Excuses, excuses

So it's been a long time since I posted anything. I feel like I had pretty good reasons: a series of adventures involving little or no access to computers. Or just little time. Witness:

I ran off to JPUSA in Chicago for three weeks, to see old friends and get re-acquainted with the place.

Once there, I found out Seth Martin, a kindred spirit I met in Portland on the Blessing Tour was playing JPUSA's Easter celebration. He invited me to join the crew for the rest of the tour, so I did. We played messy folk music – sometimes pretty, sometimes screamy-and-stompalongish – in Missouri, Illinois, Minnesota, Kentucky, Indiana, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

A few highlights of the tour:
-Playing the front porch of the Possibility Alliance, a permaculture farm where the people live electricity-and-gasoline-free lives. They also send out teams of people dressed as superheroes on bikes to do free acts of service in neighbouring communities and states.
-Seeing The Great Confinement live at one of the house shows in Minneapolis. They have yet to even finish up an album, but they should become huge if there's any justice in the world.
-At our two 'standard' shows, refusing to use the proferred stage and amplification, but setting up in the middle of the 'audience,' playing acoustically and having them sing and stomp along, blurring the line between 'performer' and 'audience' just a bit.
-Giving out free seed packets for people to shake along with the music. (And then take home and plant, hopefully).
-Playing our last show in Philadelphia with the Psalters.

And immediately upon returning to Toronto, I biked out with my love to spend a week at an organic farm near Hamilton. The people there only ate locally – mostly stuff they grew themselves. The farmers there strove to (in their words) to 'put themselves out of business' by trying to convince all their urban CSA clients to grow their own food, showing them how to do it, providing seeds, etc. One of the longtime volunteers there lived year round (Canadian -20 degree Celsius winter included) in a teepee, and mostly wore beautiful clothing he had made out of the hides of deers he had hunted.

In the future, posts will not have such a diary/faceborg/'what I did this summer' kind of feel.