Every time I drive up to Point Arena to visit my friend Louie Frazier,* I admire this sculpture of wind and rock.
*which I’m gonna do in a few weeks, now that all us old people have been vaccinated.
This is a newsletter I send out maybe once a month. If you’d like to be on the list to receive it, you can sign up for email delivery of the Gimme Shelter newsletter here.
“We must realize that the world as it is, isn’t worth saving; it must be made over.”
–John Rice, founder of Black Mountain College, 1933
It was, of course, completely unplanned, but we came out with this book about doing stuff at home at precisely the time that people had to start staying at home. There are dozens of things you can do en la casa, besides staring at screens of various sizes. Here are a few pages from the book:
Get something done. Bake bread, plant (more) vegetables. Sprout some alfalfa seeds. Start a small flock of chickens. Make a table. Knit a hat. Fix that leaky faucet. Straighten up that messy desk/workplace/shop.
One time, years ago, I was seriously depressed. I went out and spent several hours cleaning up my shop, and it really lifted my spirits. I often think about that — making lemonade…
I was scheduled to do two presentations at the Mother Earth News Faire in Nashville on May 16th, then flying to Italy to attend the La Biennale di Venezia, a bi-annual architectural exhibition in Venice opening May 23, where our book Shelter was being featured as having had an influence on architecture. Sigh.
“Hoping that endlessly won’t be for long.”
–Townes Van Zandt
In 1979, I discovered a homemade book for athletes called Stretching. I was working as a carpenter and gardener, and the book helped me fix my back problem. I wasn’t actively publishing then, but I contacted the authors, who were living in Southern California. I called Bob Anderson and said, “What about stretches for carpenters, or truck drivers or waitresses?” (By then, they had sold 35,000 copies out of a garage at Bob’s folks’ house.)
Long and short of it: Bob and Jean moved to Bolinas, and over the course of 3 months, we added many more stretching routines, and Jean did all new drawings. We printed 50,000 copies on the first run, Random House was our distributor, and boom! It took off and never stopped, now at 3¾ million copies in 23 languages.
The big deal about this edition is the new section on smartphone problems, mainly bad posture, but also stiffness or pain. There are some simple suggestions for improving your posture, as well as new stretching programs for smartphone users.
Pub date: October, 2020
Note to our friends in other countries: We will be negotiating contracts for this edition in all languages.
A life changer. A Specialized Turbo Levo, with carbon fiber frame. After 25 years of competitive sports, I’ve grown tired of running the same trails, bored with lifting weights, dealing with the constant injuries. These days I want adventure when exercising, and the bike provides that. It’s not only got a brain, but it calls me to get out there. I can go so much further.
Plus it’s “pedal-assist,” meaning you’ve got to pedal. I’m going for 2-3-hour rides. I keep the level of exertion reasonable, and get to see a lot of the countryside while getting exercise. When I first got it, I was maxing out with “turbo” assistance, now I’m scaling back so I have to pedal harder and get a better workout.
I’ve been riding out in the woods. When I get to a spot where I have to go on foot, I find a spot off the trail, lock the bike with a cable, disconnect the power, and cover it with foliage. Then I’ll put markers on the trail so I’ll know where it is upon return.
My friend Bruno Atkey told me that yerba mate tea has as much caffeine as coffee, without some of coffee’s side effects and, by golly, he’s right. I’ve started making it in our espresso machine, and it does have a stimulating kick. Only thing is, I enjoy the ritual of roasting and grinding beans, then trying to get espresso in crema form, then foamed milk for a latte — and zoom!
Author Michael Pollan experimented with giving up coffee, with interesting results: www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/02/10/803394030/michael-pollan-explains-caffeine-cravings-and-why-you-dont-have-to-quit
In our book we show garden visitors: foxes, skunks, hawks, great blue herons, dozens of other bird species, butterflies, honeybees, spiders. Over the years I’ve come to realize that we’re only here temporarily, that the other forces of biological life, including termites, ants, and woodrats, are always chipping away at our self-made kingdom, and that eventually, they’ll take back over.
