Yes, thank you, I am perfectly aware that it’s a kangaroo.

Happy solstice.

This is coming a bit late–most everybody has their power back by now. But I have a free moment to breathe, and I really have been hurting for something to scroll down the freakish zoot-suit-boogieing android post immediately below.

I live in the Connecticut valley, so the ice storm passed right over our heads without breaking a branch. There was a visible line on the sides of all the hills, at maybe six or seven hundred feet—a stark division between bare brown oak and black hemlock woods and a crystalline otherworld of steely, sparkling ice. Over the first couple days there was a rash of paranoid tree-felling along the street I live on, beautiful, perfectly healthy, centuries-old maples chainsawed into towering heaps of lumber for fear the next storm might bring them down and kill us all. I felt guiltily fortunate, hearing news reports about what had happened to people barely more than five miles away.

Then I had to drive up into the hills to the farm where I work.

It was unbelievable. There were miles-long sections of road where the top of every single tree on both shoulders had been sheared off fifteen feet up. Entire houses and yards were buried under fallen timber. National guard humvees rolled past with coal-gray chunks of slush clinging in their wheel-wells, utterly surreal against the frozen landscape. Dozens of electric company cranes moved in long, slow lines, surrounded by dead-eyed, frost-covered dudes in grey and orange.

On the dirt road that leads to the farm, a huge tree-trunk had snapped almost completely in half, fell across the road and got caught in branches on other side, so that I had to drive underneath its horizontal trunk, swerving to avoid the low-hanging brush and praying that the whole thing wouldn’t choose that moment to fall and crush me.

At work, they had been without power for six days. We operated on a little gas generator, switching off every few hours between powering the refrigerator and oven to the computers and fax machine. I learned how to work the generator: a horrible roaring gremlin, like a lawnmower engine off its wheels, loud and awful-smelling. It gave me a new appreciation for electric power—and a potent sensibility of its limitations. Running a small hair-dryer (for shrink-wrapping herbal tinctures) at its lowest possible setting was enough to blow out the generator in three seconds flat.

We had our christmas party by candlelight, huddled close to the wood stove in hats and coats. At four, when it got too dark to see, everybody packed up and went home.

The local home-supply megastore, which had only opened the week before after overcoming vehement community resistance (and which I’ve been angrily boycotting in the vain hope it will go away and the marshes and pasture it replaced will magically reappear) sold out its supply of generators in two days.

“This is what it’s going to be like from now on,” my boss said. “People can’t rely on the power company anymore.”

I felt sick. The implication is there—the cause of all this. And gas-powered generators aren’t going to be the answer.

So I went home and tried to make myself feel better by filling out my christmas shopping list with LED and CFL light bulbs and solar-powered cellphone chargers and worm-powered home composting kits. It hasn’t quite worked. Maybe it’ll help to blog about it.

Here’s some other stuff I would have bought for people if I could budget it:

• OLPC Laptop
• Tesla Roadster
• Home hydroelectric
• Wood stove with catalytic converter
• Residential wind turbine
• Vegetable oil conversion for diesel cars
• Bicycle

I’ll shut up now.

is the title of a Peter Rowan song I’ve been kicking around in my head for awhile. Like most of Peter Rowan’s stuff, it has a certain ageless quality that makes me feel like I’ve known it all my life. When I first heard it, I sort of assumed it must belong to the same storied vernacular as songs like Whiskey in the Jar, Stagger Lee, Jack-A-Roe, Man of Constant Sorrow, songs that have existed for so long in so many different versions nobody knows who wrote them anymore, and it feels perfectly possible nobody wrote them at all, they just appeared, fully formed, out of the fabric of the universe just in time for the invention of the fiddle. Archetypal. Like the figure of a Michelangelo slave inside living granite waiting for the chisel.

There are stories like that too.

When I hear something like that for the first time, I have a tendency to go digging for its history, trying to feel out the shapes of the ideas that formed its roots. I figure for an element of story to hang on so long, to endure so many changes and keep going, is a sign that there’s some fundamental truth at its core, some lesson to be learned. The study of the horned god I undertook for last year’s solstice is an example of this; I’ve done it with King Lear, Baba Yaga, the myth of the Flood.

I tried to do this with “Fetch Wood, Carry Water”, and found out I was wrong. Rowan wrote it in 2001; that’s as far back as the song’s history goes.

Or so I believed until the other day, when I came across the following Buddhist proverb in some insane occult/new age literature, while researching the concept of spiritual ascension:

Before enlightenment, fetch wood, carry water. After enlightenment, fetch wood, carry water.

Turns out Peter Rowan, bluegrass balladeer, pulled those lyrics out of Eastern philosophy and used them to write a reggae song. That is exactly the kind of universal wisdom I’m looking for.

Now those words keep coming back to me, whatever I’m doing.

I’m pretty sure the point of these koan thingies is not to try to explicate all the wisdom out of them, but to contemplate in silence, glean from them what lessons you can without having to put it into words.

But words are kind of the point for me—both means and end, if you know what I mean.

Suffice it to say I think there’s a powerful message here for the struggling writer. It’s about perseverance, about knowing what’s essential, and about the importance of returning often to the fundamentals no matter how far one may stray. There’s no such thing as too much enlightenment. In fact, you can never have enough. But you’ll always need water and wood.

Here’s a version of the Peter Rowan song I’m pretty sure it is legal for me to share:
“Fetch Wood, Carry Water” – Peter Rowan & Donna the Buffalo, 5-2-2001 (13.5 mb)

I took this Monday at about 6:30 PM in the Southwest. Clockwise, the moon, Jupiter, and Venus.

Obviously the Great Shift is near to hand.