The Free Radical

The rain diminishes to the fog and spittle of the breaths of mountain giants… and the drifting mists part…

(The Wizard by Uriah Heep from their 1972 album Demons and Wizards)

The Day’s Eye rests upon a world that looks and feels brand new to polished skin and unclouded cornea…

…yet so many squeeze their eyes, their hearts, their minds tightly shut. To them there is nothing new under the sun…

The day awakes to all the skeletons past, as the memories of amnesiacs stand as a thin veil, parting us from something more primal, more ancient…

Dragons are our ancestors, their lineage lost amid hordes of ghosts, that now even the living are lost souls…

“Awake!” the silent plea from every quarter. “Consider the long delusion of your senses!”

The world is brand new… yet again… and again…

Green gooseberries are like sour patch kids… except without all the fakery!

And the world is overgrown and undergirded with alfalfa, channeling rock-solid truths from deep within the Earth to present as blossoms… Let a new feast begin!

And the cutest spider didn’t quite know what to make of me, but I told him anyway… “With your legs all tucked in close like that… and the way your eyes follow me… that’s a really good look for spiders…”

Spiders in my kitchen sink never looked so good!

A pair of joyful hawks met us where the dense forest meets the power line. They danced and cavorted for our happy little audience, while I sang Empty Sky… into a fulsome sky. Sitka spotted them first– my little skywatcher. Watch the dog; one day she’ll learn to fly!

They stayed with us for the better part of eternity and their message was as clear as the sun: “Celebrate!”

Yes! The world feels brand new… against my skin… as a joyful teardrop in heartened eye…

Aye! Tomorrow promises to be brand new… again!

Today, The Oracle Report suggests that it is a day for music. (When is it not?)

I didn’t even have to think about this selection; it came to mind immediately.

(Title track from Elton John’s 1969 debut album Empty Sky)

This is before Elton became enticed by the lure of mainstream pop… his more “hippie” sensibilities. It’s a fantastic album… and in case you didn’t notice, it’s lifted from vinyl, so there’s a few pops and clicks… keeping it real!

The dogs had their own earthly agenda, involving a rack of ribs, envy, keep-away and the re-enactment of Wrestlemania 6.

Meanwhile, I ate somewhere in the neighbourhood of 30 puffballs or more!

Then finally down by the river, we were met by this gorgeous snake. He was very cool! Despite the dogs’ incessant rambunctiousness, he wasn’t frightened at all, and even showed a little genuine curiosity when I shoved the camera in his face.

A few minutes later, as we were walking along the cliff above the river, the Big Daddy regal eagle flew up from the river valley and began circling for us above the far bank.

He stayed for quite some time, so I had the opportunity to track him closely with the binoculars. He definitely had the white head and tail feathers of a mature bald eagle, but his enormous size left little doubt from the beginning.

After a short while he was joined by his mate. Together they choreographed a looping dance in the sky. It seemed that every time that I spoke to them, they beat or dipped their wings in response.

It is a tremendous time of creativity for unfettered spirits! They’re here to inspire and encourage among those who’ve shed the “usual” modus operandi. The sky is our blank canvas… no limits!

While I was filming the eagles, a mosquito crossed the screen. This is like only the second one I’ve seen! Damn, things in my neck of the woods are so auspiciously fantastic! Sing on, Captain Fantastic! Sing on!

Well, with all the recent rains, the puffballs are back in proliferation. I found and ate dozens of them yesterday!

For every one that I picked there were at least three more smaller ones sprouting up nearby. They should mostly be ready today. With puffballs, you have to get to them early– within the first couple of days– if you wish to eat them. As soon as they’re a bit squishy and not completely firm to the touch, they’ve already begun to convert their innards into a green gooey mess which will eventually dry out to become the spore mass ready for later dispersal. You can still eat them during this intermediate stage… but they’re not nearly as palatable.

Sometimes, in those first few days, they manage to grow to epic proportions! This pic is from a few years back when I still sported much longer hair… and at the time, I didn’t even know that puffballs were edible.

Pretty much everyone whom I bring along on my daily walks finds it rather remarkable that there’s so many interesting things to sample along the way. It’s not necessarily the volume of food I find, but the variety of flavours is always an unexpected treat.

The wild raspberries are just beginning to bloom. Now here’s an indigenous plant who produces an abundance that no one can fully exhaust. It’s simply not possible to pick all the raspberries available in a few weeks!

One thing that tag-alongs always notice is that I eat a lot of flowers. My eye is drawn to the colours… but there’s a nutritional rationale as well that keeps me coming back. Flowers produce pollen. If you wish to learn more about the incredible nutritional qualities of pollen, research “bee pollen.” Besides nectar, pollen is the other staple food which bees gather continuously.

