The above link from PBS.com of the Ken Burns film on the National Parks and their founding origins, is a lovely gift to yourself or others for the upcomming winter holiday season. The series is currently playing on our local NPT here in Nashville, Tn.
Having read this old rag of Random Fruitful Delirium for some time now, as I said in a previous blog on and off since 1984. Here in town if you don't
have a suscription to R.F.D. (highly recommended) in Nashville one can also
find it at Outloud books Outloud
I think the guts of Radical Faerieism or ness..is a return to the land. Getting out of City mind and out to the country mind. I have a special connection to this in there was a book by Charles Allen Smart R.+F.+D.
written around the time of the founding of the National Park movement. In the 1917's to 1920's called RFD. Well I was pretty close, the book actually came out after the stockmarket crash. The Williams-Smarts were well to do, related to The Duns of Dun and Bradstreet mercantile-agencies. My Christian namesake uncle refered to them as "those people" LOL. In it Charles A. Smart wrote of being a person of means returning to rural symplicity. Charles Allen Smart was my Grandfather Williams cousin. At Running Water the first Radical Faerie place I went to in 1984 in western N.C. high in the hills, in that cabins library was a copy of that book. My Grandfather Philip Williams inspired by that book in the thirties bought his own farm. He had been a WW1 flying Ace so the story goes and had mild thoughts of being a gentleman farmer. Also in the family history trove was an earlier Williams, one Vincent Williams from whom my christian middle name comes wvmemory who had scuffled unendearingly with the Shawnee indians and has his own roadside marker now in the state to prove it. So the chiming windbells of this magazine has a special family aura to me. I recall being young with my head thick with such ideas from such writers as Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreou, Ralph Waldo Emerson : Self-reliance democracy, and others more modern. Principlely the idea I gained from reading RFD the magazine is to live loving the earth and also enjoy the rugged guy on the farm with you or next door-wink!. Here in Nashville I have been privileged for the last 9 years to live on a piece of property I called Rainbows End. There were no trees here after the tornado that went through east nashville in april of 98. The lot was barren. Plants were given, and I invoked the nature spirits that had blessed the English commune..Findhorn.
Findhorn_Foundation Trees came growing in one space, that I moved as seedlings to another, most out of the yard itself or were given until nine going on 11 now grace the landscape here. This fall I plan to move another young maple into place. It is an incredible feeling to see a tree you planted grow to forty feet tall, It gave me a knowing that I had entered the mystic aura of life itself on our planet. Birds, bugs, abound now in my little yard. It has been a monkish existance..well fed monk, but monkish that I have lived here the last two and a half years slowly, slowly, slowing down to the speed of a tree itself, and riding the spin of the planet like a wizard who shapechanges into a tree, out of "The Riddlemaster of Hed" Riddlemaster_Hed. My Roommate Del is enjoying greatly
the above film. So I thought i would direct attention to its current playing on most PBS stations across the country. Again, I thought the film might be the perfect gift to give, or the centerpiece for community discussion groups. Nine years ago when I first moved here i was working at a flowershop here in Nashville and for six months I walked the dog that belonged to the owner. Each day we would walk through the little park across the street from the flowershop for 20 mins to a half an hour and each day I would pick up one or two bags of trash. The park had trashcans..people seemed to miss them. It was a good excercise in humility Humility and also in making the world temporily a more beautiful place. So if you need a buddhist half hour and a good walk, take a dog, and a trashbag or two..and some gloves..and enjoy bowing bowing ..in your wake will be the trashfree beauty of nature at least for a little while. Yours in Autumn beauty -Timefire Rex, The Pirate King of Oz.
