Otherworld

“The heart of spiritual practice is to learn to shift consciousness at will and travel beyond time and space. Through soul-flight, we return to worlds beyond the physical plane in which our lives have their source and are able to explore many dimensions of the Otherworld.”

http://blog.beliefnet.com/dreamgates/2012/01/paleopsych-101.html

School Days

The constant noise of the train, heavy fuel-laden industrial trains, miles long. It starts with the urgent whistle and then the clang of metal wheel clattering against steel rail. The camp is nestled up against the west side of the tracks. The pallets shake, the tents rustle. Tiny drops of frozen dew fall.

Inside the camp, people huddle around camp fires, warming up after the light freeze from the night before, stamping off the chill and checking hoses for water breaks. A few bundle up children for a day at the local school.

The first train of the new day is accompanied by the school bus going down the road that parallels the tracks. The view from the school bus is a cluster of patched single-wide mobile homes, travel trailers that have grown roots and tents that might fly away at any moment. All covered by the blue tarps and duct tape.

My gorgeous children, full of wide-eyed wonder, asked so sweetly if they could please go to the school this year. At eight and nine they wanted to explore, and while I might have preferred a trek through the Amazon, their bravery was as strong as their desire for a year of School Days. We arrived early, when it was still hot, and set up camp a few weeks before the regular season to be there in time for the start of the school year. I went down and got them enrolled and placed into third and fourth grades, and each day pack them off to that strange world of vast cavernous hallways and flush toilets and florescent lights.

I never thought of School Days as anything other than those few days of the festival when it is open on weekdays for school field trips, And now, five days a week, 180 days of School Days. When we discussed this grand experiment, we decided that to make a full go of it we would stay put through the entire school year, so they would attend August through the next May. Here it is November, first freeze. Should be planning to move on, and instead we’re planning to bundle up.

Last night as the temperature dropped I remembered two brand-new flannel shirts, men’s xtra small, still in packaging and tucked into a corner of our tiny Scotty travel trailer and laid them out by their school clothes. Clothes are always picked out and laid out the night before. After we figured out no amount of light matches daylight for making sure things look good enough for school days. They walked off to the school bus stop in 90s grunge style, big flannel shirts over clean-enough jeans, their breath hitting the cold air and creating smoky halos around their bright blond spiky hair. I imagine families spending serious money trying to get all the style my little boys manage from carefully-curated thrift shop remains.

It puzzles me, almost terrifies me, each day, watching them leave on the school bus, suddenly disconnected from my boys for all these long hours until they are dropped off in the afternoon. Growing up, my family considered ourselves lucky that we’d never run afoul of the law or been picked up and picked on by so-called social services and forced into state schooling. And now my boys don’t consider it a dangerous place at all, but instead rush headlong into that world of wonder. Inside living, media rooms, standing in line, raising their hands, regimented controls on everything including the temperature with its central heating and cooling air conditioning, they are exploring new parts of the big wide world in their own way.

I’m grateful they are going together, I don’t think I could send just one child off to school. As a pair, they protect each other and compare notes. I doubt they’ll do this school thing again next year. They seem to have new-found appreciation for being able to read and study one book for hours instead of the constant moving and shaking and changing of a school day. They learned confidence that their skills in reading, math, and science are up-to-par for their ages. They learned the flow of the school week, with Monday coming so early, five straight days after a weekend of working the festival. Monday should be a day off after two 11-hour festival days, but their boundless energy took them right through the past six weeks, two weeks to go.

They are joined by a few others — out of maybe 60 children at the height of the fair season, five get on the school bus, three more from the end of the street known as the End of the World. Most children out here are home-schooled, with various results depending on their family’s knowledge and schooling. In most case children find in their teens a career path where they can put their talents to work expanding their family business, whether that is candle-making, elephant rides or food booths. More kids, more outlets, more work, more opportunity. Some are scholars and go on to tackle college and become scientists, writers, teachers. Some drop out, further and deeper from the fair community.

Raising my boys, I’m taking it a year at a time, not making any grand plans for their future for them but allow how they will explore and come to the right next steps. I don’t own a business for the boys to join, my family is gone and we are only three. My work is piecework, some beading and a lot of sewing, independent work as a seamstress.