Perhaps at my urging, you’ve recently plucked a dandelion to eat and noticed that your fingers got stained yellow even though you barely touched the yellow flower. No, it’s not the juices being pressed from the flower; if you look closely, you’ll see that it’s a powder; it’s pollen, a real treasure.

All of this inevitably leads to a deep and abiding feeling of freedom. The food is free… and often abundant… and totally awesome!

Sometimes an idea gets planted in my head… and I don’t give it a second thought.

The Sasquatch People seem to be fond of crystals. One in particular, amorite chalcedony rose, is specific for the heart connection and moving forward through life in a heart-centred fashion. “I want one.” That was the idea which I never gave another thought; I just went ahead and got one.

Here I’m “washing” it in the river. Flowing water “erases” any interference from its former handlers. Now it’s clean and attuned to just me; it’s my high-tech friend in a complex wilderness. Complexity is a symptom of the mind; the heart simply sees right through it. I have a very active mind… who needs to learn how to just chill.

So I’m digging for buried treasure, thinking that this wild onion is it, when suddenly under a rock I discover a “proto-hopper” in some intermediary stage of metamorphosis. You can see that the bulb of the onion goes right underneath the vulnerable critter.

I gently put him back after I successfully removed the onion. Then I gingerly placed a flat rock overtop of him again. “Shh, he’s sleeping.”

He reminds us in his dreaming that the Earth provides for all of our needs. Half-jokingly, he warns us against galactic salesmen who seek to peddle exotic philosophies for the aggrandizement of our earthly experience. “We don’t need no stinking light chambers!” When in doubt, run it by– and through– the Earth. She knows what’s appropriate magick for these earthen vessels.

We’ve become so disconnected from our home here that we fall in love with the first flying unicorn to come along, promising to whisk us away from our own disenchantment. Love is the magick; our hearts plug us into Earth’s infinite resources. As the stars beckon, first we must twinkle back… before we blast ourselves off… off our friggin’ rockers!

How many times have you heard it? Stay grounded. How grounded are our hopes and dreams…?

Lately, I’ve been taking my walks after heavy rains… and the forest smells amazing! There’s such a riotous variety of olfactory indulgence going on that I seriously wish I could share with you all the incredible smells along with my rather sterile pictures.

The clovers are beginning to bloom… (and you can’t spell “clover” without “lover.”)

…both the red and the white.

The yarrow too is spreading its white umbrellas all over the hills and fields. Sometimes I pinch just a tiny clusters of the flowers for a taste. They are unbelievably flavourful, and I find myself singing “Ricola!” every time because they taste strongly of cough drops. If ever I should feel a cold or flu coming on, I wouldn’t hesitate to make a sweat-promoting tea from the flowers.

It’s very hard to see, but there’s actually two beetles (not Lennon and McCartney) having a tryst inside this rose. I have to admire their choice of love nest!

Can you begin to imagine all the intoxicating smells… especially after the rains? It’s time that “smell-a-vision” was finally invented and distributed with the next wave of computer software updates. Fortunately, according to the Anarchist, whose current residence is the multidimensional internet, just such an invention has recently come to fruition in a parallel reality. Briefly, he explains how it works:

“At first glance, one might think that “smellovision” is a stupid and inappropriate name, for we do not see smells. But in this case, we do. Smell-a-vision is based upon first creating and inducing a state of synesthesia in the subject where the stimulation of one sensory apparatus causes an automatic response in another sensory system. In this case, the computer monitor, through a burst of specifically-calibrated visual frequencies, first induces synesthesia which is then followed by another specifically-calibrated burst which corresponds to the molecular frequency of the smell desired.

“In actual fact, there is no smell released by the computer; rather, the sensation of smell is achieved solely through visual frequency means. Only someone actually viewing the computer monitor will experience the sensation of the smell. It is a form of direct neural stimulation achieved remotely.”

Don’t you just love having access to information from parallel realities? Thanks Anarchist!

We could confidently march right into the gaping maw of a forty-foot grizzly bear…

It was at least a week ago now. I was crouched beside the river; having removed my makeshift necklace, I pried the lid from its hollowed body in order to add a mixture of river water and my own saliva. The “necklace” was actually a hollow wooden pendulum I’d filled with seeds a couple of weeks earlier and tied around my neck so that the seeds would dangle directly in my heart-space. (An idea I got from Andrew Bartzis, the Galactic Historian.) It was time now to begin the germination process.

