“I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief... For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.” -Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry is just another common man with some enriched revolutionary sort of heart and mind. He is known as a notable leader of the agrarian movement, detailing how the recovery of agrarian principles is a form of redemption to us and a fresh breath of cultural renewal and well-being. I got into him real good while out at Buckhorn, but I feel like my understanding of everything he stood for had no face to it. Finally about a month ago, I got to go with the ma and pops out to Oregon in an attempt to let them see what I saw, feel what I felt, breathe the air that I felt released me into the family of things. I ended up getting super enriched by their wisdom, and especially their willingness and earnestness to relate with me in this stage, era, whatever of my life. My mom got to tell me about her liberal arts program her first year of college-- a program- which only 35 years later, she had managed to still have ALL her books from that program. One of her monumental books was "Let US Now Praise Famous Men." It's a book written in the late 30s about three tenant families who worked farms in Alabama. It reminisced the daily tasks, ordinary duties to which these men gave of their energy and time on the land of the deep south. Some of the speculation and observation was dull, with somewhat pointless rambling-- but I think that was maybe a subconscious intention. Not a make the book, "interesting" or overtly philosophically and ornately beautiful sounding, because it's not. It's rough. It's raw. It's their lives. But this is where a book is a book. The pictures of these famous man are paper, bound together that sit there on the shelf. Their lives are not perceivable by mere perception. Who really are these men? Is that education? To read, read, read. This is the call to me and the rest of my generation-- with public causes of the environment, technology and human rights--- to put down our damn books, and see the lives of the people around us. Let our movement be the culmination of all the past movements. Not just as Berry puts it, a "public" cause, but let it penetrate deeply, let it encompass in our private lives, daily life. We know the familiar voice-- to go deep, we just have to be willing to tread the land that brings us there.

My friend Mollie is one of the most fun, clever, nonsensically magical genius artists I've ever known. SHE IS ALMOST THERE WITH LYNDA BARRY. Which, dear God, if you have not experienced the work and writings and super remarkable ride of Lynda Barry, you have not lived. Mollie is a Wisconsin-ite (derr) and she grew up on a farm with Amish neighbors. She calls this "The Evolution of Man". INKKKK. I inked myself... (If you get this, genius..ness is calling your name). LOVE LOVE LOVE

amen, and amen.

Just take a look at this brilliant creation and ingenuity. It's called the Neo Nurture Incubator.



Every year, 4 million babies worldwide never live to their 1-month birthday. Healthcare specialists believe that 1.8 million babies could be saved if they could be kept sufficiently warm. Kangaroo care would alleviate this mother-to-child problem, but the problem exists that more than half a million mothers die from child-rearing complications and many more unable to provide consistent care. Regular incubators roll in an average pricetag of $30,000. Utilizing a surplus resource, old car parts, reliable incubators can be made cheap and designed geniuosly. Get this: Headlights provide heat; a dashboard fan circulates air; a door-chime and signal light system is recreated into an alarm system that alerts users when troubleshooting or haywire details get awry. Funny, as we're going goo goo for gadgets all over the place, we may have a repurposed purpose for remembering that we're here to stay for a while,.

i love that word: design. It's different than create. Sometimes creating things becomes this inert doing, unexpected, something where you supply the resources, and your inner parts craft their doings. "To design" sounds like this lifetime of intentional creations that make a daring journey out of uncertain parts. It's an elongated source of making it up, improvising, and being willing to follow the path that leads... moment by moment. Well i'm gonna take this moment and go work on my bird feeders-- made out of sticks and old tea cups... well sorta. Today, bird feeders. Who knows? Tomorrow, a flying saucer powered by solar energy that detects other earths in other universes. Life is exciting in this way. Gracias my BFF, UNCERTAINTY.

To smell or not to smell.

Being back with the old homies for a little bit this past weekend gave me warm fuzzy feelings and reminded me of the fun eclectic grooves of our college-age generation. One hilarious friend said that if we didn't all become alcoholics or universalists after we graduated we wouldn't know what to do with ourselves. I laughed-- especially seeing it befitting as we sat around and drank and laughed how life is straight up damn crazy out there in them real life woods.

Here are some findings:

1. Coffee. Beer. Coffee AND beer in a coffee shop. This is pivotal. We got the whole coffee shop persona, atmosphere that we're all like....Yeahhhh...I sit and drink coffee, write and draw. Get the creative urges flowin', converse a bit, really check out who's all at the coffee shop, give em a little Whats up nod, and ride the wave from there. Yeah, yeah, Find the wave and ride it. I nodded at the folks there, why not? If the coffee gets you too bubblin, then you got a beer that chills ya out. Genius or what?

2. Look cool, but not too cool. Edgy always, never predictable. "Try hard to not try." Love it.

3. Still true at any age... Boys are always boys. Girls are always girls. We all grow. just differently. THANK GOD.

Allison and I were on the way home and and we stopped by a gas station to grab an ice cold milk to accompany our journey. I was actually behind a fella our age in the line who was edgy, pulling the whole suave, cool thing going on. He smelled different, so i sided to the right and sort of leaned to his right shoulder to try and get a better whiff. Oddly enough, he sensed my presence, turned around in a bit of angst as if I was trying to stab him. He gave "the look". Psshhh, i thought. Why would you wear a fragrance if your didn't want people to smell it? Why would I wear a blue shirt and not want people to see that my shirt is blue? My sense of smell is extraordinary anyways. Am I suppose to consider myself a creeper from that? Nope. He wore the scent for people to smell him, so when he was aware that people were smelling him, he was offended. Maybe he has other issues but this is what this translates to me: He puts the fragrance on to make him smell good, but doesn't really think he smells good or else he wouldn't mind people smelling him. Burnnnnnn. Oh, the lessons of life.

