placeplaying

Quick visit to the confluence of the Wopowog and Matawan rivers, currently called Lake Carnegie, the body of water tattooed on my back. More than 15 years of intentional art/ritual at this spot, fallen ancient maples, a medicine wheel, so many memories. Today great green growth subsumes the directional stones, the flotilla of kayaks is down to one dinghy, a solitary garden chair, and a tiny fire pit. Glad it's still special!

The kids get it. Unprompted, they call him Donald Skunk or Donald Dump. They call him a bully. They know anyone else would be a better. For instance, one girl wrote "Kitty + Kitten + Cat = Awesome President"

Last week I had the kids draw a map of #wherewelive with whatever landmarks they felt were important. They included San Francisco Bay, the Golden Gate Bridge, Mt Diablo, their houses, an ice cream shop, Lake Tahoe, Hawaii, and Korea. This week I had them draw another map, this time with the Earth, Solar System, Milky Way, and our galactic supercluster Laniakea. They drew in Voyager 1 just outside the solar system, and a bunch of aliens. I dressed up like a starshed, which they thought was weird. #theneighborhood #placebased #ecoeducation #laniakea

#workingwithlittleones #1weekoldgoat #distractthecat #whileduckssneakby #heartshapedmushroom #pomegranatefairiehouse

#goodgigs #sowhatdoyoudo? The bees are (blessedly) strong headed out to early spring blooms. Teenage chickens are laying their first eggs. A red tailed hawk has started swooping low over the coop, but the kids howl and scoop the chickens to safety. Yesterday I got my first "What's climate change?" Today ten different faerie houses sprouted around the garden. And that thing where you almost tie a magical pomegranate house onto a persimmon tree. Very grateful for what I do.

That thing where you're looking forward to catching up with old friends, and it turns out they've added some #corporatefascism #surveillancestate #perpetualwar #militarizedpolice #factoryfarms #bigpharma #oilcabal #weatherwars #6thextinction to their #alienconspiracies, and you remember why you were such good friends in the first place.

#elninobonito

Cut the grapevines all the way back in the winter, and they'll give you gobs of grapes in the spring.

What a wonderful rain! Took over the whole sky this morning, sent gardeners scurrying into greenhouses, chickens tucking under sheds, kids stuck inside making art ~ we don't need any more mud monsters today.

Woah. Whoever called chickens flightless never caught them under a low hanging persimmon.

Favorite time of year, glad for my first season as a garden teacher, er I mean, Char the Garden Chimera!!

Well, we lost a chicken to an eye infection my first week at the school ~ but the kids handled Choy's funeral sweetly, and helped make a comfrey poultice which healed our oldest chicken Lola's lame leg a whole lot! Some kids are super participatory, some just want to play. This week we're planting a new collard tree forest, sprinkling fox pee to scare off squirrels, and I learned that the season for pumpkin, pineapple guava, and tyrannosaurus rex are all the same, tho the guavas are a little early this year.

Catching up on thank you's ~ especially to those who put us up and fed us on our journeys, it's profound to cross such long distances and arrive among such reassuring allies. Thank you again, and you're always welcome where we are.

Ancient trails convene at this medicine wheel, still actively in use by 81 tribal communities, with hundreds of public and private ceremonies every summer, near 10,000 feet above the basin in the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming. We respectfully prayed and gave thanks for our place and time on this poetic planet. And then from the sacred to the profane, we dropped into the canyons of the Badlands of South Dakota, where the old timey outlaws used to hide out. Emerging again, we started booking it East...

The land and sky and water change so dramatically across the Northwest ~ it's like we're able to map our own openness to life and life changes in the expansions and contractions of the Earth as we pass through.