Of everything I’ve ever made, these mixes are my favorites. Download by clicking below:

My final preview of a very special DJ set. This one features the poetry of Della Watson.

Touch or be touched?

A preview of a special DJ set that I’m working on. This one features the poetry of Olivia Cronk.

Where were you when the wheel fell?

Another preview of Tonal, Volumes 1 & 2, this one features the poetry of Andrea Rexilius.

Can you describe movement?

Another sneak peak at a very special DJ Mix I’m working on. This one features Kathy Regina.

What do you do when on fire?

This is a preview of a special DJ mix that I’m currently working on. This clip contains poetry by the delightful Megan Martin.

Do you have a kite of dead promises?

We are sitting on the edge of Crater Lake in Southern Oregon, the site of the only National Park in the state.

White men did not set eyes on this lake until 1854 when a small group of prospectors found the lake while looking for an abandoned copper mine. Awed by the beauty of the lake, they named it “Deep Blue Lake.” Explorers they were; poets they were not. Also, they never found that copper mine.

The Klamath people had known about the lake for thousands of years. The site, to them, was a sacred place. Only those seeking vision quests visited the lake. They performed dangerous rights of passage such as scaling the sides of the cauldron, but they did not live or hunt near the lake.

The lake was considered so sacred by the Klamath people that they kept it a secret for more than 7,000 years.

Crater Lake today is just a remnant of the mountain that once stood here, a glorious ruin and a true freak of nature. The mountain was Mount Mazama, and it rose to 14,000 feet—a height that parallels Mt. Ranier outside of Seattle.

The Klamath people witnessed the eruption that eventually led to the formation of Crater Lake. It happened around the year 5,677 B.C. The Klamath people recorded the eruption in their myths as a great war between Mt. Mazama and Mt. Shasta (across what is now the California border).

The eruption reduced the mountain’s height by nearly a mile. The highest peak on the mountain today is Hillman Peak at 8,159 ft (roughly the height of Mt. St. Helens in southern Washington).

The Mazama eruption was 42 times more powerful than the 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens.

When the volcano’s cauldron collapsed a great pit was formed, a pit that over the course of the next 700 years would fill with rain water and glacial melt to become Crater Lake.

At an average of depth of 1,148 feet and a maximum depth of 1,949 feet, Crater Lake is the deepest lake in the western hemisphere. It is also the deepest lake in the world entirely above sea level.

Because of it’s height and lack of tributaries, the water of Crater Lake is considered the cleanest in the United States.

We are minutes from sunrise. The lake is dark and still in the early morning light. Birds begin to wake and call out across the lake. Swarms of insects can be seen moving across the lake’s surface.

Aside from these sounds all is perfectly quiet. The lake is completely still.

The sunrise happens in a matter of moments. You could easily miss it if you’re not at the mouth of the Crater during the two minutes that it takes for the sun to clear the crater’s rim.

Once the sun is up, the lake transforms into the most stunning blue I have witnessed in nature. The lake becomes the surface of a mirror, creating a horizon of double sky. Photographs cannot capture this blue.

To see this sunrise is to know the meaning of the John Muir’s quotation “the morning of creation.” Once you see this event it will never leave your psyche. Here, in the city, I often think of Crater Lake. I know that it is out there, several hours south of here, and that it will be there long after I am gone.

The Klamath people revered this fallen mountain as a site so sacred only the elect could see it. They knew that within their boundaries nature had given them a miracle.

Now we white men have taken this land and made it a back drop for post cards and established an extensive RV campsite run by a private Christian Nationalist organization that promotes intelligent design (a theory that proposes that the world is only 6,000 years old—which is directly contradicted by the geographic record of Mount Mazama).

Is Crater Lake still the spiritual Mecca that it’s been for thousands of years, or has it become just another generic American postcard?

The only way to know this answer is to escape the throngs of tourists in the early morning hours and to see the sunrise for yourself.

No matter how many RV sites they build lower down on the mountain, no man can conquer this place.

Crater Lake is one of nature’s strangest and most stunning creations. To see it is to be reminded that we live surrounded by forces much greater than we are. No matter how ‘advanced’ we become as a people, we will always be subjected to the laws of nature. Nature is greater than we are. Someday, we will understand this again.

Photographs by Brandon Heckman and myself.

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I have a brief article in the latest issue of the Sierra Club Magazine about Mountain Top Removal in Eastern Kentucky and the inspiring efforts of one group of residents to repair the damage that’s been done. Click here to read it.

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Andrew Lahde was a Hedge Fund Manager who made 877% profit from betting against the subprime market in 2007. In 2008 he closed his hedge fund and sent the following letter to his investors.

October 17, 2008

Today I write not to gloat. Given the pain that nearly everyone is experiencing, that would be entirely inappropriate. Nor am I writing to make further predictions, as most of my forecasts in previous letters have unfolded or are in the process of unfolding. Instead, I am writing to say goodbye.

Recently, on the front page of Section C of the Wall Street Journal, a hedge fund manager who was also closing up shop (a $300 million fund), was quoted as saying, “What I have learned about the hedge fund business is that I hate it.” I could not agree more with that statement. I was in this game for the money. The low hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking. These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government. All of this behavior supporting the Aristocracy, only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades. God bless America.

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More from Chris Hedges:

“Functional illiteracy in North America is epidemic. There are 7 million illiterate Americans. Another 27 million are unable to read well enough to complete a job application, and 30 million can’t read a simple sentence. There are some 50 million who read at a forth- or fifth-grade level. Nearly a third of the nation’s population is illiterate or barely literate— a figure that is growing by more than 2 million a year. A third of high-school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives, and neither do 42 percent of college graduates. In 2007, 80 percent of the families in the United States did not buy or read a book. And it not much better beyond our borders, Canada has an illiterate and semiliterate population estimate at 42 percent of the whole, a proportion that mirrors that of the United States.”

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