BENVENUTI A TUTTI … Willkommen to a twice monthly po-mo mash-up of opinion & poetry (the Japanese called it 俳文 haibun). We’re calling it “Captain B[arefoot]’s Earthship Log” … Writing from Cloud Acre on this sunny drought winter Western Slope day, the 18th of December, 13025 [2025 Anno Domini], second daughter Sara Mae’s birthday in my Goodtimes ‘ohana … For 40 years I wrote op-ed columns like this for Telluride and other regional newspapers: Up Bear Creek, Pandora’s Box, Looking Out from Lone Cone … CBEL is inspired by Silverton wise woman Dolores LaChapelle (Sacred Land, Sacred Sex, Rapture of the Deep) with nods of appreciation to Herb Caen’s three-dot journalism, Peter Berg’s Planet Drum, Donna Haraway (Staying with the Trouble), Gary Snyder (Riprap, Earth Household, Turtle Island, Practice of the Wild), Dick Ganci’s cherry pits, Shawn Dubin’s stilts, Jack Mueller’s portolanos, Danny Rosen (Lithic Press), Wendy Videlock (The Barefoot Laureate) & Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer (Emerging Form podcast) … Pulitzer Prize-winning San Francisco poet George Oppen says what we are up to best in some lines in the poem “From Disaster” from the book The Materials (New Directions, 1962)

Ultimately the air
Is bare sunlight where must be found
The lyric Valuables

SOLSTICE … As humans, we exist embedded in our brief space/time continuum (Heidegger’s dasein) … We are beings living in a time & place – in a family, in a country, in a religious tradition (“religion” from the Latin> re-“back” + ligere “to tie, to find”) … Just as our earthship has its multi-million-year existence embedded in its place & time in our solar system, in this obscure arm of our milky galaxy, in one minscule quadrant of an almost unfathomable universe … Dolores taught us the importance of ritual, of celebrating the climate changing seasons of our blue planet (“planet” from ancient Attic Greek πλανήτης planētēs “wanderer”)

Cloud Acre Solstice Hymn

It’s not so much the standing still
that makes us stop & turn our busy heads

It’s the way the Sun keeps springing away
like the arc of a dulcimer string unstrung

Sliding down almost to the Blues before
tromboning back to the crescendo of the La Sals

Then’s when we in the headwaters of
Maverick Draw start beating our drums

Raise our voices De Colores like flags
around a fire, large as we dare

Harmonies twinkling off into embers
May we release there what we’ve been given

As gift. As goad. Or what we’ve chosen to hold onto
past all reason, until it too gets tossed on the pyre

Into the fire

And we stand stripped bare to the stars
Smudged in the dark blur of Gaia’s spin

JINGLE BELLS … Yes, Margaret, we are a Christian nation (like it or not, fellow Libs). We follow a Gregorian calendar – dated from Christ’s alleged birthday — & celebrate Christian holidays. Halloween. All Hallows’ Eve. Christmas. Christ’s Mass.

Christmas Eve
Market St. 1969

Let’s buy one
she said

But every tree
in the lots

stood nailed
to a wooden cross

& Jesus
I began to weep