Chickasaw Bluffs

"By 1800 there was little danger of the Chickasaws warring against either the whites or other Indians. Trade was the most immediate concern, and in 1802 the United States opened the Chickasaw Bluffs Trading House near Fort Pickering. Government trading posts also played a vital role in encouraging Indian land cessions, and President Jefferson was disarmingly candid in this regard. He urged the establishment of a Chickasaw post “for furnishing them all the necessaries and comforts they may wish (spirituous liquors excepted), encouraging them and especially their leading men, to run in debt for these beyond their individual means of paying.” The Indians would then cede more lands to satisfy their obligations. The effectiveness of this policy was almost immediately apparent. In 1805 the Chickasaws ceded land in Middle Tennessee to offset a debt of $12,000. The Chickasaw Bluffs trading post continued to offer on credit an array of high quality goods—the Chickasaws were discriminating customers—and each year Indian indebtedness rose by several thousand dollars. Struggling to meet their material needs and financial obligations, Chickasaw males used their West Tennessee hunting lands to good effect. In 1809 the trading house at the bluffs ranked first among fourteen U.S. trading posts, with more than $12,000 worth of pelts."

-The Chickasaws

Civilization of the American Indian Series, V. 109
by Arrell Morgan Gibson,
Norman, Okla. University of Oklahoma Press, 1981.

Ayali

imagine
being so driven
so desperate
using almost anything
money, liquor, guns, and lies
to take land from people
who'd been here for over 500 years.

imagine
new people
occupying that land
five six seven ten generations
slowly learning what
money, liquor, guns and lies
will buy

and now we
after a half-life in these hills
still under the influence
know almost nothing
of the first people who
laughed and sang here
not so long ago
almost nothing
of their sacred ways and stories
or their word for the mystery

Do you even know how to say goodbye in their language?

Garab Dorje

The skies are too cloudy to see tonight's lunar eclipse but I did not want to let the day pass without paying homage to one of mankind's best friends. Recalling his central message, contemplating his inner experience and sharing awareness that such a one once walked this earth. Isn't that the point? Today the Nyingma lineage of Tibetan Buddhism celebrates the anniversary of Garab Dorje. Born in the region by the Aral Sea in the centuries before Christ, he is the source of the 'Great Perfection ' or Dzogchen teachings. Due to the influence of teachers such as Padmasambhava, Vimalamitra, Longchenpa and Jigme Lingpa, this sublime method of awakening to full Buddhahood flourished for over a thousand years in Tibet, widely renowned as the highest form of the three vehicles of Buddhist practice. Garab Dorje translates as Indestructible Happiness. The essence of his teaching was summarized in a final transmission known as Striking the Essence in Three Words. Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche renders the triad as follows;

1. Direct introduction to the primordial state is transmitted straight away by the master to the disciple. The master always remains in the primordial state, and the presence of the state communicates itself to the disciple in whatever situation or activity they may share.

2. The disciple enters into non-dual contemplation and, experiencing the primordial state, no longer remains in doubt as to what it is.

3. The disciple continues in that state of non-dual contemplation, the primordial state, bringing contemplation into every action, until that which is every individual’s true condition from the beginning (the Dharmakaya), but which remains obscured by dualistic vision, is made real, or realized. One continues right up to Total Realization.

Sri Ramakrishna

Today is the 172nd anniversary of the birth of the Great Swan, the incomparable Sri Ramakrishna (1836-1886). If you are not yet familiar with this man, do yourself a favor and take the time to become acquainted.Even at this distance, he will make you laugh and open your heart, inspiring and deepening your practice, no matter what path you tread. Be delighted and enlightened by his magnetizing presence, and please do so with my full encouragement. He is one of a handful who I recognize as a fully enlightened Buddha; a true gem.

"Suppose a thorn has pierced a man's foot. He picks another thorn to pull out the first one. After extracting the first thorn with the help of the second, he throws both away. One should use the thorn of knowledge to pull out the thorn of ignorance. Then one throws away both the thorns, knowledge and ignorance, and attains vijnana.[1] What is vijnana? It is to know God distinctly by realizing His existence through an intuitive experience and to speak to Him intimately."

- The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna

[1] S. vijnana translates as consciousness

The Retreat Cabin

It has been a busy interval.

