-Hazrat Khwaja M'inuddin Chisti (r.a.)

Sometime around 1981 while visiting variety artist pals in West Hollywood California I began a conversation regarding the Fool with good my pal Andrew. My background was rooted in the fool thorough mystical studies, led by a master teacher, his background was as an actor, director and philosopher. The course of our lives were irrevocably changed that day, as our conversation grew and began to pull other people into the orbit, in many senses it has lasted all these twenty six years since. The Fool is the zero in tarot, that mystical motif deck that carries internal messages. Zero itself is a wonder..."sifur". Cypher.

The Fool is outside of the deck, he exists as the interior mind exists...beyond rolls, beyond trappings...unmarked by the mask.   Masks are taken up and put aside as needed often many at a time. Always underneath it all is begginers mind, free flow, play and love.

Because that is what the universe is made of at its core.

My experimental website http://rtgarden.com documents this ongoing project,  the imporovisational group "The Fools Guild" became the collaborative production ensemble "The Fools Guild:", an alliance of artists and Fools in general.

My origins are "The Family of Love" and as a child I can clearly remember when someone would refer to "The Family" meaning the greater extended family...that is what they were referring to. That was long before the whirwinds of materialism blew the tribes into many new fertile gardens.  At this point I see these gardens blooming with the ideas spread far and wide.

The Fool is the Great American Hero.  It is the best part of the American spirit, the ability to understand that you have folly in your nature means that you have to learn to be self-editing.  The ability to expand into possible ideas and yet still be self-critical enough to do good works...well...California in particular has been very generous to the world with this such spirit. Witness the internet, The Rennaisance festival, Burningman, Film, Music and funk.

Lately the Fool for me is about dreaming the next delight. Like a circus family that designs and then trains for a new incredible impossible circus trick we need to dream and train for the next thing...the vision of a world where there is greater participation in re-thinking our materialism and engaging ourselves in the play of caring for others.

The best sort of PLay of all!

Lately working on this project, and in general, I get tremendous surges of energy, excitement, and bliss.  I feel the free flow of the good energy from the past washing over me again.  The fool is my card, my passion and my totem.  My compact and covenant with my inner child(ren) means that I have this deep connection to reaching the child within everyone. The Fool has been the best way for me in the past, and again it is a timely vehicle as we move firmly towards freegan values.

I'll go first.

Walking on our *walk* in the afternoon yesterday my daughter and I encountered three purple headed finches altogether singing in about a half-a-mile radius of the house.   They sing with this ernest intensity that is very captivating, we are in a belt of greenwood above a river near the giant Redwoods of Northern California.  We enjoy walking along the avenue to a spot which has every appearance of being a mundane turnout, somehow it is vibrant with energy and thriving with a delighful small spring and crickets in the summer.  There is a deer path which leads down the cliff-like hill to a special deer nest. Yesterday the river was deep jade green and everywhere the grass seed was setting up. You can see the movement of the trucks on the 101 highway from this spot as they pass through the giant eleven story trees.

It is spring here, and the mornings are cold while the sun is delicious. The garden is being brought into full swing in stages and there is good enough weather to take a bike ride today!

What are you enjoying lately?

This morning I finally figured out how to start The Fool Pod here on zaadtz.  In conjunction with the recent presentation of my experimental website http://rtgarden.com/ I have launched a pod here especially for the worldwide discussion of The Fool. In general a sort of green room in space for all of you fools out there. Youalready know who you are.

As our ancient tradition goes we only admit those who ask to be admitted. No one would ever force such a difficult identity on someone else...it has negative associations for many people. If you are a Fool, come on over and sign up for the Pod and we will see what fun we can stir up.

http://pods.zaadz.com/fool 

Movement everywhere.

My cousin arrived two days ago and spent his day off putting a deck on my cabin.  This was a gesture of great love, and it is heartily appreciated.  Now the cabin has a lovely place to hang out, sit, sun, shade, and enter the cabin.  This has cleared away space and brought me that much closer to actual construction progress on my earth oven.

Since it is spring the gardens tend to come first. After deerproofing my main garden and shifting the large pots with trees around my cousin Davids appearance was just that sort of family magic that unleashes tremendous creative powers.

Yesterday cleaning up around the now circular arena at the front of the cabin I had a blissfull time setting a small river stone pathway. It brought to mind episodes of play in childhood at the beach, or creating intricate worlds in the backyard. delightful.

Imagine my excitement to return to the internet after a whole two days away and see that already seven people have joined my new Fool Pod and that already they have started a mery thread.
joy.

Over the last week my cousin and his pal came over and made short work of putting a new deck/porch on my cabin.  This sets things forwards quite a bit for making the gelftan/earth oven.  While cleaning up around the entrance circle and the back yard I also found all of the remaining bricks that I needed for the oven floor.

Amazing how everything you need can be already *here*.

My new idea is that we need to re-think and we need to re-act.  This is the part of the fool that embodies tha great American Spirit.  Essentially it is the ability to check yourself, to notice ingrained habits, and thoughtless moments, be forgiving of them, gently correcting and move on.

