Shroom Stroll

We took our second Herb Walk with Naturopath Maggie Conklin of Douglas’ LadyHawk Nutrition this week. Cooler temperatures coupled with the shift in evening light made for a pleasant saunter through our backwoods, richly populated with flowers, plants and herbs indigenous to Michigan’s Northern hardwood forests. This night’s particular walk focused on mushrooms, those fleshy fungi of the class Basidiomycota, with their often umbrella shaped caps borne on a stalk. Amateur Mycologist Anthony Blowers was in or rather behind the house to help lead the way, pointing out and identifying edible Oyster Mushrooms (Pleurotus Ostreatus), the lilac of Purple Tooth (Trichaptum Biforme), and the unique shape and colors of Trametes Versicolor, or Turkey Tail, the name derived from the mushroom’s resemblance to a wild Turkey’s back plumage.

 A seven-year study funded by the National Institutes of Health found Turkey Tail boosts immunity in women treated for breast cancer, and its merit as a supplement and immunity boost for dogs is widely known. Mushrooms’ general immunomodulating ability to stimulate or suppress the immune system and help the body fight cancer, infection and other diseases, is, for lack of a better term, mushrooming. It’s wild, literally, leaning about the nutritional and medicinal value as well as the history of interactions between our species and those of the timberlands, with Oyster Mushrooms first cultivated in Germany as a subsistence measure during World War I. We also came across Chlorociboria Aeruginasens -  tough to say but easy to see - the Green Stain Fungus that often brightly colors felled trees on the forest floor. Woodworkers have prized the stained lumber for ages, 14th and 15th century Renaissance Italian craftsman using the wood to provide the emerald coloring in their intricate inlaid intarsia designs. Paul Stamets’ name came up, a whole other discovery and story (teller), the author and Master Mycologist who’s given a Ted Talk on Six Ways Mushrooms Can Save The World. Check him and the new wave of technologies harnessing the inherent power of these magical plants out at fungi.com.

 The number of treasures we walk right over and past in this world because of our lack of spiritual awareness can be astounding. With that, we’ll be growing our knowledge of the healing power of the natural world at Maggie’s next herb walk in Saugatuck, a quick 20-minute jaunt from South Haven, on Tuesday, September 25th at 6 pm. And given Tony’s expertise and added experience as a chef, we hope to have him back in the near future to make his offerings a part of all the wild things cookin’ at The Higher Haven.

Sky Is A Neighborhood

Sky is a Neighborhood is a Foo Fighters song heard on the Howard Stern show last week, Howard jamming it and singing its praises.  "The sky is a neighborhood, heart is a storybook, a star burned out...Oh my dear Heaven is a big band now, Gotta get to sleep somehow (The sky is a neighborhood) Bangin' on the ceiling... Bangin' on the ceiling" I like the song and its cryptic, poetic title, as this piece needed a heading that harkens skyward. Always deeply contemplating (aka obsessing) on how to better the Higher Haven and offer visitors a singular, more sanctified experience, I had the idea recently to acquire a Telescope. The channel of thought ran this way: visitors could connect more directly with big, celestial movements happening overhead, movements that definitely effect our human lives, although the influence of many remain unaware. The HH's stretch of 20 acres is not an official Dark Park, however, the black blanket of night sky covering the place from dusk to dawn, aglow with brilliant, diamond-chipped stars, always inspires.  Considering that star smattering is speckled with planets, there's a simple, beautiful aspect to the scientific, astronomical focus Up. But here, there's also an appreciation for the astrological aspect, an awareness and reverence for ancient sciences like Vedic astrology, informing us of patterns and periods as well as the challenges posed by different planetary periods; the planetary weather if you will. And whose plans don’t benefit a bit from checking the weather?

