Excerpts from the Hemp Diva's Journal - Most Recent Entries

August 7, 2008: The nature of Let there be Hemp as social experiment demonstrates how little mainstreamers know about the difference between industrial hemp and marijuana, which is raised for sale as a high THC smokable drug. We were at a party just last weekend and a couple we know, new in VT from Long Island, and know about our website, are still in the dark!

So, what do I need to do... take off my clothes and set my hair on fire? Now there's a picture for you! Hemp Diva in the buff! It would get the word out there! Nudity sells... It's something to think about! "Hemp Diva, Naked Activist..."

August 11, 2008: "Practical agriculture" is what a North Dakota farmer, high school principal and Republican state legislator says about farming industrial hemp! North Dakota is so close to getting hemp in the soil! If they do, North Dakota could become a highly prosperous state, given the current deep petroleum deposits that are making millionaires overnight! But, it isn't just about the money... it's about having a vision and getting US agriculture back into a crop that really makes sense!

August 20, 2008: Becoming an advocate for hemp farming in the US just got more interesting, as our NEW ad in UTNE Reader is now in circulation! Traffic volume to this website is climbing and although we hope the visitors will step bravely into their world wearing a Let there be Hemp t-shirt, getting the FACTS here on this website may empower individuals to be courageous. Come on, folks ... more of us need to walk and talk it: Let There Be Hemp!

September 2, 2008: I have recently discovered that from Hemp you can make wood-like products, from the compressed woody core of the hemp plant. These can be pressed into fiberboard and other wood building materials. I discoverd a few great websites by googling hemp building materials. Featured on our home page is one in the UK and WOW! What these guys are doing ... look at what opportunities are NOT available to us here in the land of the free... kind of gets ya worked up, doesn't it??

September 12, 2008: This presidential election promises two extreme possibilities: that We the People take back our country, or that We the People continue to be greeted with derision by the religious right. How did this develop? Seems we are on a pth of self-destruction ... yet, if you are familiar with astrology, Jupiter (the fairy GodMother of the Universe) and Pluto (the transformer) are both direct once again, after months in retrograde... the effects of these and other celectial influences are "invisible" forces in play ... yes, this sounds airy ... and no, the Diva has not been toking ... but she does pray and anticipate the highest and best outcome from the election and for HEMP! I just received a Canadian client, written by Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues - it is making it's way throughout Canada, whose sympathies are with those of us who can think here in the States ... and they fear the spin - here it is:

Drill, Drill, Drill

I am having Sarah Palin
nightmares. I dreamt last night that she was a member of a club where they
rode snowmobiles and wore the claws of drowned and starved polar bears
around their necks. I have a particular thing for Polar Bears.
Maybe it's their snowy whiteness or their bigness or the fact that they live
in the arctic or that I have never seen one in person or touched one. Maybe
it is the fact that they live so comfortably on ice.
Whatever it is, I need the polar bears.

I don't like raging at women. I
am a Feminist and have spent my life trying to build community, help empower
women and stop violence against them. It is hard to write about Sarah Palin.
This is why the Sarah Palin choice was all the more insidious and cynical.
The people who made this choice count on the goodness and solidarity of
Feminists.

But everything Sarah Palin
believes in and practices is antithetical to Feminism which for me is part
of one story -- connected to saving the earth, ending racism, empowering
women, giving young girls options, opening our minds, deepening tolerance,
and ending violence and war.

I believe that the McCain/Palin
ticket is one of the most dangerous choices of my lifetime, and should this
country chose those candidates the fall-out may be so great, the destruction
so vast in so many areas that America may never recover. But what is equally
disturbing is the impact that duo would have on the rest of the world.
Unfortunately, this is not a joke. In my lifetime I have seen the clownish,
the inept, the bizarre be elected to the presidency with regularity.

Sarah Palin does not believe in
evolution. I take this as a metaphor. In her world and the world of
Fundamentalists nothing changes or gets better or evolves. She does not
believe in global warming. The melting of the arctic, the storms that are
destroying our cities, the pollution and rise of cancers, are all part of
God's plan. She is fighting to take the polar bears off the endangered
species list. The earth, in Palin's view, is here to be taken and plundered.
The wolves and the bears are here to be shot and plundered. The oil is here
to be taken and plundered. Iraq is here to be taken and plundered. As she
said herself of the Iraqi war, "It was a task from God."

Sarah Palin does not believe in
abortion. She does not believe women who are raped and incested and ripped
open against their will should have a right to determine whether they have
their rapist's baby or not.

She obviously does not believe
in sex education or birth control. I imagine her daughter was practicing
abstinence and we know how many babies that makes.

Sarah Palin does not much
believe in thinking. From what I gather she has tried to ban books from the
library, has a tendency to dispense with people who think independently. She
cannot tolerate an environment of ambiguity and difference. This is a woman
who could and might very well be the next president of the United States.
She would govern one of the most diverse populations on the earth.

Sarah believes in guns. She has
her own custom Austrian hunting rifle. She has been known to kill 40 caribou
at a clip. She has shot hundreds of wolves from the air.

Sarah believes in God. That is
of course her right, her private right. But when God and Guns come together
in the public sector, when war is declared in God's name, when the rights of
women are denied in his name, that is the end of separation of church and
state and the undoing of everything America has ever tried to be.

I write to my sisters. I write
because I believe we hold this election in our hands. This vote is a vote
that will determine the future not just of the U.S., but of the planet. It
will determine whether we create policies to save the earth or make it
forever uninhabitable for humans. It will determine whether we move towards
dialogue and diplomacy in the world or whether we escalate violence through
invasion, undermining and attack. It will determine whether we go for oil,
strip mining, coal burning or invest our money in alternatives that will
free us from dependency and destruction. It will determine if money gets
spent on education and healthcare or whether we build more and more methods
of killing. It will determine whether America is a free open tolerant
society or a closed place of fear, fundamentalism and aggression.

