Relese Your Inner Rock Angle

I've been quiet lately here at Epiphany Now. I'm suffering from a bit of reality induced writers block. I'm tired of doom, and the amount of doominess that's just outside waiting for me, and you, and anybody else not anesthetized on fukitol, corn beer, and big idiot clowns smashing into each other for the purposes of moving a pigskin around on fake grass. Even the fuckin' grass is fake in that wallerd out carcass of a long past stinkin' dead horse that is American football. Even the name is arrogant since football (as in the game where you kick a ball around with your feet) is probably one of the oldest sports. A game that's played and recognized globally as football, but here we call it soccer and reserve the name "football" for a sport that has very little to do with kicking a ball. It seems we can't even be honest about our sports, and that we need to be exceptionally different along with how we measure things. The rest of the world uses metrics, what with it's easy to understand increments of 10.

What of the metrics of the future? Agreeing on how we measure that, be it with metrics or standard, they both spell the collapse of our complex civilization. Not a collapse fit for television or the big screen, but one fit for a detention room with a group of misfits nobody wants to be around (that's the rag tag group of genius boomers at the Diner... well actually the Diner is a good cross section of different ages). Each year will be shittier for more people, and eventually you may be amongst their roles. Present and not accounted for as an economic non-person who's been pushed to the margins of a collapsing society without so much as a reach around for the years spent servicing that big tube up your anus, stuck there by the machine, and always sucking memories out to feed the bullshit black hole that the American Hologram projects into every mush for brained i gadget wielding cyborg. Where reality is presented on smaller and smaller screens that we all hunch at, growing crooked, and gnarly in our weaknesses with obsolete flesh. Flesh composed mostly of man made chemicals...flesh maintained on genetic modification and powered by ancient fossil sunlight, as John Michael Greer recently dubbed petroleum.

Why should those internet i gadget cyborgs look away from their ithingies? Why should they wake up and notice that memory hole tube up their ass that's powering the Matrix? We can't all be Neo, and it seems whenever he tries to make an appearance he's whisked away to a kookville for profit, corporatocracy owned private prison (it's interesting to me that Google Blogger doesn't recognize "corporatocracy" as a word). Those state of the art prisons they've been steady building need prisoners to remain a profitable business. You can't make money on building and running prisons with no prisoners now can you? It helps that the laws have been rewritten so that we can be deleted in some forgotten military prison that's tucked away where nobody will ever notice. They might as well just send us to the land of away, with the rest of the trash in our consumer fueled "landfills," or trash dumps as I prefer to call them. At least that's an honest description. The place where our inability to think past the newest flavor Dorito goes to rot, along with any chance at a future that doesn't resemble something you'd likely find somewhere in a smog choked Chinese slum, or an Indian one for that matter. There's nowhere left to go from here except straight into what's left when the fog from a perpetual progress myth dissipates, and there's no longer anything that agrees with the stories you tell yourself...that you verify with that imagidgit and all of those stupid scripted stories that pass through that memory tube up your ass. It's always convincing you that what you need is to work more hours for less pay and no benefits so that you can afford to support those slums that steady chuck out shit for you to buy. Shit that breaks just as soon as you bring it home. Your home being just a place for the thing to pass through on it's way to the trash dump.

How empty can we imagine ourselves to be? Can we get much more empty than a paradigm that mines the wealth of nature for the production of trash? A system that subjugates everybody to it's incessant worship of profit as the only sacred. The game is rigged. You gotta have money to play. Now you gotta comply to the new wealthcare mandates or be fined, leading to imprisoned...eventually. Just being alive requires that you pay, and only money will be accepted as payment. Well, that's not true, there is also the option of an all expense paid incarceration in one of those for profit prison businesses where you can make a few cents a day to pay for the cigarettes that will hopefully kill you before your prison gay cell mate decides to push your shit in. It doesn't sound that bad does it. It sounds like you could almost learn to enjoy having your shit pushed in doesn't it?

The trouble is not in imagining a world where money is not required.  It's actually quite easy to imagine. It's just that you'd be imagining a lie. Money's not going to go away, and nor are the men whom control it's completely hallucinated nature. In fact, those men control trigger happy goons in police suits. And those police suits revel in their high tech deadly weaponry, and in the sound that their boots make when they stomp on your freedom to be a slave in this Orwellian New World Bravely that's become the reality surrounding the imagidgits we're all plugged into. Well, we're not all plugged into them, at least not unconsciously. There are those of us whom are trying to come up with solutions to all of this totalitarian tyranny over nature and the mass human mind. We're out here hiding in plain site where we are free to think about the world outside of the Matrix. Hiding in glitches hoping for a miracle and trying not to fall prey to near term human extinction nihilism (or one of those shit pushin' in prisons).

