Velvety Black Earth Tongue reporting in. I am in the middle of Missouri, after having just visited Superhero Headquarters (of the bicycling, local/organic food-eating, service-oriented variety) near La Plata. Here you will find the Blazing Echidna and Tiger Lily nesting in an amish farmhouse on 80 acres with their newly-hatched young’un, the lovely Miss Etta. So far, I have rendezvoused with Hugman, Love Ninja, the Great Gitchigumi, a French couple Olivier and Sabrina, Sarah’s mom and dad, sister and nieces, and recently Luna, Warrior Princess and that sneaky ole Coyote and baby Noah. The place is only 4 miles or so from the nearest train stop and visitors are often greeted by a hero with a bike trailer for hauling your stuff and an extra bike for the journey to headquarters. If the weather is bad and you are lucky, you may be picked up by an Amish ‘taxi’ in a horse and buggy!! I managed to get a ride in the double-seated deluxe buggy with the velvety blue blanket in the back seat…driven by Jake, the nearby neighbor who runs the mill. Marty is the horse, a morgan I think, that puffs and puffs and pulls us along through snow, ice and pavement. There are road signs warning drivers of horse and buggy traffic, but even so, we just saw a local newspaper report of a nasty-looking collision on the other end of La Plata where an 18 year old driver skidding on ice took out a buggy, luckily no injuries were reported. You really gotta watch it coming up over these hills!
The place has been called Wren Song Sanctuary but was threatened to be renamed by New Year’s Day 2008, due to numerous mispronunciations and questions…wrongzen, Rensong, nobody seems to recognize a wren nowadays…let alone an Echidna! I voted for Firefly Sanctuary, since they are known to be covering the place in summer. I think they are still searching for the perfect name. They may solicit you for a name with the first newsletter, due out very soon.
Anyways, this is an amazing and inspiring example of right livelihood and good country living! They are committed to human-powered transportation, electricity-free living, local food production, organic farming, daily meditation, service to the local community and beyond and loads of laughter and silliness.
Each day we arise at 7am for morning meditation and then listen to a morning reading from one of the many spiritual texts on the full wall of books, as well as a reading about one of the non-human community members, be it morel mushrooms, shagbark hickory, or one of the many species of bats (Missouri has more bat caves than any other state!)
On a stone mill in the pantry, we grind our own rice for porridge and cook it on a huge wood-fired cookstove in the kitchen. There are all kinds of old skool human-powered machinery available at auctions in the area because of the presence of the Amish communities surrounding them…so if you have never seen someone iron with a real deal hunk of iron with a removable wooden handle that you set on the cookstove to heat up, or put your wash through a hand-cranked wringer, or sew with a food-pedaled treadle sewing machine…here is your chance. This is Little House on the Prairie for real!Starring Sarah as a grown up and married Laura Ingalls Wilder! Well, it is much like that except we have mostly bikes for horses so far and we have more outrageous fun and laughter telling of our adventures and hearing Ethan play impromptu ballads of our daily foibles and mocking our friends. (By the way, it is the highest honor to have Ethan mock you in one of his two cord ballads!!)
We meet after breakfast to make a plan for the day…would you like to help build the goat fence for the 2 newly arriving pregnant females on New Year’s Day? Or help Sarah paint the guestroom with her homemade milk and lime wash paint, tinted with some yellow iron oxide? Or chop firewood? Or bake some fresh bread with the sourdough starter that Somebuddy, named Katrina, carefully nursed on her month-long bike journey from The Ark in France? Make beeswax candles for evening illumination? Or hang out with the drooling wonderbaby, filled with smiles and happy milk-fed burps so her mama can work the hand-cranked wringer after soaking and plunging a tub filled with dirty diapers? Sound like much more fun than sitting in an office for 8 hours a day??? Well, IT IS!
So much fun, in fact, that one of Ethan’s friends that he grew up with, Derek, hopped on a train all the way from New York City to spend 5 days ‘roughing it’ in the countryside. Now he just happens to be a famous ice hockey player and a composer with a graduate degree in music…(what a combo) and we were treated to an evening of candlelit opera singing by Sarah, accompanied by Derek on the piano the neighbors, Don and Dana, donated to the project this summer. Now this is sophisticated country living!! We ended the evening with all of us joining in for a round of Wild Horses….ya know, the Stones…’couldn’t drag me away’? and even Etta began singing and banging away on the piano!
We also make time for well-being meetings, where we sit in a circle and share what we are feeling and learning about ourselves and each other. Anyone who needs support or to just be listened to or to have healing energy focused on them can ask for that. There is time to share celebrations and grief, concerns and appreciations, thanks and prayers for others. This is the most important foundational practice of all the communities I have seen that function well in the realms of the heart, spirit and mind and I appreciate the courage it takes to provide this type of experience for newcomers and oldtimers alike. Emotional honesty and vulnerability may seem risky, but the payoff is realness and a more peace-centered world to live in!
Other nights we play board games like, Ticket to Ride, a fantastic train game with a map of the actual USA rail system of the early 1900’s, Lost Cities (apparently inspiring some heated competition between Somebuddy, Echidna and Compashman) and Settlers of Catan. Or we take turns reading aloud from a book, or trade massages, or bake peanut butter cookies!!
One thing is for sure, you will eat some delicious food, whether it is Coyote’s fresh-ground, dried Painted Mountain or Hopi Blue corn polenta, or Sarah’s home-made pasta, cellar-stored sweet potatoes and squash, or canned corn, tomatoes, or peaches from the summer harvest or dried or canned venison. And…well, you better like turnips… a lot!!!
We sure seemed to go through some butter!! And we made some of it fresh from the cream that rises to the top of the fresh raw milk that I walked up the road to the nearest Amish farm to buy from Jake’s wife Emma for $1 a gallon….organic! Just spoon off the cream and shake it, shake it, shake it…til it magically lumps together. Then you pour off the ‘buttermilk’ to use later for some skillet-fried cornbread and rinse the butter in water, squeeze it a few times to get the moisture out, roll it in some salt sprinkled on a plate and pack it into the upside-down pottery jar butter-keeper that sits in cold water, then spread it on everything from fresh hot bread to steaming hot sweet potatoes!
Ok, so if you have not yet been sold on Missouri, you just have to come and see for yourself…there will be a superhero ride in September on the famous Katy trail which spans the state of Missouri and follows the Missouri River to the East!

That’s it for now…
Signing out with love,
Velvety Black Earth Tongue