Joplin, MO

We are camped at the KOA in Joplin, MO, surrounded by Interstate Highway, Industrial this and Retail that - Anywhere, America. The roar of traffic is incessant. It blends together in a way it did not at the AOK Campground in St Joseph. Here, it is a dull mono-tone, no vehicle but the occasional motorcycle standing out amid the cacophony.

Lights are all around, sometimes blinding even from a quarter-mile. I block certain lights with certain trees as I dance. I'm in the middle of the campground, dancing to the sound of tree frogs, about ten thousand of them within hearing at various distances. I key on one and then another. Sometimes an underlying rhythm compels them all and I am caught, as by a wave.

I stop dancing to hang a tarp above the tent. Val Kyrie is showering. A group of men are milling around a rentable trailer between the campsite and the shower house. It occurs to me that Val has been gone a long time, longer than seems necessary, and I begin to worry. There is a code to get into the shower house, but the code is the same for the men's and women's showers. An abundance of discomforting images fill my head as I walk to the shower house to check in.

Every so often air pressure is released, suddenly, behind a fence, truck and trailer air brakes maybe. It sounds like a giant animal snorting aggressively, maybe a dragon. Thinking about my fear, this fear of men, of what men are capable of. Where does it come from? Why should I be afraid for Val?

Thinking of St Joseph, four gigs in two days and a strange paradox. Exceptionally well attended, as library gigs for Val Kyrie go, yet so many attendees just sitting there, staring, vaguely hostile in some indefinable way, as if predetermined not to be open, not to enjoy the performance. Val, at one point in the last performance, a bit exasperated - from the heat, humidity, and overall unresponsiveness to her words, to her music - mentioned corn and soybeans. It was clear, many in the crowd had never given any thought to mono-crop corn or soybeans, or what they mean.

The energy, the vitality of a landscape funneled upward and elsewhere, the land poisoned and polluted, local community destroyed and the people made fat, listless and angry. I see the name Jesus everywhere, and yet this tour through the breadbasket has been a strong reminder - in America nothing is sacred but Hierarchy, and the Market.

Who are the men who have brought this fear of mine to this world? Who are the men who maintain it? Walking through this campground in this small but very busy city, revolving security on golf carts patrolling the grounds, I realize in some Nations, I could not say the things I say. In America, we are allowed to say almost whatever we like. We think that is because we are a democracy. I say it is because we are fat and listless, and in our fat listlessness we do not threaten the men who rule this Nation. We are angry too, though we blame everything but hierarchy, and the expectation that we must bow down to the Market. Sky gods telling us hierarchy and the Market are inevitable, that they sustain us, the only reason we do not live like apes.

I can say what I say because there are only about five or six people listening. If there were ten million people reading my words, then sky gods would have reason to be afraid for hierarchy, and the Market that sustains that social pyramid, which they benefit so greatly by.

Val is fine. She is flossing her teeth as I knock on the door and call her name. I walk back to the campsite and continue dancing to tree frogs channeling the Divine. All around us are the tones of Empire, the mad machinations of the Market, the crass, grasping, insatiability of the Machine. Yet even here, the rhythms of the Earth are calling and I know, there is a greater power inside me than any I can be given; I need not bow down to anyone, or anything.

And a message to Deerslayer, who set the tone for this whole tour with a violent criticism of Val Kyrie, in a public forum, though he would not take full responsibility for his words:

I have renounced the gun. What can you say for yourself?

Introduction

The first thing I did when I returned to my house in Minneapolis was start tearing up sod, with a spade shovel and my hands. Started that project June 02, finished June 16. 1800 sq ft, ten new garden beds in addition to the 300 sq ft bed I already had. My theory is, I can grow enough food on this 60 x 180 lot to last me the year. That won't happen this year, this garden but a test garden for next spring. Still, I expect to grow about three hundred pounds of potatoes, about 50 pounds of dry beans, to go with preserves from twenty tomato plants, about thirty pepper plants, corn, squash, grapes, etc, and whatever I can gather locally, including serviceberries, currants, grapes, wapato, etc. I know I can keep the house until harvest at least.

I use the water I collect from what falls from the sky, and what the neighbors allow me to gather for drinking and the occasional solar shower. I'm using four 47 gallon Rubbermaid tubs, another smaller plastic tub, an old liner for a water softener and my Royalex canoe, la Vielle. I can hold about 400 gallons total, which is pitifully inadequate, but it's the best I can do currently. I dug a 400 gallon pond, but I don't have money for a liner. I should have a 5000 gallon cistern buried in the garage (which I would like to turn into a greenhouse, using recycled windows), and another cistern in the basement. That, and a few home-made filters containing charcoal and sand, and a few low-tech passive solar water panels, to heat water and the house.

Without a steady supply of fresh water, you learn quick what a waste of water a flush toilet is.

I really miss electricity. I use candles and an LED headlamp. I'm using an old beat-up radio and d-cell batteries to occasionally listen to the radio, and a smaller cd-player with c-batteries to play the music I dance to, part of the Sacred Theatre piece I'm working on. My computer is five years old, the hard-drive has been replaced twice in the past year, and the battery holds about a ninety minute charge. I have to go to a coffee shop to work on my book, to check email, to charge the computer and my cell phone, which is also falling apart. I could pretty much take care of most of my basic electricity needs with a pedal-power set up including a 12V car battery. Without grid electric however, the refrigerator is dead space. I should be using it to hold water.

I've written a book called The Dragon: Balance, Wholeness, Healing. It is primarily a challenge to men, to look inside and find their Origins, to access the deep well of power that is inherent to every man, to live in service to one's family, friends, community and the Earth, to open one's eyes to the predicament we face as Homo sapien sapien with the end of the Age of cheap and abundant fossil fuels. I need $15,000 to publish; I have approximately $5 and change, no job, and no prospect of any job imminent.

The garden isn't producing much at this point, though early in June I had all the strawberries I could eat, the raspberries and black caps are now abundant, and the asparagus still send up an occasional shoot even though they've long since flowered. Otherwise, I'm subsisting on serviceberries, dandelion greens, lamb's quarter, carrots, eggs, peanut butter, bread given away by a local church, and a bag of commercial food-product I gathered at another church food line. I can subsist quite well this way through the summer, but if I don't find income to start paying on the house again come September, I'll have the harvest but not the house. If it goes into foreclosure I can probably continue to squat in it until 2011, though I'm not looking joyward to a winter without heat, water or electricity. I'd rather just publish a book and start selling it, and continue writing the second one.

Don't think I'm complaining. Living off-the-grid in the summer ain't anything but campin' in the house. I spend the days writing, working in the garden, biking, gathering berries, sitting in coffee shops. Quite idyllic, really. Living in accord with the rhythms of the Earth is remarkably healthy. My life may look in a shambles from the outside, but I'm stronger than I have ever been. Money is only energy, and that energy isn't flowing my way right now. But the energy is shifting; the book is nearly complete and the Sacred Theatre is coalescing. I keep saying, I'm going to sell a million copies. No one believes me, yet.