The first day of a road trip is always the hardest, to wit:

At 3:30 AM this Thursday morning, dear podmate Rebecca will drive me one hour to the Indy airport, where I will fly four hours to San Francisco where, in a totally ungrounded state, I will rent a car and, while getting used to the car, somehow manage to drive north through Bay Area traffic to Hopland, California, and the 2018 NORCAL Permaculture Convergence at the Solar Living Institute. I should be there by noon PDT.

http://permacultureconvergence.com

This year the theme of the convergence is to be Permaculture and Community Resilience. Perfect! The very next day, Friday morning, September 21, at 9:30 AM (not the Equinox this year, that’s the next day), I will present a slide show with commentary on the Origins and evolution of Green Acres Permaculture Village.

I will then spend the rest of this coming weekend milling around with other starry-eyed idealists and ecstatic dirt farmers, have fun absorbing all sorts of ideas, and even meet up Saturday evening with Anthony, who is driving three hours to be there in time to join me for dinner. A frequent commentator on this blog, Anthony recently gifted the GAPV with a dozen organite pucks, which I have placed in various (winter) gardens, including two of the Garden Towers. It will be interesting to see if they help plant growth and even discourage pests!

But this NORCAL event is actually an afterthought. My original plan was to attend this year’s 26th annual Crones Counsel (September 26-30) which will be in Bellingham, Washington. An annual gathering which I co-founded with Shauna Adix way back in 1992 as an offshoot of Crone Chronicles, I still attend these counsels every few years, because they are so damn much fun — even raunchy! (To me the finest crones carry the Baubo archetype . . .)

And of course, I planned to do a presentation at the Counsel on GAPV, as an inspiration to all the older women who find themselves living alone, feeling useless, more and more habit-bound and, basically, waiting to die. If there’s one thing that’s guaranteed to pull you out of your tight little calcified lifestyle box, it’s intergenerational living, as we demonstrate here.

So, I had already planned to present there, at the Counsel, a show with 140 slides and stories to accompany them, and then, meanwhile, was invited to present at NORCAL, in California. Hmmm . . . I wondered, when is NORCAL? Aha! September 20-23. The very weekend before! Hmmm. . . oh well, okay, I will do a road trip, from Northern California to Seattle, with, it turns out, a stop along the way at Eureka California to do, not another GAPV presentation, “No I don’t want that,” says my friend Julia, who helped restart the Green Acres Neighborhood Association in which the GAPV is now embedded way back when, but then moved to California: “I want to do a CE-5 event in a nearby field, with my friends.”

Oh? Well, okay. We will wait until dark, then sit in a circle on high-backed, reclining lawn chairs, go into a connected meditative space, and call in friendly visitors to communicate with us. Here in Central Indiana, such loving call-outs  routinely result in heavenly flashes, some of them strong, prolonged and/or repeated.

Such a spread, between doing two (actually three, another one at a suburban church in Seattle after the Counsel) presentations on a very grounded project, GAPV, and, on the other hand, opening with CE-5 to the heavens above — is a stunning illustration of this blog’s motto, Bridging and Blending Above and Below.

This trip is sponsored by a 501c3, the Association for Regenerative Culture (ARC). Thank you! And thank all the gods, goddesses, and guides, for the exquisite timing that will allow me to venture on yet another Sagittarian road trip.