The Great Teacher's Teacher.

Every night of my childhood Dad would stay up in conversation with me, examining the lessons offered my the day and handing down the knowledge and insights he had acquired in his old age. Kind and patient in manner he also had a sense of urgency, the kind common to a person whose task is far larger than their remaining time to complete it. His task was passing down my inheritance, that is, educating me; nothing else he had, Dad correctly reasoned, could persist in the trying times he foresaw.

When I was nine he sent me away to the mountain herders, to escape a war which was brewing in our own community, and as I left he gave me a book he had been writing since he learned that I was going to be born. The Seedbook. It was the first I knew of this book, but it was also the last time I would see my Dad, and since I never again conversed with him my childhood was ended as I rode away.

Every morning of my youth I studied The Seedbook, it was a thick leather bound tome, every inch, of every line, of each of a thousand pages was crammed with his shorthand. The first hundred or so pages were written simply and I could appreciate them right off, but the bulk of the book was dense and often turned to highly technical or elaborate writing which took me years of study to understand. The Seedbook rambled over every topic my Dad was fascinated by or suspected of being useful; each topic grew from a child level topics to the furthest extent Dad was capable of expressing by way of sections scattered by my Dad's fickle muses across the book. Each topic introduced with fairy tail like morality plays, and a hundred or more pages later would delve into the complicated realities of each subject, quoting pages at a time from the reference books my Dad had hoarded his whole life. He taught me though this book of all fields of knowledge concerning soil and seeds, poetry and maths, physics and history, meteorology and environment. A section I still recall vividly delved deeply into technical charts cataloging the composition and properties of the different materials left as salvage in abandoned building, on pages opposite he wrote me a personal letter where he struggled to express his regret about siring me at such an advanced age the he wouldn't be there for me as I grew up, musing about his feelings for my Mother and how unexpectedly they became lovers, then lamenting the powerlessness when she was arrested, and stopping mid thought to write an essay on the properties of radio waves. The book was every bit my father's spirit given a paper form which fit him better than he own flesh ever did.

When I tucked away the book to live each day, my Dad's spirit would follow me, filling my imagination with the conversation born in my childhood, the conversation and my Dad's spirit grew as I grew. Through these spiritual dialogs the ethics and techniques of the Seedbook took a new life in the soil of my spirit, they guided my own innovations in nomadic gardening, seed bearing, herding fire and water, serving and enriching the territory in general. I only had that book for 18 years before it was taken from me, lost forever. Loosing the book was in many ways more difficult that the first time I lost my Dad, and for years there after I lived in a dead world, where the very imagination which guided by each day became dark and cruel. It took me a long and trying life to discover that the best of that which was lost had become a part of me, but I have never felt youth since.

Every moment from then on was balanced between the dark resentment of a world Consuming itself as the all too many struggled for survival, and a bright faith in a fertile future I imagined could still come. A future where the seeds I could bear through these trying time might some day germinate and create beauty surpassing the vileness all around me of a world devoured down to bare granite bones. On the days lit by that faith I glowed with the beauty of a future of pure imagination, and during times when that faith failed I confess to being as viscous and consumptive as any of the many enemies I fought.

As I write this I am much older than my Dad lived to be: a younger cohort has taken on the daily burden of bearing the endangered seeds to the future; a respite from the Consumption has come to this territory with the outcome of the recent war; and I am free to spend my final years as he spent his, passing down what I can to an uncertain future.

In The Seedbook I learned to imagine a bright future, and I was given the tools which I used to bear the best things around me forward; from the darkness I learned lessons that humble any written teachings. So I will write a new Seedbook, recalling what I can from readings half a century ago, adding selections from the books in Dad's library with I have reclaimed, and putting myself and my experiences into the work. Dad's Seedbook may be lost, so I hope that my Seedbook will be a worthy gift to the future.

The Preamble to Seedbook by Heni.

Introduction to the Seed Bearers.

There is no finer course to wisdom than the remembrance of patters which have been eroded again and again by the Earth's currents. Those which recur we repeat in memory and thus etch in our humanity. Thus Journalism*, as opposed to clean perception of what has been, the judgement of what we can cultivate in ourselves. Then patterns judged consumptive which we wish not to partake in must, in prudence, be sealed by nobler patters of resolution.


