Alpha Johne > Recent Status Updates

No naked little men sat on the summit dispensing wisdom, because the first thing the truly wise man works out is that sitting around on mountaintops give you not only hemorrhoids but frostbitten hemorrhoids.

The ability of skinny old ladies to carry huge loads is phenomenal. Studies have shown that an ant can carry one hundred times its own weight, but there is no known limit to the lifting power of the average tiny eighty-year-old Spanish peasant grandmother.

*The post of Senior Wrangler was an unusual one, as was the name itself. In some centers of learning, the Senior Wrangler is a leading philosopher; in others, he’s merely someone who looks after horses. The Senior Wrangler at Unseen University was a philosopher who looked *like* a horse, thus neatly encapsulating all definitions.

WHAT?! Me finishing a book depends on ME?!

As I grew to understand the gift of the earth, I couldn’t understand how “love of country” could omit recognition of the actual country itself. The only promise it requires is to a flag. What of the promises to each other and to the land?

The young and old are linked in one long breath, an inhalation that calls for reciprocal exhalation, nourishing the common root from which they both arose. New leaf to old, old to new, mother to daughter - mutually endures. I am consoled by the lesson of lilies.

When I stare too long at the world with science eyes, I see an afterimage of traditional knowledge. Might science and traditional be purple and yellow to one another, might they be goldenrod and asters? We see the world more fully when we use both.

“Children, language, lands: almost everything was stripped away, stolen when you weren’t looking because you were trying to stay alive. In the face of such loss, one thing our people could not surrender was the meaning of land. In the settler mind, land was property, real estate, capital , or even natural resources. But to our people, it was everything.”