Baron Michael Mojohito John Richerson von Tchudi

October will be a fun month in Mendocino County! First of all, it’s C’mon Home to Eat, local food month: the challenge is to eat within 100 miles of where you live. There will be a couple of great local-food potlucks and other events, including a workshop called Acorns for Food – a pertinent topic considering that acorns were the primary staple of indiginous people in California for porbably thousands of years; considering the risk of food shortages in the wake of peak oil concerns, this information may be invaluable in the near future! So: Sepember 30th is Oz Farm’s Harvest festival (www.oz-farm.com/harvest_festival.htm) and the Hoes Down Harvest Festival is on October 7th at Full Belly Farm in Capay Valley (www.hoesdown.org/).
Emerald Earth (www.emeraldearth.org/) is having a work party the weekend of the 7th and another workshop around the 20th. There’s a real push to get roofs finished before rain comes, and the energy is really electric.
Of course, I won’t be at any of these events, as my priorities are elsewhere. Yesterday we made an offer on 45 acres outside of Lower Lake, California. Today, offer received, and we’re in escrow. I’ll be doing a lot of research and meeting people for perc and hydrological tests, learning about the legal status of a defacto easement and seeking to negotiate a modification if necessary. Reno will be home base until the house is sold, and I’m expecting a lot of travel to Lake county for preparations. I am officially on the payroll.
Heather and I leave EE in four days. We’re antsy to transition, but know we will miss this beautiful land and the interesting harmony of community living. It will be interesting to return to a city with all of my new skills and abilities acquired while living and training in the boondocks. Interesting Autumn indeed.

I’m writing from the Heartwood library, where I am pleased to see that they have installed three new iMac computers. A fine upgrade over the one shoddy Windows machine that used to be here. Makes it comfortable to sit here and write a little bit.
Heather and I are just visiting; there’s no kitchen interview, as we’ve decided not to work at Heartwood, though I’m sorely tempted with an offer to run the Wellness Center here. Instead, we’ll head to Reno, as was once upon a time the original plan. This will allow me more face time with the folks for planning our land inhabitation, and an easier deployment for going to Lake County (or wherever) to look at land or meet with officials. Heartwood would mean being further from the places we need to go and less likely to get time off from the ol’ J.O.B. We can find work in Reno, but things are more looking like working part- to full-time on the land project. We’re sad not to be living at Emerald Earth for much longer, or to be working at Heartwood, but truly, moving to Reno just feels like the best thing for us!
It’s beautiful to be visiting Heartwood, familiar and new faces. Spending time with my dear friend Alexis, who is now a student in the same Asian Healing Arts program I just graduated from.
Stress is relieving due to positive interactions with family and colleagues. Our plans are looking more realistic than ever, and things are moving rapidly.

Dang, over a month since adding something to this page. Little point, I think, in reviewing the last five weeks, but let’s see…
The apprenticeship has ended, a smashing success, and now I am living at Emerald Earth in a work-trade capacity; still building, but also gardening and doing a lot more cooking for the community. My kombucha is thriving, and I’m brewing near six gallons a week. Probably more than I can drink, but I’m hoping to produce some to share – or sell – also working with sauerkraut and have a batch of beer in the works!
Heather is here too, and we are very fortunate to be living an a beautiful natural building that would otherwise be unoccupied. Our own little home, with kitchen and bookshelf and desk and most certainly a bed in a bedroom. Stompin’ our feet on the wooden porch, never got to worry about locking the doors.
But we’re not here that much this month. Three three-day weekends in a row, plus. My sister Emily got married in Oakland, and we were happy to see Cheetah and my folks, as well as Tim. It was a partyin’ weekend, see photo. I read at the ceremony as well as prepared a vegetarian entree for dinner.
Back at EE, Heather and I are going to the Solar Living Institute tomorrow, to volunteer for SolFest.
On Monday, we’ll be seeing Cheetah and his partner Jen again, along with my Mom, who is flying them down to look at a promising piece of land in Middletown, California. This is particularly exciting, because we are very close to making a dramatic step forward on this homestead project, manifesting dreams.
The list of events goes on.
I’m trying to balance the excitement in my life. There is anxiety about fulfilling my obligations to EE as a work trader, what with being away so much. We barely feel arrived before we turn around and go again. Too much pot smoking and ejaculation leaves me feeling drained and grouchy, so replacing addictive behavior with positive things is something I’m putting a lot of focus into. In the meantime, people mostly irritate me, and I prefer being alone with Heather, or in the kitchen, or working hard. Social stuff around the community not so much.
I return to the concept or process, being gentle with myself, taking my time, appreciating the hard parts, savoring the fun parts, laughing at my dumb attitude, and learning to thrive on what my life entails.
I am surrounded by beauty and abundance, and the trick is to remember that always.