“Shameless Commerce” is what the Car Talk brothers called their commercials, and I’ve always felt ambivalent about sales pitches in these newsletters or on my blog. But nowadays, we need to survive, so:
A couple of little beauties patrolling the vacant spaces with their ma yesterday. Notice how deer always angle their ears at you like radar antennas.
Papaver somniferum in the garden this week
“Take it easy (and) if you can’t take it easy, take it as easy as you can.”
–Shaggy Man, on the Yellow Brick Road to Emerald City
Dragonfly. Male golden-winged skimmer. At lake yesterday, no other humans, little pale blue butterflies, one orange/black butterfly I’d never seen before, many dragonflies skimming around, a Steller’s jay flying to a close-by tree branch to inspect me, I swam in the maybe 68-degree water for 20 minutes.
From Anon
This raccoon has been hanging around here for a few years and recently started getting some of the cat food we leave outside, so I slowly made friends and eventually got it taking the pellets from my hand. I love watching the dexterity of its paws, very human-like. I eventually quit doing this, not good to feed wild animals, as it may encourage them to trust other humans, but it was a thrill to watch its handwork for a week or so.
Makes me realize how domestic cats and dogs came about; wild felines or canines hanging around at the entrance to caves or following nomadic tribes, becoming friends, family members, then being bred into different sizes, shapes, talents.
In our overly civilized lives, it’s a thrill to experience part of the “natural world,” or like 95% of our lineage: wild foods, fishing, making stuff by hand, harmonious interaction with other forms of life. To be sought out. Refreshing for the soul.
Just when you think maybe SunRay has done all he’s gonna do — like major buildings — he pulls off this wild soaring, spiraling, 4-story log-framed structure in the woods. The spiral turrets up top are just insane. I mean, holy shit! SunRay rolls on, a true Spirit of Nature in his designs, carried out with incredible (and intuitive) building skills.
I wrote Uncle Mud (aka Chris McClellan) about SunRay’s latest (I’d seen a pic on @cabinporn) and he responded:
Lloyd,
I was there in 2018 during the rebuild after the fire so I don’t have anything newer than framing, which I have enclosed. Bonnie sends this video. I’m off to the mountains of Jamaica to teach mud building again next week. The village of Nine Mile is very sweet to us. The little kids call me “Meesta Mood”. People there make $20 a day but a sack of cement costs $10 so no one every finishes their house. When we were there in 2018 we taught them how to make windows out of bottles that get thrown by the side of the road, putting up a rough “Tree of Life” window in the dead of night before our flight home. When we came back in 2019 we were treated to this lovely view of the finished window.
(I’ll put up Mud’s photos in a later post.)
Tussock moth caterpillar this morning, about ½″ long. It was on a cup on an outside table, so now we put him on a milkweed plant, known to host caterpillars.
Talking to Louie on the phone just now about the smoky air of the last week, he said, “That isn’t just wood smoke: It’s plastics, building materials, exploded gasoline, burned-up houses and cars…”
Shit, I hadn’t thought of that this last week. I wasn’t out running, but did take a few walks.
I shouda stayed inside a lot more.
We went on to talk about causes of these fires. He said that a lot of the problem is the type of logging that does not deal with the “understory” — all the saplings and plants that spring up afterwards. If they keep growing unchecked, they produce ever more fuel for fire. It makes sense to burn the understory (at its right phase of growth) on a windless day in wet or moist weather.
When foresters are involved in a cut, they will set a limit on the height of the understory, so loggers have to cut slash up into smaller pieces; this is managing the forest. However a lot of logging is interested in profit, not land management, and they leave behind conditions ripe for fire.
He then segued into how the Pomo of the Pt. Arena / Manchester area managed the land. In addition to hunting, fishing, and harvesting, they used fire to clear selected areas of land, making it easier to move around, making hunting easier, producing green young growth.
I told him about this great book, Tending the Wild, by M. Kat Andersen; about “…indigenous land management practices …in… California when first encountered by Europeans and detailed explication of the care of, harvesting of, and use of California’s native plants.”
You can get it at Larner Seeds: www.shltr.net/tend
The cycle of life…
