Grey Snake

MORE Snakkesss! Yesssss!
This is so cool. It's like a snake-a-thon out here the last two days. And all friendly snakes too, i think maybe it's a sign. Of what? I dont know.... but i could make up a buncha silly stuff it could mean.... and i am going to right now....
like :::

• Dont judge a snake just cause its a snake, look closely at it's nature/attitude
• I can find bunches of cool shit on my own (no need to lament aloneness making it harder to find bad ass stuff in nature.)
  
• sometimes you get what you wish for, especially if it is obscure and easy to deliver, like seeing snakes or lunar moths
• and if i think hard with my hippy mind.... i am SURE it means my kundilini is a' risen' (and i want to note here that spell check wanted to change "Kundilini" to "cunnilingus".)
  
• According to my "Animal Speaks" book.... it means Rebirth. That the snake represents swift fast changes and shifts, and healing... AKA, phoenix rising from the ash in fast forward! that is me!
  

YAY!
Is this a garter snake? I can't remember.
I love him regardless of his name though.
XOxXO

Hey Asshole! I am Talking to ya!

(Note: I usually try to focus on only the positive aspects of nature in order to stir a feeling of awe and respect in a world where it seems vastly forgotten in our daily lives --- this post is not in the usual pattern but I was so moved I wanted to share...)
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Today I was pulling invasive Kudzu vines from the side of the road to make baskets with, when I walked back to my truck and loaded the vines in I had a strong urge to go down into the large beautiful creek below and play in the water. The ledge to get down there was somewhat steep and I held on tight to strong tree saplings - when something caught me off guard. Trash. Tons of fucking trash carelessly and selfishly thrown over the side of the road, strewn about the bank of the creek and in the water! (see pic up top)

The closer I got to all the bags of trash and realized the vastness and quantity that had been thrown overboard in sheer ignorance - the more sick I was. Not cause it was just rotten and gross, not cause of the smell, not cause the the bottles of chemicals that were seeping into the soil - but because i was heart sick, sick in a way so deep into my soul that I started crying.

I tried thinking of the different types of people in the world objectively (to help me stay calm).... that there were three types of people in this situation:

• The people who litter.
• The people who notice the litter and are appauled.
• The people who see the litter and clean it up even though it's not theirs.

I used to be in the second group. But seeing this pushed me into the third group... I plan on going back this week with gloves and bags to clean this shit up. Anyone want to come?

I wanted to yell at who ever did this, and the only way to begin to stop hating the stupid mutha' F*cker was to tell myself this was some poor old man who didn't know any better- but I am gonna say to anyone who has eyes, anyone who breathes, anyone who walks the earth, anyone who lives surrounded in nature as we do in this rural part of the mountains....

How in the name of fuckin' gawd could ANYONE think it is alright to dump your household trash into creeks, water, life force ---- HOW can the stark contrast between the beauty of nature and the garbage not be seen? I think it's impossible unless this poor person who dumped this trash is BLind... in which case they shouldn't be driving on curvy mountain roads carrying bags of garbage.

What is even sicker, is our local dump is only a few more miles down the road and is open a few days a week! There was no way me or any other person who stopped there to admire the power and grace of Spring Creek was going to touch that water with detergents and who knows WTF shit sitting in it.

I felt the very spirit of human history cry - this is only a small example of the HUGE amounts of trash we are making, disposing. The even deeper thought that eventually occured to me through my tears and anger, was once we bring this trash to the proper dump - it simpley goes into landfills and continues to be destructive.

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People, we have GOT TO reduce the amount of trash we are creating! We have to stop buying things, giving into the modern push, stop keeping up with the freakin' JOnes'es over at the local walmart, filling up your houses and garages with things eventually meant for the 'trash'- stop buying so much packaged unfresh foods, so many plastic products!!

Get a life, and start learning how to make things, learn some DIY skillz, learn about upcycling, learn how to repair your shoes instead of buy new ones, thrift shop and stop supporting slave labor industries, stop dumping toxic chemicals down your drains and lathering that shit on your skin, THEN get off the internet and go take a walk in the woods and remember that without our natural resources we are dead. Literally. No clean water = no life for humans. And humans are a beautiful part of the natural world.

