This is for Sophie, Julia, Carol Judy, Matt and Billy P., Wendy, Rachel, Dave, Lou, Patty, Joe, Matt Landon, Stacey, Larry, Jason, Gabby, Junior, Sid, and Dana, and many many others. Thank you for sharing your ideas hearts and minds with me and so many others over the last week.

Creature Comforts - oh so important 

• Accomplishment - I pitched my tent in 20 minutes! It was tight and tidy. Slept great the first night. Second day, around noon, I headed back into the tent to grab my notebook, and found a carpet of ants - crunchy icky wiggly ants - under my sleeping bag. See, we had been warned not to have food in our tents (because of bears - ants were not mentioned) but I decided to sneak in a Pop-Tart before snuggling into my sleeping bag. I thought I had put the wrapper in a zip-loc bag, but had accidentally left a tiny one inch square piece of foil that the ants just could not resist. Plus, I had pitched the tent right on top of a giant ant hill. So... swept it out and moved it to a new location. Got to sleep a couple of nights later through a great thunderstorm but stayed dry. 
• Porta-potties are not too bad, as long as they are emptied and cleaned regularly. And as long as you can figure out the whole latch system - had one brief period where I was locked in and couldn't figure out how to release the door. Whew. Or pee-yew.
• GREAT food - Lots of tofu and tempeh - and eggs and apples and bread and also fresh veggies from the farm nearby. Much more food than I needed. 
• MUSIC! Monday night we were gifted with the music of The Missing Parsons Report - headed by brothers Matt and Billy - mandolin, guitar, banjo, fiddle - old old old folk songs. The highlight - Matt singing Dark as the Dungeon  mining dirge, a cappella. 
• The best part of it all - the people - hugging, serving food, washing dishes side by side, sharing ideas frustrations and plans, singing.
• True confession - headed to the Pipestem State Park Lodge after the fourth night in the tent where I had a ceramic toilet, shower, and, more importantly, a little space on my own just to think.

Contradictions - stretched my mind...

• Tuesday morning we spent several hours digging into anti-oppression talk. We began with what initially seemed to be a pretty simple small group exercise with two questions - When have you felt excluded? When have you excluded others? Okay. Not so simple, it turns out. There was lots of pain evident as folks recalled times when they had very actively and blatantly or even subtly been excluded - as young children, in high school of course (lots and lots of those stories), as adults. More surprising - many people talked about how they isolated or "excluded" themselves from groups or activities, often from fear of being rejected or misunderstood. And there was pain in the memories of times when we had not been so kind - either deliberately or unintentionally - and in our efforts to understand why this had happened. 
• Oppression? Related to physical, mental, intellectual abilities. To race, class, ethnicity. To sexual orientation or gender identity. To religious beliefs and practices. To military status. To educational status or work life.... too many ways that we sort people out and put them into categories, weighing their value in such odd and unimportant ways, resulting in so much damage.
• Talking about this stuff was important as we moved into talking about how we can work with others in respectful ways in our efforts to stop mountain top removal - members of the mountain communities, politicians, miners, other activists who think or act differently. We put mega-buckets of energy and effort into talking and thinking about this. It was hard but necessary - and uncovered parts of my mind and heart that had not seen light for awhile.
• Early afternoon on Tuesday, I took a ride into town, needing a little time by myself to process all that we had talked about. I turned on the radio, by happenstance tuning into an American Family Radio station. Within ten minutes, I heard two brief stories that kind of blew my mind. One, a talk show guest, who represented himself as a Christian attorney, took a call from a pastor who described a troublesome situation at his church - a man had recently started attending the church, sometimes accompanied by a service dog and sometimes alone but using a cane to help him navigate. The caller's question - was the church legally obligated to allow the man to attend with the service animal? The parishioners found the man "odd" and thought it was "strange" that he sometimes had the dog, and sometimes didn't. The attorney assured the caller that the church was within its legal rights not to allow the service dog in the church, in effect leading to the exclusion of the new church-goer. Well. Second, two talk show hosts voiced anger and disgust that a Macy's employee had been disciplined for not allowing a transgendered individual to use the women's restroom - "I would have said, 'Dude, use the dude's bathroom.' HE's the sick one - HE is the one who should be in trouble." This conversation was presented in sarcastic, snarky tones.

