bitten and freezing, usually alternately, often concurrently.

So I decided to forget that I live in the United States and become a citizen of the Earth. Rural Tennessee is more like a Third World country than like anything else, anyway. So what does a woman living in poverty do, anywhere in the world, if she has holes in her house? She plugs them with whatever’s at hand that bugs won’t eat. So, I’ll let you know how that goes as soon as I get a minute to do some experiments.

Meanwhile,  yesterday I made progress towards fixing another house problem: When the woodstove was removed, the leftover hole in the roof leaked. Manly solution: “Yeah, someone needs to go up on the roof and fix that.” My roof is really really tall and it’s not strong enough to be leaning ladders up against perhaps, and probably scaffolding would be involved, and anyway the upshot is it’s never going to happen. So I decided to make lemonade.

Here’s the set-up. See the leftover stovepipe at the top? It would be  leaking water in front of Jessica Simpson, and  onto the pink square, if it was raining outside. I know it doesn’t look like Jessica Simpson. I am just starting to learn to paint, and she was on the cover of Vanity Fair, so she was easy to look at and try to copy. I hadn’t gotten very far when this was taken, so please don’t hold it against me. I know her arms look like T-Rex arms in this picture, but that’s just the way art happens. It looks like sh*t until sometimes the very last minute when it all falls together and becomes brilliant, maybe transcendent. And then after the glow, the artist starts wondering if it’s really sh*t after all. Like a religious experience, perhaps.

The pink square on the floor is where the woodstove used to sit. It’s just painted-pink tarpaper, or whatever the stuff is that goes over the bottom rafters or whatever the things are the house sits on. My daughter Molly painted a sort of lovely hearth rug around it the other day.

But it can’t disguise the fact that there’s no floor there. I figured that couldn’t be good, to have water dripping right onto the floor supports. (Or onto the particle board floor, for that matter, should I manage to patch it—a longshot project sure to leave new icky cracks in my house.) So I decided if I was going to have water coming into my house, I was going to put it into a sensible environment. One of those simple Japanese fountains would be nice, but I can’t afford it, and I don’t have the time to mainfest one from scratch—some other time perhaps—so right now, if rain is coming into my house, it needs to water some plants.

I looked around my yard, which has a couple of piles of junk left over from manly-man exploits of past residents, and found just what I needed. Or, as my first ex-husband used to say, “Good enough for the girls we go with.” I found a little piece of sheet metal, and a leaky plastic tub. I also got some rocks from the creek….

The rocks hold the sheet metal down, and keep the sharp edges covered. (I still need more rocks.) And I very simply laid the foundations so that our, let’s say, atrium (open-roofed central room) can have plants one of these days, when I figure out how to get enough dirt to fill the tub. I’m not keen on digging, since the ground here is cherty and hard. I got a book from the library today on container gardening. Perhaps it will give me some ideas. I can always make compost if I have to! (I once heard a wise teacher say, “If you don’t know what to do, make dirt.”)

So our container garden is taking off, let’s say. But at the moment it looks like a Jessica Simpson wannabe is rising out of a plastic tub, which I find disturbing. But now I have to leave; I’m out of time. I leave Molly a scrawled note on the wall: “Molly, we need flowers.” Flowers rising up out of the tub would de-weird things, somewhat.

When I got back to the cabin this morning, I found that Molly, sweet girl that she is, had painted us a lovely nekkid (as we say in the south) angel silhouette. Either she’s rising out of the tub, or about to stub her toe on it, or blessing it, or all three; interpretation varies by angle and inclination. Anyway, the project is far from finished, but it’s definitely an improvement (as measured by my ability to stand my environment), and it’s going to solve my hole in the roof problem, assuming all the water can be taught to go in the tub. Well, it’ll solve that particular hole in the roof problem. There are others, for another day.

A nekkid angel.