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| John |
|
Actually as a kid I knew this expression "Cool out" and that's kind of
how I feel now, because in a lotta ways no matter how much we talk, how I relate
to this is kind of simple, really - the words "sharing", "community",
and the fact that the other word which no one understands is "thirst" -
And I guess I do not believe that anybody came all this way unless
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| Katie |
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To be a hippie?
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| John |
|
Unless they understand sharing, and had a thirst. So that's it
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| Philippe |
|
People have a nasty habit of seeing tortoises in deserts and picking them up and
taking them home. People pick 'em up and think they're rescuing them.
But they're perfectly content to be out there. They've been using that design for
3 or 4 hundred million years without any trouble, but people just can't seem to leave
well enough alone.
They're really quite miraculous creatures, because they can go for long periods of
time without drinking any water at all. What they'll do is recycle the water they
have inside of them over and over again as they eat food. And after a while the water
inside of 'em gets real toxic, so they start to go into a state of torpor.
And then, somehow - and this is not well understood - they know when it's gonna rain.
About a half hour before it rains, they excrete all of the liquids, and then when
it rains they just guzzle it in and start the whole process over again.
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| Nancy |
|
It feels really natural for me to out here. I spend a lot of time in the city, I'm
a city person too, but it feels really natural to be outside.
The only thing I wish is that I could IMPALE myself - on a cactus or something -
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| Voices |
|
OWWWW!
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| Nancy |
|
Because it just feels like I want that INTENSITY.
|
| John |
|
There's some over here
|
| Michael |
|
Go ahead, Nancy
|
| Nancy |
|
I'm a fairly normal person.
|
| Mark |
|
We're still waiting to see you jump onto the cactus.
|
| Nancy |
|
I only meant that as a metaphor -
It just sort of feels like you could go so much further in your involvement with
nature - that you want to, but it's hard to do that, it's hard to know how to extend
your involvement.
And I guess that it just sort of feels like - I know that there's more involvement
that could be here, and I don't know exactly how to extend it.
|
|
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Pow-Wow '87
base for solar photovoltaic panel
photo by katie rauh
1991
In preparing the book on this pow-wow, I had the help of others with the transcriptions, but there was a huge volume of it, and I got bogged down with personal affairs and the loss of our loft in the Loma Prieta earthquake, so I didn't finish the book until shortly before the next pow-wow.
But this book had a lot of photos, and without an economical means of printing it at the time, it languished on magnetic media.
Pow-Wow '87 took place outdoors in the Mojave desert, and to distinguish between the daytime and nighttime discussions and give a better sense of place, I laid out the daytime dialog in positive (black text on white) and nighttime dialog in negative (white text on black).
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|
| Cindy |
|
I don't know where this fits in, but - I have almost a hard time focusing in on this
conversation, because I was thinking about going back to when you talked about being
grounded and concrete.
And one of the things the Granites has done for me is grounded me - although that
hasn't been easy. It's a lot more powerful and larger concept than I've ever experienced
before. And one of the things I'm thinking about as you're talking is the sense of
otherness that an experience like the Granites, or something other than a city, can
give you, and also leads to an understanding of self.
Philippe and I have both studied this a lot or thought about it and now are experiencing
it. Otherness gives you a boundary within yourself so that you understand things,
how they relate, in a way. It sets a boundary that I think is often missing, and
I've really been aware -
I mean, my mind kind of tracks on a different level in the sense of HUNGER I feel
in this group for SOMETHING. I kept thinking - what IS that? And I think sometimes
it's the otherness, sometimes it's the boundary. Because boundaries give meaning
to what one's doing in some way. And that's just kind of what I've been thinking.
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| Katie |
|
So Michael. You know what we need for dinner tonight, is a small cooking fire somewhere
close to the house, so we can see out there, but, you know, we don't wanna get scorched,
so if we make one with small sticks and then shovel some coals into the -
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| Max |
|
Yeah.
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| Katie |
|
I wanna be warm -
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| Max |
|
We've already used a lot of their wood, in addition to ours, so - we don't wanna
go too berserk.
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| Katie |
|
What's a Pow-Wow without a campfire?
|
| Max |
|
Well, that's a good point!
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| Katie |
|
Stoke it!
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| Fire |
|
CRACKLE CRACKLE
|
| Jack A |
|
Can somebody -
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| Maureen |
|
Turn it down?
|
| Voices |
|
Hah hah hah
|
| Fire |
|
Crackle crackle
ROAR
ROAR
|
| Ellen |
|
Is something burning again?
|
| Fire |
|
ROAR
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|
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