Power Potatoes Bread Dream

Early in the morning a few days ago our power went out, our electricity that is, not our personal power, though I sometimes mistakenly conflate the two. This was a planned outage. PG&E was replacing an old power pole across the street and putting in a new pole with new updated parts attached. I watched a good deal of the process and found the action riveting.

First the crew of eight men employing many tools and four large trucks disconnected all the wires going to the pole, and there were lots of wires. Then they removed various electrical appendages from the poles that those wires had been connected to, and then they sawed off the top ten feet of the pole and lifted that part away with a crane. Finally they used a crane to yank the remaining length of the pole out of the ground. All that took five hours.

The existing hole was then drilled anew to make room for the new larger pole, and this massive pole was then expertly swung over and tilted into the hole by a skilled crane operator with the help of three men on the ground. Then three men in lift buckets spent four more hours affixing new parts to the pole and re-attaching the many wires. A nine-hour job in total, during which I ran our little generator a couple times to keep the food in the fridge from spoiling.

As I watched the men work, I thought about the United States military bombing more than nineteen thousand targets in Iran for fifty days and nights and destroying hundreds if not thousands of such power poles and hundreds of miles of power lines. For what? To try to seize control of Iran and steal their oil in the same way America’s corporate oligarchy is currently stealing Venezuelan oil while also doing the bidding of the Israeli lobby that controls our government.

But they failed. You and I did not fail. The criminals who took over the American government failed and lost the war and are now doing everything they can to profit from their failure and to hell with everybody else.

*

Meanwhile I’ve started harvesting the summer potato crop and I’m happy to report the spuds grown in my tubs are bigger and better than ever this year. I planted more potatoes than I usually do as a reflexive response to my hunch that this senseless war against Iran and the resultant higher oil prices will result in food problems, globally, nationally, and locally. I can’t grow enough food in my ten big tubs to sustain us, but I can grow enough to help us better weather a food crisis should one materialize. 

*

In other self-sufficiency news, I’ve greatly improved my garbanzo-lentil-flax seed bread recipe, and the latest loaves are not only delicious and highly nutritious, they are beautiful.

*

This morning I woke from a vivid dream in which Marcia and I are living in a house that is a hybrid of our current house and the three previous houses I lived in. We are standing in the dining area when my attention is drawn to a young woman in our backyard, a woman I recognize from a previous dream in which she and several other people damaged the back end of our house.

I watch the young woman looking at the damage she and others did to our house in that previous dream and I wonder why she has returned. I’m not angry with her, but I’m not comfortable with her being in our yard.

Now she moves away from the house and goes with two small children and a dog into our orchard. Marcia has gone into another room and morphed into a hybrid of several women I’ve known in my life. She seems disinterested in the woman and children and dog in our garden.

As I watch the woman and children picking apples, I notice the wooden fence at the far end of the orchard is damaged and burned and many people and two enormous bears and several dogs are coming through a hole in the fence into the orchard. The bears and people swarm the apple trees and break several branches and eat all the apples and trample my garden.

I say to the disinterested woman in the other room, “I think I’d better go out there and ask them to leave.”

The woman makes no reply.

So I go out to talk to the people, mostly children, who have gathered in a group around the two bears who are now lying down bloated with apples and seeming quite tame. I’m not angry or upset, only saddened by what the people and bears did to our trees and garden.

“Hello,” I say to the people, mostly children.

They fall silent and gaze solemnly at me.

“My name is Todd. I live here with my wife and our daughter. You have eaten all our apples and trampled our garden and I want you to leave now. If you won’t go, I will have to call the police.”

The children continue to gaze solemnly at me and I wake.

I told the dream to Marcia and she asked me what I thought about the dream. I concluded that yesterday I had a long conversation with a neighbor about the bears that have been knocking over our garbage cans of late, and we also talked about how degraded the trails in the local forests are now that tens of thousands more people than ever before come here every year to take advantage of the beauty of the area, and how the war against Iran is creating shortages and will create even more as time goes by. Perhaps the dream was a symbolic synopsis of those things.

What sticks with me most about my dream is I was not angry with the people, mostly children, destroying my garden and trees. I understood that they did not act out of malice, but were starving.

fin

The Magician piano solo improvisation from Todd’s album Ceremonies.