Rapatap the birchsap tap rap ...☺️

The birds were singing and the sun was oh so warm. After all the cold and the shite happening all over the world this was really soothing. The woods are calling, and obviously I heed the call. 

What really feels great is that my sentiment of "why bother?" does not involve anything woodsy, crafty or natural. These things still give me the motivation to get out of bed, so to say. Because they make sense. Obviously, I am fucked, but on each outing in the woods I learn more how the woods work. Of course, they are in a sorry state, what with climate change killing fir, spruce, birch and beech, and I plant as many trees as I possibly can, but yup, we are ruled by idiots. That said, I left the politics at home. The birch sap is rising, and I like birch sap. ☺️ 

This creek is running with more water than it has in the last five years. This gives me a lot of hope, actually, that even if we get another summer of draught eventually, the new trees will eventually recuperate. As is, the woods are radically changed. 

The first spring blossoms, too, and something tasty to boot : Violets (viola, in German :Veilchen), with an anti - bacteria - effect, blood - cleaning, calming and anti - inflammatory. Also you can make a tasty tea or spice from it, a wonderful cordial and it goes into my "lawnmower - mead" 😁, Methubrawri in the language of the Dhiudhai na nÍamparaï, a mythic people I invented. Invented the language as well, BTW. ☺️ 

Now if the trees all die, how can he possibly tap a birch, some may ask. First, I very much know what I am doing, and all the trees I tapped are even now still alive, but then there was that stump of a recently felled tree, where the sap rises really strong. So strong in fact, that there was a rare bushcrafty treat. 

But first things first, out came the tools. 

And in no time the birch was on tap. 

In the meantime, I collected some last Chaga (Innonotus Obliquus, in German :Schiefer Schillerporling). And sat down to really savour a sip of tea made from rowanberries and roasted and dried apple I foraged in autumn last year. 

 On the detour then I was in for my treat... Some chunks of frozen birch sap.

It was a really cool outing. Well, pardon the pun. But actually, I could wish for little more. Sipping your sap and your tea from a gukši you have made with your own hands with a knife and a carving hatchet you have forged yourself while preparing the Chaga you have just collected in a dish you have made with your hands is more than just comforting. It is not only strangely soothing in a world gone stark raving mad, it is empowering. Everything of these items was made from junk. From scraps of steel to scraps of wood to food most people do not see. And it is all connected. 

We all need to change. Well, I never belonged at all, so maybe I can exclude myself a bit. A bit, because I still have to learn a lot. Most people think this means a loss of quality in life.

Personally I think, the opposite is true. This is how life is meant to be. I do not say this because I were a guru or something. We need less gurus and a lot of more common sense. It is nothing esoteric or philosophical. It is just getting the good stuff in, and then have a cuppa of the good stuff. And the good things are estimated as junk, and noone cares. But I do. 

I, for one, came home deeply content. It was a feeling you got when you came home as a kid and got a hot cocoa made by your mother. Only that my mother is dead now and I get that feeling in the woods. There is so much good in the world. We need to learn to appreciate more and learn to be humble and grateful... As we were as Kids, when we got our hot cocoa made by our mothers. 

And it feels plain and it feels good. 

The wonder of spring

 It´s been a while, on a day when the sun was shining so vibrantly, that I felt that urge again. I had to get outside, and so I packed my foraging gear and a cuppa and saddled my not-so-trusty steed (for it is crumbling at the moment and I lack the money to fix it) to get out into the woods. I am very glad that I have managed to ride more frequently this year. I even commute to work again, which amasses to a bargain of about 100€ per month! Plus, it makes me fitter. I also have started the year by drinking up to 1.5 l of birch sap per day, which made me do at least a 20km ride each day on top, for the sap does not collect itself;-). Also it makes me wonder what crap we normally drink. When drinking unprocessed birch sap I have the impression that it takes an immediate positive effect on my metabolism, and, comparing it to soft drinks and alcohol I wonder how much crap we normally drink... but I am realistic enough to know that I will continue to drink my beer and my coke from time to time. It´s just that the effect is that cool, and that there is actually something about that myth of the "tree of rejuvenation", aka the birch that´s not entirely... erm ... mythological ;-), or better, that indeed is mytho-logical.

