So much going on.
Investment markets. Job disappointment. Staff firings at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Tariffs. Epstein revelations. Ghislaine Maxwell. Nuclear sub redeployment. Trump booed at WWE event. Israel and Gaza. NIH funding. Trump nomination of Jeanine Pirro. Shootings. Appellate court cases on tariffs and birthright citizenship.
Just breathe.
Climate worriers have it backwards. Earth will endure. It's humans who have problems.
The grapes know what they are doing. They know what time it is. Here is a Pinot Noir plant yesterday. The grapes are getting color.
Back in the late 1960s, I thought unrealistic and sentimental the back-to-the-earth romanticism of farming by urban youth -- people who had never hoed a weed or got dusty and sweaty bucking hay. Growing melons was work. I grew melons for sale, to make money, to pay tuition. I was making verbal contracts every day with Mr. Blunt at Blunt's Ranch Market and the produce manager at Sherm's Thunderbird Supermarket. They were counting on me. Customers would expect stocked shelves.
Now, 55 years later, my livelihood not dependent on the farm, I relax into a mindset of pleasant refuge at the farm. It's the sentimental thinking I used to scoff at. Forget the world. The farm is more real than the news. Relax into nature's rhythm.
There is a tradition for that kind of thinking. At college I stumbled upon William Wordsworth, a Romantic poet, himself writing about escape from a world in turmoil from the Industrial Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars.
The world is too much with us; late and soon,Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—Little we see in Nature that is ours;We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
Joni Mitchell's Woodstock played in my dorm room and the AM radio in the family car in Medford, a 1962 Chrysler Newport, the one I could use on dates with young women on summer evenings.
We are stardust
Billion year old carbon
We are golden
Caught in the devil's bargain
And we've got to get ourselves
back to the garden
[Note: To get daily delivery of this blog to your email go to: https://petersage.substack.com. Subscribe. Don't pay. The blog is free and always will be.]
3 comments:
Here are some more lyrics from that song:
By the time we got to Woodstock, we were half a million strong
And everywhere there was song and celebration
And this is what Hunter S Thompson had to say about the 60s a few years later:
Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.
My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
Then there was Manson, eh? And—speaking of HST again—Altamont.
Idealism meets reality; reality scores a knockout… 🤷♂️
Post a Comment