A final wave to the school bus from my distant spot – never hovering, not too close but watching as it goes down the street, then turns out of sight. It will wait at the railroad crossing for the morning train to finish it’s thunderous progress. I open the doors on the shed, let the sunlight in and turn on the small electric heater. I don’t imagine that they want to pick up these threads of a career, as I sit to start sewing today’s stack of material. I wonder what they’ll want to explore next year.

Nano nada

My darling niece posted something on FB – I just read the headline – and I put the iPad down (that entertainment device for reading and playing games, but I can’t type or actually *create*) and boot up the big old fashioned laptop. The device I picked out for its lovely fast keyboard. My niece, a Barnes and Noble bookseller, posted about NaNoWriMo. I knew that one of my fave books, Like Water for Elephants, was a NaNoWriMo creation. The headline was that eight, 8!, bestsellers have germinated by people writing daily to reach 50000 words during National Novel Writing Month.

November. Hm. I just don’t know where to begin, and I’m not sure what I’ve already posted here. It all started when that odd crew asked me how to get to Mt. Bonnell and I went with them on that surveying trip. Only to find that the highways weren’t there, and the land looks different with footpaths along ridges. To reach Mt. Bonnell we had to cross a bridge that isn’t there, on a river that was never dammed. I got home again, and nothing was ever the same. The world streetside, where I was born, overlaps and intersects and loops around the creekside ways. The two timestreams flow alongside each other and somehow I got pulled into a rare point of intersection.

There’s this whole other path of American History. Yes, the Tories and the Indians went to the mountains after losing the wars of 1775 and 1812.  Somehow, the whole story of how the continent got divided politically changed, I’m still working on how it happened, Aaron Burr and Wilkinson and the Gulf of Mexico fell out differently during the time of the Louisiana Purchase. Spanish-speaking Seminoles – not Florida State University, but real Seminoles, have Florida. St. Louis remained French, Acadians stretch from the Great Lakes to Mississippi. And the Cherokees came west of the Mississippi Valley and established households in one of the great mash-ups of all time, English Common Law, utilitarian philosophies, and native knowledge of the land. Did you know that there, Sam Houston stopped drinking, brought Diana Rogers in as an elegant exotic First Lady of Texas and the Cherokee land grants are never questioned?

Research into history creekside is not so straightforward. Thinking about it, it’s not actually that straightforward on the streetside. Just today a friend posted on FB about Eugene Debs – mostly forgotten. I know people who were in streetside schools in the 1960s, and report any instance where students asked their teachers about war protests in US history were squashed fast. The current US history as we “know” it in the streetside timestream is a McCarthy-era subterfuge. Creekside, the schooling structures are different, children learn basic math and reading skills for literacy, but quickly and in just a few years. How they practice and develop those skills between the ages of 8 and 18 varies widely. Very few continue in the institutional learning and colleges for scholars. Instead they are learning by doing. Learning weights and measures while baling hay, counting and watching livestock multiply, preventing coyotes from subtracting from their herd.

It might be easier to talk about what is there than its history, for now. I saw a great method of using the creek floods to irrigate fields and bring in new soil, and the tasty greens are already growing just a few days later.

But I think I’ll come to the history too, from the scholars. There is a group still working on translating the Greek bible to Cherokee. The alphabets are so similar, with their graceful curves. Now that the survey crew has found out I had dictionaries at my disposal, the Iliad and the Odyssey in Greek, and the ability to create printed documents oh-so-quickly, I think I’ll be hearing from them again.

Creekside, documents are rare and often carefully handwritten. Printing presses and books are precious, and the digital revolution never did happen. Man didn’t go to the moon. NASA never built a huge supercomputer. Houston is known as Harrisburg and is a swampy backwater between the Brazos River’s agriculture and Galveston’s ships. Technology is not that much advanced past 1850. Goods are handcrafted, farms are small, people have a good life but spend most of every day cultivating and crafting.

Speaking of crafting, I am trying to commit to an attainable goal for the number of words, or posts, for this writing month of November. I think I’d be best served by getting out weekly posts for the next year, not trying to write a novel this month. Slow and steady, just like I’ve learned from my neighbors creekside.

So, let’s say 10 posts this month in honor of NaNoWriMo, 7500 words. Not anything like 50,000, but way more than Zero.