Anyway;-), I rode out to the hills, and really basked in the warm sun. Spinning my cranks in slow circles, just breathing and climbing above the valley, away from the exhaust fumes and the ruckus and the noise, it felt as if a weight had dropped from my shoulders, just like it has felt again and again.

We tend to forget that in our world. We are all bombarded with the latest bad news, with greed and hate and lust and violence, with need and want and whatnot, that we forget that somewhere birds still twitter and don´t preach hate with it, so to say, but just sing, because they feel like singing or because it´s what birds do in spring. And trees just grow, with no meaning needed apart from that. It´s all still there, and we are the ones that have alienated themselves from tree and bird and fox and hare.
  

 Sometimes I tend to think that the bicycle is the last sensible machine that man has invented. You push the cranks, it lurches forward, it´s simple and has little ecological footprint when compared to a car (ANY car, even a modern electric engine), a plane or rocketship. Even a mountainbike for all its hardcore image is a humble means of transportation. It does you good and takes you places, full stop. Of course, if you do skids down an alpine slope, chance is, you will have some more or less grave ecological impact, but so will a caribou sliding down that same slope. Compared to a V-8 engine this impact is outright ridiculously small, even if you consider the production. But it´s not about ecological calculations. It´s just the good feeling I had. Take out the old warhorse, and ride to the hills where things still make some sense or do not even need to make sense.

 Now I think long and hard about the current political situation in the world, and I do this far too often for my own good. But let us be honest. We all know we are preparing for our death. Mankind will be extinguished, maybe even as early as next year. The American and North Korean dictators as well as the one in Russia, the one in Turkey and the lunatics in the Middle East are all playing with the fuse and will light the fire soon (and mind you, I do not exclude our own local and political German dictators), because their tiny egos demand for a nuclear war to feel as if they had a huge genital. It´s that simple. It´s not about any God or Allah or what is right or wrong. It´s about who has the power, and who has the least of a conscience to blow us all into oblivion. And we have reached a point where a simple mechanism of nature is taking effect. Mankind is reaching the verge of overpopulation and has routed a good part of the ecosystem, and so the population is to be reduced by the simple failsafe of a nuclear world war. Most of us will die soon, and I daresay I won´t survive, too. There is nothing I could do to prevent this. There is no election I could attend, no measure of protest that will stop this failsafe. And it is right that we will be extinguished (for the most part). Why then should I make plans for the future? Why should I bother to buy a load of shite that will be useless? If I will survive, fine, but why should I care? The world will be a shitty place for the rest of my life any which way. I will always have a hard time living. There will be no children, no family for me. And no happiness.

Except for something very, very simple. There will always be a view from a hilltop. Maybe you will look down into a valley of ruins and shacks and desolation, and maybe not, but you will always be able to stand upon a hilltop (provided you survive). There maybe even will be birds singing, and maybe some trees still standing. Hope dies last, one says, but as long as one human being still lives, he or she will hope. And what I know for sure is that I always had a hard time living. It´s not that this will change for the better, but if it will change for the worse, I am well accustomed to that. What I want to say is that there will always be things that count. And these things will always count.

A bicycle is but one means to experience these things, but one it is. 

 And I am fighting to get this resolve, over and over again, as you well know from reading my blog. Often I think it´s just superficial and superfluous to just have some careless, plain old fun. Mountainbike riding as I often practice it is a surrogate activity not meaning a thing, but then, why should it mean a thing? I watched a buzzard some days ago. Okay, so he was circling for prey, but why did he go into seemingly unmotivated dives and rolls? Doves to that, as well as ravens, bluetits and sparrows and swallows. They play in the air. Their need for sustenance is far more dire than ours can ever be, and yet they play. Wild cats, foxes, deer - they all play.  

 Yeah, the situation we are faced with, is no reason to be glad and cheerful. But there´s nothing we can do now to prevent the rout of mankind.

