Sacred Spot Wild River, NM

In the winter of 1972 I was living in an old wooden house on the edge of the Verde River, Clarkdale, Arizona. The town had seen its boom and bust when the copper dried up in the 50’s and the smelter closed down, leaving scores of neatly built 5 room, company owned, brick houses empty. The house I lived in was from another time. It still had its outhouse and every room was adjacent to the kitchen, all six doors, with two leading to the outside.
We had a friend named Georgia who live in Centerville (the geographical center of Arizona), the next town over. Georgia had come to know a Hopi Indian family living on Second Mesa, a hundred mile to the north. She would play for you the scratchy sound of a Hopi Butterfly Dance on a 78 RPM record that probably can now only be found now in the Smithsonian Institute. That February she notified us that the Hopi’s had just called for their Winter Dance to be held. Their star watchers had just noticed that three planet where in alignment. This was to be a special dance. So eight “Back to the Earth” people loaded up into a small school bus and headed north for dinner and a dance. We had been invited by Daniel, a Hopi elder and his family.
We all sat within the adobe house, at a long wooden table set upon a shiny hard packed chicken blood mixed with cow dung floor, while Daniel’s wife feed us corn, beans, greens and pika bread (a fine purple corn flour rolled so thin it is translucent), as Daniel bounced his granddaughter on his knee singing A_B_C_D_E_F_G, first in English and then in Hopi.
Climbing down the roof ladder into a smoked filled Kiva, you became suddenly transported into another world. Kerosene lantern lit dancers chanted around an open fire, their shadows shaking gourd rattles, their faces painted in ochre clay and their legs strapped in juniper sprigs.
That night Daniel’s father-in-law, the oldest member of the clam, died while dancing. The ceremony halted and a new ritual began. His last words where, “I see that I have been on the wrong path.” Outside, though the wind was still, the night was bitterly cold. Stars not seen by modern man filled the heavens from end to end. A close friend of mine and I walked back to the house for warmth. As we entered, Daniel and his wife, alone, had built a small fire right where the table had stood. Over its incense smoke Daniel’s wife squatted and sang a most sorrowful song. We turned and left. This was a private thing.
The following summer my first garden was  tilled. Joe Perez, a long time local farmer gave four of us three irrigated acres to farm. We shelled 5 gallons of black eye peas, took 15 pounds a day of zucchini up the mountain to Jerome to sell,  grew everything from elephant garlic to mediterranean squash  and weeded and weeded and weeded, using absolutely no fertilizer. We camped next to the garden and through those long silent summer nights I thought about the Hopis heart. I wanted that Heart, where objects where not extraneous and nature was not separate to myself; where I extended into a cottonwood tree as an observer while at the same time being its essence, for I had seen that I too, had lost my way.
So we come to now, and you may think how frivolous or mundane to believe that the knowledge of time or the movement of the moon has any importance. Of course we are in a new era where for hundreds of thousands of years human kind never heard their own voice, never saw an image of themselves taken yesterday or never spoke to anyone beyond a yelling distance, yet the constant persistence of duration, watching the slow incremental change in the moon and the stars, the seasons and the shadows and the rain drops soaking into the dry earth, have been lost. If we have learned  “the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”, this has now been relegated to myth. Are we some primordial soup whose DNA is exactly derived from nature? Though it may take more effort not to speak or think and just to be, it takes no effort to be part of nature. Yet we have become separated from ourselves where even our neighbors have become “other”.
At this point, though most of you have become dis-interested, I will tell you how “Time” came into being. It started with one stick; one stick stuck straight in the ground within a sunny clear spot. On Day One at sunrise, a stone was set at the end of the sticks shadow, and at evening, as the sun set, another stone was set at the end of the sticks shadow. On Day Two, as the sun rose, the first cast of the sticks shadow did not fall upon yesterday’s stone, but had moved. Stone, stick, shadow, sun, and now the heavens had moved. On Day Three a third stone was set at the mid-point shadow between the first two stones. On Day Four all three shadows had moved. As knowledge is like a dry twist in every man, this information had to be taken in and understood. It could be written in symbols. It could be passed on. It could be perfected. Like the steady drip of water or the duration of walking to a distant cliff and back, the shadows sped up or slowed down according to their length. Heat came with the shorter mid-point shadow, cold with the longer. This knowledge you could take with you just by carrying a stick. After years, the shadow knowledge was perfected. New stones where added. A shadow stone to show the perfect time to plant beans and another for gathering wood. Nothing needed to be counted, just observed. And nothing now was random to where even ancient Celtic caves had their entrance facing exactly towards the rising sun at the winter solstice, whose first light fell upon an alter at the cave’s back wall. Obelisk where set-up, Sun Chiefs began capturing  time and order came to earth.
The moon was a deeper mystery. Its path took 150 years to capture. This knowledge, this thirst, had to be carried through multiple generations for completion. It was not a simple cross of sun shadow rising and setting. In the end the moon took a nautilus path across the heavens. Though it had no function like that of survival attached to the sun, the study of its path lasted from generation to generation, started by some long dead initiator, plotted and finished by a disciple of the dead who upon completion said, “Ah so, Master.” Then the path had to be reproved and replotted and confirmed again.
Such is Time.
In my next blog I will talk about How to Build a Hoop House with a reflective back wall and why Merlin built a curved stone wall for his herb garden.

