Backcountry Almanac
April 1, 2008
Creare Diem!
Mix a little foolishness with your prudence: It’s good to be silly at the right moment. –Horace
Kanamara Matsui-Tokyo (look it up) // Charlemagne b. 747 / Buddy Ebsen b. 1908
Jane Goodall b. 1934
Maya Angelou b.1928 // Martin Luther King murdered in Memphis, 1968
New Moon in Aries @ 8:55p.m.
Get your kilt on! It’s Scottish Tartan Day.
Bless seeds // Billie Holiday b.1915
Paul Robeson b.1898 – singer, freedom fighter
Samuel Hahnemann b.1755, originator of homeopathy
Emiliano Zapata assassinated, 1919
International Labor Organization formed, 1919 // Elephant Man dies, 1890
Thomas Jefferson b. 1743
War Tax resistance day
Green Tara, consciousness of compassion
Benjamin Tucker b.1854, publisher of the journal Liberty
Cuban people defeat CIA sponsored invasion at Bay of Pigs 1961
Full/ Seed moon in Scorpio @ 3:25 a.m.
John Muir b.1838, naturalist & conservationist
Earth Day – day to honor Mother Earth
Roy Orbison b. 1936 // Will Shakespeare b.1564, d. 1616
Mumia Abu-Jamal b.1954- journalist, prisoner // Tojan Horse 1184 BCE
TV Turnoff Week, 21-27. Turn off the TV and gain clarity of mind.
Chernobyl nuclear power plant melts down, Kiev, 1986// J.J. Audubon b.1785
Ralph Waldo Emerson d. 1882
Floralia// Jean Redpath b. 1937 // Terry Pratchett b.1948
Arbor Day // Pirate Festival, Lake Charles LA
Beltane Eve // Willie Nelson b.1933 - beloved & notorious
Planets visible in the morning sky: Mercury till the 8th, Venus, & Jupiter
Planets visible in the evening sky: Mars, Saturn, & Mercury from the 24th
April planting days:
Above ground crops- 7,8,11,12,18,19
Root crops & perennials- 3,4,20,21,22,25,26,27,30
For in a hard-working (money focused) society, it is rare and even subversive to celebrate too much,
to revel and keep on reveling: to stop whatever you’re doing and rave,
pray, throw things, go into trances, jump over bonfires, drape yourself in flowers,
stay up all night, and scoop the froth from the sea.
-Anneli Rufus
Thanks to some well-timed winter rain, it has been a fine and flowery spring. The fair weather and color could last another month if April doesn’t have too many mood swings. As anyone who has lived here through a spring season knows, there can been sudden change-ups in temperature and precipitation in April. This is the month that initiates the growing season in the Northern Hemisphere and the sun is right on time, making the days longer than the nights and jump starting everything living. Though sometimes I can hear the rocks humming, too. Nature is transforming in a very immediate sense. It’s good to be alive in this place learning about transmutation while creating some of my own.
Rob Brezny says, “people have been transforming all around. Be alert for the possibility that they are not who they used to be. Your ability to shape reality creatively in the coming weeks depends on you being able to recognize that some of the old truths about them have been replaced with new ones.”
immediately think that this is all to the good, but then realize that this truth could go in any direction at all. They may be choosing to live their darker dreams or, perhaps, they are struggling to break out of a cocoon and become brighter. And I wonder, if a person changes, will those that have known them a long time allow those changes to be real in their experience of them? Or will they insist on ‘keeping’ the program they have memorized about that person? It may be that those who stagnate in their own lives refuse to allow for the changes in other people.
T. S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party:
“We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting stranger.”
In my ramblings in the hills, I’m finding increasing footprints from strangers. This part of the valley had enjoyed a two-year hiatus from large numbers of nightwalkers. Are they catching on to what happens to those who board the slave ships and avoiding the roads again? Maybe it’s a phenomenon of the full moon week.
We are living the Chinese curse of ‘interesting times’. The whole world is beginning to rock from economic instability and we are seeing prices rise on everything from gas and utilities to food. Will we continue to blame the victims and look to the perpetrators of the collapse for answers ( a bit like the Fox guarding the henhouse), or will we wake up to the fact that people of wisdom must be put in positions of authority? Time for a major tax revolt and demand that our money be spent on the homeland infrastructure. Take back your country. Sleeping ones awake! Vote with your money by choosing carefully how you invest it and spend it if you want to change the world.
Borders? I have never seen one. But I have heard they exist in the minds of most people.” -Thor Heyerdahl
Long Life, Honey in the Heart, No Evil, 13 Thank yous.
Next came fresh April full of lustyhed,
And wanton as a Kid whose horne new buds:
Upon a Bull he rode, the same which led
Europa floting through th’Argolick fluds:
His hornes were gilden all with golden studs
And garnished with garlonds goodly dight
Of all the fairest flowres and freshest buds
Which th’earth brings forth, and wet he seem’d in sight
With waues, through which he waded for his loues delight.
-Edmund Spenser (c. 1552 - 1599), English poet;
Faerie Queen, The Cantos of Mutabilitie
Copyright 2008 Meg Keoppen
Comments
Got something to say?