by Scott A. Jones
Peace to all our brothers and sisters.
We bring you warm, piñon-scented greetings from the cosmos, or at least our little hippie-dippie end of it. In the cold and dark of winter here in the Southern Rocky Mountains, we huddle in our little adobes and wait for the transcendence of spring to come, and muse on the long hours of fire-lit night. Of course we also go out to the greenhouse where we’re growing the finest organic weed around for the Colorado recreational marijuana industry.
That’s right! Peace love and understanding are finally paying off for us. Scott has a new profession – legal hybridized marijuana grower. He’s developed several new varieties, including one that has no high and five times the munchies for the anorexia rehabilitation clinic in Pagosa Springs. The greenhouse is only twenty feet wide and a hundred long, but he can carefully hand-tend each of the one thousand plants. Think of them as the Kobe-beef dope plants of the stoner world. Sandy particularly likes the agave/hemp cross, because it produces a hand cream with a killer high that removes old-age spots.
Of course there are some downsides to this business. It keeps Scott so busy that he doesn’t have any time for anti-war protests or his haiku poetry. And Sandy, well, the paperwork for each shipment is just exhausting. And the certification process! You would think that we were building a nuclear reactor or something. It makes us nostalgic for the old days of Haight Ashbury and the flop down near Fillmore West – the times of no responsibilities and no rent.
We’ve officially gone off the grid, not necessarily of our own free will, but more because of the unreliability of the local utility. [When is an electric company Zen?] Once upon a communal time we lived off the grid – in the days of Wavy Gravy and the Hog Farm. We admit though, that privies and trucked-in water and electricity from truck batteries wasn’t a lot of fun. And those tipis were cold! Now we have a generator we power from diesel made from cooking oil. Margie is still running her deep-fat frier vegan restaurant nearby and that is one source of grease, and we love the way our generator smells like crispy tofu. We have three wind turbines, and you know this is one of the windiest places in the world, short of Katmandu. We used to recycle our grey water into the flowers around the house, but now using NASA technology we water the dope plants – and it’s better than agua from the well. Scott is trying to rig a Tesla converter to tap into the singing resonance of the Universe, but the instructions on the internet are confusing and evidently incomplete.
That’s right – we’re space age hippies, grooving with the technology that makes the counterculture sweet. Don’t worry – we still use a wood burning stove.
Sandy’s crystal business is taking off down in Taos. She has a new line of crystals – labradorite – that a lot of liberal people are buying up and sending off as Christmas gifts to Texas and Oklahoma. The rumor is that the rays channeled through the crystal will change a Republican into a Democrat. Unfortunately, there is a side-effect, like in most things. The rays also change Libertarians into Catholics. She has a friend who owns a leather shop that is selling her entire line, and she’s actually selling more there than Denver and Hotchkiss combined. If you want to check out the full range of crystals, go to www.GetYerMojoRaysOn.org. She can take care of anything from depression to an unbalanced spleen. Scott personally uses Epidote for acid reflux, and it works a charm.
We adopted a mountain lion who just wandered up one day and lay down in front of the fire. Her name is Janis Lyn (take a little piece of my heart now baby), and we feed her mostly with elk that have been liberated from the mountain. Remember the old days, when everything was “liberated” for and by the People’s Republic of Rock and Roll? Well, when a mountain lion wants to get up in the bed between the two of you, you don’t need a weather man to tell which way the wind blows. Janis has decided she is the protector of our free-range Turkeys. We think she’s in love with the tom – his name is Ken Kesey.
Speaking of Ken Kesey, we and a nearby commune have pioneered a new-age tourist attraction. We call it the Full Tilt Luminous Forest. Of course the idea came from the Merry Pranksters, but we’ve done it up brilliantly – it will so warp your brain. We donated the property, and the commune is mixing the glow-in-the-dark paint. So far we have applied two hundred gallons of it to the trees. We’ve put up eighteen sculptures, two of which are solar powered mobile creatures that wander the woods at night on battery power. We’ve created six nests. There is a skinny dipping pond for moonlit nights, and a stage for folk music concerts. We rent the place out to Christians at Christmas time – it’s like driving around looking at the lights – and the Druids for Solstice. Honeymooners like the nests.
Last year we moved out of our yurt (it’s now Sandy’s weaving factory for her line of organic Tasmanian wool fleeces) and into Scott’s Built Environment. We started with a three story steel frame, loaded it with recycled trailers, connected them with spiral stairs, ramps, chutes, and slides, and then surfaced the whole thing in glass and sheet mica. We’re now busy creating a psychedelic environment with found art, vintage concert posters, specialty lighting, and ever-present music. It’s our little homage to Bucky Fuller and Timothy Leary. Not to mention John Lennon.
Last year we joined the caterers for the Southern North New Mexico Rock and Sock Clean Your Clock Mudpie Solar Powered Music Extravaganza. We specialized our end of the kitchen in green chili stew and organic swiss-chard mushroom risotto. In all, we made fifty gallons and 100 pounds of our delicacies. All money went to saving the hump-backed whales of course ( http://us.whales.org/ ). We had a great time and got to hear a lot of good music. At least we thought it was good. At least we thought we heard it. Who are we kidding – we were major impaired. Better living through chemistry!
So let’s hope this season of Druidic cycle, Christian celebration, major festivals in many religions including churches of one person, shamanistic resonance, and Hindu/voodoo/redo/hudu finds you all lit up with whatever cosmic limitless vibe gets you off. Light a candle for us.
Sandy and Scott (Little Grouse Feather and Bogwan Ramscott)