I recently returned home from my first ever long distance bike trip!

I road 260 some odd miles, first west along the katy trail (a converted old railroad bed) and then north through Columbia to dancing rabbit ecovillage (my third summer in a row visiting there) and neighboring red earth farms, making it there in four days.

I lent a hand to my friend Brian (aka Ziggy), who is building his cob house, while I was at dancing rabbit.

Then I headed on over to red earth for a short introductory visit. REF is intending to grow into a collection of homesteads (more spread out than the village model of DR). The people there are really great and knowledgable, and one homestead, called Dandelion, aspires to grow into a tightly knit group of 6-8 adults, focusing on attaining sufficiency through permaculture. I'm thinking maybe I'll intern with them at some point after portland.

The bike ride back was more direct, 150 miles, rerouted slightly due to flooding, which I made in three days. I experienced many kindnesses from strangers as a touring bicyclist.

I'm amazed at the absense of residual soreness from this adventure. Certainly, my butt and hands and back got sore and tired as each day went on, but off the bike, after each leg of the journey - just fine. Exhausted, but fine. The whole of the trip was very intense physically, and I do want to note that I cried a lot (well, at least for me - I rarely cry, unfortunately. In fact, before this trip, the last time I cried was last december when I was in the midst of a stomach bug - another physically exhausted moment). I really enjoyed inhabiting my body in this way, going to bed tired - and early! At red earth, with people retreating to separate quarters after dinner, I started sleeping with the sun! Finally! It was amazing.

Of course, ever since I've gotten back, I swung violently in the opposite direction to staying up all night and sleeping through the morning. Life is a lot simpler on the road and in the country. When there are so few distractions, it is a lot easier to apply the self discipline to get done what needs to get done. When biking, I used every ounce of self discipline that I have towards biking, so whenever I rolled into a gas station, or a cafe, I ate a whole lot of ice cream and pizza. But now that I'm back and not biking, I'm still eating a lot of ice cream.

Also now that I'm back, my next goal - getting ready to move to portland, is a lot less physically demanding, and there are so many other more interesting things to be doing than sorting through and getting rid of a childhood's worth of shit. I have to shift to applying all that physical self discipline into mental self discipline.


Ohp, sunrise - that's my signal to finally succomb to that heavy pull of weariness and cut off the endless flow of reddit and brainfood and youtube videos.

I've got a handful of pictures up of pruitt-igoe forest, the grassy fields to the north, new roots urban farm, their small cramped orchard, and random lots throughout the neighborhood. More to come as I have time.

Here's google's satellite image of my neighborhood, including the mystical forest formerly known as Pruitt-Igoe. Ground level pictures that I've been taking to come shortly.

Ran links to a story about a town in Ohio razing abandoned buildings AND tearing up the roads around them.

If only St. Louis could be so cool. It's really rather frustrating because where I live now (north city, near downtown) has already had blocks and blocks of buildings razed, but it's just in preparation for new ticky tacky development, some of which has already been built.

My apartment is just a few blocks away from where Pruitt-Igoe (housing projects built in the 50s and demolished only 18 years later) once stood. They haven't taken out the roads, but they have put a fence around it and simply refrained from mowing it, and after just 35 years it has grown into an amazing beautiful forest of weeds. I'll take and post pictures around the neighborhood soon.

I just hope this depression depresses any more injections of suburbia into my neighborhood so that saplings and seedballs have a chance to take hold.

A couple of months ago, I became acutely aware that I was circumcised without my consent and that a foreskin might have been something I would have liked to have. I felt anger towards a culture that takes away natural pleasure, destroys intact working systems, and violates bodies, as I so often have, but perhaps never so personally. And I felt frustrated because couldn't see anything I could do to resolve my loss, except to resolve to never circumcise any future son of my own. But then, I read an article about circumcision that mentioned the possibility of foreskin restoration, with a link to a website providing a device to such an end. Hope! Or rather, if hope wishes for something over which I have no agency, what word can I use to describe the seizing of that agency?!

Circumcision became a popular practice among christians in the 1800s as a means to "cure" masturbation. Circumcision strips away the most sensitive nerve endings in the penis (in the ridge of the foreskin) and exposes the glans, a naturally soft, moist mucous membrane (just like the inside of your mouth), to the abrasion of the outside world, with the effect of making it dry, hard, and largely desensitized. While this really sucks for men, it does not, in fact, "cure" masturbation, not that I need to assure anyone of that. But it almost sucks even more for women who end up on the receiving end of a desensitized penis trying to still get off. From what I hear, when a man is intact, the rolling back and forth of the foreskin over the glans, which requires only a very subtle movement, provides so much pleasure that pounding never becomes necessary, and the two pelvises stay closer together for a much greater amount of time, with much increased pleasure for the woman.

None of the health or hygiene claims in support of circumcision hold any merit, according to both common sense and current medical opinion. The intact penis actually produces its own anti-bacterial cream (and lubricant), smegma (scroll 2/3 of the way down to reach the relevant section).

So, I am restoring my foreskin, as much as I can. Techniques for doing so work on the basis of skin under tension creating more skin to relieve the tension, just as in the bellies of pregnant women and the earlobes of people stretching their piercings.

