The Ghost Dance has recurred frequently in human history, but the term has its origins close to California. By the late 1800s, a decades-long assault of European values and technology, not to mention forced relocation, poverty, and disease had taken their toll on Native Americans across the west. Many tribes were at or near collapse when on New Year’s Day 1889, a Walker River Paiute mystic named Wovoka had a vision. Wovoka foresaw a new age in which the white interlopers would vanish and the natives would reclaim a rejuvenated world and be rejoined by their ancestors. Wovoka preached that this new world would arrive sooner if believers would engage in moral conduct, peaceful behavior, and practice a ritual round-dance that came to be called the Ghost Dance.

What a town. I go to the local healthy grocery store, and there's Tibetan monks at the salad bar and a sand mandala next to the condiments island.

I'm a bit under the weather today, so the surreality of it all was much welcomed and interrupted my sleepy daze.

I'm not getting off the bus until we know where we're going...

Here's another burst...

Apologists and naysayers are trying to make a dent in the zeitgeist today, but the momentum seems to lie with those of us, from the left, right, neutral and previously apathetic, are keeping up the tidal wave of cries for accountability. The logic of those glad to make excuses for the Worst Preseident Ever is fairly simple to deconstruct. Sure, many of those in State government probably made a few mistakes, but not at the collosal level that helped to drown an entire city... it comes down to levee funding, and appointing completely inexperienced people by way of patronage to fill positions vital to national security. The accountability trail stops at the Oval Office door.

Here's a few new developments:

Regular blogging on my relatively regular schuedule will resume soon, but for now, all attention needs to go to this. We can't let the fuckers get away. So, no rest for those in their blazing desire to expose the wicked:

Never forget.

Oh, and he's investigating himself. Twit.

From the WWL ongoing coverage:

3:32 P.M. Ben Morris, Slidell mayor: We are still hampered by some of the most stupid, idiotic regulations by FEMA. They have turned away generators, we've heard that they've gone around seizing equipment from our contractors. If they do so, they'd better be armed because I'll be damned if I'm going to let them deprive our citizens. I'm pissed off, and tired of this horse$#@@."

10:10 A.M. - Broussard: I know what the body count is so far, but I won't horrify the nation.

Here's the latest roundup of must-reads...

A Lebanon Pine stands in silhouette against a cloudless sunset, such golden light...

Two stars, maybe planets, reflect in the slow ripples of the lake, such distant light...

Bats, those harbingers of the unknown, swirl wild in the purple-ing sky, such mysterious light...

Such light.

I had to leave the house, and be away from the endless streams of communication which were flooding, saturating my Saturday. On the short drive to the lake, the streets were emptier than they ought to be on a Saturday. There were less walkers than normal, and what faces I saw had, by degrees, vacant and heavy eyes. The fisherman, tending the thin line between this world and that, was expressionless. Facing the water in silence, he may as well have been a painting. Perhaps he was.

Such light.

As I made my way around the lake and into the Audubon Bird Sanctuary, a hummingbird darted to my right. We saw eye to eye, and I’d like to think that the curiosity is mutual. As I enter the Sanctuary, crossing the wooden bridge over marsh, I stopped, and looked to my left. There, swimming so smooth in the shallow water, a beaver. I’d never been so close to one before, mere feet away. With the smoothest of movement, it stripped some low-lying bark, and ate, with its tiny hands, a few weeds. It dove and surfaced without seeming to mind my gaping mouth and wide eyes. It carried on, deeper into the marsh, into the twilight.

Such light.

It’s so wonderfully overgrown there. Paths are lines blurred by wilderness, and you can only move forward by being brushed with the wild. It erupts in a late-summer last chance at fruitfulness. Vines bend with berries, and hardy, vibrant flowers appear so optimistic in the cooling world. The stars which overhang this, they are clear, and wild geese and gnats and the boldest of fireflies fly through the constellations, carefree, busy in the work of the living. I move through this sanctuary busy in the work of living myself. I’m broke, but alive. I’m scatterbrained, but alive. I progress through the night to this moment clumsily, but alive. And I savor the all the lights I see, but won’t covet. You can’t have the light, you can’t have the world, but you can be alive, and cast a shadow, and tremble in your own skin for the beauty, horror, and love of it all.

Such light.