On Friday afternoon, a steady stream of visitors began passing through the hollow. My eldest son Isaiah and his wife left Durham NC and drove over the Smokies before dawn to spend some time with us. Zoe joined the three of us for a sunny afternoon walk out to the extreme northwest corner of the property, where we sat surrounded by leafless woods on the weathered porch of what we refer to as the 'retreat cabin'. Here we caught up on recent events. Isaiah and April work at a printing press in Durham. A few months ago he invited his brother Isa to move in and begin working in the same business. Later that evening, after the ladies returned from work, we all enjoyed an excellent meal of curried gluten and rice.

In the Tibetan tradition of time-keeping, we are approaching the first full moon of the year (Wednesday). In relation to the day, early morning is universally considered a good time for meditation. In the same way, the first weeks of a buddhist new year are considered an important time for retreat and spiritual practice. Saturday was the tenth day after the new moon, a day noted for strong masculine energy. In the Nyingma tradition, each tenth of the lunar month is associated with a different aspect of Padmasambhava. This month, in keeping with the emphasis on one-pointed practice we contemplate his supreme qualities as the thunder yogi Santirakshita ('guardian of peace') devoted to ascetic disciplines while dwelling on the extreme fringes of the civilized world.

Saturday morning, I woke to dark skies, high winds and torrential rainfall. So far this year there have been 291 reports of tornadoes, which marks an increase of nearly 500% for this time of year. A peek out the kitchen window reveals a few sparrows picking through seeds spread on the walkway.

Amazingly enough, the skies were soon clear. Zoe and Scott appeared to join us all for coffee and whatnot, neighbor Patty, her son Jeff and his kids showed up at noon as did Dechen's mom and niece Jade. Jeff erected a small platform for bird seed and bread crumbs in the front yard and it has been fairly busy out there since. One rufous-sided towhee seems to favor working the grass, a lady cardinal, a dozen house sparrows, and a few titmice flit between the concrete and the platform. Around sunset, Tenkar, Dechen, Jade and I walked up to One Heart Rise to feel the wind and watch the light play on the underside of the dark clouds. Jade (9) lives in town and doesn't get to do this kind of thing very often.

Soon after the ladies left this morning, Brother Ralph, the self-styled preacher who sold us this house twenty years ago, drove up on his 4x4. I invited him to come in and set a spell. As always, he asked about my 'outlook on the spiritual universe', and told me he wished Huckabee would win the nomination.

Then at last, this afternoon, I began formulating my thoughts and working on this post.

Over the years, I have initiated various forms attempting to provide the sangha with opportunities for creative expression and meaningful interaction. For over a decade we maintained an intense schedule of formal practices, both as individuals and as a group. Rasayana journeys, sweat-lodge ceremonies, ngondro and Vajrayana sadhanas, public rituals, dharma crafts, astronomy class, Tibetan language studies, posting forums, a community website, reading and discussion groups. In the latter half of the 1990's, there were countless opportunities to go backpacking for days and sometimes weeks at a stretch both here in the southeast and in the deserts and mountains of the southwest. The last seven years have seen an emphasis on making devotional music. All of these forms have had their limitations while also serving as primary vehicles to focus interest and available energy in a manner which has virtually defined the sangha at any given moment.

Now the days pass ever more quickly. What have we accomplished here? Years ago when there was more fire and activity in these parts, Khenchen Palden pulled me aside to warn me not to be distracted or sidetracked by the bustle of community and that he could tell me about scenes much bigger than ours which had completely dissolved and are no longer able to introduce anyone to the Dharma because their personal commitment to practice and awakening was weak or secondary.

At this point, we are once again in a sector of the labyrinth where samsaric distractions dominate and there is not very much holding us together as an active spiritual community. At times, it seems my interest is the primary connection of this group to the teachings of the Buddha. This impoverishes us all and should be recognized as a challenge to both our individual and collective well-being. In considering this, I feel an urgent need to finish up the retreat cabin.

Eight long years have passed since the structure began to take form. In spite of our talk and ideals and plans, it remains a dusty shed and sits unused and isolated in the woods. I have often said that I think we would all hassle less and evolve more rapidly if we each spent a few days out there alone every so often. Apparently, not everyone agrees with me about this. Even though we regularly suffer through familiar patterns of discord, there must still be faith that there are more direct and practical ways to move beyond these difficulties than by increasing the frequency of time spent in solo retreat.