By the time I met Mr. Rael he knew his value. His tin work retablos had doubled in price. There were no bargains. Unlike Mr. Rosen, who ran an antique junk shop on Main St. in Bethlehem, NH,  ten years prior, Mr. Rael had learned a gringo would pay good money for an old thing.

Mr. Rosen, on the other hand, had the luxury of being undercover. He could gather perishable wood items and the whole history of Life Magazine, within whose covers you could find such information as the wonders of chocolate added to your baby’s milk or what a healthy wad of tobacco chew could do for your sex life. At Rosen’s you could purchase a great cabbage shredder invention, circa 1940 and instantly become a wholesale vendor of German coleslaw. In truth, the finds at these collector havens could change your life.

Mr. Rosen and his wife Rose, then deep into their eighties, had class. Though keeping one of the major collector tenets of orderly chaos and major disruption of the Dewy Decimal System, their shop held treasures. Unlike the daily newspaper, Mr. Rosen’s new supply would come totally unexpectedly. A summer’s leisurely walk passed his front display window would suddenly excite you with the likes of an authentic pre-war Antwerp diamond scale traded in by a summer vacationing Hassid, sitting there under the hanging 50 watt light, like the hands of blind justice weighing the weight of truth or an oak flip top school desk inscribed with “Johnnie B”, “I love Mary” and the initials of a decade of past and future students.

There where bargains to be had at Rosen’s shop. You could buy an old Coke machine for less than it would cost you to fill it with bottles of Coke. But no one then wanted his old copies of Life Magazines or National Geographic’s. He and Rose lived in the back of the shop on tuna fish and crackers. Rose would wander down to the only restaurant in town and use the pay phone that was out front, to call the owner in side. She didn’t have a phone, but she loved to talk on one. So the restaurant owner and Rose would have a conversation, she in the phone booth saying “It’s hotsy in the bootsy.”, and the restaurant owner from behind the lunch counter, looking at her sweating in that phone booth, trying to coach  her out before she suffocated.

These old time collectors have died away and with them, like a house that has been sold five times over, the bargains. Mr. Rael left to live with his children in southern New Mexico before his legs gave out. Like a number of Hispanic New Mexicans, he had made a little stone grotto where he kept a statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe. The statue he took with him. What he did with his metal collection, I never did find out.  The spring after he left the new neighbors where digging up the front yard to make a xeriscape  garden. Brooke was a landscape architect and Katie was an author. While digging in the dirt right in front of the stone grotto, they hit something hard. Not sure what they had found they dug around until they had uncovered a claw foot bath tub. The real find was not the tub, but what was inside. Mr. Rael had filled the tub with football size pieces of white quartz and black obsidian. Washed off, both where still bright and shiny. Our conclusion was that Mr. Rael had created some kind of secret energy force, a mystical battery right there in front of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Though Brooke and Katie gave me a piece of obsidian, we all decided the tub and battery should be left in place and we should not mess with the forces of nature. The obsidian and quartz are buried with the tub till this day.

You may ask, “What does this have to do with humates.” Well, when I first became a purveyor of humates I said, here’s a product that could radically change the method of farming in the United States. Here was something that was being used by millions of people throughout the world, yet was being kept out of the common knowledge base of Americans. And I had to ask myself, “Why”.

The good news is, I have just returned from a two day conference given by the New Mexico Organic Farming Commission and in three different workshops humates where brought up independently by questions from the audience. In answering one of these questions Clarence Chavez, a soil scientist with the government’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, talked about his early days when he ran into a bunch of hippies in Taos, NM, who had filled up a 3”x 3’ PVC pipe with humates. They poured a quart of water into one end and offered him a cup of the yellow fluid dripping out of the other end, which he refused to drink. In his tone, I heard just another case of disparaging a counter culture until Herbal Essence or Coca Cola usurped their idea. But the real reason I’m telling you about Mr.Rael has to do with two scientific papers that I happened to come across over the weekend, one by a European nuclear group (Forschungszentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (FZD)  http://www.fzd.de/FZD/Jahresbericht/2004-2007/Internet_Environment_and_Safety.pdf) (http://www.osti.gov/energycitations/product.biblio.jsp?osti_id=4707521) and the other funded  by the NASA Physic’s Dept.  (http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=14987582). Basically in laymen terms, these scientists took radioactive uranium and put it next to humates. The humates electrons started acting up, but in a “unique and complex way”, so did the uranium electrons. In fact the outer shell of the uranium started breaking down! The scientists, to this date, do not know why or how this happens. The physicist journal words sound more like the description of a mystical battery than that of nuclear scientist discussing nuclear waste.

