robert wolff

The spiral we call evolution circles around the center that is Life becoming.

Evolution spirals around and to the light.

robert's story begins thusly:

"At first there were rumors. Yet another so-called Unidentified Object. I did not pay much attention. I am deeply aware of my environment, I cherish and nurture the plants and trees and the animals that live in and around my garden (what Americans call ‘yard’). Outer space seems very remote to me. But very soon after those first rumors the Media exploded with what apparently was real news. Observers had seen something in orbit around our earth. And inevitably a few days after that the media talked about an alien space craft..."

(104 pages PDF)

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(116 pages PDF)

DOWNLOAD SPIRAL 2011

HA‘INA MAI KA PUANA
LET THE STORY BE TOLD

Stories are rarely new, their value is in the retelling of human truths. Many of the stories in this collection are old, they happened many years ago, and were written a few years ago. What made me want to put them together in this book is that they are like snapshots of a past that is only just behind us. Our world is changing very rapidly, so rapidly that the world of a previous generation seems almost incomprehensibly strange.

"Ha‘ina mai ka puana" is a Hawaiian expression, used in almost all traditional and many modern Hawaiian songs. It is the last verse, used very much as a story teller might end his telling with “and so it is.” As many Hawaiian expressions it can mean other things as well, including “let the story be told.”

(109 pages PDF)

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Also see Earth Renews below.

FROM THE FOREWORD
"There were survivors. Somewhere in the far northern part of North America a few survivors found each other at a cabin in a forest. Their story is told in Rain of Ashes. Other survivors had started a village of sorts, near a west-facing coast of middle Africa. As elsewhere, among the survivors were some who had recovered an ancient human talent to commune without words. For some of them, distance apparently was no barrier. One such, an African, called a cry that was heard by some in the cabin in the woods. The African organized a daring expedition. They had found an abandoned private jet, and with a few companions—and a 'real' pilot—they made it to the people in the north woods. Eventually, they returned, leaving two passengers that had come from Africa, and taking on two American women who wanted to join 'the Africa group.' This book, Anansí, is the story of the travelers, the African group, beginning after they left the north woods."

(55 pages PDF)

DOWNLOAD Anansi Part 1

In 2014 robert wolff included Anansi with Rain of Ashes under the title of Earth Renews.

For more about Anansi, please see 2014 Earth Renews below.

Sometimes you can find a rare used printed copy of Rain of Ashes online.

There are many scam websites promising 'free downloads' of Rain of Ashes, but they all want to invade your computer with viruses and get your credit card numbers, so be careful with that.

In 2014 robert wolff reissued Rain of Ashes with Anansi and other writings under the title of Earth Renews.

For more about Rain of Ashes, please see 2014 Earth Renews below.

The title says it all!

(16 pages PDF)

DOWNLOAD A Little Book Of Little Poems

FROM THE INTRODUCTION

Reality is a concept made in my head, shaped from experiences, sights, feelings, many ideas that were taught me, impressed on me. And out of all those perceptions my mind somehow makes a whole that in the modern world is the stage and backdrop of where and how I live.

All societies, villages, tribes, cultures have ways to educate, describe the tribal reality to growing children. From birth our parents, teachers, neighbors, peers, shape the experiences and the meanings attached to experiences that make up my reality. Western culture is more forceful and more determined perhaps to impress a certain way of seeing what IS. Modern, or civilized, people have definite ideas about good and bad. Anything and everything can be good or bad: the way we dress, the color of our skin, what we do, what we can‘t do, what we say, how we deal with life. In the real reality (a useless concept of course) there is no good or bad, because that is a value judgment humans invented. And, as we all know all too well, what is good for me most likely is bad for someone else.

(93 pages PDF)

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Earth Renews, and human kind...

In 2014 robert combined revised versions of Rain of Ashes, Saba, and Anansi into one all-encompassing volume he titled Earth Renews, and human kind... (robert's undying unanswered question).

robert also added a two-page Epilogue - flashes from a book that will never be .