We have made good use of the porch across the years as a place to spend Sunday afternoons, a quiet place to share tea and read Longchenpa and a bug-free destination for a day hike but the building itself is not finished. Nobody has spent a single night out there yet. This Year of the Rat we must work to finish the interior and make serious use of it. And considering the benefits that we have gotten from the porch alone, I am equally inspired to make this the year that we construct sitting platforms on both Turtle Hill and Easter Ridge.

Emaho!

Cedar Ridge

Woke early and filled the bird feeder before going next door to say good morning. Yesterday was to have been Dechen's last day of seasonal work but they asked her to stay on for another six weeks. Tenkar has the whole day off. We decided to call our eldest daughter Zoe to come for a walk and try out the fancy new digital-camera. It is barely above 30 degrees but they immediately discovered some crocuses on the edge of the woods before we trudged up Lizard Lane to the ridgetop where an old schoolbus is parked on the edge of the woods. Climbing up through the lower branches of an oak near the front bumper, we settle ourselves on the sunny end of the roof, overlooking surrounding fields, sharing a ginger beer and a catlinite bowl.

Zoe noted clear roads and a half-foot of snow in northern Kentucky and expressed surprise at the existence of good vegetarian restaurants in Louisville. She says her new boyfriend is very amusing and told him not to bother with the Valentine crap. He is cooking her dinner tonight. My eye is drawn into the shadows under the trees over the wirey remains of a hog pen and two piles of unused grey cedar logs. When Tenkar grew cold we decided to keep moving.

Before we got too far, we hear Jack crying because he couldn't figure his way out of an old shed. Nala kept barking at him from outside of the same wall he was facing and whiz that he is, Jack didn't realize he would have to turn around to find his way back out. Zoe went to the shed door and rescued him. The dogs seemed so happy to see one another that Nala charged and head-butted Jack in the chest, sending him flying onto his back. Never seen that before! We all laughed.

When we first settled in the hollow, twenty years ago this April, this high ground to our west was owned by a local family who had only recently acquired it. They wanted to raise pigs and take advantage of the local mast to help fatten them. With this in mind, they left all the hickories but cut down a mature stand of eastern red cedar to make fenceposts, turning a small evergreen forest into hillside pasture. Fortunately, about fifteen years ago, a hippie friend was able to buy half the parcel and she remains the absentee owner. The rest was picked up by my good neighbor Silas. A massive white oak holds the high ground overlooking an abundance of baby cedars, a short fuzz of purple-gray sprinkled amidst the tawny knee-high grasses of these sloping fields. On the coldest nights, a thick red cedar provides a protected, favored place for chickadees and other tiny feathered folk who don't migrate. Unless the volunteers are clearly tagged, they will be destroyed by the yearly bush hog, needlessly perpetuating the open pasture. I will write a letter to see what I can do about helping the glade return.

We walk through a wrought-iron archway and across the grassy openness of Oneheart Rise and down through a small stand of mature cypress. The path continues up another hill on a track snaking between tangles of green briar and the barbed-wire marking the western border. This south-face was also logged for cedars and poplars but unlike Oneheart Rise, no bush-hogging has been done here in over a decade, so it is quickly recovering. From the high shoulder the view opens to the south beyond our little hollow, the intervening space stretches across a blurry sea of wintry buds and grey tree tips, connecting the eye to a far horizon, a wooded ridge on the far side of the Saw, about a mile distant.

Here the path re-enters the trees, passes a small triangular pond and traverses Cedar Ridge, which still holds a fair number of older cedars, but not without a struggle. Back in the day when Silas had recently been granted title to this land, a local fellow drove up on this ridge with a logging truck and went to work, insisting he'd already contracted to harvest the trees. Silas said this was not part of the deal and asked him to please stop cutting until the problem was sorted out with the former owner. When the sawyer refused, Silas called our friend Ivan, who came over with a loaded shotgun in the trunk of his old Chrysler to see if he could help change the fellow's mind. The sawyer drove off without Ivan ever opening his trunk. Through rigged connections in the local courts, the sawyer ended up successfully sueing Silas for a few thousand dollars and soon after died of a heart-attack.

Later this evening, Dechen, Tenkar and I discussed the need to produce two more benches for the eastern and souther altars on the hill as well as initiating a plan to finish the retreat cabin. Tomorrow I will take a walk out there and write more about it.

