Maybe it's the endless string of gray luke-cold days that pass this year for winter. Or it could be this relentless recession, even repressed emotions from my years in the monastery studying philosophy. I prefer to think of it as my Italian farmer heritage evoking a thoughtful
Wendle-Berry-like view of everyday farm life. For whatever reason, I find solace and inspiration turning over my goat manure compost. It provides a rich analogy for our existence. So most every morning you can find me out there workin' the pile.
Let's get something straight first. I purposely went out and got this manure from the
Quilliasacut Farm School. They need to clean it out of the goat feeding area. We need to feed it to our vegetables and grapes. Maybe not the worlds most pleasant accumulation, but for our purposes it is valuable. And that strong aroma of ammonia that drifted over the farm for weeks after it arrived, it's gone now, but it was proof that this was the good stuff. So I think of manure, not as the icon for everything that has gone wrong, but the essence of the way things work. Things come to life. They die. They get eaten. They turn into manure. They come back to life. It's the circle of life. It's living physical karma. What goes around comes around. With care, it gets better every step of the way. It could be the foundation of a whole philosophy of natural ethics, but I'm still working on that.
Make no mistake. Manure is still teeming or steaming as the case may be, with life. Life doesn't just die, it changes into new kinds of life. Actually I think a lot of these microbes are inside of us keeping us, or at least the goats alive, which in turn keep us alive. Curiously, they benefit greatly from a little helping hand in getting mixed together, evening out the moisture, bringing in fresh air. So we have a symbiotic relationship. Sometimes you work the pile. Sometimes the pile works you.
Dust to Dust, ashes to ashes says the Bible. There's a part I can understand literally. Just north of us is a huge belt of limestone, source of calcium for cement and matrix for crystals, lead, zinc and trace minerals that glow under ultraviolet light. It was all once alive. Limestone, for the most part, is the compressed remains of diatoms which filled the ancient seas and were sequestered into stone over millions of years. Marble is a kind of limestone, the stuff of headstones. I find that fitting. The theme of the next Panorama Gem and Mineral Club Rock Show
(March 26 and 27) is "Stories in Stone". Making a poster for it is on my pile of stuff to do.
Even as stone, the pile gets recycled. The volcanic ridges in the middle of the oceans gush magma from the mantle of the earth. It continually pushes out to the continents and back down under them, into the molten mass beneath the not-so-solid rock. So the sea floor is younger than most of the land masses, but even they are churned back into the mantle and built up again from fresh lava and submerged magma. Which brings up the earthquake in Haiti. A local family was on national news for bringing home a family of orphans and more than that, for having established
a relief organizaton just for Haiti years ago. Talk about a pile of stuff to deal with...
A big endless pile of stuff to deal with every day also makes a nice analogy for almost everything else on my schedule. The Panorama Gem and Mineral Club website is up and running. It includes a couple of nice new things, a
story on the provenance of jewelry inspired by jeweler Fred Rossman, and an interactive map to
club rocksites with links to articles about them. I intend to do another article or two about Fred's Jewelry. That's still on the pile.
There is a lot of history activity including 15 oral histories, much of it is not available on any website yet. But the
Wagon Trails Tour, one of five I have planned for Stevens County is now operational along with the original,
River Routes Tour. You can now buy the
River Routes booklet from the website. There is a lot more history to post on the pages for Wagon Trails. It's on the pile.
My friends and family continue to come through with links to their piles. Bina put together a nice montage of pictures of my grandson,
Ovid Duke Brock. Charles Murley gave me a heads up on a video released last Thursday by Canadian Broadcasting on the $20 Billion Marijuana industry in Canada (bigger than logging or fishing) with a focus on Grand Forks, just over the border from us,
Cannabiz. Canadian Broadcasting won't let Americans see it from their site, but it is available through
Bit Torrent. The setup takes a little time, but this is the best video I have seen on the issue. Speaking of good video, you MUST SEE
Food Inc. You can get it through
NetFlix. Put it on your pile.
There's a lot more going on but I don't have much to show for it yet. I am printing a newly revised
Geologic Atlas of Ferry County and finding lots of interesting rocksites to check out later in the year. If you wonder what I'm up to, trust me, I'll be workin' the pile.