While this miracle of space definition and family time was happening I came to this conclusion. Like the crazy laughing Monkey bees that we are, we need to re-think the solutions and re-act to engage ourselves in practical steps to make those changes possible.

Yesterday I brought home all of the sand (hopefully) that I will need to create the dome on top of the existing stone base which I constructed slowly over last summer.  The sand dome becomes the form for the eventual empty space inside the oven. I am using Kiki Denzer's book on cob ovens to work out the dimensions, using the simplest  most basic shape and style from the book as a starter. My only innovation is to add on a small fire-pit which can also act as a hibachi, essentially a place to keep and store the coals by the doorway once they have been removed from the oven.

  In the front of the house the deck is now overooking the garden and the outdoor oven seating space.  The earth oven is just in front of the point of entry into the modest vegetable garden surrounded by maples and other small trees in big pots supporting bamboo stakes with deer-netting on them.  It looks like the garden is giving birth to the oven.  Truly I hope to have some lovely gatherings here where we can easily create food and music and sleeping space for a dozen or more people.

Right now the main feature of this area is a blue tarp, which has inside of it the slowly mixing giant wad of clay and sand and very broken down straw. Today I will dance on this to se if I can get it to make a solid mass for the oven to form out of, and I will make a big sandcastle form for the clay.

The cob is very high in clay, including recycled old scrap clay and clay from my friends property.  I need it to be unusually high in clay because I intend to fire it off like a giant pot in order to make it waterproof.

Blissful time spent yesterday creating a mound of sand for the interior mold of my earth oven. Many memories raised from times spent at the beach as small child acquiring the skills for this undertaking. The sand was salvaged graded river sand so the pieces were prone to tumbling off in big chunks.  The sand is amazing, small pieces of jade and agate and very colorful tiny tiny stones. 

The sloopy mud/clay mixture that forms the first layer is started, eventually I needed to stay out of the sun for a bit.  The mixture needed some sun on it so that this morning parts of it will be stiff enough to toss onto the form.   Whatever remains will get wetted onto straw for the thermal layer of the oven.

More than about preparing food, or using salvaged fuels, the oven project is about re-defining spaces.  Using contrast to tie simple small spaces together with natural elements extends the house and creates stimulating areas. The oven is meant to create an interface between inside and outside, an outdoor room, where the feet can be near warmth and the rest near the cold air and stars.  The idea is to create a space with the charms of my summer camping places that I gather with my family at to play music and dance.  Now with the Deck on my cabin there is room for all of it.

Over the top of the giant  *sandcastle* dome form I patted and shaped up a mudclay layer.  It was big mudpie fun, hands on, in the sun.  The materials had already had a chance to bind together nicely and the dome went up very quickly in the mid-afternoon.  It seemed a very fitting way to celebrate the mother and activist in us all; bringing to the next step this lovely cob oven which will create food for gatherings and for the immediate *village* of neighbors.  These ovens really heat up nicely with small pieces of kindling, and they make a great focal point for an outdoor gathering area. Very key for urban community gardens, and for re-thinking the suburbs and creating garden gathering spaces there as well.

The shape of the oven so far is this lovely smooth skep shape. Like the sncient woven straw bee-hives that we associate with bees and honey.  Once I get the rice hulls, and mix in more sand into the mud mixture the final layers will have more of a rounded-off quality. The sand was shifty because it is river sand, so my form was not as conical as I would have liked.

The primary resources for this project were easy for me to gather over the last year as I accomplished my usual routine. The stones and gravel for the base were salvaged from the roadside, some of the clay was donated by a friend who has huge deposits on his land. The initial hay for the plaster layer underneath was gathered at the farm and Garden club last year and retted down.

Today is the day to create the mix for the middle thermal layer, all of this mixing is being done on the now modern traditional "blue tarp"

As a general guide I am using Kiko Denzer's book "How to Build an Earth Oven".

Overall the process is similar to ceramic arts use of forms. Some of the oldest known glass smelting seems to have used a lot of small scale ceramic "fabric" and small kilns to actually create much of the glass used in the times of the Pharoh.  Part of the modifications I have made in the basic oven is to add two features: one a small stone hibachi below the opening to the oven; to re-use the coals. The second is incorporating a salvaged broken crucible at the rear of the oven, and connecting it with a thermal bridge of clay. Inside this cricuble I hope to fire-off small "PMC" jewelry items made out of the precious metal clay which fires off  at relatively low temperatures. It is an experiment, and no doubt will have some use, if nothing else for annealing small pieces.

The vision is to gather with my family of musicians artists and dancers, and make food and music and merriment and meanwhile create small pieces of jewelry which are concurrently fired. I may end up needing a seperate kiln, I suspect that I can make this one work. My neighbor down the hill is a Glass Blower and he can always help me with Kiln details, or test firings in his test kiln. If this one doesn't work we will just work something out with him.

One of the most exciting discoveries emerging is the ancient very intricate Sarasvati culture. As described in the Rig-Veda (which is now being quickly understood as the worlds oldest accurate historical document) the Sarasvati once involved a huge seafaring empire with a very developed system of agriculture, canals, ports, and the boats were accounted as among those that would arrive at the giant pyramid lighthouses every year during monsoon when they would become giant loading docks for the Pharoh.