So I figured I´d rather have some fond memories of sunlight and trailriding and playing on my bike and drinking spring in a mug of birch sap when sitting in the dark of a bunker or waiting for the cancer to kill me slowly. At least then I will have the notion, however ridiculous it may be, however worthless is may seem at first glance, that even when I am dying in torment, there once was a time when I lived, and really felt alive.

 And, yeah, spring is on the way, and there will be spring, or seasons, at least after a period of time. When the nuclear winter will be over, nature will reclaim what was lost. As it is the case even after the most hopeless winter of all, after every winter there will be a new spring.

 Maybe the lake, a jewel now that mirrors the sky under a vibrant sun, will be a dried-out ditch, rock-strewn and full of debris. But that ditch will remember the time when it was a lake.

 And even after the desolation, something will sprout. And after the rout of mankind, nature will prosper again, prosper and will be left to itself to grow as it was intended to be.

But what is most important: It is NOW that everything basks in a vibrant sun. It is NOW that the birds are singing. It is NOW that the sap rises and the trees sprout and blossom. It is not tomorrow that you can take out your bike to go on a beautiful ride in the sunshine. It is not tomorrow that you will have fun, but NOW. We are still alive. We might not be able to do anything against what will happen soon. So why the fuck should we listen to all the bad news and the next moron telling us not to do this or that? Of course that does not tell you should go out and kill your little sister and eat her shanks seasoned with thyme just because someone told you not to.

But their entire system of morale and value has brought us into this fix. It is not competent to bind us, for its moral integrity is non-existent and therefore non-contiguous. Meaning, those that forged their swords to ploughshares now plough for those that did not. Yap, violence still is not an option. I despise it for the stress that it will give me afterwards. It always comes full - circle, that´s what I am still saying. Some things will always make sense. If you whack someone, chance is, he will strike you back. If you kill someone´s brother, chance is, he will kill you for it, law or justice or not. They tell us (and keep telling us) that man is more than an animal while they act like predators upon us. Yap, man is more than an animal, for no degree of violence such as the one man employs against even his loved ones is known in nature. Foxes kill out of lust, that´s true, but never so much that one endangers an entire local ecosystem. Owls keep mice alive as a food storage and even mast them, but with little impact on the local ecosystem, too. Animals never go that far as man does. We are an abomination, born naked, with no scales to protect us, no bristles to fend off animals, not even fur or pelt, with no fangs nor beak nor claws, and traumatized by it, so much in fact that we are not content in making our own fangs and beaks and claws, but throwing them around the world and making them explode, so that one claw can kill hundreds and hundreds of thousands and millions and our entire species. It is out of fear that we do this.

And now they tell us to fear. They thrive on besting the latest bad news. And they tell us to be prepared when there can be no means of preparation adequate. And they tell us lies that the guy next door, the people in the country some 3000km away are responsible for all that shite. They keep us in fear in order to make us hate and in order to support their own fear and hate.

But it is NOW that the sun is shining. It is NOW that the swallows and bluetits play in the air. It is NOW that the sap is rising and the trees are in blossom. I am content with making my own claws, so that I am up to par with the other animals. I am content with my bike, and I love to play. And, that´s the culprit, why should I not?

 I am extremely grateful for the birch providing its sap, for the warm sun.

 For the vista down that tricky trail, down to a lake that´s still a lake and not a dried-out crater.

 For the wonderful, beautiful stems of the birchwood grove.

 For my beaten and battered bike, so simple and yet so complex.

 For a cuppa tea in the warm sun.

 For the ants that show me that it is okay to take advantage of the good that nature has to offer.

 Even for that little bug.

For dry leaves that rustle in the wind.

...and a Chinese ************ of a ladybug.

 For beech sprouts, so delicious in a salad....

 ...sprouting their living green...

 from something moulded and dry.

This is spring. This is the wonder of spring.

 

Bad news today?

 

Rise like the birch sap. It is spring, the sun is warm. Get out and play in the leaves and scream your joy at the trees!