(btw- click on the pic below for leslie's mad face bigger and more real. )

**You fuck up my swimming creek..... I am gonna dig your address out your stupid garbage pile and report you to the county! F U stranger.**

xoxoxox

I Found A Turtle In The Road...

....and jammed on the brakes of my Jimmy GMC to pick it up. I jumped out the truck and ran backwards to the turtle, grabbed it, then ran back to my truck and put it in a box to bring back to my pond at the Luck Cabin. Safe and far away from any busy roads!

I hadn't seen any box turtles at my pond yet (only two snapping turtles just this week) - and had been wishing for some turtles to come hang around. :)

I waited behind some tall ferns for Lil' Boxy to pop out it's head and check out the cool place it now could live.... I sensed a look of approval and appraisal.

A whole pond to itself to start a family! Yay!

XOXoxox

Mouse In A Bucket

Last night when I went in my bathroom to use my composting toilet, I noticed a tiny furry dot in the peat moss bucket! A little scared mouse!
I didn't know how it got in there and I wasn't entirely sure it could climb back out...

awwwwwwww. It's so cute, it's sick - I just can never get myself to hate mice... maybe if they passed on plagues (fleas on tha' rats?) like in the days of Ole' I could fear them but since I am from these modern times I just don't have any bones ta' pick with the mice.

So i poured it out the bucket into one of my outside potted plants and watched it run away!

Xxoxoxo

The Dying Hemlock Tree(s)

I had heard about the Hemlock Pine trees in the mountains here dying out a few years ago, but had never really seen the damage, the reality of what was happening till moving here to Hot Springs, NC. Here at the Luck Cabin (and throughout the adjacent forest) there are scores of big HUGE old growth Hemlocks, and many smaller ones too - all dead or near death, falling down to the ground in piles, families of barren trunks, groves of up-turned roots.

I was told by an Old Timer neighbor that when the bark starts pealing off and shows this red color pictured here, it means it will soon fall to the ground. Another neighbor said after it's death, due to shallow roots, they will fall over within one year of dying.

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The impact is much more apparent when you are standing in the forest surrounded by dead trees - from the spot I took these pictures, in a heavily, dense wooded area I counted approximately 20 dead Hemlocks from where I stood.

""The future of the species is currently under threat due to the hemlock woolly adelgid (Adelges tsugae), a sap-sucking bug accidentally introduced from East Asia to the United States in 1924. The Adelgid has spread very rapidly in southern parts of the range once becoming established, while its expansion northward is much slower. Virtually all the hemlocks in the southern Appalachian Mountains have seen infestations of the insect within the last five to seven years, with thousands of hectares of stands dying within the last two to three years. Attempts to save representative examples on both public and private lands are on-going. A project named "Tsuga Search", funded by the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, is being conducted to save the largest and tallest remaining Eastern Hemlocks in the Park. It is through Tsuga Search that Hemlocks have been found with trunk volumes of up to 44.8 m³ within the Park, making it the largest eastern evergreen conifer, eclipsing in volume both Pinus strobus (Eastern White Pine) and Pinus taeda (Loblolly Pine).""

Under these giant dead trees are the young new sprouts, of tiny hemlocks - ones that looks free of the disease. One thing about the forest is it knows how to renew itself... the sucky thing is, we have yet to begin to understand what the impact of losing old growth trees has on the eco system. There may be some lag time between now and like, say 200 years from now when these can right themselves again. Then again, before recorded history I have to wonder how many times species were wiped out and no one would ever know about it now... if these things are part of natural life cycles, we call disasters?