Firewood

The other morning a thin coat of ice covered the porches and car windshields, a light dusting of snow melted on the ground but remained for most of the day throughout the woods on the top layer of last autumn's dried, curled leaves only because they are exposed to a layer of cool air between their underside and the slightly warmer earth.

A few surprisingly fat bluebirds landed on the mulberry out front of the kitchen window as if to say how 'bout it? They are regulars in these parts but this is the first I have seen them this year. A very cold morning and having been well-treated here in years past, they were looking for a handout.

After stoking the woodstove, I went next door where the ladies were sharing an early breakfast, getting ready to head off to work. We have no bird seed, they say, but there is some old bread and tortillas that I could throw to them. I break it up and spread it on the narrow strip of concrete leading from our front porch to the parking lot. Cracked and lifted by the roots of a nearby hybrid poplar, this twenty foot walkway was one of the only places our kids could use chalk when they were younger. Now, all of a sudden, those days are long gone and I am feeding birds instead of children.

Around noon, an old friend stops by, dropping off a loaf of day-old sourdough from a Nashville bakery, a copy of the Drive By Truckers' Southern Rock Opera for me to sample, a package of lemon cookies and reminding me that I need to order more Tibetan incense, which he has been buying from me for the last 15 years. Before he left, my daughters (ages 27 and 15) passed through to say goodbye and grab a road atlas, en route to Kentucky to see some friends. As the weather is less than ideal, I tell them to bring blankets and wear long-johns. The elder says good idea while the younger rolls her eyes.

Cold weather means burning more wood; the pile on the porch is almost gone. After shaking down the ashes, I wheelbarrow the ashpan to the far side of the parking lot and dump it on the compost. Nearby is the woodpile. Most of what we burn is slab, the rounded outer layers and bark from logs rough cut into squared timbers at the local Amish mill. This is usually a mixture of green and seasoned, hard and softwoods cut into stove length sections. If the price is right, we may also buy a small amount of hardwood rounds for the coldest weather. So far, we have spent less than $100 on firewood this year.

If you have to split your own wood, some things quickly become obvious. For one, no matter how macho you are, you simply cannot split rounds from a gum tree. Gum barely accepts the imprint made by the edge of an axe blade before bouncing it back at you without initiating even a hair-line crack in the grain. Further experience reveals the difficulty of splitting significant knots or branch junctures. In many cases, this is not altogether impossible, but invariably requires more energy.

Come mid-February, depending on the groundhog, the ratio of remaining slab to rounds becomes a concern. Looking around the pile my eyes are drawn to one big knotty piece that will never fit in the stove as it is, but would provide a bed of live coals for six or eight hours when split. Checking closer, marks indicate that it has previously been tested by my axe. Perhaps it was still green and tough at the time and will now yield easier. No such luck. I shift plans and instead of attacking the center, decide to work the edges. After a few well-placed strokes, the chunk is just narrow enough to slip through the mouth of the stove.

A few wheelbarrows worth are rolled to the porch, I replace the ashpan, shut down the stove and tailed by both dogs, set out on a path along the creek to ask if my neighbor has any bird seed. Past the old sweat lodge site, across a footbridge, up a mossy bank and in the back door. Warmth, the smell of food, bright with electricity and people noise. Four friends sit around the kitchen table, four kids watch a show on Alaska. Mary offers tea. Silas points out a half-bucket of bird seed on a nearby porch. The television narrator compares the changeability of a certain Alaskan river to a woman's moods. I would never get away with saying anything like that, but Dave explains that this guy is alone in the wilderness or he might not either and everyone laughs.

We share breaking news. The youngest son of our local mechanic was in a bad car accident and will need every bone in his face reconstructed but he will live. A small trailer has recently been moved out into Skymetal field to accommodate the rowdy nephew of the man who used to own all this land, although no one is living in it presently. Patty and her son Jeff both have their homes out on the edge of Skymetal, an open stretch of grassy ridgetops hosting a few ponds defining the high ground to the east. To discourage further development, Patty will not grant access to her electricity. I thank Jeff for putting up a no hunting sign accompanied by a prayer flag on Easter Ridge. And everyone concurs; it is a good place to watch the sun rise and set and we should probably build a small platform for sitting out there. Anticipating the coming spring, Jeff said he was surprised the other morning when he saw what appeared to be a bush in full bloom which quickly transformed into a family of goldfinches huddling in the early light. The circle soon broke as darkness fell and we wished each other a pleasant evening before I followed the dogs home, lugging a bucket of seed.

