Thursday, September 6, 2012

Chicken with Rice.......or Fife and the Piscator go Native




Politics, the job, the dutiful societal niceties, the weather, the failed apple crop
it doesn't take much to make me sick of the whole damn situation.

Full on partisan contact sport in every conversation
on every blaring media outlet
in every bloody space you care to enter
so completely frantic
so absurdly useless.

Testosterone and treasure
both squandered
at the grid iron and the campaign arena
both during the same season
no wonder the shooters

Switch it off man........................look at the blue moon......................feel its grasp



September first finally arrived along with rescue via brother Fife. We embarked on an adventure so ancient yet completely new to me. Manoomin, Menohmon, MNohMN.  Zizania, palustris - wild rice. That which kept the Annishinabeg and Lakota alive for millenia.

Primal and eternal - a completely different mode of thinking, and as close to the earth as possible. Thin or thick ? Green or ripe? Falling or clinging on for the next day?  You cannot force answers to such simple questions. You can only give yourself to the play, and ride the endless spinning cycle.

Right on Brother!  He is the old hand, me the novice. I poled, he knocked. A right good moose hide grew in the canoe bottom as we plied the carefree waters. Ducks and herons flushed.  The little sora rails fluttered,  unaware that I fancied them in cream sauce with the rice. Goose music wafted from afar and eagles soared. I hit the wall at five and a half hours into our legally allotted six hours of white man time. My arms, they paralyzed !

Burnt by sun and wind, sore of pole and flail, sweated out and bug bitten, we happily arrived at home.  A short walk produced a fresh chicken.

One hundred pounds of green wild rice became forty-five pounds of winter comfort food and presents for those that are loved.

We felt like Kings !