June!

Big changes for myself and my family this month.  We decided to leave the garden of eden, the wild Gila riverside spot where we'd been living for the past year, and move back to my family's land outside of Silver City, where we can be closer and more linked up with my family there: my sister Maria, her husband Eric and their two boys Colin and Kai, and my brother Dominic.  Living with our new amazing baby Grace, we were feeling a little bit too isolated out there.  Our dream has been and continues to be to live together with people that feel like family; to have a little tribe of people on some land, living and learning how to more closely and harmoniously relate with the land, the plants and animals around us.  And what do you know?  We actually have land that my parents bought 25 years ago, the land I grew up on, the land where some of my blood family really lives, family that is also wanting to raise kids together and interact in a good way with the land.  So for the moment, the lesson is: the gifts don't always look how you might have imagined them.  Here we are, blessed by family and high desert New Mexico. 
    So this weekend, we'll be buiding a new wigwam/wickiup, inviting the local community to come out and join, help us out, and learn this style of building technology.  We're gonna try another willow-frame lodge, this time thatching with beargrass (Nolina microcarpa) that grows all over here.  All day Saturday and Sunday, wigwamming!  For those in the area, please come out and join in the fun. 
    We've also been working on gardens and on cleaning up this land, all the plastic, foam, rusted metal, rubber, etc. that has built up over the years from salvaged building materials, etc. etc.  What a mess our culture can make of this beautiful Earth in such a short time.  What a task to turn it around, both in terms of cleaning up our messes, and also the gargantuan task of changing our way of thinking, our way of building, of interacting with this living Earth.  The one law that so many successful indigenous peoples on this Earth have held and lived is the one that we so dearly need to begin to understand and carry: Do not disturb the Earth.  In other words: we are walking on sacred ground, and there is a plan under way in the natural world that we still don't understand.  How can we make our living and really live well, while living under this one law?  
    Music this month:  June 20th I'll play solo at the Yankee Creek Coffeehouse, prior to the streetdance there, and that night Compas will play out on Little Walnut Rd. at a public dance party at a new farm there.  Fun!  Check out dates for more info