 

A spring snuffkin hardcore foraging ride-and ranting about society

The sun came visiting through my window, and tickled my nose. And I took my bike and got outside. The snowdrop was blossoming in fields before my door, and there was this scent in the air. The air, while still fresh, had that feeling to it that is that hard to describe. 

 Spotted dead-nettle already there.

 Hazel bloom...

 Crocus...

 And the bees, these little and labourous helpers of our ecosystem, without whom the world would be a dead planet, were swarming. Sorry for the out-of-focus pic, but the little fellow refused to sit still;-)...

 Lung wort. Got myself some for bannock spicing...

 Stinging nettle... got some for tea, spice and spinach substitute and for stew and soup.

 Also coughwort (tussilago farfara, in German: Huflattich), as spice and against bronchial diseases.

 Beautiful like the beaming sun it blossoms...

 Up I rode, and the trail I was on is a well-known one for over 20 years of hard riding. Time was when I trained for my first downhill race (Kaprun world cup qualification run 1992) on it. I have ridden up it on my way back from school, with friends and solitarily, ever more so in fact in these days. The friends I had seem to be all gone, dead, off to pursue the rat race alone or curling up in a corner or whatever. It was a strange feeling riding there. The trail is not changed that much. I am.

...or maybe not. I ride several gears lower up it. I am a bit more ravaged, beaten and battered, just like my bike, but still I am there, riding the same trail I rode 25 years ago, and the grin on my face is just about the same. It is not that I am not changed. It is not that I have no scars, in my heart and soul and quite certainly, on my body. But there I was, riding up this very same trail.

 It felt good.

 Then I was off to business, i.e. getting myself some birch sap. I brought a drill winch, a big drill bit, a piece of hardwood that I prepared as a tap, a length of garden hosing and two coke bottles.

 In the trees there were two raven croaking. The sun was shining vibrantly.

 The grove lay peacefully calm...

 ...but a bird of prey, presumeably a buzzard, was circling above, crying its eerie cries on the hunt for prey.

 This is one way of tapping a birch.

 And this is another, more simple one.

 I had a sitdown and a cuppa tea while waiting for the vessels to fill up with the sap.

 Little fellow out in the woods... ;-)

 I also made a tap on site, which made it more efficient to get the sap flowing.

 Please take note: If you tap a birch, please use one that is at least 30 cm in diameter. Take just 5l at a maximum, and seal the holes you made with a plug of green birchwood. The ones in the pic are made from maple, because I also tapped a maple tree.

 One bottle of spring.

 Then I saddled my steed again....

 And rode down this not exactly ungnarly trail. Now this is another trail that has eaten my flesh and drunk my blood for some 30 years now. It has evolved into a really technical chute. Makes me make up for my midlife crisis that I still ride it and even faster than I did when it was smoother.

 

Down to the lake I rode with a huge grin, the lake where I grew up and lived through the happy days of my life.

 

When I think of these days I sometimes cannot but think it was all a fairy tale. Like it was something that happened in a story book. When we were driven out of our home, I suffered from a culture shock. Here, I knew everything that was of importance. I could work all day in the garden, I could plow a field with just a hoe, I could fetch whole tree trunks from the woods alone for coaling. I coaled my own smithing coal, I made tar and pitch from fir and birch, I foraged for herbs and mushrooms. I was nimble and fast and subtle. When the police was looking for someone, I was the one guiding them. I forged my own tools, I built my own furniture and had just started to experiment with textile work. Of course, I knew what I needed to know about the "world outside", but most of the trials and tribulations of the outside world were a laughing matter to us, for we had far more concrete problems. My father being a deputy police officer, I shot my first gun at the age of seven (and never liked it). As I said, I never liked firearms and still do not, but it was not an option not to train how to use it. On the other hand, I got one of the rare really hard whackings in the face when I pointed my toy gun my father had made from wood and a copper tube at a passers-by and my father saw it. I got such a cuff I sat down in the dirt! I used a chainsaw first at the age of ten, and an axe at the age of seven. Life was not exactly easy, but it made perfect sense. And I knew the tricks and hacks of it.

