The mission of H.O.P.E. is to turn the prow of our entropyship, the Earth, back upstream so that Earth's evolving consciousness may explore the headwaters of the Universe for billions of years to come. The work of H.O.P.E. is to make visible the larger relationships we live within - relationships that inspire visions of wonder and works of hope.

This issue is dramatically late and short. Tomorrow our family flies off to spend the summer mostly following our noses around Scotland (with a week's jaunt at the end to see the total solar eclipse on August 11th in Europe). Quite the adventure for us. The girls are vibrating eagerly. What with finishing up the school year and getting ready for the trip, I haven't had time to write up an official Cairns.

Chelsea Green will be publishing Shifting probably this October. The new title is Seeing Nature: Deliberate Encounters with the Visible World. Projected price is 15.95. Will have more professional illustrations, page layout, pretty cover. The entire manuscript has been copy-edited to make it tighter and clearer. Plus I've added things to bring the book closer to the evolving vision. A couple of chapters have been added. "An Unexpected Ally" and "The Downward Spiral" have gone through major revision. Sections have been added here and there. Below is one such section.

Just two days ago, I sold out the second printing of Shifting. There will be a several month gap of no books available until the new publication comes on line.

Meanwhile, the teachers union and the school board association and other educational special interests have been mounting a major effort in the California Legislature to eliminate charter schools like Chrysalis. The legislative attack has come in the form of several bills. The charter school movement has beaten them all back thus far but the rumor is that tomorrow, a trailer bill is going to (in my mind) circumvent the whole legislative process and declare our kind of school ineligible for funding starting immediately. Reminds me of Shifting: the larger change one tries to create, the larger are the resisting forces. Ah well. We will enjoy Scotland thoroughly. When we come back, we will read the legislative product and somehow adapt Chrysalis to the new requirements and keep up the work.

What follows is a section I added to Shifting in the chapter "The Gradient of Converging Water." For years, I wanted to give readers a sense of the sensual shape of drainages. This publication gave me a chance to try putting it in words. There will be a few illustrations to help one through the trickiest parts of this section. I start with the paragraph from Shifting that leads into the new section. What follows is not the final copy-edited form. The back and forthness between my editor and me is done with manuscript, not computer copy.

Have a great summer, one and all. We will, too.
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These drainage patterns were unknown to me as a child because I grew up in a town. Every town is built upon a pattern of streams but most towns have encased their streams in culverts and buried them beneath pavement. Raindrops begin converging into streams but then they disappear through grates down into the storm sewers. Streams are allowed to flow freely only through parks so I encountered streams as disjointed scenery that appeared at one end of a park and disappeared at the other end. The intricate, subtle slopes of a drainage have been graded and covered with smooth sidewalks and roads. We become what we practice and in towns we practice the pattern of streets rather than the pattern of drainages. Not until I felt the subtle slopes underfoot as I hiked across deserts and mountains did I learn the pattern of drainages.

I came to this kind of hiking with a road map mentality; the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. But a straight line across the land will keep rising and falling. I puff up one slope and then drop down the other side only to puff up another slope. This constant change in breathing tires me out. The land feels like a series of obstacles.

After enough of this clambering, the land started shaping my path of shortest distance into the path of least resistance. I flow around ridges rather than straight over them. My straight line begins melting into graceful curves that contour the land. My always-changing breathing that fueled the straight line calms into a steady, sustained breathing as powerful as the steady yet gentle ascension of the always curving path.

As I curve back and forth, I start to notice patterns. I might notice, for example, that every time I start curving to the left, the view starts to open up. The plants grow further apart and the view through them extends further. But when I start curving to the right, the land curves in to embrace me. Plants grow more abundantly. My view closes in. I find myself in a more intimate setting of flowers and bird songs. Then the path begins its curve to the left and the world opens once again. Like my steady breathing, the land alternately opens and contracts.

These patterns transform my awareness of a path curving back and forth into a path curving in and out of drainages. I curve into and through a drainage and out and around the ridge that divides drainages. Within each drainage, the curves of the land gathers soil moisture from the surrounding slopes. The plants, insects, and birds respond to this greater abundance with greater abundance. But out on the ridges, there are no moisture-providing slopes above. Soil moisture and the life it supports is less. The view opens.

On the ridges, the slopes are below. In the drainages the slopes rise above. Along each curve of my path, the slopes rise and subside around me. With every curve a gradient of soil moisture rises and subsides, expressing itself uniquely with every different facing of slope, with changing elevation. The path pulses with soil moisture. Feet feel it in the ground.

The curving direction of all these patterns alternate, however, like an even slower breathing of the land. Whether the curves to the left lead me to a ridge or whether all the patterns are reversed and the the curving to the left leads me to a drainage is part of an even larger pattern that tells me where I am within the pattern of even larger drainages. The curving path is not a simple repetition of in and out. Every step is simultaneously in and out at different scales because the drainages nest so complexly. I can be walking into one drainage at the same time I am walking out of a larger drainage and yet deeper into an even larger drainage. [Illustration, for sure] Because of this nesting, the experience of the land curving in to embrace me with a drainage is different every time.

If I'm walking across dry land, for example, I am usually crossing the slight, gentle curves of micro-drainages, wet only during a heavy rain. Sometimes the only hint is the slight curve in the trail that draws my attention to the plants growing a little higher, a little closer together. The rhythm of these micro-drainages are punctuated every now and then by a larger drainage with an occasional tree lining its route. And after an hour of these ins and outs, I come to the center of the mother drainage, a rocky cascade, green shade beneath overarching trees.

So too, with the ridges. Most are so subtle they aren't even noticed as divides, only as bends in the trail. Others push me far enough out to make me look around. And every hour or so, I walk out around a divide. . . and a whole new landscape swings into view and I stop for a snack break and to gaze for an hour.

But it is not that regular. Every piece of land has a different rhythm depending on its moistness, the nature of its bedrock, the steepness of its slopes, and where I am within even greater drainages. In some regions the streams are five minutes apart; in others they are only springs several hours apart. In some regions, I see only a hundred feet through the forest; in others, I gaze perpetually out over tens of miles to distant mountain ranges.

All the land is drainages nesting complexly. I feel its sensual shape with every step when my path fits the land.
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Business Stuff

My book, Seeing Nature: Deliberate Encounters with the Visible World, may be ordered from me. Prices are $16 for one book, $29 for two books, $64 for 5 books, or $112 for 10 copies. All prices are postpaid and include any sales tax. Mail orders to Paul Krapfel, P.O. Box 609, Cottonwood, CA 96022-0609.

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© 1999, Paul Krafel, P.O. Box 609, Cottonwood, CA 96022-0609
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