The way forward is to no longer care about the Matrix and the goons whom worship at it's suffering feet. We need to collectively turn our backs on the system. I'm trying my hardest to do that, but there aren't many options and it requires a bit of luck to pull off. We don't have the money to build a future before the Matrix grinds to a halt (one stair step at a time all the way to collapse). The answer is as simple as access to land so that we, the unplugged and empowered forward thinkers, can begin setting up the natural systems that will sustain us. It's easy to do! Real easy on the ground, and especially while we still have tractors and chainsaws. Restoration Agriculture, permaculture, ecological design, and perennial agriculture are all ideas that seek to implement the answers to all of the problems we face as a species.

Money stands in our way, true, but more importantly we stand in our way. We need to get out of our way, and that's exactly what us Heliopaths are trying to do at the SUN Foundation. We are trying to believe that as bad as the endless procession of problems we face on this planet are, that they are not insurmountable. There has to be a way through the endless storm that industrial civilization is proving to be. We've turned ourselves into slaves and are doing our level best to destroy life supporting biomes on this planet. As a Heliopathic Rasta Man Druid it's my job to figure this shit out (and it's okay to laugh at my dumb ass self applied moniker). As a father and husband it's my responsibility. Hell, as a sentient being with access to abstract thinking, it's my responsibility to figure this out. This is a call for help. If you are reading this, and you have not been to the SUNFoundation website, please do drop by for a visit. Have a look around and ask questions. Join the dialogue about how we're going to fix this mess and contribute to the solutions we're so desperately in need of.

I believe that the solutions to the demise of this industrial civilization will have to be small, grass roots, decentralized, and connected to the natural world, just like SUN Foundation is. The solutions will not happen if you don't try to pull them out, if we don't try. You, I, the other guy...us all. The goons are coming for us all sooner or later. Their masters already have all of your rights locked safely away at the bottom of the Land of Away with all of our mindless consumption, and that's all right next to the shit storm future we've left for our children. I refuse to be a part of a wealth pump that grinds up whole mountains, and oceans, and peoples just to spooge it all back out onto itself and everybody else in an endless act of hedonistic narcissistic greed. We fuel this machine with our apathy. We give our power away for the right to consume imagidgits and America's Got Talent. Let us take the land back, and so take our power back. Help us figure out how to do that. Become a Heliopath and help the SUN Foundation come up with the solutions to our problems. We're interested in solutions at SUN. Solutions that will weather the building storm. Got any ideas you want to share? 

The first person to guess what a "rock angle" is will get a bottle of SUN sauce...my fermented hot pepper sauce mailed to wherever they want it free of charge (and there are two possible answers I'll accept).  Here's a hint...it's a word that my son Ayden Zen McCarty thought up.  Guess I should prepare to give away two bottles.  

Here are some pictures of one of the ongoing SUN Foundation projects.  It's a monumental hugelspiral.  The hugelspiral will be completed once we wheelbarrow 12 yards of topsoil on top of the 2 yards of mushroom compost, on top of about 6 yards of leaves, on top of white pine, poplar, oak, and maple sourced from the land.  

 

The Birth of Sun Harvesters

The above picture was taken from inside of a swale I just dug out at the Fox Den.  The fox in the picture is my companion fox, and she goes by Bo Beppa.  I was taking the picture when Bo Beppa jumped into the frame unexpectedly, making the image serendipitous. 

I dug this swale, measuring at about 2 feet deep by 2 feet wide, with an accompanying 2 1/2 foot berm, and about 50 feet or so long on contour, in two days by myself. 

I busted through South Carolina clay fit for a pottery wheel, and South Carolina rock that had bands that crumbled like salt.

I dug this swale to capture water and build soil.  During the spring, when we get torrential rain, I hope this swale stays full more often than not, and I hope that an underground lens of water forms.  If that happens, then another hole which I've dug at the lowest point on the property, about 25 yards away from the swale, may fill with water from that lens.  However, that biggest hole, at the bottom of the property, will fill with water because all of the water striking my property has been directed to that spot. 

I used an A Frame Level, which I constructed from scavenged and excavated bits.  I used an old broom stick, a piece of wood that was scrap from a previous project, a piece of trim from a 1969 Airstream International Sovereign land yacht, some cordage, and a rock I dug out of the ground in Asheville NC on a previous paid permaculture dig.  It was a crude instrument that I made simply to last for this one job. 