We also practice a form of Shamanism drawn from the indigenous people of the Americas, people of the plains who looked to the stars to help navigate their nomadic movements. I'm on the hunt for and hoping to gather a book buried deep in one of many basement boxes,  the best source of Lakota Star Knowledge I’ve ever come across, acquired at Sinte Gleska (Spotted Tail) University on the Rosebud Reservation, circa 2001. Recounting how tribes synched their movements with that of the sun and the moon and stars, the guide helped establish my personal practice of modern day stargazing, a healthy acknowledgment of the cycles of the moon, the solstices, etc. Jiving with the sky, as the ancients realized, helps one live a less fractured life. And although a  comfy home and a roof with central heat may cushion us from the rough, rocky edges of living in nature,  the same Wakagna Luta, The Red Road of The Spirit World, aka The Milky way, looms above. This bright, starry path that called to our ancestors still calls to us today, perhaps calling to rise up and ascend to our True Home.  There you have my long-winded, slightly dramatic explanation on the mindset behind expanding our night vision with setting up a Higher Haven Telescope. And because the Cosmos' vastness have been on my psyche’s radar, I wanted to share the following  piece, written by Sky Scientist Carl Sagan.  With a vein (vane?) or two of atheistic pessimism, this excerpt taken from Pale Blue Dot: A Vision for the Human Future in Space is quite profound in its grasp of the fragility as well as the majesty of life on Earth. 

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.” 

Yoo'pin It

I'm back. Back from the edge of middle earth, from a little left of nowhere, from going "Forth!" (Wisconsin's state motto), from a Loop de Yoop (more on that in a minute), from a few days spent getting lost, all in the service of being Found. And more Sound. Regarding the following travelogue -  focused more on an August road trip than an August retreat- sometimes I, too, gotta Getaway. But when you've found your place and you already live off the grid, in the woods, where to? This is when I heed the howl of the heavily forested and remotest region of our state, the rocky mass bordering three of the Great Lakes and extending outward from Wisconsin, that isthmus (my new favorite word) known as the Upper Hand, Michigan's Upper Peninsula or U.P. 

Sometimes backlit by Aurora light displays, more recently by the high beams of my Volvo C30, this odd land is the Mexico of the Midwest, a funky frontier, warmly welcoming in its burnt-out, backwoods way. There's a strange... sense to the U.P., an attitude, an altitude, a feeling the place may be imputed with special powers. From Ironwood (a far West hamlet) to Iron River (a bigger township) to Iron Mountain (a virtual metropolis), here's a spirit of Unparalleled Personal independence, a character of forged mettle.

When I resided in Northern California a few years back, I heard the poet Robert Bly say, "If you live in a land for a period of time and you don't become the land, you know you must move on from that place." I was gone soon after. And back to Michigan. Following that channel of thought, part of my elation over this recent jaunt sprang from the new route taken, by way of the SS Badger - the coal-fired ferry chugging the great lakes since 1953. Wanting to take that trip since first learning of it upon moving to South Haven in 2014, the watery way opened up new access to Michigan's remotest corners. Couple a quick drive to Ludington with a chill, four- hour boat ride plus another few hours and, you're in The Porcupine Mountains, or Porkies, a group of small peaks spanning the northwest crook. Soon after, you're miles out by Nike on The Escarpment Trail, snapping pics like the above. 

Conjuring up visions of The Higher Haven North, The Highest Haven (?) can you picture a tiny house on the shores of Lake Superior? As to becoming the land as well as the lakes, from the beaches of Mishigama to the shores of Gitche Gumee, perhaps in a few years it'll be a place of required study! Why not? Elsewhere on this web site it claims "the stately splendor of Southwest Michigan living" is a part of our appeal. We're expanding that vibe far and wide, to folks the world over, to learn of and seek out the healing power of The Great Lakes area.

For now,  given our own late summer retreat, we're looking to the Fall. If you're one of the many people interested in meditation and healing but yoga not so much, join a like-minded group the weekend of September 22-23rd. We'll also offer a Barre exercise retreat the following weekend September 29th-30th, and other October and November events we'll have up my month's end. Toksha, Until then.