To understand these experiments here are some extenuating facts:

Though American Green Agricultures humates are not a derivative of coal, humates main ingredients, fulvic and humic acids is abstracted from leonardite (soft) coal by large commercial agriculture conglomerates. ( http://www.healthyhomemall.com/leonardite.asp )These acids are also used by the FDA in experiments and sold in health food stores to remove heavy poisonous metals from the body. Uranium is the heaviest metal that occurs in nature.

The ability of humates to transmute a radioactive material are as profound as Hoffman’s extraction of acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin) from coal, ( http://didyouknow.org/aspirin/) or Selman Waksman’s discovery of the antibiotic streptomycin from soil.

Who knows what  forces of nature emanates from Mr. Real’s obsidian/quartz battery, and who knows what knowledge has been forever lost from Mr. Rosen’s shop.

And not only the Spaniards, but all over Europe and the Middle East can be seen these rudiment pre moat and castle walls of engineering. While creating pasture and crop terrain, this labor intensive altered land also became a rain catchment and erosion control system. Even until 1963, when the laws where changed, Italian landless peasants had a stipulated agreement with their Landlords that an added slope terrace would be constructed yearly.

Taken to extremes, you can view the marvel and wizardry of such a method from a spring, high overlooking the Bahia Temple on Mt. Carmel in Haifa, Israel. From its source, an elaborate and exact concrete system mirrors left and right, channeling water through acres of manicured green lawn and flowering scrubs, ending in a pool to the front of the gleaming white Bahia Temple. Long before the Bahia arrived, the people of Israel had worked out elaborate ways of capturing scarce rain water into rocked hued cisterns. The coolness of these underground caverns was even piped up to air condition their sandstone mansions.

I write this at a time when the world’s eyes are focused on the earthquake devastation in Haiti, a country thrice plagued with floods, poverty and tectonic shift. Now the world has been given a gift, an opportunity to make something out of nothing. We have the ability to look upon a barren slope and turn it into a verdant field. To paraphrase Pearl S. Buck in her “I Believe” essay, I believe the earth contains enough land to feed every man, woman and child. And to extend that, I believe the earth contains enough to feed every mammal, fish and reptile. It is within our capabilities to turn the waste land of Haiti into pastures of sustainable growth, a social Mecca.

One of the first videos coming out of Haiti, taken by a woman overlooking Port-au-Prince, showed a huge grey cloud emanating from the floor of the city. And the women’s voice in the back ground was heard to say, “Oh my God, the world is coming to an end!” When Jesus was asked how we would recognize the End of Times, he didn’t go into any elaborate description; he thought such knowledge is useless. To stay intact through the end here is what will qualify you, taking care of others.  In the poetry of his words, “I was hungry and you gave me to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me to drink, I was naked and you clothed me.” Or as Thomas Jefferson said, “What you do to one man, you do to all.” Two wise men, one story, we are all like a spider’s web interconnected.

You may wonder what any of this has to do with humates. Well, just as coal has helped heat and power us through the ages, humates, the precursor of coal, its distant cousin, can help feed us. There are some lands like the bog fields of Ireland that would not benefit from humates, but you can take a suitcase filled with humates, terrace the deforested, eroded slopes of Haiti and turn them into a Bahai-like fertile feeding field.

After visiting a Navaho run humates mine in the arid southwestern United States, the answer as to how an agrarian non-nomadic tribe such as the Hopi Indians could survive became evident. Just as the sacred yearly journey to the western salt mines of the Grand Canyon became a Native American ritual, so too the gathering of humates to the east became part of the Hopis deep winter Corn Dance. If you happen to visit one of these high mesa dances, you could be lucky enough or unlucky enough to be snuck up upon by a roving clown/protector and have your faced smeared in soot.

In my next blog I will discuss how the Hopi/Navaho sun watcher, taawat wiikiy’maqa, observed the sun fall upon soot dots within the walls in the prayer hut, signaling the times to plant different crops.  I will write about the “lunar watcher”, how they obtained their knowledge concerning the four moons within a sun season (four months) this November 21^st. I will tie this all into the relationship between potash, humates and charcoal.

J. Gibbons

Here is a link to just a small part of the scienticfic research
done on humates: http://humates-nm.com/scientific_research.html

With all this knowledge on humic and fulvic acid out there, one
has to wonder why we have been kept so ignorant for so long, on it’s
use?

J. Gibbons

Tonight is the Long Night Moon or some call it the Full Cold Moon. We have gathered most of our naming of the moon from the Native Americans, who watched the moon so closely, generations of  its movement were recorded upon rock deep within hidden places in the high desert of the southwest.

This month we also have a second unnamed moon, a Blue Moon, a betrayer moon, on the last day of the year. The native americans of the southwest would be able to tell you when the last time that happened, 1971 and the time before that, 1952 and the century of December 2 moons. Long Night Moon is actually the native american name for the December Moon. The moon’s arc directly travels overhead, its path the slowest and longest of the year. The name Cold Moon came from the Celts, another moon watching people. The colonists called it the Yule Moon.