Update from Pincher

A slight shift in horse living. Na’anni as well as Dakota has come back with me to my friends, David and Heidi’s place at Windy Coulee. It ended up being not possible for Naha to stay over in Wideview and fate being what it always is, there is a couple that would like to adopt Na’anni. She will be in a good place there I feel, a challenge to her new people. All good. Dakota is here at Windy Coulee Ranch with Heidi’s bunch of Canadian horses until I head out again in the spring. An exceptional home for him. Lots of native grass where he’ll be able to graze upon through the fall and winter.

I am staying here until the end of September, helping out with hoof trimming and other things. David and some of his friends and I will have a concert at the end of my stay at the lovely nearby Spring Point Hall. I will then head up to Banff and the music department of the Banff Centre to work on new material inspired by my adventures.
Banff for a couple months and then off to Thailand, Compeung’s 5 anniversary exhibit in early December and then all willing, a residency there later in the winter for a month or so. Then also, all willing, insh’allah, etc etc back to the high plains to prepare for stage two of the Sun and the Wind long ride epic.

I was recently high in the Rocky Mountain foothills surrounded by forest. How wonderful it was to be there. I love the open plains and yet have so often, during my ride, dreamed of being back in forested lands again. There is a part of me that feels that with the coming times a forest may be better than the open. Not so sure, when I really think about it, though if that is smart thinking. Many deer in the prairie, many edible plants too. Of course, winter in the open Canadian plains is truly sobering but around here in SW Alberta you get some wonderful chinook winds coming through to ease things up. Of course many people live here already, in solid homes, with heat, petroleum, electricity coal, oil. In the old past the people would migrate to treed areas with great groves of cottonwoods near rivers for shelter, water. Where with spring floods you can pack up in a few hours and move to higher ground.

So much to learn from our ancestors. I’m just reading about the idea that resilience is the opposite to efficiency. That the more efficient something becomes the more susceptible to breakdown it also becomes (thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com). It’s the specialist theme … one definition of specialization being that the specialist becomes more and more specialised until they know everything there is to know about nothing.

As current systems (I hate that bloody word 'systems') collapse the technology that people will gravitate towards may be the earlier incarnations that we consider our ‘primitive’, never to be seen again past: Microchips to transistors to tubes to sitting around a winter fire conjuring fantastical stories, internal combustion engines to steam (maybe) to horse to walking, computer word processors to typewriters to movable type presses to hand writing to … speaking.

The natural pro/re/ag/gression being to find ourselves finally back using stone age technologies and finally see a possibility of living on this earth in something resembling sustainability. Stone age agriculture … perhaps … for a time, but truly I dream at this point to a planet capable of sustaining us as hunters, as gatherers. The memory of seven billion people a distant warning passed on through the ages to all tellers of stories and myth and song. This is where we are going and it would behoove us all to start moving there asap. Well, that’s what I think anyway … but then most folks reading this blog already know this about me.
More to come. Hope all is well withal!
Cath