Good morning now Sept 27, 2020,staying home here near Haha Wakpa, the Mississippi River, grateful to have a roof over our head and able to reflect on life and the current pandemic, and listening to my Tibetan teacher Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, about how to dance with fear, and learning the Chod practices to live in the midst of the life and death reality of a pandemic. He invites us to consider this as a global retreat and can bring the best out of us...Time to rest and to re awaken to our life purpose of listening to life and self care. Now in Sept, still taking care of ourselves and took a 16 mile bike ride from
Mississippi River looking west from Anoka County (Fridley) to Hennepin County (Brooklyn Center) on Sept 24, 2020.
Mississippi River east side early autumn photo Sept 24, 2020
Blog author, Tom Weaver at Golden Lake North Rice Creek Trail, Sept 13 by Jon Nisja
Tom Weaver with compass plant prairie along North Rice Lake Trail
And the bounty of fruit harvested and made into jam and jelly found in and around the area here in MniShota Makoce. Jams and Jellies to share during waniyetu, the winter times. Reflections on the bounty of the tree nation, the chan oyate with fruits....Juneberries found on some 7 trees North Mississippi Park in Minneapolis about a mile from our home. 
June berries in June, on the tree, the purple ones are more ripe and sweet....
Took a June day trip with my friend Doug Beumer, on the left up to Lake Itasca with a bike ride around the lake of some 17 miles. Here we are at the headwaters of the Mississippi . Hope to drive up again this fall to see the colors. Douglas Lodge ? And Now for other berries and fruits.
Next after juneberries at chokecherries, that have a big pit and thus are making jelly and use a jelly bag
Chokecherries on the shrubs by the Greenway
Red leafed bushes with ripe cherries below
Not a fan of the "updated" way to blog on this currently free way to write online. Difficult to insert text with the various photos - Above all the fruits harvested this year to put away for winter during this pandemic....From the top -1) Juneberries (Amelancher a rose family plant with small seeds) , 2) Chokecherry, larger seeds, pits and make jelly using a jelly bag. 4 batches of jelly this year in July mostly. 3) Wild plum made one batch of jam, from fruits harvested in August Elm Creek Park Preserve
4) Crabapple-apple jelly, Chestnut Crab apples in Golden Valley with Apples added, one batch, and 5) in Sept went to buy Aronia shrubs
.Part of this for me, is to more deeply reconnect with my earth centered connection to the Dakota and Lakota nations through our MN Hollow Horn Bear Tiospaye by re-reading Lakota America, A New History of Indigenous Power, Yale University Press 2019 by Finnish Author Pekka Hamalainen, that was given to us by brother Jim Weaver late in 2019. Lots of teachings about the role of epidemics, esp small pox in the history of Turtle Island (North America). Here is a map from page 16 of the book.
"The ancestral Sioux shifted slowly and moved west"
AND from my mom's memoir, who was 8 years of age during the Spanish Flu Epidemic.
From Peg Weaver's self published Remembrings of an 83 year old grandma, regarding 1918, WWI and the concurrent flu pandemic p 11 "
When I seven or eight years old, my father had abscesses at the base of his spine which required several
major operations, a surgeon, Dr. Frick, coming from Toledo to perform the first one. Because this was
during a disastrous influenza epidemic during World War I, the Findlay hospital being short of nurses was
glad to have my mother stay at the hospital to care for my father (where, incidentally, she learned the
proper way to make beds with mitered sheet corners). During that time I lived with Grandmother,
Grandfather Glessner and Aunt Mary. When more surgery was done in Toledo, removing several inches
of his tail-bone, the surgeon thought that my father might never walk again. These were grim days in my
home, worry about my father's recovery and about meeting the medical expenses since health insurance
didn't exist.
After my father came home for the hospital, for months he was confined to bed, lying on a cot in the bungalow dining room, where I remember my mother dressing his bloody wounds. When the roof of our bungalow caught on fire, the fire department was called but went to the wrong address, a bakery, which the firemen couldn't enter because it was a "coal-less Monday", the day when businesses closed to save fuel for the war effort. Finally, the firemen arrived to discover that my mother had put out the fire, carrying buckets of water up a ladder to the attic. We all moved to by grandparents' until the hole in the roof was repaired.