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""A 2009 study conducted by scientists with the U.S. Forest Service Southern Research Station suggests the hemlock woolly adelgid is killing hemlock trees faster than expected in the southern Appalachians and rapidly altering the carbon cycle of these forests. According to Science Daily, the pest could kill most of the region's hemlock trees within the next decade. According to the study, researchers found that "hemlock woolly adelgid infestation is rapidly impacting the carbon cycle in [hemlock] tree stands," and that "adelgid-infested hemlock trees in the South are declining much faster than the reported 9-year decline of some infested hemlock trees in the Northeast.""
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What do I plan on doing with all my dead Hemlocks? One thing I can not do is burn them, because the pine would clog up my wood stove pipe and catch it on fire ... I can use the smaller branches for good kindling though. I am hoping to get a portable wood mill out here and turn them into lumber for building. Other then that I am not sure what to do except watch the Hemlock graveyards house the bugs and birds and slowly decay, while the tiny new trees reach for the light.

XOxoxo

All The Therapy You Need

There are so many things in nature which have saved my life, physically and emotionally. Nature doesn't choose by personal preferance, it chooses by survival. And while this may seem cruel at one turn, there is nothing cruel about it, it is simply part of the natural process of life on earth.
I suppose at one time I used to watch nature do it's thing and just be amazed by the beauty, then as I submerged myself into it 24/7 I saw that there was as much destruction as there was creation, there was value in every living and dieing thing - and most of all there were these simple therapeutic messages in the way eco systems function. Messages so simple and strong, they changed my life to one that was more tolerable inside my chattering mind, a life more accepting and at peace. No, I didn't get totally buddha and enlightened... just less miserable with better skills of coping.

While society teaches us to take everything personally, nature says don't sweat it... it wasn't thinking of you when it made that hurricane, tsunami, earthquake, thunderstorm, or big wind come your way.
Basically if you have a question about your life, take a moment to go outside and watch how things function outside the modern human realm, and there is an solution. One so simple, usually we don't like it.

Watch dis' video below... cause the ants say it betta' ...



XoXo

Guessing Game! What is this?

Time to guess WTF this is....
Here is another jewel of North Carolina, a little piece of winter mystery!
Your hints are:

• nature and man made combined
• changes shape
• impermanent

Can you tell me what this colorful bling is?

XoXo

Bleeding Tree

One of the reasons most regular folks label environmentally concerned folks as "treehuggers" and "hippies" is for exactly what I am pointing out here. This tree is obviously bleeding from being partly cut with a saw - the macabre part of my personality noticed right away how sickly the dried black goo looked dripping out to one side... the part of me who strives to give nature all the respect it deserves wanted simply to share how strange and amazing this looks with others. I am not an advocate of deprivation, I am not seeing this and having it lead me to simply screaming "save the trees" - in a world of survival there are many uses for trees. It is how we (ab)use at this point in modern history that strikes me as odd and disturbing. We don't just build simple shelters, we build toxic McMansions in gated communities, we use billions of paper grocery bags instead of bringing re-usable bags...and still that isn't exactly the problem, our whimsies are just a symptom. The real problem is the disconnect from nature. Who will really think of a tree or the eco system while building their big 'keep up with the Jones' house in the wealthy or middle class neighborhood - and can you blame them for not thinking of it, when they have no exposure to the reality of our natural resources and where these resources come from? Sometimes I think people should act more responsibility towards the earth (of course they should) but the over educated rich are just as under educated as the poor in this modern consumer society. Without the hands on knowledge of what this eco system really entails, without the reality and experience (AKA living in the woods and with nature in the raw)- I have doubts to whether the majority of uneducated will come around very quickly to learning the basic elements of respect for the earth that supports their very life and breath. Our education system is concentrated on teaching children and adults what I would consider some really petty skills, mainly ones applying to consumption, sales, and how to fit into the economic box we've created. After learning to read and write- our most basic education should be to learn the one-two steps to what really keeps us alive - being our food & how we can grow it, our water & how we can keep it drinkable, our air & how we can keep the earth in balance enough to breathe it without breathing in later health problems.
It's good to recognize it, it's amazing to talk about, but it's extraordinary to go out and really live it! I believe the low mummer of talk I hear these days of cleaning up the planet is a good sign - I am forever an optimist about the possibilities of change... I know that when things really start to break down and are seen for it's dysfunction people will undoubtedly be motivated to make changes - but it would be so awesome if we could fix before it completely breaks.
XoXo