It wasn’t long ago that I was awakened by a small earthquake. What a novelty! It wasn’t even strong enough to make a single curio do the foxtrot. Everyone talked about it the next day, with the stories of where they were, and with that glint of wonder. We all cling to this orb as it spins, it’s a wonder it doesn’t shake us more often, as we cling to its surface with foolhardy abandon. Then, a storm began to churn in the Atlantic. Since last year this area was ravaged by once-in-a-century flooding, we’re watchful of those frightful spirals in these parts. When the forecasters proclaimed the storm would not come to visit, the city sighed and went back to bed. Yet by the pale, early diffuse light of the next morning, we stopped and realized that it was ashore with a vengeance... this can’t be happening. They call this one Katrina. On the maps, it is white and full of froth, and the sun does not penetrate, save for the eye.

Such light.

We’ve been torn asunder by that light; the light reflected off the misplaced waters in a sunken city, the light barely returning from a hungry child’s eyes, the shadows cast by refugees in our country, walking with slumped shoulders along the interstates. The light shimmering in those dark pools has convulsed us with tears, and the world we knew is not the world of now. Rarely does a cataclysm make the newspapers. Rarely is the thin veneer of a nation so quickly shattered by mad winds, and the society is left to wonder what and who they are now. Another fisherman in his little rowboat in the sunset-rippled lake is us, this society, this planet. It takes great care to maneuver just right, and should the winds blow and the waters chop, it takes so little to upend everything. We’ve been upended, and we’re grasping for whatever we can before it all sinks. Will our friends on the shore save us? The night has come, and a moonless sky and its bold stars twinkle, and the stars seem to swing low, blue sparkles, comin’ for to carry me home...

Such light.

Sleep is full of yammering dreams, of hoards begging for simple help. The rest of the world, the one we keep at bay with our endless distractions, has come to us. Refugee camps, here, in America. Dysentery, typhoid, and everything I had to get immunizations for before flying to Haiti two years ago, happening here, in America. Children dying from no food or water, happening here, in America. They could’ve named the storm Humility, for that’s what we’ve got now, in spades. Yet there are those, whose fear drives them to hide behind great institutions, who will say that this has washed away sin, and driven out the snakes, and that we ought not rebuild for these places are scourged and accursed. Yet they are not in tatters, walking miles for clear water, clothes or medicine. The storm has only cleansed the illusion of their piety, and left for all to see their own sin of self-righteousness. They shall be forgiven, or at least ignored, for their blindness. And these figures are not important anymore. All that matters now are the survivors; the sick, they crying, the homeless, the dying. For the voiceless, they need voices, for the hungry, they need food. Priorities for us are simpler now. This water, I savor it, and this bright clear day after my walk by the lake. I savor these on behalf of those gone, unable to savor anything, and too wounded to notice the beauty that remains, in spite of the cruelty of human arrogance. Beauty shall thrive in spite of arrogance.

Such light.

Tonight, some strangers and some friends will gather in a circle, downtown. We will light candles, sing a song, share some silence. A woman is even going to release homing doves. We’ll stand in ceremony for those who can’t, who can’t traipse around lakes and be agog at beavers and hummingbirds, transfixed by the great varieties of this living, terrestrial experience. We’re a community hundreds of miles away from the affected areas, but we are one people. The sun, out right now which summons the cicadas and entices the green of the leaves to be ever more so, is one star. This planet is not a pressed together mishmash of hundreds of countries, it is one sphere in space, spinning so perfectly, with us or without us. We are so fragile, and so tenacious. I almost drowned in water this year, but a sheer miracle of opposing current allowed me to live. Today, fewer people in our part of the world can say that. Life is thin, but it’s damn good when it’s here, and we all depend upon it, that vibrant little word, which somehow is magic enough to give us something to do each and every day. Because we love it so much, we must work for it, we must give it, we must absolutely adore it in the trees, the birds, in the eyes of our beloved. Some say that all this will bring revolution. Fine. Let that revolution be to savor life, and if we do that enough, the fearsome institutions will lose relevance. Besides, the light that illuminates an oncoming storm will also illuminate its dissipation, and will make clear what must be done. For the good of the world. We can see what needs to be done now. We are all refugees, in a galactic sense, wandering through the wilds, guided by the light of our passions. Through that brilliant light, we move, onward together to sanctuary.

Such light.

Fears of an international energy crisis mounted on Wednesday as the scale of human and economic devastation caused in the southern US by Hurricane Katrina became fully apparent... As the human tragedy unfolded, there were fears that the economic impact of the storm, which has paralysed the Gulf of Mexico oil industry, could be felt around the globe.

But don't panic, m'kay? I've been to so many places where the people thrived without fuel. The Sun is fuel. Love is fuel. Working the Earth is fuel enough. Even if the sky falls on Chicken Little, survival is immanent; the ferment of dead dinosaurs must eventually run out, so that we can understand that real survival does not depend upon the chemicals of the dead; it depends on the innovation of the living.