Aside from the primary sensory benefits, I feel like I am getting a chance to physically revoke my membership to the Judeo-Christian tradition, and even to this American culture. I am rejoining the the 3/4 majority of the rest of the world as an "unchosen" pagan. yippee!


In a similar vein, but on a different subject, I recently learned that the use of hops in ales was brought on and enforced top-down during the Protestant Reformation, replacing a wide variety of herbs that were often medicinal, and also highly inebriating, and that such was done so expressly because hops is an anaphrodisiac for men (that is, it decreases sexual desire), as well as it being not nearly as conducive to altering one's state of consciousness (it actually just puts you to sleep and makes you need to pee). Hops is filled with phyto-estrogens, so it could be beneficial for a woman in menopause to consume, but not very good at all for men. So now I am wondering if anyone knows of a commercially available ale that does not contain hops? And if not, that's cool - I'm way excited about brewing my own gruit, anyway.

I am amazed by the hidden, subtle ways in which this culture negates sexuality, and with it, life.
Get your knife off my penis. Get your hops off my libido. You can't control me anymore.

"My efforts won't matter to the world. It's best to keep the peace."

Holy shit, is that really my world view? How did I ever come to that conclusion? What could my family have done to me (or not done to me) to make me that resigned to my lack of value to this world?

The books tell me I must have been neglected when I was young, but I don't remember feeling neglected. My mom tells me I was breastfed for a year, at which point I had almost completely self-weaned (I still wanted to nurse before bed at night), and then I was weaned the rest of the way. I may be wrong about this (and my mom will definitely let me know if I am), but I get the impression that I did not sleep in a family bed but in a crib. But I definitely have fond memories of snuggling in the family bed as a toddler and small child before going off to my own room. Could I simply have followed in my dad's footsteps, imitated his personality? Maybe he was neglected. Maybe his dad was neglected. . .



The words "enneagram" and "nine" took waaaay less time to become cliche for me than the phrase "people-pleaser", so I'm using them as little as possible these days. Honestly, I've grown tired of focusing so much attention on baring light on all the ways I am not integrated and whole. In fact, I'm pretty sure I've ended up enacting the "law of attraction" and have manifested some more bad habits by reading about what "nines" do. So, since I have no clue what the real secret is (how to succeed without positive thinking), I'm focusing on the positive.

I've found a book by Riso that provides mantras to aid in focusing in on integrating and letting the rest go:

I now affirm...

• that I am confident, strong, and independent.
• that I develop my mind and think things through.
• that I am awake and alert to the world around me.
• that I am proud of myself and my abilities.
• that I am steadfast and dependable in difficult times.
• that I look deeply into myself without fear.
• that I am excited about my future.
• that I am a powerful, healing force in my world.
• that I actively embrace all that life brings.

(text pulled from this site)

Basically, I can transform myself with right action and self-love. And both of those things lead to practical application in the form of developing a personal agenda - what my opinions, beliefs, and passions are, separate from everyone else.

So, step one: separate myself from everyone else (momentarily - after my agenda is set, I want to be able to hold onto that while still communing with others)
Step two: declare my opinions, beliefs, passions. I don't want to get into all of my opinions and beliefs and passions right now, but I'll use one as an example. I am currently very passionate about learning how to stalk, hunt, kill, and dress animals, both as a way to grow in community-sufficiency and as a spiritual practice.
Step three: set up a structure of some kind to either express or make my opinion, belief, or passion a reality. So, for hunting, I need to create a ritual for myself of waking early in the morning and going on a walk first thing with the intention of watching the animals and their behaviors and habits, starting to build a relationship with and deep knowledge of them. At the same time, I need to be reading about the technical aspects of tracking, making a kill, and dressing, or seek out an elder who can share that knowledge with me, as well as the wisdom that comes with being so intimately involved in the life and death of another animal. As I gain more knowledge, I will need to incorporate practice of more skills during those daily morning walks - how to walk, how to read tracks, how to construct, handle, and use whatever kind of weapon I learn will work.

It sounds like a great plan. If you're familiar with threes at all (that's what I integrate towards), you could see that this is looking like something a three would come up with. Unfortunately, there's no way I'm possibly going to get up tomorrow morning at or before dawn to take that walk. And there's absolutely no way that it would happen every day that way. BUT, what I will do is commit to going on that walk every day, just not necessarily at dawn. Some days I'll make it at dawn, and gradually, it will become a routine thing. And that's what I need - life-giving routines.

I do want to say that there are positive things about being *ahem* that number that I already have down. I'm great at listening to people, receiving them exactly as they are, holding them without any judgement, and really feeling what they're feeling along with them. I'm good at that. And I love doing it. That, and in the midst of lighter conversation among a group of people, when one person misunderstands what another has said, I can usually jump in and clarify what was meant more easily and quickly than the original speaker. I also probably have vast powers of intuition that I've got mostly locked up right now. I think, when I unlock them, they could express themselves in the form of telepathy, maybe even psychokinesis. Now that's cause for excitement about my future!