WALKING ON THIN ICE

in this vis-à-vis world of text versus context, reason versus revelation, insiders versus outsiders and good versus evil, i’m the slightly seedy hero - for how do you know what’s far enough until you’ve gone too far? you must taste both sides of the equation to find the answer. we each find our own. my particular answers only show you one way to go, or not to go - your own path, vector and speed are your choice alone. all i know after 61 years is you can’t let another choose your life for you because only you pay the price.

i have one-way legs. couldn’t get the bicycle tires pumped up because i’m a mechanical idiot, so we walked an hour to the next village (servian, france), walked around it for two hours, sat in the sun, shared a lunch of fresh french bread and goat cheese with a cautious street cat, filled my back pack with fruit, and started back - whereupon my legs decided we’d walked far enough. didn’t do them any good though - when you’re on foot on your own you’re on foot on your own - nobody else is going to walk it for you, no one else is going to come along and carry you home - not alive anyway. sort of like life. my attitude sure has changed since we sold our cars last july and started walking around europe - now i think nothing of walking a couple miles just for pleasure. walk a mile in my shoes and you’d see some pretty cool stuff.

kathy started her fresh stash of french trash on our walk - gathered bits of cultural detritus from the road side for her assemblage art.

i’m trying to learn a wee oui bit of french. the language is graceful to my ear, but stumbles in my mouth. our village of Abeilhan is pronounced Abbey-on. i’m on the road to abbey on, years beyond abbey road.

our last place - the istrian peninsula of croatia - was a giant rock thrust from the sea and covered in wild green growth. here in the south of france the land is peaceful, gentle, tranquil, domesticated, tamed, manicured, serene, used. france has much more people and is much less wild. of course both istria and southern france are headed for desert along with the entire southern half of europe according to the global warming warnings.

although, i no longer believe we’re going to have to worry about global warming, because the government’s crazy ideas to re-work the earth’s atmosphere to get around it will probably wipe us out before then - per this excerpt from the Inter Press Service Feb 6, 2007:

‘many of the most heavily industrialised nations find the economic costs of stopping global warming hard to swallow. Instead, some, led by the United States, are looking at geo-engineering schemes — large-scale attempts to manipulate the environment to produce environmental change, according to the ETC Group, a Canadian-based non-governmental organisation. Many such schemes are currently under scientific study, and include deliberately polluting the stratosphere with tiny sulphur dioxide particles or putting trillions of wafer-thin reflectors into orbit. Both of these measures are intended to deflect sunlight and cool the Earth, according to the ETC Group’s report “Gambling with Gaia” released on Feb. 1. Other mitigation plans have already been launched over the past few years, such as dumping tonnes of iron particles into the oceans to trigger phytoplankton blooms in the hopes of absorbing more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. “There’s a little bit of panic brewing, governments are taking these wacky ideas seriously,” says Pat Mooney of the ETC Group.’