37: Family

Yesterday afternoon, Jack and I walked up Easter Ridge, a thousand meter long finger of higher ground covered in young oak and hickory, slowing to kick down some of the branches that had fallen across the mossy path along the way. We looked for a log to sit on, but it seemed like they were all either too rotten, too close to the ground, or angled away from the sun. Instead, we settled in a patch of sun on some dry leaves with a young white oak to lean upon. Light plays on the wispy webs stretched a few inches off the ground between saplings. Off to the west, a pair of Barred Owls were hooting. This is the first time I have heard them this year.

A dozen vultures circle effortlessly high in the sky to the south. A hawk passes below them.

Nala appears over the rise with nose to the ground. She has followed our trail from the house. Jack hears her coming and jumps up running to greet her but Nala does not recognize him. She stops, startled at Jack's approach and prepares to turn and run before she recognizes the little dog she sleeps with every night. Much jumping and tail chasing before they settle down.

I walk to get out of the house and enjoy what this part of the universe offers up for free everyday. People spend so much time doing things they don't want to do so that they might be able to do some of those things they would like to do. And far from a just reward, they are often underpaid, taxed unfairly, exhausted and dehumanized by jobs that may be outsourced, ultimately looting the middle class and further enriching those who are already criminally wealthy. The other day, I saw a chart indicating my family's income level is among the lowest 10% of the national average. Still, we live comfortably, eat well and want for nothing. And like so many other people across the earth, we have no stocks or insurance. Oh the great reckoning will surely come! In the meanwhile, you could kill yourself trying to get adequately insured.

Developing a taste for simplicity and meditation generates great personal wealth. In particular, the magic quality that transforms the mundane into its deeper, luminous context is appreciation.1 Exhausted by news of a world descending into madness, I head out to spend more time in the little wilderness that remains. The other day, I was saying to a loved one that I have always been of the opinion that a litltle ganja, a holy book, a patch of woods to get lost in and friends to share it with are the essence of a good time. What else do you need? Culturally, we seem to have lost any meaningful context to understand ourselves. Considering what we are up against in these latter days, it sometimes feels like man is a very small, impermanent thing. I don't always feel that way. Letting go of such concerns for the moment, I take refuge in the three kayas and light the bowl, look around and listen to the distant wind. A waxing crescent moon floats in the empty blue above the sun. Both are visible in one field of vision.

Climbed the ridge onto Turtle Hill. Late afternoon shadows stretch across the crown, the lone cedar appears black. Rows of prayer flags flutter in the wind. The paths and central clearing are covered in leaves. All the altars are intact, the Buddha is snug in his dark blue robe. The long flag on the central cedar pole has been ripped to shreds in the recent storms, the bench in the southern quarter was poured with bad cement and needs to be replaced. Nobody has blown a conch or performed a fire puja up here in months. It feels like an old abandoned ship. The hill has been through periods of neglect like this before. Will she ever sail again? In the trees overhead, a pileated woodpecker flies determinedly toward his nest. He has lived upon on the edge of Skymetal field for years.

I follow the path clockwise toward the red altar and set my shoulder bag between myself and the cold bench. I spent some time with the yidam as the last crimson rays of the primordial blaze bled through the winter tangle of trunks and branches on the western horizon. I have always been enthralled by this particular experience but it was not until today that i could put any words on it. As a clear phenomenal display of the symbolism of elements outlined in the hexagrams of the I-Ching, this is the natural sign of unqualified awareness radiating through the jungle of sentient channel and wind systems.

om ami dewa hri
____________
1. from Latin, appretiat, appretiare, 'set at a price', 'appraise'. Also, Latin 'pretiosus', of great value. Tibetan, 'rinpoche', great precious one.

an unremarkable place

The past few days have been beautiful; crystal blue skies like you only see in the winter, amber sunsets and a pink glow on the eastern horizon at days end. You would never suspect that earlier in the week, a thousand homes were destroyed in Tennessee and over fifty people were killed by the descent of 69 tornadoes, terrifying in their raw power and arriving in the dark.

