Whose Land is This Anyway?

Posted on May 24, 2017 by Harold Rhenisch

No-one’s. The question is absurd. It’s not land.

It’s earth. One can ask for room, not ownership.

You can’t own Earth. She gives everyone room.

A request for land is a request for social rights. These requests occur within societies that divide social respectability and power by dividing earth into rooms of social power called land. If your goal is to escape the constraints of such a society, claiming or buying land won’t do it. You will only continue the constraints in another form.

We do it, at best, in the hope of protecting the flow of life between earthly and human spheres in that place, so we can be a part of its flow. This is called life and all creatures need it. When that flow is capitalized, it becomes part of the system of privatization. It’s a tricky balance.

Surely, we can protect that flow together.

Apples Make Their Own Heat

Posted on May 9, 2017 by Harold Rhenisch

Here’s my Spigold opening up last week. Note how the sun drew the leaves out quickly, but the flowers take their time, drawn out more slowly by the heat their fur traps close to their skins and the heat the red spectrum of their first show of petals gathers from the sun. What tiny worlds. What tiny energy effects!

This isn’t global warming. It’s local warming!

In the end, 500 gram apples are the result. It takes time. We have that.

Placenta of The Earth

Posted on April 10, 2017 by Harold Rhenisch

Every red osier dogwood is a placenta.

It streams with blood into the sky …

… or it catches the sky, and brings it to you.

Traditionally in this country it was used to control pregnancy and to stop bleeding after childbirth. That’s quite likely because it catches the seeds from these cattails, which are male (top) and female (below) flowers in one.

It holds them in the air for a later time, or dries them out, rather than allowing them to enter water …

… and carry the sun into it.

It stands apart from the two worlds.

It is at balance with earth and sky.

It is a screen of nerves, or blood, in the Earth’s mind, or body.

They are the same thing, and so are you: the one that is two, and still one, and still many.

This is the blood.

The red sea in your veins is no different. Rather than a metaphor, like this…

“The red of the dogwood is like the red of my blood, and the patterns of it are like the arteries in my eye.”

… there is this instead:

The complexities of the world are written here. We may read them, with minds built out of this same blood. If put in words, they might be reducible to something like this:

Blood flows through the dogwood and my eye, my heart, and my hand.

Ah, the heart, dear thing. Sure, it’s in the chest, but it’s also here, simultaneously:

Red Hill, John Day

It’s good to remember, of course, that this blood is also the screen of nerves in the mind. Perhaps you can see the thoughts collecting on neural points of gravity and tension below?

That is also blood. This is sacred medicine. It is not a metaphor, and it is not a unity broken apart into body and mind, earth and sky, thought and feeling, or anything else. It is as unified as light. Our ancestors didn’t learn to read the world by trial and error. They lived it.

Perhaps you see how words direct our thoughts away from our knowledge? It’s not that

it’s as unified as light.

Rather, dogwood and light are one.

More clearly: dogwood, light, blood, mind, water, heart, birth, water, conception and life are one.

In this form, in this holding up, the sun speaks. It becomes offering. Well, it was all along, but we reach out to it, we respond to the sun’s hand with our own.

There is no end to the listening, which is the mirror of the speech. Yes, the hand listens.

Yes, the hand teaches, and speaks. Yes, the mind is a hand.

Yes, the hand is a mind.

Gravity Waves

Posted on April 1, 2017 by Harold Rhenisch

Today, gravity waves, and a gravity whirlpool, too! Amazing results happen when gravity is tethered.

We stand between being spun off of the earth and drawn down to her molten heart. Nothing to complain about! We are gravity dwellers, that’s all, just like this grass bearing the writings of winter snow.

Earth, Sky and Water East of the Subduction Zone

Posted on March 17, 2017 by Harold Rhenisch

Look at Okanagan Lake project itself into the sky, as a cloudless space. Storm is trying to move in from the west (and from the northeast), with no luck. Terrace Mountain, in the distance, is pushing the energy of the incoming front into a projection of its own shape in the centre of the image, projecting the storm within the cloudless space as a mountain-sized fall of rain.

The pressure driving at the mountain from the west, causes smaller projections to form in the projected lake space between the mountain and the mountain of rain in the sky. One forms every five minutes, and then drifts into the negative space of the lake.In this climate, in the negative space of the Coast Mountains to the west, negative space makes our weather. Notice as well how as a result of the projections of the earth into the sky when the rain falls it doesn’t fall on Terrace Mountain but at the head of the watershed in the centre of the image below, which then carries it down to the lake.

The forces that made this deep inland fjord through such underground water pressure systems are still at work. This scene is their projection on the sky.

Ancient Waves Live On

Posted on February 14, 2017 by Harold Rhenisch

These drainage waves were formed 10,000 years ago when a lake as large as a sea filling the valley below my house drained in half a day. They are still catching sun and water, in the forms of heat and cold.. p1480024

In other words, the lake is still alive. It only seems so long ago because of our individual life times and generational change… but it’s still that moment long ago. Wondrous!

The Beautiful Temporary Estuaries of Winter

Posted on February 13, 2017 by Harold Rhenisch

Ice freezes in flat sheets down on the old fjord lake. A few days later, it is broken up by the wind, in angular chunks, as the repeated rising and falling, linear energy of the waves is translated into long, linear pressure fractures.

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Still waves, right? Then water rises through the angular cracks and contours them most beautifully.

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And so the waves become rivers and islands. This is an estuary landscape! When it dissolves, as estuaries do, there will be open water again.

The Old Tourism Industry Hits the Water Again Rag

Posted on December 20, 2016 by Harold Rhenisch

Look at how the wind and water are building the land at the mouth of Vernon Creek. p1420765

Look at how little Canada deserves this lake.

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Yup, it’s the time of shame again. That’s the invasive waterweed chopper, set out with water care funds not to care for the water but for the business of selling summer in Palm Beach, which this isn’t, but it’s all that people could think of. With my water care taxes, yet. p1420749

What a dishonouring of spirit.

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Ancestral Water Knowledge

Posted on December 16, 2016 by Harold Rhenisch

Look at the shapes water freezes in when it freezes over pebbles.
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The pebbles create an image of themselves on the underside of the ice…

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which melting follows, and air, which re-freezes in gaseous shapes. p1420491

Gas is not uniform however. When it blows as wind and breaks the weak ice up, it slides it against itself in wind sheers. Water freezes to hold these shapes as well. Water is very accommodating. p1420449

These are solidified forms of what it does with light and wind, instead of cold and wind. p1420618

Still, of course, beautiful, which is the word we use in my language to indicate a physically-apprehended balance that is right for life. p1420613

It’s no surprise that life freezes in those watery patterns as well, or that it gives them back to water.
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It’s that kind of place.

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Water takes on the shape given it.

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It would be wrong to say it has no shape. It even has negative shape, that space where it is not. It is very accommodating. That is the nature of flow. That is a power in itself.

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