Now the old house is crumbling, because the corporation that owns it needed to write off miscellaneous losses to compensate for aid money they made less of an optimal use of. And I have an office job myself, underpaid of course, because I am not qualified enough, and lying and betraying others is so commonplace that it is not even questionable. I have to dress in funny attires that both tie you down like a webbing load restraint assembly while providing the least possible amount of weather protection. I am developing funny ideas of what I really need (or want), and the cyborgs and internet zombies around me try to convince myself and themselves that all this ridiculous endeavour is natural. But even if it sometimes feels as if another person had lived through the time at the lake, it still belongs to me, and always will. This enables me to stand up and walk away from the crippled souls. To breathe real air, even if it´s in a dream.

And the soul cripples hate me for it. They always have done. And they have always tried to break me, from the Kindergarten (yup, I WAS a weird kid), to primary and secondary school (yup, I was weird, I was the one riding 30 km to school and back in a snowstorm to sit and listen to the crap some cheesy-faced starveling economy teacher coughed up). Fellow pupils, teachers, preachers and whoever, masters and clerks and bosses have tried to break me. They tried. But there I am, riding the very same trail with the very same grin, with a love for the place that is even vaster and deeper. But there I am, still foraging for part of my food and feasting on the virile sap from the paps of mother nature. Yeah, they will hate me forever, because I am the one able to walk away, at least in a dream, and they cannot, because they sold out to the big deceiver, the grey god. I do not hate them, for they had not the alternative that I had. I try to heal wherever I can. But I cannot understand them, and they cannot understand me. I cannot understand, what is going on in this world. To me, it is lunacy, even rabies. But it is not relevant, out there.   

The woods brim with colours after a winter of hardships, and hope is born anew, even when there is no hope in man´s company. There are kids killing children (http://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/herne-neunjaehriger-junge-umgebracht-taeter-auf-der-flucht-a-1137584.html) just because they want to, and, when asked, just shrug and tell their judges they did not feel too bad about that. There seem to be no consequences. Out here, there are.

The consequences are grave. Make a mistake, pay for it, and dearly. And it´s not that someone comes to punish you. Ride down that trail, sail over the bars, fall deep, die. It´s just that you messed up, did wrong, and the results will catch up to you. If you sow, you will get your victualies, if you work, you can reap the fruits of your labour-or maybe not, then you have to work out an alternative. But you will get a very direct response to all of your behaviour. This is, by the way, the reason I suppose things like bushcraft and survival, traditional crafts and extreme sports are booming that way they do at the moment. For in these sports and endeavours you can still get what is lost in the everyday madness that is called modern society. And while we have to keep in mind these are surrogate activities, this is not necessarily bad. It is a matter of measure in my book. For instance, if you have your riding technique wired, you can ride trails like these. If you can ride trails like these, they can take you places. Remote places, for instance, where you can tap a birch and get home with some delicious beverage way better than any soft drink. The other hand is that you can get lost in the process. It is fun to air out and do stunts, and I love to do so. But man´s society tends to make a business out of that. Look at events like the Rampage (https://www.redbull.tv/live/AP-1M77N5KZ92111/red-bull-rampage) to get a gist.

Now all´s fine if a rider likes doing backflips over 73-foot canyon gaps and loves what he does, but I strongly suppose it´s more because he has to eat something and pay for his huge pickup and the 10 bikes in his garage (or get someone to pay for´t) than for the love of it. This rider fulfils a simple business marketing task. When he does backflips over 73-foot canyon gaps and drinks a soft drink afterwards, people buy soft drinks because they can feel as mad as he is. Talking to a former acquaintance of mine at the marketing of a big soft drink and media corporation on that guy doing a free fall parachute jump from the orbit, her saying was: "Yeah, even if he had died, the marketing effect would be so great that the cost would be justified". Wait, what did that cost? A million? Consequentially, the marketing corporation was even fond of the possibility of the guy smashing himself to pulp on a rock, because that meant an even bigger marketing return. Back to consequences. The "normal" cyber kid sipping his or her energy drink watches that stunt on the internet and sees that there are no consequences other than a "high five". That the freeride biker and the parachute guy are highly focused and extremely dedicated athletes escapes his or her attention, since its  (intended wrong use of pronoun) attention span is lower than that of a goldfish anyway. So what remains is a kid just so being able of balancing on a bike throwing "it"self down a violent chute and stacking up big time. We all hope all is good and he or she recovers from the stack-up well. If there is someone tutoring her or him, even better. Parents were the ones doing so in those fairy tale days... now teachers shall take this part. Mkay... that makes sense to me... NOT.

