A Tale of Two Vortices

Turns out Basye, VA has a sister in Texas. It is a village by the name of Wimberley.

Wimberley is about 40 mi. from Austin in the Texas Hill Country. I first saw it when I evacuated Houston along with wife and cat, all of us fleeing Rita, the second of the major hurricanes of 2005 to hit the Gulf Coast. We left our Houston townhouse at 2 in the morning to the care of Jorge, our Salvadoran landscaper, and reached Wimberley at 12:30 the next afternoon (it’s normally a three-hour drive). My neighbor had refused to evacuate, choosing instead to trust in survival skills and his 9mm Beretta pistol. We were all still in the grip of television images of armed thugs and looting New Orleans neighborhoods and I understood. But when I got to Wimberley, I felt sorry for my neighbor. The village, designed around Cypress Creek (which itself has a story of interest... but later for that) is a little tarted up, but in a tolerable way; the setting is gorgeous.

As it passes through Wimberley, the translucent olive-emerald color of the Blanco River is an effect of the bed of gouged limestone at a depth of a mere one to two feet beneath the surface. A light layer silt, the color of sun-bleached sage, rests on the limestone bed. There is something unique about the hue it creates, and once I saw it, my eyes seemed to lend it to every view of the town. It blends with the darker palette of Cypress Creek which, shortly before it joins the Blanco, glides more umber and viridian through Wimberley in a turning ravine. As you glance down on it from the bridge on Rt. 12, the creek, echoing the turn of the road itself, forms a bend way below road level. Wimberley is built around that double-notch. It gives the town a sort of spiral form, with the roads splayed off from the bevel of the banks. From the bridge you look down at the trees and below them the creek, and it takes a while to learn about the beautiful space formed beneath the branches, the light pooling like plasma under the broad leaves imposed on the darkling water below. One or two restaurants have patios that back up to the banks of Cypress Creek, creating a terrace with an intimate view, cool in the summer heat.

Within five minutes of having arrived in Wimberley, we heard about the Wimberley Vortex - at the Town Hall where we had stopped in a desperate attempt to find a hotel room (everything was booked for a 500 mile radius from Houston). My ears perked up at the mention of vortex energies… and I was even more surprised to hear it from someone behind the counter at Town Hall. After all, vortices (or “vortexes,” as the new agers in Sedona refer to them), are controversial even in this age when “plasma” is recognized as the fourth state of matter.

Other than this blog, which has languished on the tips of abandonment, I had created a web site based on the Basye Vortex, the (sort of) history of the town and the native Americans (the Shendo, or Senedo) who formerly lived in the Basye area. The Basye Vortex web site constituted the first public announcement of the existence of natural energies, in a measure greater than the norm, at Basye. About 2 hours by car from Washington DC in the Appalachian foothills of Virginia, Basye is, like Wimberley, a community of second homes and retirees. Since the evacuation, I have been even more interested in both the phenomenon of vortex energy and the parallels between Wimberley and Basye. Digging into it further, I found some interesting material…

Passing the Torch

Spain becomes the third country to legalize gay marriage, the other two being Belgium and Netherlands. But the words of the Spanish Prime Minister, Jose Luis Zapatero, seemed especially significant:

'We were not the first, but I am sure we will not be the last. After us will come many other countries, driven, ladies and gentlemen, by two unstoppable forces: freedom and equality.''

Why comment on this? - three reasons come to mind: 1) gay rights is not a "gay" issue, it is a human rights issue and perhaps even a barometer of the enlightenment of a given society; 2) freedom and equality are the twin beacons of American values... but the current administration, with its commitment to the Guantanamo gulag, its subversion of the Geneva Convention (if you are a freedom-loving country, can you really dissolve human rights by inventing a magical category lacking them entirely, e.g. "enemy combatant"), and its torture-by-hire policies, is behaving as if these twin beacons were shattered along with the twin towers; 3) Europe, stodgy and aristocratic, generally lagging behind, seems now to be picking up the torch. If we are only humble enough to recognize the example and follow.

What's In a Name?

Quite a bit, as it turns out. For instance, an hour's worth of web searching reveals that the name "Basye" is actually of Biblical origin... related to the daughter of Pharaoh who had Moses plucked out of the river while the future leader of Israel was grooving dangerously in his basket of Nile reeds. Basye is also related, apparently, to "Bas-sheba" or Bathsheba, the seventh daughter.

Trés cool.

Less than total recall but...

... The Memory Hole (www.thememoryhole.org) finally makes it to the national consciousness. This was the only web site (that I knew of, anyway) who published the list of private companies, including U.S. firms, that had sold arms - including potential nuke components - to Iraq during the decade leading up to the Gulf War. German companies led the list which had been published in Europe... and the matter of the disclosure had been discussed in detail in the London Financial Times, among other credible places. But not here in the U.S. Which I found disconcerting, considering the idea that basically the press is free to report what is happening around the world.

Can you have a free press anywhere? - As Robert Bly said, "free this way and free that way"? Free from outside censorship - but also free from internal, institutional censorship maintained through pressure of any kind?

Anyway thememoryhole.org's operator had requested Pentagon photos of caskets containing bodies of U.S. soldiers fallen in Iraq. The request had been granted and suddenly everyone knows about thememoryhole.org. Today I can't get to the site - I presume it is because the traffic to it from places like ABC News and CNN is so heavy the server is unavailable.

You don't need a weatherman....

So I spend $5 on the Sunday New York Times, just to be able to sink in detail into the news from our Middle East quagmire.

But I do finally find a use for a sundial given to us by Mark Fleisher, a real estate agent, when we bought a house in Washington, DC, in our pre-Texas days. The sundial is about the size of a dinner plate, with well-rendered oak leaves and acorns circumambulating the intricate upright wedge, also oak-leaf embellished, in the middle. Almost a quarter of an inch thick, it weighs probably 6 to 8 pounds. A quality item, in short; however I always thought it was a diabolical gift. I've never been settled enough anywhere to have it affixed to any surface, never mind to contemplate time as it pushes its shadow-children across my deck. But now I find it makes a great patio paperweight to prevent the NYT from blowing away in the Houston wind.

Whatever... :)

I was googling for the French philosopher who said "I did not say it is possible; I only say it is true." Instead Google served up a variant:

"I did not say it was possible, I said it happened." Sir William Crookes.

Nice.

Celeste

"There is no beginning, there is no end."

-- Sufi saying