But an A Frame Level must be used because placing swales on contour is a counter intuitive thing.  You can't see that level of slope and land movement. 

one of the various rocks I dug up in Asheville NC

Today I jumped the chain link fence that separates my property from a trailer park.  And I racked up a shit load of leaves that fell from a massive oak tree and placed them on my side of the fence.  A few roads down I could smell the smoke from yahoos burning the leaves that fell on their property.  I suppose they lack the knowledge, or concern, or brain cells to know that burning leaves is a border line retarded thing to do. Concentrate them on the earth and let the earth worms eat them and shit them out.  Earth Worm poo is as fertile as soil fertility gets.  Building soil is not that complicated.  Concentrate organic matter, or biomass, and if you do nothing else it will eventually become fertile ground for life to grow. 

I placed many of those leaves on the back side of the berm I had just created.  I plan to place a couple inches of mulch on top of those leaves, once I drive back to the county dump to get another truck and trailer load of free mulch.  I have to fork that mulch myself, and I have to pic the trash out of it, but it's free and it's a very diverse mixture of woody plant material.  Lots of people worry about things like herbacides and pesticides accompanying the free mulch.  My argument is that the mostly perennial and ornamental woody plant material I see being trucked into the dump, to be ground into mulch, is not the type of plant usually sprayed by homeowners.  It's just pruned and driven to the dump, where the trash in the back of the pickup truck and trailer gets ground along with it. 

I'm building fertility on this acre of land that I've found myself a husband of.  I'm using the principles of permaculture to guide me.  I'll be starting a business one of these days, but I won't be calling it permaculture because that word is in the process of cooptation.  I won't be co opted, nor will any organization I'm involved with.  I'm doing ecological design.  I'm using my brain along with intuition and spiritual guidance to create a landscape that allows regeneration, fertility, and life all to flourish.

Zen busted open a dried out gourd on the concrete after an impromptu game of "kick the gourd."  It ended up in the future pond, and some type of green growth emerged on the gourd.  You can see four gourd seeds still attached.  It is sitting on top of mulch from the county dump. 

 This is what I spend my time doing these days.  I dig holes, direct water, collect and concentrate biomass, and I sift through the literal waste stream of an empire drunk and glutted on the end of the age of petroleum abundance.  I have dropped out of the Matrix and no longer pay in any attention.  Maybe my actions are futile due to radioactively contaminated Fukushima rain.  Maybe Obama's hench men will show up and cart my ass back off to the solitary cell they've created for my kind.  Mostly resistant to the bullshit destruction for pigmen profit, I carry on with my blissful work of concentrating the raw ingredients of renewal and regeneration.  I'm an earth moving alchemist concerned with the quality and ecology of living soil. 

The view from the top of my truck, before the swale.

The only meaningful action for anyone to take now, to give our children a chance to eat, is to begin concerning yourself with sustainable food production.  As in, we need to begin seeing ourselves as sun harvesters.  We need to design our society with this as our central purpose.  I see a symbiotic dance between the plants and animals on this Earth.  We can orchestrate this dance like conductors, and that should be our place.  To concentrate natural processes in an attempt to create the most life giving fertility possible is the loftiest of goals for our species just now. 

Zen swimming in the first pond I dug out after a good rain

So I've sort of rambled and ranted towards the summary of this particular photoblog.  I've got many more pics up at the SUN Foundation site www.sun4living.com  You can see them here

Hopefully someone with great means will show up and donate a large tract of land for the first Foxstead to materialize.  We are now a 501c3 foundation with a bank account.  Go and visit the SUN site to learn how you can help create a realistic alternative to the end of petroleum abundance.  A realistic strategy for dealing with the transition from a first world empire, to a third world slum.  Or just go back to your ithingy and mindless idiot panel entertainment in service of BAU pay checks and pointless poisonous existence. 

There is too much for us to be doing to be wasting our time in perpetuity for pay checks.  We can sustain our own universal needs if we just believe.  Even with radioactive rain falling from our corrosive chemical sky, we can seek shelter beneath a forest canopy under which we have built culture and food.  Even when it all burns down we can survive, and we can thrive under a new paradigm that honors our sacred connection with the natural world. 

This is what's left of the home I currently have a $744 per month mortgage on.  Hopefully Allstate does what they are supposed to do.  If they don't, my wife and I will default on this loan and my credit will resemble this burnt out shell.  Fortunately we have exited the Matrix and so none of this matters to us.  Yet, I brought my first baby boy home to this house.  I still can't believe it's reality.