Canyon Updates & A Cactus Tale – I’m Not Prickly or Contradictory, I Just Have Different Points to Make
Canyon Updates & a Cactus Tale:
I’m Not Prickly or Contradictory, I Just Have Different Points to Make
The storm we last talked about left a couple inches of beautiful snow which has since soaked into the thirsty ground of the arid Southwest. The early Spring winds have been tremendous, and would have taken away our solar panels if not for the sandbags and tie-downs that Marc attached. Moisture, cold, and now drying winds — only the cactus seems unaffected, its soft sweet innards and prickly exterior sustained through storm and drought.
I just got back the proofed versions of the remaining parts of the serialized “The Search For Home” series, so if you’d like to see more of these essays here please let us know. This week we are working out the bugs on the project vehicles, while continuing to try to raise the rest of the money to repay the cost of the “street jeep”. Thank you to those of you who have sent recent donations earmarked for that purpose, as well as for your orders for sets of the Gifting Bones – your addresses are being sent to Apprentice Resolute today, who will place the Bones she made for you in nice bags, package and ship them. We will email you the extensive user’s manual from here, until we can get hardcopy formatted and printed.
Responses have gone out today to several waiting students, making it possible for me work on historic firearm articles that will bring in needed income. And please don’t imagine that they are simply a profit producing diversion for a not-for-profit project, as it is my art to instill Animá principles of love, wildness, resistance, female empowerment, personal codes of honor, the lessons of nature, tribalism, activism, self empowerment and libertarianism, the value of spiritual awareness and response-abilty to every possible audience in these times that try our kind and tax our planet.
The occasional problem comes when someone who craves my outdoor or history articles feels offended to discover a tree hugging article of mine on the Gaia hypothesis, say, or when somebody from the alternative or liberal camps feels personally let down to see a piece I’ve done calling Obama to task, encouraging abused women to arm themselves or telling a tale of values through the not always pretty story of the Old West. It is most likely a fault of mine that I get any enjoyment at all out of upsetting the preconceptions and disturbing the decorum of easily offended people from all walks of life. Despite this curmudgeon satisfaction, it is still likely evidence of a commitment to fair treatment for everyone that I have managed to ruffle the feathers of folks from such a wide range of groups and beliefs.
There was a time when at least the noble man (sorry, poor men and even wealthy women generally excluded) were valued for their “Renaissance” diversity, the dancer and poet in velvet brocade also able to swing a mean sword, the scientist also spiritual man, and magic and science melded in the alchemists’ search. Today in the small rural towns of this country, those some might think of as narrow minded remain widely experienced and broadly equipped, posting twitter on the internet but still versed at planting gardens and fixing well pumps. It is the spirit and tradition of the above, we might see the well-roundedness and dynamic balance of some of our more colorful characters. We need not see hypocrisy in some contemporary Hayduke eating a healthy paleo diet even though the planet could not sustain the whole current world population doing the same. In standing up for yourself even though desiring peace. In promoting care for the living planet, after defacing a asphalt laying, small town wasting WalMart.
The wild processes of nature appear complex and sometimes contradictory or even unfathomable. In a similar way, I would prefer not to be thought of as contrary so much as diverse. And that the Southwest cactus not be seen as prickly and pointed, so much as an aid and ally to awareness.
-Jesse Wolf Hardin
(cactus photos (c)2008 by Jesse Wolf Hardin)
Categories: Announcements, Updates & Canyon Tales, Jesse Wolf Hardin – Essays & Tales
Kari H.
We can only be who were are. I have often found that who I am interferes with who others think I SHOULD be.