During the brief procedure by the river, I completely lost track of the three dogs: Lhasa, Toby and Sitka. They were off doing their own thing– undoubtedly nearby, but unseen– as I focused on my own task. Once the seeds inside the pendulum were thoroughly soaked, I replaced the lid to seal them inside for one day more. In the process of wetting the seeds, the wooden lid became swollen and would barely fit into its proper place. After I jammed it partway in, I found it thoroughly impossible to subsequently remove it. “Oh no,” I said aloud a couple of times.

The dogs turned up immediately with total concern for whatever was troubling me. Sitka rested her head on my shoulder to get a good look at “the problem.” I quickly reassured them that there was no real cause for concern.

We’re a very tight crew. Ever since that episode the dogs are very careful to always have one of them be with me while the other two go out exploring. They determine their own rotation. What’s really remarkable is that Toby and Sitka are only nine months old.

I’m very proud and confident with my forest crew!

The bank of Silverberry bushes, as it’s now flowering, makes the whole forest smell like a candy shop. The roses too add such a pleasing spice to the air that their petals are in continually grave danger of being plucked and eaten at any moment.

This rose bush has no business trying to hide up in this tree! But in all fairness, it was an adequate strategy to prevent me from eating it. So kudos to you, little tree-climbing rose bush!

I managed six days in a row of feasting on puffballs (mushrooms) along the way. Then for two days I didn’t find any… and then yesterday, a few more. They’re a pleasant filler.

What’s surprising, despite the delicious deer legs to be had, is the frequency with which I still have to remind all the dogs “Don’t eat poop!” I guess we all have different ideas about what’s food and what’s not.

It’s all the graceful– and not-so-graceful– dance of predation… and, I suppose, it’s really easy to sneak up on a turd that’s just lying there in the grass bemoaning its fate: “I was once food… not too long ago; now look at me!”

Whether we’re full-on carnivores or dedicated vegetarians, it’s all sentience assimilating sentience– a sharing of experience through the subjectivity of complete communion. We all know and mostly agree that “You are what you eat,” but we don’t consider much that what we eat is equally us for the time it shares our system.

Every morsel of food that passes our lips partakes of our full human expression, experiencing exactly what we experience, for the time it takes to pass through our digestive tract. That brief “human experience” is logged into the soul-repository for whatever species it originally belonged to. Our food gets to go on a “human trip”… and the uniqueness of the experience is greatly appreciated… in natural settings.

Usually, the dance of predation is carried out instantaneously. Typically, in a natural setting, whatever prey is being consumed gets eaten immediately after its connection to life is severed. The prey becomes the predator in an instant.

Now consider the food typically occupying the human food supply. That cabbage had its head lopped off days ago. It was crammed into a bin with countless other cabbages as it travelled thousands of miles in a refrigerated truck in complete darkness. Then it is placed on a shelf under fluorescent lights where it is judged by potential consumers. Believe me, the whole experience is rather confusing for the poor cabbage… who then passes the contents of that strange “dream” on to you, the consumer. Can you just imagine the journey of any highly processed food?!

Fresh food is far more assimilable because it never has a chance to accumulate such muddled, inexplicable experience… at least, that’s the metaphysical side to another benefit of foraging. Growing your own garden works too.

Ah, the simple life of sentience absorbing sentience… in relatable ways…

Before anything… I am happy to report that the young girl who was rescued from Dutch Creek and airlifted to Calgary last week has been discharged from the Children’s Hospital in a state of perfect health. Phew!

And Hawk is still daily holding the vision for us as the guardian of the future… but she’s become less vocal, and somehow, more conspicuous.

And now… on to our main feature…

I like to lean in and smell the roses often, but lately, I’ve had to watch that my nose doesn’t get tweaked… or outright stolen! “Ha! Got your nose!”

Some say that Spider, with her hourglass figure and eight limbs is the symbol for infinity. I liken her more to a mobius strip… a mind-bending illusion. These very plentiful white spiders who lurk in the heart of the rose do not create ensnaring webs like other spiders. They just wait for their prey to come along in order to feast on nectar and perform their pollination duties… and then just outright grab them. No trickery required. At least it’s honest.

Spider, in general, created the first alphabet. And indeed, the illusion is woven with the subtle and binding threads of language. It is language– spoken, written, objectified– which holds the illusion of separation in place moment-to-moment.

But the White Spider who lives at the Heart counsels silence. Whatever is needed comes to the open heart in good time. Meanwhile, the fragrance of the open heart expresses its contentedness, so that waiting is less of a wait and more of a happy indulgence instead. We can leave the illusions of craft and guile behind now.

The whole Forest, and even the neighbourhood surrounding my home, has that wonderful spiced lemon smell of wild roses everywhere! Right now, you can’t escape it… but why ever would you want to? And every once in a while there’s a hint of cloves in the taste. I eat a lot of rose petals… and I’ve taught Sitka to eat them too. They tend to blow hearts wide open!