To be clear, Rain of Ashes is included as the first 161 pages of Earth Renews.

robert's masterpiece of a future becomes less fictional day-by-day. It begins like this:

"Tomorrow I die. That's what the new teacher says. How can she know? Joe and Larry died a long time ago. Maybe ten days, or thirty? It's hard to know what days mean any more when it is always night. The teacher's name is La Honda. Funny name. She says it is where she grew up, or where she was before, I can't remember. La Honda says it will be day again. One of these days she said. I've sort of forgotten what 'day' means. Night was when we were in bed, but now I sleep when I'm tired. So many hours are a day. But, how do you know what hours are? When La Honda said I die tomorrow, she meant soon, I think. Because I threw up in school. Well, not really school. It is that house where some people lived we did not like. I don't know why we did not like them; I thought they were okay. But, my mom says they do bad things. How does she know?"

This is the last and most complete version of Earth Renews that I know of.

(294 pages PDF)

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From time to time someone will ask me, very seriously, Can you teach me how to listen to my intuition, or, learn what you call, knowing? This knowing, is knowing things that in western thinking I cannot know. Like knowing who is calling before picking up the phone when it rings. Or, slowing down, for no apparent reason, when there is a speed trap around the next corner—placed there because drivers cannot see it before they are in range of the machines that measure speed. Or knowing that this plant is unhappy and needs to be moved to another place. Some call this intuition. I am convinced that knowing is not a supernatural, or unusual, capability. Many animals have it, and it is not rare among humans.
Can it be learned?
Yes, probably.
Can it be taught?
Maybe.
I learned it, so someone else should be able too, right?

(9 pages PDF)

DOWNLOAD What Is Knowing?

Dear friends, this is a continuation of what is getting to be a three part long story that I am sending you in parts. The first was called Control -- which some of you read as a story about chickens and ducks -- it was meant to be about people and our need to control nature and ourselves. The second part was Chaos, the thing we most want to control. This part i call Ecology, although of course all three parts are about ecology.

(10 pages PDF)

DOWNLOAD Ecology

So-called modern agriculture is asymmetrical warfare on Nature. All indigenous
peoples knew that food plants must be planted mixed. As I have been told in three
different countries, “what one plant takes out of the ground, another puts back in.”
That kind of agriculture was sustainable for thousands of years. But no, we modern man, knew better. We flatten a thousand acres of rich soil, and plant a thousand acres of corn in straight rows so that a few machines can do the work of a thousand men and women. It so happens that there is a tiny animal that loves corn; an insect probably. When there is one corn plant that is grown in the middle of a bean plant that climbs all over it, the insect may have a bite here and there, but does little damage. Where there is a whole row of nothing but corn. Oh boy! Insects multiply fast, and soon a thousand acres of corn has a million or more little insects leaving a thousand acres of damaged corn overnight...

(8 pages PDF)

DOWNLOAD Change?

What’s the point of remembering, a little girl asked. Well, it’s what we all do, all the time. You remember your name, don’t you? Oh, it’s like learning. Yes, learning is remembering. Cats and dogs remember their name, too, but they have other ways of remembering as well, but scent. Remembering makes me think. Remembering makes me know that there are differences between your name and mine, between cats and dogs. And today can be different from yesterday. Do you remember what you had for breakfast yesterday? The same we have every day except sunday then we have eggs do you like eggs?
That was a good conversation with a young person. For me, the point is also that I
can know there is, was, another way to live. Easier. Better I think. Certainly more
sustainable. Not as confused, not as violent, not as mean-spirited. People were not as broken up as we have become...

(4 pages PDF)

DOWNLOAD What's The Point Of Remembering?

What is happening to us, human beings? We are rapidly getting more
cruel, confused, complicit. We were never like that. We are getting detached
from what is real, what is true — believing in ideas that are obviously unsustainable
and inhuman. It would be easy to make up some explanation
that it comes from outside. A virus, the whispering of aliens. But probably it
is our own species that is going crazy. A tiny percentage of humans is pushing
with all the might of their almost unlimited wealth to literally destroy the
planet. If that is not crazy I don‘t know what is. In all of the history of Life
on Earth have there been other species who systematically set out to destroy
the ecology that is all Life? Hard to believe. And if there were they obviously
did not survive because not that long ago we had a normally working
ecology.