Let the stove die down, turn off the screen; it is time to get out there. Winter time in these woods means no bugs. I rolled one, grabbed my mala and denim coat and headed off into the hills, followed by an insecure black mutt named Nala. To give you some idea of the setting, the local version of starbucks is named Siberia, and at 35 miles away, it may as well be there. To be able to disappear into the woods without getting into a car, passing a neighbors house or even crossing a road is one of the many blessings of living out here.

So we walked on the mossy path under the dormant redbuds and came to the junction where three drainages meet and sat on crispy brown oak leaves in full sun on the southern slope of Turtle Hill for an hour. Jack, a second dog, joined us here after a typically cautious approach.

A normally dry creek cuts through the bottom, hidden under honeysuckle and brambles. When it rains hard enough, springs and runoff from Sky Metal Field, Resistance and Easter Ridge(s) wash over the gravel and fallen trees in the defile between ridges until the waters are forced into a narrow stream quickly descending a few feet into a log lined gully. An unremarkable place, wild and overgrown, but when it rains enough, the surface water must go somewhere and this is the way it runs down off the hills. Around the base of Resistance Ridge and through a zinc pipe under the road before joining the year-round creek draining the hollow, down past the old shack and behind Zoe's trailer, under the main road before meeting the Saw running west. Under TVA lines, past vacant farms, behind the old churchyard and down through deeper woods and beaver dams into the Buffalo River. After flowing circuitously over thirty miles west, the Buffalo angles north at Flatwood, merging with the Duck forty miles down stream as the crow flies. Both soon empty into the Tennessee, a disturbingly unnatural 'lake' at this point, 184 miles long. Twenty two miles past the Kentucky dam, the Tennessee merges with the Ohio as things really start picking up. West through Lock and Dam nos. 52 & 53, past Cairo and 'Paddle' is finally moving south on the Mississippi. The descent is long and obvious. Here is an energy pathway that connects me directly to the oceans of the world. And doesn't it flow the other way as well? The return in seasonal rainfall has been a growing concern over the past few years. For the first time ever, our spring dried up for a month last summer. This touches on the topic of nagas, but I will save that for another post. Let me take you back to where i am sitting.

At one point, an old school bus was towed back here, set up on a little shelf between Turtle Hill and the dry gully. We ran long waterlines from my spring and buried a phone line and it was home for a few different folks over the years. This came to an end one stormy Saturday morning in 1996 when the trunk of a big red oak was ripped off the slope of Resistance Ridge by straight-line winds and tossed into the air like a dried corn stalk. Fortunately, Silas was laying on the bed and merely got sprayed with rain and shattered safety glass as the roof was crushed in. All that remains now are a few old concrete blocks, and a stump of white pvc where the phone line surfaced.

Looking across the hollow and up through the woods of Resistance Ridge, a thick stand of tall green bamboo marks the home of my neighbor James. We have known each other for nearly forty years, having first met in a small private high school on Long Island. As fate would have it, we were both expelled and ended up in the same public school. Over the years we have farmed local ridgetops, lived in Guatemala and Cape Cod, played uncle to each others kids, and worked together as roofers and chimney sweeps for years. Many seasons have passed and we don't see very much of each other these days, but it is still nice to have neighbors you know who you are at ease with.

The dogs nap in the stillness of the day. People find nothing of interest in this 'in-between' place. I could wait here for six months and never see anyone pass by. An old logging road winds up the valley disappearing into the shade between Easter Ridge and Turtle Hill. After an hour or so of sitting silent in the mid-day sun, we decided to continue our walk.

Turtle Hill

A few notes about place

The state of Tennessee can be geologically divided into three adjacent regions. The eastern mountains, the central plateau and the western plains. During the Paleozoic, from 570 to 240 million years ago, a shallow tropical sea dominated the region. Life flourished in these waters. Forests of crinoids or sea-lillies, animals that looks plants, dominated the sea floor. Every hundred million years or so, the marine environment would yield to a phase of mountain building. As relentless as the convergence, faulting and skyward thrust, rainfall and streams continually worked to reduce peaks to lowlands so that most of the time the area remained underwater. The muds, silts, sands and river gravel eroding off the slopes spread out in the basins, eventually covering the primordial bedrock with a nine-mile thick layer of sediment.

