Camp Re-generation!!

If anybody know any happy go lucky, go getter, enthusiastic about living types ages 10-16 then please tell them about our Summer Camp....
It starts June 14th for the whole summer and themes include:
Ecological Gardening, natural building, spinning and weaving, holistic cooking, wilderness awareness, natural handicrafts, herbal remedies, bread making, energy and resource efficiency, and much much more!
Organically local lunchs, yoga, hikes, and basically all the fun you could fit into a kids summer camp! We may even have a booth at the Basalt Farmers Market so that the kids can sell the produce that they grow and the creations they make.

It is held at Rock Bottom Ranch in Basalt in collaboration with ACES.

So excited to be a part of this. Can't wait to document the summer and be outside learning, teaching, living, moving, making and working with such great group of people.

More info email me at erintiff@gmail.com
and check out our website www.re-generation.us

Banana life

I don't know what the hell it is about cooking that makes me so damn pleased. It is a project that can be started and finished and then utilized all in one short time span. Thank god for things like cooking in a world where we start projects that seem to never get finished. You would be a damn lier if you said that you didn't have a half done project sitting somewhere within a 12 foot span of you right now that is not finished and may not be for a while. So cooking brings me home and into a place of meditation, purity, and originality. Above are some scrumptious muffs for your delectable pleasure..... here is the recipe... this is one of those recipes that is easy, cheap, fast as hell and will make you new friends. Just to illustrate to you how these happy shit like this makes me.....I leave the kitchen and non chalantly wave to the muffins from across the room, like we are casual acquaintances just loving on each other in a public meeting place without even thinking about it....till about halfway down the hall when I realize what I did was just partially psychotic.

* 3 ripe bananas, mashed with a fork
* 1/4 cup oil
* 1/2 cup honey *** note: use half maple syrup..so good
* 1 & 1/2 cup whole wheat flour
* 1/2 teaspoon salt
* 1/2 teaspoon baking soda.
* 1/2 cup wheat germ or oat bran or flaxseed meal
* I add 1 egg....just cause I hate following recipes to the tee . turns out perfect
*lil' vanilla
*lil' allspice and cinnimon

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Mix all dry ingredients first, then mix in bananas, oil and honey. (If you measure out the oil first, when you pour out the honey, it will all slide cleanly out of the cup.)

Pour into oiled bread pan and bake for 20 minutes. This recipe is also great for muffins. Muffins are more like 15 minutes until done. Use a toothpick or knife to check the middle. If it sticks, keep baking.

That is that. In life few things are definite or reliable. But food is all of that and so much more.

Blue blue blue

Oh Colorado...that blue sky you have regularly should be framed and painted on every wall in every town that has rainy winters just to remind them that, yes, it still exists in all its glory.

Immersion within

SWimMing- WaTEr
Everything forgets underwater. The body of water in the shape of a pool inside a little place called the rec center about 800 feet from my house is a sanctuary of sorts for me. Back and forth I flip and propel. The steam rises from its ripples into the mountain sky, the reflection of movement dances on the tiles below.
I lose myself in the patterns slipping and sliding over each other as I un fog my 5 dollar goggles and sweep in again watching each hand swipe in front of the other and move me forward. After about the 8th lap I lose myself, the ache in my arm goes away, the obsession of people watching and the comings and goings eludes me. Silk slips past my skin each time I move in it. My skin cells regenerate and free themselves from their constant clothed awkwardness. I am free.
It is not perfect I will admit. Granted, It is a salt water pool and it is outside so that the sun can reflect and cure me of those blues. Yet there is no swells to juxtopose me and twirl me in my own vulnerability. The water doesnt go on forever from my perspective. There are walls and it is a rectangle. I have to turn around more then I would like to. It is not an ocean. But it is a pool and one has to appreciate the security that it is there when i need it. It does always grant me the gift of flow right when it is needed most. You can not just tell yourself to flow, one has to feel it surrounding every inch of ones body. One has to dive in and let it swallow you to come out feeling new again. Refreshed, rejuvinated, remembering the continuation goes and goes and goes....

Their our days

And we don't have to live them alone. Connections fuel inspirations and inspirations ignite progress. So my new opinion is to share, because it seems what gets me through all of this proposed madness is those connections and the expression that creates them. So this year I write. I blog. I can not even believe I am saying it, but I won't say it, I will just do it. Saying is just a way of manifesting doing without using ANY of your power. Yes, so we do.

I propose to bring a regiment, if you will, into my life by expressing, documenting, photographing and bringing to you my stream of conciousness observational writing. Purpose? Mission? To seek out the small stuff that passes me by in this whirlwind and to bring it to you (and myself) fresh and ripe for mass distribution. Okay, okay, none of that mass distribution.....more of a sky high collaboration. Or a healthy documentation. A catalysimic collaboration station of beautiful daily moments and how to infuse them to really ensue them. How about ......??????? A twirly bird spiraling cannotation (http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_a_cannotation) that sparks out of me or out of you and into all of us too? Ahh I love them all. They all tickle me right in between my left toes.

I want to look at the world with more love, health, and creativity, thus importing more of it into every one of our lives. So I set out to illustrate, scribe, and create a visual for our evolution together in living it.....to the max. Each day I want to pick one thing that brings a little flitter flatter pitter patter into my life. Each thing we may take for granted gives this universe a little tidbit more of that mystery and glory that fuels us, just in noticing its sheer existence.


Conciousness in these small routines and learning techniques from each other is our blessing. So lets use the tools we have to manifest what we talk and use that power take this walk. Together.

