I have been staying on an a small farm on Fogg Pike in the outskirts of Mt. Sterling, Kentucky. This is out where the farm land and little exurbs of modest houses and neat rows of ‘double-wides’ mingle, and people are scrambling for jobs and flirting with fundamentalism. The strange weather has resulted in weeks of drought here in East-Central Kentucky. There is a fine layer of dust on everything, the crops and other plants and trees are muted colors of brown and green and hang slightly withered in the still air. People have been looking at the sky and muttering about feeling like they are in Arizona.

I arrived after dark on October 7th, someone had plugged in a string of grape cluster lights that glowed red and frost-white in the darkness. The lights cast a much needed welcome glow out into the darkness for I was more than a little road weary and feeling a bit lost and fragmented from the constant movement and travel of the last two weeks.

I went in, found a cold beer and sat down on the back patio in the night. It was still and there was an omnipresent high hiss of crickets sounding almost science fictiony in the night. In the distance the sound of cars passing along Fogg Pike. The night sky was blazing with stars and I saw the milky way I am ashamed to say for the first time this year. I had finally come to rest.

October 8 — walked out on the farm, down through idle fields to an unharvested corn field at the end of the property. The corn was brittle and rattling in the breeze, the air was dusty and dry and carried the sharp fragrance of cattle. I had started later than I intended and night was falling in a deep lavender and purple gloaming, the sounds of the cosmos and the night bugs rose up as if out of the ground and completely swallowed me whole. Just as I turned back the first sliver of the new sickle moon caught fire in the red glow of the western horizon. I was a space walker picking my way carefully through the dark back to the farm house and the grape cluster lights glowing in the night.

Today, October 14th — Last night the dry weather broke, big thunderheads rolling in, lightening flashing across the southeast and the Cumberland Plateau. It rained hard for a while and at least laid the dust. Not sure it helped the farmers though as the moisture was instantly gone. This morning cool, scoured air that had a crisp freshness to it had arrived, the light more clear. I took the first coffee outside on the little brick patio and watched the day flow. Three Great Blue Herons came sailing in across the fields and over the trees at the back of the house — they were huge presences in the sky, like space travelers. They were circling and surveying this place for a landing. The goddess of this farm had recently excavated the spring-fed pond near the house, filling it with frogs and as much magic and transformation as she could lay hands on. The Great Blues are surely here for the frogs, and probably the transformation since they have always been the side kicks of the old druids. I am here for the quiet, the Great Blues and transformation, and we are all grateful to the goddesses of this place.

The autumn equinox came just an hour or so ago
Accompanied by a full harvest moon
Glowing like a giant living pearl in the sky, a rare occurrence.
Persephone will reluctantly return to the underworld now
But tonight,
Tonight,
Tonight is full of moon fire and gnomes are flickering in the night shadows.
Go outside.
Breath deep, summer is over.

I grew up in the company of men and women who on holidays got together and drank beer from long-neck bottles, told stories, sat around playing the guitar and singing. Days like this “Independence Day” were not spent milling in large crowds, listening to predictably packaged speeches touting the official culture’s platitudes of a non-existent form of democracy. My folks got together with their friends and sang rock-a-billy, blues, jazz and country. They often would drive for hours just to be with each other. They sang songs that portrayed their experience, and on holidays they celebrated that experience, together.

These were good times in the decades after World War II, and the memories of those times came flooding back to me today as I was listening to a recording of Jorma Kaukonen singing Merle Travis’ Reenlistment Blues. I can remember my father brightening up almost every time they would sing Reenlistment Blues [and someone usually eventually did sing it]. Dad would always explain to me that Travis sang that song more than once in the 1953 Film, From Here to Eternity.” Travis not only sang the song in the film, in a way the whole film was structured around that song as an expression of the brutal fabric of army life, the idleness, violence, inertia, but also the intense camaraderie and friendship experienced by working class men in the military, as depicted in James Jones’ novel by the same name.

Many times as a young boy I was allowed to sit in gatherings like the ones in the film. The stories would go round, my father, mother, uncles and aunts, extended family and friends all sat in an irregular circle, and sang and talked — in peoples’ homes, hotels and motels, backyards, after hours in bars and restaurants. And it would go on for hours, days, and often, as the day and night progressed, they were ringed by a forest of long-necks that defined some sacred post-war space. It was a rich communal experience and it did a wonderful job of making me impervious to most forms of packaged experience to this day. Nothing much measures up to these kinds of moments, to these ways of being together with people.

March 2009: Waking up in Elko, Nevada, over 5000 feet in high basin and range country. Riding I-80, formally an old fur trappers’s route; formally an early rail route to the Pacific; formally, I am sure, a Native American trace learned from the migrating herds, angling through the illimitable expanses of high desert.

I-80 West, Spring 09 - Donohue Photo

Our trip yesterday started in Price, Utah on the Colorado Plateau, then up over the Wasatch Mountains through explosive light and snow of Soldier Pass, down into the Great Basin of Utah, picking up I-80 near Salt Lake City, and then cruising, endlessly, and arrow-like, through the Great Salt Lake basin — water and salt and minerals laying on the table-flat expanses, industrial salt operations and mounds of snow white salt in the distance off the Interstate.

At Wendover Nevada the road rises into these basin and range landscapes and we rise into a kind of awed wakefulness and calm silence, the gathering sense of moving through deep time. These landscapes are architectures of deep time; and we are time travelers, getting into Elko just before twilight. Elko, an old Basque Cowboy town-railhead, and now a trucker’s and rancher’s center buzzing with casinos and travelers. In deep time everyone’s face is familiar, lined with detail and specificity – we are all travelers here.

Knowing where the journey begins is always a tough call. Where did it begin for this journey?

Breaking the Galilean Spell — “Not everything that happens in the universe is governed by natural law”

Complex systems and multiple leveled organizations result in properties, behaviors and spontaneous order that can not be explained by the individual parts or levels of the system: “Hearts are emergent”, unforeseen and unpredictable.

Stuart Kauffman reinvents the sacred: “live forward into mystery”

Spring dragonfire and moonfire
Cold air and blazing light.
Wandering 21st century poet-bureaucrats
Huddle under a gibbous moon
With their cheap wine,
Dreaming April crocuses .

What happens when meta-narratives turn biological?

Critique of Information – Lash

Kenneth Rexroth: from The Lights in the Skies are Stars, A Sword in a Cloud of Light

“…Believe in Orion. Believe
In the night, the moon, the crowded
Earth. Believe in Christmas and
Birthdays and Easter Rabbits.
Believe in all those fugitive
Compounds of nature, all doomed
To waste away and go out.
Always be true to these things.
They are all there is. Never
Give up this savage religion
For the blood-drenched civilized
Abstractions of the rascals
Who live by killing you and me….”