A new horsey event is doing good while having great fun - thanks to Val Richman, Mentor Me Petaluma, Rotary International & Giant Steps

Some days it pays to go downtown - 7th Annual Art & Garden Festival was best ever!

"Reducing sprawl called crucial in warming fight," SF Chron June 27 - so how's about changing our auto-centric ways?

Sesquifest on stilts, add cotton candy and beer ... glorious fireworks at dusk!

How did it happen that the smoke seemed to be coming from the South but was actually far more thick as we drove North? We were expecting to escape smoky skies and join 3,000 friendly bodies for singing up the days and nights at Wavy Gravy's Black Oak Ranch - the Kate Wolf Festival, 13th iteration.

Always a joy, the Festival this year was also sort of scary - grey-yellow smoke sat heavily in the motionless air for days before we saw any clear break and that awful excitement of helicopters airlifting people out of homes in nearby Leggett was unnerving. Would fires of this magnitude now be a yearly event? Would smoke kill the Festival? Thankfully, the promised stars were visible Saturday night!

You can say whatever claptrap you wish, but I say climate crisis is well underway and we have to change our whole way of being if we don't want to sing on a sour note the rest of our days. Now to figure the ways...

Still, Kate Wolf Festival seemed an optimal place for a vision of a positive future to bubble up. So many lovely beings gathered here. The young harlequin-boy, tall at maybe 17 years, perfectly painted, this year's mud babies, caked all over with brown as these boys molded mud pies with glee out of what had been a foot path, the graceful hula hoopers, sexy girl dancers, and 9 year old nephew Koben and his friend, Miles successfully navigating 5 hoops round their middles with minor purplish bruises to show the wear and tear of many hours circling. What fun!

Sadly, my camera gave out, but perhaps not sadly? I was nudged to live in the moment with this dust-village in Mendicino whose remarkable music rose to memorialize not only Kate Wolf but friend-to-all (Bruce) Utah Phillips, dedicated labor guy, hobo-appreciator. I had my Utah moment once at Petaluma's Progressive Festival when in his big, warm voice, he invited me to sing "You sing with us, you are part of the Love Choir!"

Sadness, loss of loved ones and fear of disease to come hung in the air along with the smoke, but all those other elements won the days - people swarming here to share - the community love - open-hearted conversations, dancing, walking, listening and tapping a foot, shared by so very many friends we know and friends we may never know.

And, of course, the memorable music. Am currently listening to this year's discovery-for-us, Moira Smiley and Voca and their CD, Blink. Lovely young women who sing Celtic, Croatian, Yiddish, traditional and just plain amazing songs written by Moira. Will have to add Jimmy LeFave to our collection - sweet, open lyrics matched by his sensitive and tender/gravely voice. Hmmm-

Gathered round this year's lamp - campfire, a Utah Phillips song about being a hobo without a place to rest came up and this quote: "The planet is being ruined by people - and they all have names and addresses". Utah would want us raise our fists against injustice as well as raising our voices in song.