(7 pages PDF)

DOWNLOAD Credo

(view 1 of 3)
It’s war. No, I don’t mean the was or terror. That may be one of the faces of the great
war that is going on. The great war is waged by the very few against everyone else. The
uprisings in the Middle East are the model. The many are finally rebelling, resisting.
Strangely, even Israel has seen thousands of protestors on the streets objecting to the
dictatorial rule of Netanyahu. The people of Papua, now a province of Indonesia, are
rebelling against their masters again. This battle has been fought for half a century and
more. In Bahrain, an important US Naval base, the “rebels” are fought by charging
doctors and other medical workers for helping citizens who got wounded by their own
government. In the US the poor, now a third of all Americans are systematically criminalized
for being poor.
Having lived in an occupied country for five years I am firmly on the side of all popular
uprisings...

(9 pages PDF)

DOWNLOAD One War, Three Views

Note: these words are translations of thoughts that we think come to us humans from somewhere in space, far away.

What we get are thoughts, concepts, images, not these words we must use to communicate with you. We are not among you. We are on my planet and your are on the planet the Elder asked us to study. We were lucky that we found so many of you allowing us to perceive their perceptions. We have very strict rules about that, we must only share with willing beings.

(10 pages PDF)

DOWNLOAD From The Next Planet Over

In Samoa one does not make fun of a Samoan
Chief! The Chief Nurse was large, with a larger voice. When I sauntered around the
hospital she saw me from two hallways away, laughed loudly and yelled: “Eh Doc,
wanna go on a field trip with us?”
Sure; where are you going?
A small island, Aunu’u, not too far from Pago, with little more than a hundred people. The public
health department decided the island needs modern sanitation: flush toilets. The island is small and
very rocky. In fact it is difficult to land there because there are no beaches, Our boat will stand off
shore and the local people will ferry us ashore, one by one in their canoes. We leave tomorrow
morning. Very early, before daybreak, she added. We did not actually leave that early, of course, but
we tried.

(5 pages PDF)

DOWNLOAD On A Small Island

I imagine that a majority of all humans by now must sense the end of something. Our planet has become a dangerous place, and almost all of us know all too well that we are the ones who have radically changed this planet. We, humankind, have amassed enormous powers that we have willfully applied to destroy at least half of all rainforests, have poisoned the air, the ground, and the water of this planet with our ferocious chemicals. It is we who have destroyed animal and plant habitats on every continent and so have caused the extinction of thousands, perhaps millions, of species of Life—a great danger for the planetary ecology: reducing biodiversity threatens the planetary ecology with collapse.
It is easy to see the end.
Much more difficult to see a new beginning.

(8 pages PDF)

DOWNLOAD Fading Voice

December 17, 2018
I wanted to publish two emails from my correspondence with robert wolff (author of Original Wisdom, Rain of Ashes, A Book of Dreams etc.) who died in 2015 at the age of 90+. Although towards the end of his life he had trouble with his eyesight, he still managed to send out newsletters and reply to personal emails in his wonderfully attentive way. The amazing Original Wisdom (and his emails) became my primary source of inspiration for all things ‘nature’ during that time and helped me to set the path along a homeschooling life for my two daughters, which in turn set the tone for the life I now lead. robert’s writings (wildwolff.com) went offline after he died, so I wanted to make some of his words available online here after being inspired by seeing his writing archived by Clinton Callahan here.
Louisa Archer

(6 pages PDF)

DOWNLOAD A Correspondance With robert wolff

A compilation of ‘letters to my friends’ written at the end of the 20th century, brought up to date in the first half of 2011.

(139 pages PDF)

DOWNLOAD The Wonder of Being

It is a privilege to have lived through some very different times—in war and peace—and lived
in several different lands. Adapting to and knowing many kinds of people was a challenge and a
great education. I know some very different realities, spoke different languages, known people
with very different kinds of education and ideas. All that gives me a peculiar view on life with
a focus on us, humans.
At the end of my life I admit that I am disappointed, to put it very, very mildly, that we, in
this country, haven’t done much to reduce emissions and changed to greener energy.

(3 pages PDF)

DOWNLOAD Newsletter 14 December 2011