The world is full of contradictions, isn't it? Hurtful contradictions - hard to fathom - divisive - counter-productive - hateful - ignorant. But it is so so so very important to face these contradictions and to dig down deep for the courage both to unearth our own cruelties and to  speak up - respectfully and firmly - when we observe the cruelties of others... to speak up about the value of every human being, about their rights to live in a home, a natural environment that is protected from the life-killing toxins related to particular industry practices.

Our natural world breathes - miraculously alive, ever-growing and changing.

What a week. I am not sure where to start - or even if I should start. My week at the Mountain Justice Summer Camp has been - inspiring, confusing, disturbing, mind-stretching, soul-feeding, humbling.

I have been trying to figure out how I ended up at the camp, what led me to sign up for this week in Pipestem, WV. The best that I can recall - about a year ago, I read the Post-Gazette reports about the investigation into the Upper Big Branch mining disaster, and it made me ill - the callous disregard of coal mine owners, particularly Don Blankenship, for the health and well-being of the miners and the mining communities and the "look the other way" practices of publicly funded regulatory bodies made me ill. Shortly thereafter I decided to participate in the March on Blair Mountain, wanting to understand the issues better, wondering if and how they might connect to Western Pennsylvania's own fracking controversies. So I went to Blair Mountain, and then continued to read and listen, and somehow ended up at the Mountain Justice camp in the heart of the Appalachians.

My parents grew up in Harlan County, KY, in the small US Steel-owned coal-mining town of Lynch. They shopped at the company store, and lived in company-owned homes on the clearly socially-stratified main street of town (an old story - it was a little scandalous that my mother, who lived in the No. 6 block, married my father, whose family lived in No. 5). As a child, we visited Lynch often - the smell of the mountains this week took me back immediately to Lynch. 

None of my grandparents or uncles worked in the mines, but my dad's cousins and uncles did. I remember stories about black lung disease, and mine injuries. I also remember what I heard a lot about this week - the boom and bust cycle of being a miner. Boys I knew became miners as early as possible - this was in the boom years - and had big cars and married young. A few years later, they were poor. Back and forth, up and down.

My parents lived in Lynch for awhile after they married, then left when my dad decided to go to the University of KY to study engineering. But to my mom, Lynch was "home." So learning - or re-learning - about mountains and mining has pulled at me over the last year in ways that I can't quite understand or explain.

The camp took place at the Appalachian South Folk Life Center - a pastoral setting looking out on breathtakingly beautiful mountains. Each morning, I sat at the top of a hill looking out over the misted mountains, listening to the birds. And all day into the evening I attended workshops about mountain top removal from all angles - Appalachian culture and history, rural vs urban activism, facilitation practices, solidarity economics, non-hierarchical organizing. I was one of only a few folks older than 40 (okay, I was probably the oldest person there), and I had the privilege of learning from much younger people who were either born in some part of Appalachia or have chosen to live and work there, all serving as social justice activists. I don't know what I expected - I don't know that I had any particular expectations - but what I experienced was unexpected. 

The people in Mountain Justice, and related groups such as Radical Action for Mountain Peoples' Survival, Coal River Mountain Watch, Larry Gibson's Mountain Keepers, and others, work with community members to understand, monitor, plan, and act to stop the practice of mountain top removal. The movement to stop MTR is based upon the devastating destruction to the ecosystem of the mountains and related long-lasting harm to the physical, communal, social, and emotional lives of community members. There is a substantial body of research documenting the damage done to water systems, wildlife, human health, economic stability, community life.

And yes, the opponents of MTR are allies with others involved in fighting extractive industries, those involved with extracting coal, gas, and oil - with a particular focus on opposing the manner in which the industries operate, again with little regard for the immediate and long-term damage to human life and the ecosystem. So yes, this movement to end MTR is related closely to the efforts in Western PA and elsewhere to stop hydraulic fracturing for natural gas - better known as fracking.

What else did I learn? I got to spend time with people who defined themselves variously as radicals, activists, and anarchists, who question and are committed to swimming upstream against mainstream ideology and against business as usual, when this business hurts people. Today, two groups of campers participated in direct actions - one involving five people who chained themselves to a coal-carrying barge in Charleston, WV (yes, they were arrested) and another involving dozens of people who blocked a road leading up to an MTR site, making it impossible for the trucks that transport coal and other materials to pass through. 

And I also learned that I have a whole lot more to think about. Not sure where I fit into this whole scenario, or where I go with what I learned. More later... about people, and food, and music, and stories...