I can happily report that I’ve had no evidence of poison oak for three weeks. I can safely say that I’m in the clear from that particular struggle.
I’m working now on creating a business for doing Nutritional Consultations, with the intent of having the kombucha tie-in, as well as getting a wholesale licence or account so I can begin to carry high-end supplements.
It’s chilly today and my kidneys are feeling it.

There are some really fun and interesting sustainability and natural living events taking place in Northern California (within a couple of hours of San Francisco) in the months of July through September:

In just two weeks, during the weekend of July 15th and 16th, we’re having a work party right here at Emerald Earth, where I’m living as a natural building apprentice. This is a great opportunity to check out a functioning intentional community, learn about natural building, get your hands dirty, have some organic food and meet some great people. We’re just outside of Boonville, California. Of course, you can visit me here any time, since I’ll be living and working here probably until October! www.emeraldearth.org

The Solar Living Institute is located on Highway 101 in Hopland, and features all kinds of classes and internships on permaculture design and philosophy, practical solar electricity, natural building, and the like. Once a year they host a SolFest, featuring lots of music and speakers (this year including the David Grisman Bluegrass Experience, and Jim Hightower), workshops, and tours of their extensive facility. The dates are August 19th and 20th, though the place is open to visitors year-round. They could use some volunteers for the week leading up to and including the festival itself, so if you’ve got some free time, consider it. www.solfest.org

Mendocino is a quaint village on Highway 1, on the Pacific coast, and just outside of that is Old Mill Farm, a small-scale natural farm producing veggies and some fantastic meats for local restaurants and farmer’s markets. A friend of Cheetah’s from Olympia is the garden manager; I was just there over the weekend for a straw bale building workshop and had a really great time hanging out with the people there. They have a one day Sustainable Living Festival on September 2nd that looks like it will be a lot of fun. Many people party late and camp out on the farm, and help clean up in the morning – a fun community event. www.oldmillfarm.org

I intend to be at all three of these, volunteering if I can find space in my building schedule, so I hope to see you at one or more. Let your friends know about these events!

I have been living at Emerald Earth for three weeks now, and I am quite satisfied with the quality of life here. The Natural Building apprenticeship is going very well; I am learning many valuable skills and rapidly.
I’m writing now not to elaborate on the virtues of country living, but instead to illustrate my damage due to poison oak exposure. I’m not sure when I was first exposed to the resin, or if I have been continuously re-exposed, but the first disparate patches appeared fourteen days ago. They weren’t patches so much as individual raised blisters on different tender parts of my body, such as inner elbows and knees. The individuals mostly went away smoothly, but some patches began to spread. It was unusual, and not until five days had passed that the patches were recognizable as a poison oak reaction. At that point there was a lot of itching, but it was mostly just annoying, so I dealt with it. However, it continued to get a little bit worse each day. By Friday, after working on stomping and laying cob in 102 degree weather for a few days, the whole lower portion of my right leg began to swell. Today, Saturday, it looks like a lobe of rotting baloney. It is painful to walk on. Apparently, the whole distal limb has gone into a systemic allergic reaction. It oozes and I leave little puddles where I go, leg propped up, dripping on the floor.
Up until this point, I was letting the body self-regulate. When the rash become more of an open wound (around Thursday) I started using healing clay.
Today, I think I’ll start taking steroids. I have the drugs (yay for community living – someone has some leftover), but I can’t seem to figure out what the proper dosage is, and since it’s such a powerful drug, I’m reluctant to take it at all, let alone some random dosage. I think I’ll go with a starting dosage of 1 mg/Kg body weight/day and ease off from there.
But through this, I’m working on understanding what it is I have to learn from the plant and this reaction. Is it some metal element boundaries thing? Is it about paying closer attention to my surroundings? Am I to learn to be more attentive to my healing, and take better care of myself when I start to get sick? Hm. Maybe it’s about getting over a resistance to Western meds.

After a whirlwind few days of travel and stuff (oh so much STUFF!), I have abruptly stopped at Emerald Earth Sanctuary near Boonville California, where I will reside for approximately the next eight weeks. I am overjoyed to be back away from the urban paved-ness, and for the first time in a while, I felt compelled to do my Practice this morning. Too-cold night and janky rib (freak massage embracing accident, no time for x-rays, gonna be fine) be damned, I set up my little urban oasis in the country (put it this way – some people carry their camping gear in a large backpack; I carry my camping gear in a large motor vehicle). Today is a day of something like rest, and tomorrow begins the Natural Building in Community internship.