If the Polar Bears don't move
you to go and do everything in your power to get Obama elected then consider
the chant that filled the hall after Palin spoke at the RNC, "Drill Drill
Drill." I think of teeth when I think of drills. I think of rape. I think of
destruction. I think of domination. I think of military exercises that force
mindless repetition, emptying the brain of analysis, doubt, ambiguity or
dissent. I think of pain.

Do we want a future of drilling?
More holes in the ozone, in the floor of the sea, more holes in our
thinking, in the trust between nations and peoples, more holes in the fabric
of this precious thing we call life?

Eve Ensler


September 5, 2008

Read Hemp Diva Archives below

April 10, 2008: It comes in the night, now: “Let there be hemp”. Compelling. I wonder: Why? ... Why not? Don't try to make it logical, just let IT be ... Next arises a sense of responsibility to create, a tension. Then an image arrives: "Let There Be Hemp!" is part of an image on a hemp t-shirt... really? Hmmm...sure...

April 16, 2008: Today I asked my son, Michael, age 21, what he thinks about a Let There Be Hemp! t-shirt: “Definitely! Go for it, Mom! More people should know what it would mean for all of us if hemp could be grown legally! You've GOT to do this!"

April 20, 2008: Creative momentum: the LTBH t-shirt project begins to manifest: Vermont Artist and artwork. Hemp blend shirts. Eco-friendly printer. We're responsible, along with our vendors to infuse the LTBH shirt with solid green values. We hope others will agree and buy our shirt . We 'll build a website to give the facts and sell the shirt. We realize there is more to this than just the t-shirt. Anticipation ...

May 23, 2008: Our first batch of 100 shirts arrived by UPS this afternoon! Our product must offer funding to groups that are actively working to bringing a lively commercial hemp industry to the USA! Find them ... 'If you build it, they will come...?!" Fields of hemp!

May 24, 2008: We were selling our shirts in Waitsfield today and a 9 year old child asked: "How come we can buy hemp milk at the store, but hemp is illegal to grow?"

May 30, 2008: Our website home page looks good, so I am issuing e-mail invitations to visit it and discover our shirts. Vote Hemp calls us... they like the shirt! We begin a dialogue. I have a goal: we're going to get a million people to buy and wear the shirt and share profits with Vote Hemp. We've got to get industrial hemp legalized and in the earth! The potential abundance from planting hemp seeds is mind boggling! Further...

June 17, 2008: A week has passed since we received the email of the Vote Hemp Report that included our article about Let there be Hemp!, the t- shirts and the website. A few shirts have sold and I expect there will be more as people get around to reading their emails. For now, we can manage the pace of the sales and we have made our first donation to VOTE HEMP, as promised! We're launching t-shirts into the Fourth of July parade crowd in Warren, Vermont and sell them at a booth during the post parade block party! What is so interesting is the response that people are having to the shirts when we wear them. I thought people would be drawn to ask questions or want to know: "Where did ya get that great shirt?!" Instead, there seems to be intentional avoidance of the issue! GOOD REASON TO KEEP GOING! When people have the facts, There Will Be Hemp! The people who have bought the shirts are visionary, courageous, and bold!

June 23, 2008: Plans for the Warren Fourth of July parade are underway and we'll be driving in FEATHER, showcasing Let there be Hemp! We were going to do a booth, but decided against it. We'll have plenty of t-shirts on hand if folks track us down post parade and want to buy one. James and Michael will probably toss a few shirts into the crowd, too ... other ideas are percolating!

July 1, 2008: Today, Hemp Diva received an email from a fellow who is in the US Air Force. He saw a LTBH post on CraigsList and he wrote: "You, sound like a real winner… try putting down the weed and getting a job. YOU ARE A BURDEN ON SOCIETY!" Is that so? A moment of compassion, seeing the reality that this man is reacting with anger to something he fears. Then, the cosmic sillyness of the words deliverd a laugh - if only this fellow could see who was reading his email... Hemp Diva runs a small corporation and actively participates in her community, not to mention her wise old age (a numerological 10). More important, he eschewed the opportunity to explore and visit this website to learn the FACTS. Let there be Hemp! is a SOCIAL EXPERIMENT, not only a business selling shirts, a fund-raiser and a website that challenges disinformation! Industrial hemp is NOT something you want to put in your pipe and smoke! We hear you get a headache and a bad cough. Change happens one mind at a time ... NEXT!

July 2, 2008: Received an email ALERT from Vote Hemp this morning! Progress makes progress! Just in time for 4th of July festivities!

August 3, 2008: SO, you might be thinking: "Now, why don't she write?" After the exhilaration of the Fourth of July Warren Parade, a respite to re-think and regroup was imperative. We tossed about 50 t-shirts into the crowd (twice the number we had "planned" to) and the kids loved the VOTE HEMP bars we gave them. Afterward, what a thrill to go to our Farmer's Market and parties around the Valley and see people wearing the Let There Be Hemp t-shirt! Now, we have about 90 shirts out there from New England to California.

I sense this is a lull time, though. There are important political issues up and this is an election year. I believe that progress in legalizing industrial hemp will remain incremental through the election and into 2009 and even 2010. If you happen to be acquainted with the art and science of astrology, you already KNOW that the old ways of thinking and the institutions we have known as 'the powers that be' are ineffective and breaking down. But, as always, there are visionaries, then there are the masses, or those who are the last to get the effects of "change". As always, we are witnessing the results of more forces in play than are visible to the untrained eye. The old chestnut: "Things aren't what they seem to be." is true!