Dale Pendell

Sometimes poison is the medicine. 
       Sometimes the action of this medicine 
      is as gentle as waking up, 
        but sometimes the world as you know it 
  is dissolved in a torrent of seeming madness, 
     so that another world might become visible.

Dale passed on January 13th about an hour or so before sunrise.

Gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha!

Here at Mantis Hill we miss him terribly.

I continue to look to his words for wisdom, beauty, magic… and consolation.

I hope you will do the same.

— Laura Pendell

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If you would like to read Dale’s account of his last months please read his Pharmako/Thanatos: or, How I Died posts in The Retort.

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Memorial Celebration of Dale’s Life

Held April 14, 2018 at North Columbia Schoolhouse Cultural Center

On April 14th approximately 200 friends and relatives gathered to celebrate Dale’s life. We had glorious weather. There were 15 people who took turns at the microphone sharing their stories about Dale (photos below by George Post).

One person who had hoped to attend was the cultural ecologist and philosopher David Abram with whom Dale did an event in Grass Valley in 2012 and then co-taught a class at Point Reyes the following year. David sent “some words to honor Dale…”

The event was filmed and is now being edited. Look for it to be on YouTube sometime in the next month or two.

Sending love to everyone of you from all of the beings here at Mantis Hill.

Blessings from the Universe to All,

Laura Pendell

 

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Newish…

Jacob Nasim (Chop-Chop Editing) recorded me reading from Geistertanz to a group of friends at Mantis Hill on Sunday, Sept 17. It’s up on the “Dale Pendell – Mantishill” channel on YouTube here.

 

On Aug. 5, at the Open Book in Grass Valley, Gary Snyder and I joined Jason Wirth to celebrate the release of his new book: Mountains, Rivers, and the Great Earth; Reading Gary Snyder and Dōgen in an Age of Ecological Crisis.
Lew Sitzer recorded the reading on Vimeo here.

 

Geistertanz (“Ghost Dance”).
Verlag Peter Engstler has come out with a rather elegantly designed bilingual chapbook of twenty recent poems, English and German.
I was very lucky to have the brilliant poet Egon Günther as a translator, who even provided a page of notes to assist German readers with some of the references.
www.engstler-verlag.de

Egon also translated  Lunar Meanders, my long “poem” first presented at Breaking Convention in Greenwich. The full German title is Mondmäander: Wissen & Macht im Gestalten psychedelischer Landschafter.  Also published by Verlag Peter Engstler.

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“Remembering the Regulation,” my story about Shays’s Rebellion, is up in Essays here.

 

 

 

 

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After many years, I am putting the final touches on my Bill Ebaugh story, aka William Ebaugh, or Wild Bill Ebaugh.
Working title is “Digging Up Ebaugh: How Nevada County Murdered its Greatest Folk Hero.” This story is based on dozens of interviews I conducted in the 1970s with Ebaugh’s relatives, friends, and antagonists, all of whom have since passed. As a place -holder, I’ve put my “Saga of Bill Ebaugh,” in the Retort. I sing it a cappella,  in A minor, kind of to the tune of “Buffalo Skinners,” but feel free.

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“The Triumph of the Lie” is up on Reality Sandwich.

and now in Essays.

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Also, “As the World Burns,” some thoughts on Hinayana/Mahayana and politics, is up on TIKKUN.

And now in Essays.

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Bodhidharma Comes from the West, 12 Sketches

Published on occasion of the North Columbia Schoolhouse Cultural Center Community Arts Show, September 1, 2016.

I’ll be putting a few of the paintings up in the retort over the next few days.

 

 

 

My talk on Lunar Meandering, given at Breaking Convention in Greenwich, is up on vimeo.  Visionary physicist Nick Herbert gives me a great plug on his most excellent blog site, Quantum Tantra .

 

 

My nutty play, Seeking Faust is available in a beautiful paperback edition from Scarlet Imprint.

TRIGGER ALERT: There is something in the play to offend everyone.

“Thoroughly enjoying the wit, foolishness, and smuttiness of Seeking Faust. Dale Pendell has caught a good mix of neo-Elizabethan and Modernist dictim. This fits right on the shelf with his Neo-Coyote output. … It is as good a piece of book art as one could find these days.”     –Andrew Schelling

 

• My new book of poems, Salting the Boundaries, from New Native Press, is available from SPD (and on Amazon).              “I’m glad I cleared the desktop and spread out and read all of SALTING THE BOUNDARIES this evening. These are all new poems to me, and new in tone, style, vocabulary. The breadth of knowledge and concern, mythopoetic, geologic, historic, et al is splendid. & your wild salmon poem: I’m so glad you did that. I had been idly dreaming of something like that for years but never got to it. This is an impressive gathering, and a welcome surprise for me.”—Gary Snyder
  A review by Eric Weinblatt is on Catamaran.

 

• Schrodinger, Einstein, Maxwell, differential equations, gunpowder, the bronze sword, and the chambered nautilus. What do they have in common? They each have a poem in this book. Equations of Power is available on Amazon. And there is a short review on physicist Nick Herbert’s blog.

 

• I’ve put some of my “paint-poems” up in The Stacks.
• “Broken Symmetry:  John Piper and the Ruins of Modernism,” is in Essays.
• “Psychedelic Top Knot” is in the current issue of The European Journal of Ecopsychology  and in Essays. Print copies are available from Lulu.
• I’ve put selections from the Norman O. Brown/M. C. Richards correspondence, originally to be an appendix in Walking with Nobby, up in Essays.
• I added “Fox Cycle,” “Seeding the New Year,” and my “Medicine/Circle,” originally published in Erowid Extracts, to Essays.
• My play, “World Fire Wake,” is up on youtube at mantishill
• I added my translation of Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” to Essays.
• And, LASTLY, my love song for geology, “Tracing the Pluton,” first published in Catamaran, is now a download in the Essays.