During the war I remember going down into the basement to get "fresh eggs" out of sticky, icky, cold waterglass, a process for preserving eggs. Anti-German feeling was so strong that my mother destroyed her German text books. At school I bought War Savings Bonds and learned to knit small "squares" of irregular shapes to send "over there" for washcloths. Geraldine, my fourteen-inch tall wooden doll, was named for my dance teacher, Geraldine Moss, had eye-lashed eyes that blinked and moveable joints fitted with springs so that she could assume and maintain all sorts of poses. My mother made two timely outfits for her: a Red Cross nurse's and a soldier's. With the soldier's garb (an olive-drab, jaunty over-seas cap, proper-fitting jacket, jodpur-like pants and puttees) she won a prize in a Toledo contest.
When General Black-Jack Pershing was at a reception at the Findlay Elks Club after the war, I was thrilled to shake the hand of the war hero who led American troops in Europe. His handsome son accompanied him, which was exciting for us grade school girls. "
Also reflecting on postage stamps, and the reflection of history....Really enjoyed collecting stamps as a boy and having stamp exchanges with other kids around the world when I was young. Australia, Southern Rhodesia, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, New Zealand, Japan and more. Got a sense of world geography through that - and later with a German Friend to collect and exchange as an adult. History and cultural things for understanding.
Here is the US Stamp of a series that has a lot of white guys mostly presidents and all, and this is Chief Hollow Horn Bear, a Lakota, and the great grandfather of relative whose chan nupa, prayer pipe was returned to his relatives to pray with beginning in 1989 at the Hollow Horn Bear Sun dance near St Francis SD. I started praying there in July 1990- and here is the flyer from that dance where I met Joe Eagle Elk and Rudy Runs Above who were guides for us on how to pray and dance in a good way.
Here is one of the dancers prior to the dance in 2018 at the cook shack with a mature prairie turnip, Marvin who is another descendant of the chief. Such great memories.
After my father came home for the hospital, for months he was confined to bed, lying on a cot in the bungalow dining room, where I remember my mother dressing his bloody wounds. When the roof of our bungalow caught on fire, the fire department was called but went to the wrong address, a bakery, which the firemen couldn't enter because it was a "coal-less Monday", the day when businesses closed to save fuel for the war effort. Finally, the firemen arrived to discover that my mother had put out the fire, carrying buckets of water up a ladder to the attic. We all moved to by grandparents' until the hole in the roof was repaired.
During the war I remember going down into the basement to get "fresh eggs" out of sticky, icky, cold waterglass, a process for preserving eggs. Anti-German feeling was so strong that my mother destroyed her German text books. At school I bought War Savings Bonds and learned to knit small "squares" of irregular shapes to send "over there" for washcloths. Geraldine, my fourteen-inch tall wooden doll, was named for my dance teacher, Geraldine Moss, had eye-lashed eyes that blinked and moveable joints fitted with springs so that she could assume and maintain all sorts of poses. My mother made two timely outfits for her: a Red Cross nurse's and a soldier's. With the soldier's garb (an olive-drab, jaunty over-seas cap, proper-fitting jacket, jodpur-like pants and puttees) she won a prize in a Toledo contest.
When General Black-Jack Pershing was at a reception at the Findlay Elks Club after the war, I was thrilled to shake the hand of the war hero who led American troops in Europe. His handsome son accompanied him, which was exciting for us grade school girls. "
Also reflecting on postage stamps, and the reflection of history....Really enjoyed collecting stamps as a boy and having stamp exchanges with other kids around the world when I was young. Australia, Southern Rhodesia, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, New Zealand, Japan and more. Got a sense of world geography through that - and later with a German Friend to collect and exchange as an adult. History and cultural things for understanding.
Here is the US Stamp of a series that has a lot of white guys mostly presidents and all, and this is Chief Hollow Horn Bear, a Lakota, and the great grandfather of relative whose chan nupa, prayer pipe was returned to his relatives to pray with beginning in 1989 at the Hollow Horn Bear Sun dance near St Francis SD. I started praying there in July 1990- and here is the flyer from that dance where I met Joe Eagle Elk and Rudy Runs Above who were guides for us on how to pray and dance in a good way.
Here is one of the dancers prior to the dance in 2018 at the cook shack with a mature prairie turnip, Marvin who is another descendant of the chief. Such great memories.