On the plateau and mountains to the east, the tectonic-powered see-saw between terrestrial and submarine environments ended around 300 million years ago, when the dense rocks of Gondwana rammed into the ancient North American plate. In the east, massive sedimentary beds faulted and tilted skyward as the leading edge of Gondwana was driven under the lighter rocks of the continent where great heat and pressure catalyzed volcanic activity along plate boundaries. Unlike the radical angles of uplift still found in the Smokies, the deep sedimentary beds of the central plateau were gradually raised thousands of feet above sea level in a manner that maintained the original horizontal bedding. This was the third major orogeny in the past 250 million years. As South America rammed north from the Gulf, the horn of Africa smashed westward, creating a mountain range with peaks taller than today’s Rockies stretching from Maine to Texas. Time and water would slowly sculpt and soften the heights while the Cumberland, Harpeth and Duck Rivers and their tributaries worked through soft limestones in the heart of the plateau, hollowing out a central basin, encircled by a cuesta of resistant, crystalline sandstones. Where the escarpment is steep, there are waterfalls.

Previous orogenies had aggregated the proto-continent and erosion provided deltas and coastal plains. What distinguishes the Alleghanian Orogeny is being the first major uplift in the heart of the new supercontinent, Pangea. The Anti-Atlas Mountains of Morroco, the Appalachians, and the Ouachita Range in Arkansas are all relics from that time.

What is called the Cumberland or better yet, the Great Eastern Plateau of North America, is bordered to the east, south and west by the Tennessee River Valley and is geologically contiguous with the profiles of sedimentary beds found to the north in the 'Pennyroyal' area of Kentucky.

To the south, the highland rim is bisected into east and west by the Elk River, a major waterway draining the central plateau into the Tennessee valley in northern Alabama. After skirting the extreme southern rim of the central basin, the westernmost remnant of Elk Ridge extends one last highland across southern middle Tennessee. The dendritic drainage patterns on the western highland are as intensively lobed as those found throughout the plateau, although in more moderate relief. On a topographic map, the visual effect is like a mosaic of white oak leaves. In this sea of broken land, forested ridges and dark hollows, the rounded back of Turtle Hill rises in silence, overlooking a narrow valley tending south.

And where are you friend?

Year of the Mouse

Greetings My Human Friend,

Today is the first day of the Tibetan New Year, Earth Mouse 2135. Mouse/Rat holds the 'mid-night' slot (11pm-1am) in the Sino-Tibetan day, associated with winter, and the cold dark of the north. Symbolizing inquiry, intellectual curiosity and the exploration of esoteric wisdom, the mouse is the vehicle of choice for Lord Ganesha, elephantine remover of obstacles. Mouse energy may bring a degree of progress, prosperity and plenty. We would all welcome that, at any number of levels.

In Mayan cosmology, rat opens the door to wisdom in helping the Hero Twins discover their true path in life. In gratitude, they guarantee that rat will never go hungry. Occasionally on cold winter nights, you might hear his cousins collecting offerings in the pantry. At best, think Mickey Mouse as the enlightened, good-natured individual; non-threatening, humorous and helpful.

Traditional outlines warn not to overextend or take too many risks this coming year, more than likely cause the world is going to hell and you ain't made of money. While some dark hearts out there are predicting the end of America and the death of billions in '08, I prefer to take refuge in uncertainty and must confess, "I do not know." Therefore, let us proceed mindfully knowing that the time we have is limited, and observe with a sense of wonder, to engage our time in the world in the spirit of love and deep appreciation. A phrase comes to mind, permanently burned into my soft tissues during the sixth grade through forced memorization of a commentary on the eighth commandment in Luther's Old Catechism; put the best construction on everything.


Thanks for stopping by. With the start of this new year, I will make an effort to keep blogging here regularly; we'll see how long it lasts!

Gutornadoes

the day between gutor,
averting negativity of the old (yesterday)
and losar,
new year of the mouse, (tomorrow)
is today, traditionally designated a house-cleaning day
yesterday it was so warm we sat outside
in the moist dark after sunset
talk of the ecliptic, Polaris, horizons, season and degrees latitude
watching skies flash blue white, big trees sway,
winds howling across the hills
recited the black phurba, burned one, clouds racing northeast
revealing, hiding Orion, Taurus,
Pleiades in the poplar
a display of great power soon drove us indoors where
i fixated on the colorful graphics of current radar maps
till long after everyone went to bed, just in case ya know...

our compassion goes out to the 50+ dead, the wounded
and those whose homes and property were destroyed.

map