What to do when you don't know what to do.

I just turned 24—another year and I can’t help but wonder, really? With everything going on in the world, with nature and it catastrophes, political regimes shifting and plummeting, it's easy to get fuzzy-eyed and confused. So every year at my birthday I try to make a concrete list of dreams, ambitions, goals for that year of life. 24 this year to attempt, to put out there on the line. This helps me see where the heck I’m at and intentionally reminds myself that my moments make up my days and my days make up my life. And life, I hear it’s a pretty stella thang these days…. So other than providing a KILLER list this year—I hope to make a true dedication nevertheless. And they're not really profound, life-altering attempts. They're simple, small (often sometimes stupid) small things. But if small things don't matter, what's all the fuss about atoms and quantum physics jargon? I mean isn't it through these microscopic small particles that flaunt the idea of parallel universes existing through them?

I just finished up a truly mesmerizing piece of narrative art, The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. Roy intertwines that if the human heart’s nature is extreme brutality, then it is also of extreme love. It is a story told in the simple, every day thoughts of children and their observation of adults’ conflicted emotional and tyrannizing lives. She is inspiring in her words, actions, HER LIFE. She puts words to what speaks my heart’s desire for this year, maybe all years—in what shines beauty and truth into every single day:

“To love. To be loved. To never forget my own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around me. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget."

You know love must be love when it comes trickling in the rains, daintily soft, but always, always flooding the river.

The world needs to know the truth. If you are a nurse, WANT to be a nurse or all the like, brace yourself. Your wits, your sanity, it's all out there-- pending, swinging out on a limb awaiting for it to be snatched by some swooping eagle that then soars to the end of the Earth to give it to some dainty kid on the beach. Not so cool.

So if I was a recruiter for nursing, this would be my honest draw-in: "What do you want in life? Do you want a rewarding and satisfying job to make all the difference in a person's life? Do you want to care for people in a way that's life-changing, life-giving? Well, what the HELL are you thinking getting yourself into nursing? GIRL, please." I would then show them the poster in the break room of the patient and nurse holding hands with the slogan--"Nursing: Where hearts and hands meet." I would next hold up a poster that is a TRUE depiction of real life nursing: A nurse held up against a wall with a fork in hand about to attack while the patient just sits on his/her bed smashing the call light over and over and over again. The slogan would read: "Nursing: Where saving lives really becomes questionable."

The irony of IV pumps exists in that when they beep, or malfunction, they do so in an attempt to make a hell of a choir out of their sounds. They must pre-arrange who is alto, soprano, etc. I find it even more lovely when I am in the room with a patient, fixing the pump and he decides to ring the call light again to let then know it's still beeping. I want to prize him with a badge of honor, thank him, I will now willingly admit myself to the Psych ward. These sort of days are when mimosas are the sweetest things on Earth.

I mean is it too much to say I imagine myself out in the meadow with 50 IV pumps, all of them singing, DINGING the hell along, and I hear the cued rap music, "Let's GO (let's Go)....If you wanna you can get it, let me know (let me know). I'm about to break this thing up. LET'S GO..." Next I pretend to be in that scene of Office Space with Michael and Peter where they beat the fax machine with the baseball bat.... playing Fight Club until the little piss pumps can pump and ding forever no more.

So how's that a depiction of real-life nursing? The irony is ever-so incredibly tormenting in that, i still want to do this. You realize that you have to give them yourself along with the lack of patience and the anger. You learn to shake your head, scream in the break room as you fling yourself from wall to wall and somehow, love them like your own family. (And anyone could be your family here in West Virginia). Because really, they are my family. I'm just like them, they're just like me, and here we are, truckin' our own little puny selves mightily along.

Conscience was once the chamber of justice.

This is what my own two eyes bellied themselves into this morning: "His demise should be welcomed by all who believe in peace and human dignity," said Obama. "Tonight we can say to all those who lost loved ones to al-Qaeda terror, 'Justice has been done.'" Bush called the operation a "momentous achievement" that "marks a victory for America, for people who seek peace around the world, and for all those who lost loved ones on September 11, 2001."

My own contorted gut trembled, twisted and terrifyingly, after attempting to process the words of the forerunners of our political system.

I must question the validity of a just system that promotes murdering of murderers, despoiling the innocent by taking loot as we then parade in our prowess around in our own means of power-- regulating lands, continuing to keep the Southern Hemisphere in debt and impoverished to pay for our Northern ways of life expenditures. Half of our every tax dollar in the past 10 years has been secured to militarism defense-- all the while people have no access to equitable health care and our schools crumble in education.

We only killed 5 million people in the last 10 years, but we got the one! Yep, justice has been done. Why, America, why? You are stealing from our hungry children, wasting the ideas created from education and inevitably vanishing hope for future generations. You are staining the very sense of any sort of humanity.

We are destroying ourselves as a mean to protect ourselves.

The exploitation, the in cognizant ignorance. I am afraid your unjustifiable means of justice are rotting my soul. And I will be dead soon, rotted, and all those who feed on the ideas that at the core, life is sacred.

We must reclaim our lives America. No one is going to do this thing for us.