Started reading a book called Tobacco; A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization by Iain Gately yesterday.

The first chapter was pretty interesting. It tells how tobacco was first domesticated in South America and some of the uses to which it was put. Besides smoking and chewing, it was also used topically, nasally, and in a liquid form was drunk and used as enemas. Shamans used it in their vision quests, and would deliberately take near fatal doses for near death experiences. It also told how it spread to North America, where is was usually smoked, and how it was the only plant some tribes cultivated. For the most part, it was considered a medicinal herb in the Americas before the coming of the Spanish.

I started a children's series tonight, known as The Dark is Rising Sequence by Susan Cooper. The individual books are called
Over Sea, Under Stone
The Dark is Rising
Greenwitch
The Grey King
Silver on the Tree

Right now I am on Over Sea, Under Stone. I have only read a couple of chapters, but it seems promising. A family with three children have gone to stay with an old family friend (a famous and adventurous professor) at a mysterious old house near the ocean in a little village in Cornwall. Right now the kids are having a lot of fun exploring the house on a rainy day.

I got a nice email from a lady from Arizona today about going to Elohimfest at this time last year, and how it helped her out emotionally in a rough time in her life to go there, and to spend time with all of us. It really was something very special, and I was very glad to have the chance to participate. I was just getting over the initial worst mourning for my father (though I would not truly get over the worst altogether until last December, when I got that huge emotional catharsis that began to change my life). Elohimfest gave me the first thing to be happy about in the five months following my father's death. The day I spent driving across Oklahoma and the Texas panhandle with my friend was the first truly happy day I had had since my father had gotten sick six months before that. Some of the people I met there are some of the finest human beings I know.

Truly the trip of a lifetime for me.