Last year, I built myself a nuclear fusion reactor, on the principle that the sun is a really great one but that its reactions are only completed when they strike the earth and are given form by matter. So, I built a reactor core, and installed my fuel cells. Here’s the core, if you remember:

Fusion Reactor Core

Natural materials are used to stabilize gravity reactions.

What I was aiming for was a wild reactor, one that was part of a complex, ongoing series of chain reactions, in which the earth was operating with dynamism and complexity — something like this:

Wild Lupines Transforming the Spring Sun into Bees

Don’t worry, the bees will come.

To remind you of the technology, here are the cells, when I inserted them into core, in preparation for initiating the reaction:

The Core After First Addition of the Catalyzing Agent (Water)

Water collecting on a stone eroded a channel down the slope. Obviously, gravity needs to be watched carefully in these tricky processes.

And the year went by, and birds came by, and mice, and cats. A few dogs crashed through the reaction, unharmed, and swarms of bees. After all that here’s the reactor at year end:

Reaction in the Process of Shutting Down Due to the Distance of the Earth from the Sun

Note how the reaction overcome with stray reactions of vetch. Some fine tuning of the apparatus is called for.

And then the snow came, but even it didn’t end the reaction. Look who has come through the winter in great shape, busily humming away at its transformations of light…

Sage, Blue Oat Grass, and California Poppies

Notice that the vetch infection has been cleared away. The slope is close to stable now. Gravity is no longer a strong force in this system, even though it is only a year old.

How glorious a fusion reaction can be! Industrial fusion reactions promise energy that can be used for industrial processes, yet we are surrounded by fusion reactions that power living processes. There’s our choice. Talk about serendipity. Look what showed up at the mailbox yesterday, and disappeared as mysteriously as it arrived:

The Goddess Was Here or What!

Or was it the Goddess? Look at the car’s butt:

The Goddess and the God’s Chariot of Fire

With the Green “N” for “Novice Driver”. You gotta love it. The world’s all right.

I promised a peek at the new Okanagan Academy. Ah, glitches. Long story of technological rat-cheese-mazes, actually. Here’s a screen shot, to give you an idea where we are going…

The Okanagan Academy, in Progress

Note how Okanagan Okanogan will be embedded and highlighted as daily research.

Tomorrow, hopefully, all glitches aside, a better glimpse. Since 1974 I have lived in a world divided between horticultural and literary passions, never far from science. That they have now all come together is an incredible gift. I don’t think it was any accident that the Goddess was in town. Given all the years, I think it’s OK if it takes a few more days to de-glitch the band aid solutions I applied to my relationship with my service provider five years ago  and get it right. In the meantime, get out there and enter that reaction. Do you feel it? Do you feel yourself standing within the sun?

Whoa!