Along with the confirmation of the existence of this empire in other historical texts, there are over 2,000 archaological digs going on along the bed of the old sarasvati river this upcoming summer. The government of India is very enthusiastic about these finds.

Over four thousand years ago this river began to dry up, and eventually the higher tributaries shifted to another river...essentially towards the Ganges...probably during an earthquake.  The civilisation was very complex, and like Catal Huyuk in Turkey much older and more populated that our common understanding of history today holds.

  The dry riverbeds of the Sarasvati have yielded obsidian which is gathered by the ancestors who still wander there, amking music and soaking the stones in heated honey they gather the obsidian from the cliff walls. The source of striped stones beloved far and wide. They build big fires on the stone and then shatter it with cold water from the remaining springs. Working it this way into beads for thousands of years.

   For some time the history was read as a matriarchal civilisation, the "Indus" which was seen as being overtaken and dominated by marauding patriarchal horsemen. Some would say "aryans". We now know that the cattle herders on horseback and the settled agriculturalists in harmony were in fact the same people.  In response to changing conditions they deployed earlier skills, migrating each year until at last the migration took them onto a long road.

    After much study in this area, it is easy to conclude that this is more likely the origin of the people who we today call "Romani" (who are actually many groups).  The common language is clearly from India, and many groups which live in the area of the old Sarasvati are considered to be Roman, including the Banjara. Read the Mudras. It is all in the dance.

Most of our ideas about the Roman were formed based on history established during Byzantine times, a very contradictoriy set of views and records remain from that time, it is an era seldom sorted out.

My traced maps of the ancient silk road kept flapping at me yesterday whispering to me to write about Sarasvati on Zaadtz.

Contentment is a form of freedom, inherent in contentment is a form of independence.  When we are content we recognize that perception is key in experience, we are open to the radiance of life.

   Our movement in this direction is carried along by creativity.  Precious in the goal of transmitting beauty and magnificence ...creativity keeps us connected to each other in a cycle of continuity and memory.  Our emerging realisation that tribe and family... that special connection of friends... comprise the true treasure of our lives we begin again to shift towards creative expression.

  It is important to live in your time. There is a freedom in our era when an entire production studio that once took a mansion to support fits into a solar-charging back-pack.  The huge connection to music that once required meticulous care and a large dark room for storage...well as if by a magic trick it has all been shrunk to the size of a deck of cards. Endless Pod miracles.

What next? The thousand solutions, the many paths to new habits new ways of doing things in our own lives that involve an energy conscious attitude and a renewal of creativity.

Now that the great laughing monkey bee-mind can transmit ideas so quickly and elegantly expect swift changes, the kind that happen *overnight* when people easily discard old destructive patterns.

It is easy because it is *fun*

 

Travelling to see pals is one of the greatest things, the other being when pals travel to see me.  Either way all the edges of the house get shaken out, and in general the preparations often lead to improvements on the place.

   This week I have been dilligently spending several hours a day putting in my drip system.  It is a yearly chore, since the garden shifts and literally gets moved into a new configuration every year.  There are repairs to be made, sections to be altered and many many new drip holes to be punched in order for the system to function as intended...spot watering this crazy symbiotiv life-raft of medicinal plants, birds bees frogs and other crawly things and things that fly. And more.

Even the little chipmunk who chirps at me steadily when he see's me  poking around this time of year depends on the drip.  The finches and the quail drink from it. I know, they leave me little offrend'as of feathers that I make into earrings.

In May things move ahead very quickly. Small things keep getting moved to larger pots. And then even larger things into even larger pots. And then on the drip.  The drip system itself is a sort of final polish on the process of knitting the whole yard *in* somehow exactly how you want it.

I have an old samsonite luggage cosmetic case (a dollar at thrift) in which I keep the whole drip and tie kit, Pruners, small scissors, drip line, emitters, drippers, the various connectors...everything fits inside the case. The last important ingredient is a cork-screw.  This makes the best hole for the dripper, offers quite a bit of control if you get a nice one.

  So the excitement of going to see my beloved, helps me fetch a sort of deep self-sufficiency into the system here at the waystation. Reflected in so many forms, including most importantly the very HUman form of my Sweetheart, the city itself of Los Angeles is a sort of beloved. Along the way stops in Berkeley and visits with pals.

The idea is that once I return I will be returned to a state relatively free of watering chores.

Lately the overall goal is a sort of optimal level of progress in my own self-discipline and self-care.  Many threads have been re-gathered and woven solidly in to my overall sense of self in the last couple of years. I am at that exciting point where I can see myself heading into fresh new territory. More *together* than I have been in the past means walking onto a fresh page of sorts. I have a growing level of excitement about what is next.

Oh I am all awake early
you are so near
how can I sleep?
when soon I will know
again the touch... the span
of your hand on my waist
how can I sleep?

The sky is already fading
a new color of sapphire
the purple finch is singing
outside your window
outside my window
I am already singing

A day of preparation becomes
a day of celebration
a small quiet room
shot through with the impossible
bright spirit of the sun on the water.