Thoughts. Ramblings. Notes on history. A generous sprinkling of tarot.
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Notebooks.
This little blog is just a place to keep track of my historical forays, developing tarot practice, thoughts on the craft of writing and teaching, observations, foraging adventures, book reviews, or general notes for myself and friends on various types of practice and little tidbits that catch my eye. Whether you’re just curious or looking for some ideas for your own practices, I hope readers will find something of value!
Deep Creek
The idea for this excursion started out innocently enough. It was my first day in the LA area for my summer archival trip, and I’d stopped in the San Bernardino Mountains, in Big Bear, for a couple of nights. Some of my scientists had places in nearby Lake Arrowhead where they would take their friends for LSD experiments and I wanted to see the area so I could write about it better. At any rate, when the proprietor of the place I was staying heard what I was working on, he suggested that I should hike down to some natural hot springs at the base of the mountains where a bunch of old timer hippies hung out. “Hell, as far as I know they practically live there,” Sarge told me. He wasn’t sure exactly how to get there, but it was called Deep Creek, and he said I’d have to hike in for two or three miles to get to it. But if I was looking for old hippies to tell me stories about the old days and wanted someone to offer me acid, that was the place to do it. “Oh, I almost forgot. I think they mostly hang out down there naked, so if that bugs you, heads up.” This was like a cherry on top of what already sounded like an awesome research adventure. For science, of course. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
Persistence
Traditional ways of doing things persist. Constantly. All around us. If we do not see them, most of the time it isn’t because they aren’t there. It’s because we don’t think them important enough to notice. Another way to put it is that we’ve made them small or even invisible in our minds. And what do we do that with? Things we think have less power than we do, things that don’t need to be attended to. The invisibility of certain kinds of knowledge is often linked to power relations, bound up in things like class, race, gender, religion, and culture. It shows up as people denigrating traditional medicinal knowledge because that knowledge is traditionally feminine, or brown, or poor. It’s the “loss” of skills like metalsmithing that are in fact still vibrant and alive, passed on in industry and also through hobbies by people who are only a generation or two removed from having to do that kind of work for a living.