Grokra the Sage of Fritzclave
(*Journalism transliterates the Henemum concept which could also be translated anthropology or history.)

History, as now told, is divided into two main sections and an intermezzo, the time before World Consumption, and the time since the Survivalist Era. Between them the Survivalist Era, the lesser time period separating them by *(~11) lifespans. All our era's literate societies have the same image of that period: Most of the land surface animated by creatures smaller than lap rats; Humans forced into alliance with other mega-fauna straining to survive in scattered refugia, leaving literature, history, and lawfulness behind that all efforts which would be needed to support them can focus on survival itself. But this term 'Survivalist' and the dream-cliches is invokes are both legacies of a culture which was the greatest exception.

(*Faur a quantity number which approaches phi^5.)

Isolated in the Rocky Mountains by the Basin salt flats and the Kansi dunes the Henemum culture maintained literacy, not merely for its clerical caste like the Tibetan Caliphate or the Arctic Brotherhood of the same period, but for the greater fraction of society. They were a historical people, preserving the greater share of the Pre World Consumption records extant today, and keeping careful journals of their own historyl. It was also a society which maintained various legal metrics, by which the excesses of the powerful could be effectively judged and checked. As their culture started to expand the others they would encounter were dismissed as 'Survivalists' on the criteria of lacking these traits. This critique on the cultures around and before the Henemum still define our framing of history.

For the major part of time since the Survivalist Era Henemum culture has deliberately avoided a major role in global affairs, but not before adjusting the course of history across the Earth by pollinating the many cultures emerging from the wounds of the Earth with their wisdom, both that preserved from before the World Consumption, and that distilled by their experiences since. The Paca Syndicate, to which I was born to, grew from seed thus pollinated, along with *(16) other cultures. Henemum culture gave the world the script and the language of historical scholarship and the language of international trade; they gave us the Natural Mathematics as a mature field of study; their concepts of law and commerce are still used to organize intercultural exchange; their study of historical patterns informs government policy on every continent; their practice of religious pluralism and their meditations on knowledge have ushered in the present relations between humanity and the divinities.

(* PraRu 13+3)

Culture today is an exploration of paths opened or maintained by the Henemum, as much as pre World Consumption civilization tested the limits of the city-state format. Unlike the developers of the city state format, who lost to oblivion before their society form's era of global dominance, the Henemum culture lives on quietly today. In my youth I moved to the homeland of the Nemi tribes and married into their people. It was joyful to discover that the way of life from *(~2207) years ago way still alive, the same traditions, games, tattoos, and mantra's that filled my childhood imagination were alive and active. Even the voice of Henemum casters from the Survivalist Era could be heard from their ceramic sound tubes. The Peak Arcologies that inspired the Paca buildings which first drew my attention to the Henemum are still the centers of bustling communities.

(*Thun a quantity number which approaches phi^16.)

Even though they have chosen to avoid the center stage of global affairs, the Henemum people still understand their role on the Earth as seed bearers. To keep alive the oldest stores of wisdom in the world, and to live as a guiding elder people among youthful and inexperienced cultures. It is with those duties in mind that I have been asked to present a Henemum history of the World for general education. Though historians around the world have access to good overviews of the major events of Henemum history, there is a lack of stories meant for mass appeal concerning the majority of their history. In deciding how to best approach this project I was at first overwhelmed by that vast amount of material to cover, but then I read the 'Metrics of History' by Grokra, from which I extracted the quote at the beginning of this section; which inspired my method for this survey.

Starting from the earliest heroes of Henemum folk lore through all the way to the end of the Isolationist period more than *(~1364) years later I will be covering the biographies of key cultural figures one lifespan at a time, spinning a single yard from many shorter strands of individual lives. Grokra's advice is my guidance in selecting so small a collection of figures from so rich a history, informed both by an attempt to connect the life of one figure to the conditions of the subsequent, and by my own life history, what parts of Henemum culture I have lived were shaped by these historical figures.

(*Gluv  a quantity number which approaches phi^15.)

Though known to historian's as the Henemum Culture, each tribe has its own unique name, and in more cases than not that name is the local dialects phrase for 'Seed Bearers'. So next I will introduce you to Hawee, or archaically, John Harvey. The first figure of four in the first era of my work, the Seed Bearers' era.