What adds to the equation is that a human life (and that of an animal) is not worth a fart in this world. Money and attention is all what counts, adding up to the lunatic layout of society. No, I am not a communist, in case you ask. In order to achieve money and attention, kids are trained "to use their elbows" aggressively. Violence, however, is despised and put under taboo. Now it´s in the very nature of kids that they need someone to look up to. This one should be of some integrity, but is not. So they distrust everything. They do not experience consequences or even sequels or something of logical order. Thusly, even the taboo on violence becomes a point of discussion. And why, they think, should they listen? They have to act aggressively in order to get attention and/or money. Why not kill? It seems to them to be the most effective way of getting rid of their competitors, and to be quite honest, in the animal world this is often the case.

But man is the most dangerous animal on earth, a natural catastrophe to say the least. Only social restraints keep us from wreaking havoc upon everything. And of these the most effective are the tight girdles we put upon ourselves. Oh, yes, I own a lot of knives and could forge a sword for myself that would be very effective. And I know how to use all of this, from firearms to bow and arrow, to a sword and knives down to my fists and feet, head and elbow and even rump. The culprit is, that I would not do harm to anyone. There was one occasion where I was beaten up with a knife on my belt, and I just defended myself against permanent bodily damage, because I did not want to hurt the guy doing this to me irreversibly. Because I knew I did not want to bear the consequences. You need to train yourself in a non-violent mindset. Each and every day you have to work on it. It is hard work, but well worth the bothering. For it adds quality to one´s life. That does not mean anyone could act the asshole with me. To set borders straight with stern consequence is a part of this. In effect, not ending up in a riot every time someone makes fun of your nose, makes for less stress. That kid who killed the nine-year old would have been far better off obstaining from it. And even if he acts cool around the press, trust me, I cannot quite believe someone can stay that stone-cold when entire Ruhr region chapters of Hell´s Angels and Bandidos agree to unite to hunt him down. He could have spared himself all the fuss if he did not do the shite he did. Of course he is rabid, and one might argue that you just shoot a rabid fox in the head to prevent the disease from spreading. But then rabies is a way of life nowadays. And here the dilemma shows best, because we are moving in circles.

I do not like running in circles. I never belonged at all into these vicious cycles of want and have-tos, and a long period of my life I lived a storybook. I experienced an alternative. And the alternative is simple. It lies in nature, in a honest sweat, in believing into things and trusting, in developing oneself and adapting to problems. It lies in winter, spring, summer and autumn, in the passing of the years, in good food and drink and in making good things. In being subtle, and moving swiftly and gracefully, weaving through the thicket. In becoming of age, and not so nimble anymore. In love and loss, in pain and joy. I don´t know if that sounds a bit esoteric to you, and I don´t know if that makes sense. In fact, I don´t like the "get a job, asshole"-phrase much, but in another translation this is what I mean: "Try to do something useful and prosperous-for you and your loved ones. Get to know what and who is around you. Try not to be an asshole. What goes round, comes around. Do unto others as you wish to be treated yourself. Do what you want but don´t work harm for anyone", and so forth. Not coincidentally there are quite a few of the Hermetic principles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kybalion) involved-because they work for me.

But all of this is just gibberish. Each and every one of us has to work. Hard. To become a part of the world again. Society is becoming a bedlam. And please take note that I do not buy into all of these conspiracy theories. Oh, yup, there might be a world conspiracy going on, or maybe not. But if anyone feels the need to conspire, this is a sign of lunacy in my book, so this would be a poor fellow, too, even if he or she does grave harm to human society.
 

 But the holly could not care less.

....and the wood...

 

...grows in patterns...

 

...as it has always done.