The evervescent moving machine

Transience becomes me. I have been living out of a black diamond climbing pack for the last 3 weeks. Before that it was a gigantic dry bag that was always full of dirty clothes for another month. The airport I am now sitting in I have sat in 4 times in the last 2 weeks, missing planes, waiting, eating, wondering where the hell I am. after travelling 240 miles in 21 days floating on a raft and only using natures power to move us, I am feeling exhausted by the high speeds in which we get going on these flying contraptions.
Life is propelling. We are naturally attracted and seek these propulsion, yearning for a degree of complexcity and an overall eagerness to feel valuable in this craziness of it. So we move with them, driving, phone, drive, phone, eat, phone, fly, go, move. Sitting at the airport, or in L.A. traffic, or just at a spur of the moment location passing in the night they are there, always. It leads me to these thoughts because I see them and our lives briefly co interact. I see them lost in the touch of their phone, the emails that elevate off each glance, I see the worry in them, the crease in their forehead, the hole in their pocket, and the attempt to fill the whole up again.

I know I have been given so much space in my own life for freedom and time to just be, to let my mind wander, to let new ideas manifest. I float and I propel. I am a propelling floater. A propoater. I also know that not everyone is bequeathed with the power to do so much floating. It is not as much monetary as just a mental characteristic passed down by floater parents.

So the float rolls on, ready to dive into a project, a place, a passion, a purpose. Not to stop the float, but just to build off of it really. And on your way home after visits to places always gives you the chance to start over. A chance to re invent the wheel and wheel your float on down the timeline.
Being in California cured my ocean blues that come on after not seeing it for 5 months. I swam with my eyes open every time I dove in. That color hue never changes for me. The blue hue with aqua rings that bubbles around me always feels just as nice as the time before, no matter how much time has passed. My body slides through salty liquid effortlessly. Everything is forgotton underneath the water. All of the hopes, the worries, the regrets, the remorse, the needs. All of it is gone. Then being with my cousins is always a lesson and inspiration in life loving. As Tommy pushes through his treatment with cancer I see his spirit go through the extremes of life. An 11 year old whom I admire, a boy who has a spirit that shines through any dark tunnels. A family that is seeing lifetimes with their situation. I admire Kathy, Tommy and Vivi like they are some sort of soul mates for me and to inspire me in how use perspective to shape my own journey.

On top of the Grand Canyon venture and the grandma visit in suburban Detroit, I have been hopping around the American landscape with evolving perspectives. Still figuring out how the 3 of them come together. Yet I know already that all those experiences never let me feel lonely. I am so consitently surrounded by people who create love and community for me wherever I go.

Now it is home again, soon enough. With the dreams and memories of the Grand Canyon still drifting in and out of my scene, the gratefulness of grandmas, the happiness that I dont live in a suburb, the glide of my body down a wave in San Clemente, the realization of what cancer does, and the beauty of having space to live a life of beauty. I see the projects moving forth from here. Through the interaction with other people one only learns more about oneself. I have much further to go, but know that the life that I have lived thus far and the one I think about on a daily basis along with the dreams, the projects, the passions, I know it is the only way to live and that I will always go out of my way to have it.

Sometimes my main thought while sitting in these chairs at airports, and all those other new obscure places is, that I can only hope that everyone walking by me is living the life that they dream of. Every single one of them deserves that.

Warm winds

I wrote this last week in the dark........

The smoke from the fires up in the mountains put a hue of pink in the north sky tonight that beamed so into the kitchen when I was making curry chicken salad too early to be the sunset. The puffy endless cloud sat right in front of the sun and were lined with purple threads.

Then the power went out. I freaking adore when that happens. Everyone seems to calm down to this point of sanity that sits a little bit better with me. People stand outside their houses trying to find someone to chat too and scrounge around their junk drawers for batteries. I love it. Chris and I played frisbee ( and may I add my throw was in perfect form tonight), we climbed a tree and then sat on the porch winding up the wind up radio ( that thing can amuse me for hours). As the sun went down the cars ceased to exist and only the faint noise of the evening train choo chooing in dimly resembled itself in the distance.

To some disasters are just that. Sometimes I fight with disasters. Have fires been happening forever? Is it a natural progresstion of their ecology? Is it too dry (Yes!!)? Too many people, using too much water?? Definitly yes. People who fight that fire tonight up in the hills are hot to trot and fighting a merciless force of indeniable proportions. What destroys and a powerful swift force that joins up with wind to overpower its surroundings.

And here we are, say 30 miles, from a brushed out dry desert that is being winded all night. We lay so lush in our houses with our power, water, internet, things and the natural progression of disaster feels so far away.
In communities like ours in the U.S. that seem like smart little safe havens and shelters from so many manmade and natural tragedies that other continents seem to be ransacked by......I feel so lucky. So blessed, like Marilyn Monroe in a covnertible on a coastal road with wind blowing in the hair. We have it all and use it like we don't even realize we have it. I am guilty. We are all to a certain degree.
We work, drive around, use technology like we couldn't live without it, we work more, fill up gas tanks and try to always justify it. We cook, we freeze, we eat, we use, we flush, we leave it all on when we are gone and let it run. Then...........we run out. It is an interesting thing when we just calm down and stop trying to chase it all down the road till we all explode.

Why cannot we progress back to the basics. Using rainwater, grey water, heating water with solar, reusing. All the rules of this country could lead to its downfall. All the health regulations leave us scrambling for water in the end.

I need very little and to have what I have in terms of family, friends, loves, food, flowers on my table, freedom, ideas, abilities, time, cleanliness, breath, opportunities to make it all happen.
The power exterminating itself teaches us all to remain grounded . Slowing me down. I love when the power goes out. Darkness reigns the streets and it doesn't feel like California anymore, it feels like a small village in Mexico on a perfect evening.