Prana and Permaculture -- The Adventures of Having Pink-Eye at Earth Activist Training

I’m at Earth Activist Training right now, on my day off from student teaching here with Starhawk, Jason, Laura Maples, and Erik.  In spite of the fact that the training is so intense, I feel completely renewed and impassioned – I felt a shift happen on that first day, during our first brainstorm about what this course is about, as I listened to the course participants share what the word "Permaculture" meant to them.  Thrivability.  Restorative.  Spirals.  Food forests.  Earth working earth.  Living harmony.  Relationship.

Being here at Earth Activist Training and the feeling of renewal that it has brought could not have come at a better time for me.  I came here suffering from post-Occupation burnout, heavy financial challenges, biting and sometimes debilitating self-doubt, stress, and a bad case of pink-eye.  Even though I only have a couple of bucks to my name and it’s a fairly stressful situation here, with 14 hour work days the norm,  the pink-eye has cleared up and my heart feels listed.  I’m present to the beauty of the world again, the blue sky marbled by wispy clouds, the tapestry of green trees blanketed over the steep Cazadero hills, the warmth of the sunshine (even if does seem is a bit too-sunny for mid January), and the feel of the living earth under my feet.  She is not simply ground.  She is a being, and my feet touch and are touched by her skin of rock and herb and soil.

Starhawk told us during the opening circle that in studying and teaching permaculture, she found a “how-to” manual for living a spiritual path that centers on healing the earth and living in harmony with the earth's natural systems.  Synchronistically, during the many hours I spent lying on my back with chamomile and eyebright compresses on my teary, irritated eyes, the one thing that I productive thing I managed to do was to listen to a beautiful set of podcasts about Ayurvedic medicine by Jai Dev from Floracopeia.  Ayurveda is a holistic science (related to yoga) that studies how lifeforce – called prana – takes shape, moves, and manifests in nature. 

Both of these courses of study -- permaculture and Ayurveda -- stem from the natural human craving to understand the miracle that is our world.  For many of us in industrialized societies, this natural yearning has been exploited to bolster a mythology that tells us that humans are inherently disconnected and even at odds with the forces of nature, rather than nurturing and deepening an understanding of the inherent interconnection of all beings and the divine intelligence of life – which is my mythos, the story that I align my life with now.  It is also the mythos of indigenous people all over the world, and my own indigenous ancestors. 

That one thing – the act of aligning with a paradigm of interconnection rather than disconnection, life rather than mechanism  -- is itself an act of healing, a balm for body and soul.  Actually, I don't doubt that my heart is always present to the interconnection of life and the beautiful, overarching divine intelligence of the cosmos.  The issue is really that I become disjointed inside of myself: mind from body, soul from mind.  Ayurveda philosophy teaches that one of the most prominent causes of disease (perhaps, actually, the most detrimental) is that disjointedness, which they call “forgetting of our true nature.”

How can we forget our true nature?  What makes this happen?  It depends on so many factors, but for me, it is the things that spin me into a wobbly irregular orbit: electric lights overhead as I stay awake long into the night reading one day (only to fall asleep after a late dinner the next), flying on jet planes and going through radioactive security checkpoints, a sporadic but busy schedule, the addictive buzz of the internet and cell phones, anonymous relationships with most of the people that I interact with in my daily city life.  It’s a certain kind of crazy.  I don’t feel that kind of crazy here, in the hills of Cazadero, submersing myself in the beauty of this gorgeous natural place and the hopeful determination of the Permaculturists.  I can also see, delving deep into this science of sustainability and integrating ways to restore what has been damaged, a way out of the trap of craziness... a way out of this disjointed lifestyle that fosters the forgetting of my true nature.

I wonder what it would be like to interweave some of these systems of traditional healing with the cutting-edge world of Permaculture, which is so focused on earth-healing.  Wouldn't it be amazing to apply the study of prana and how lifeforce manifests into matter to a radical design system that focuses on the ways that plants help protect one another from pests, and how to recycle graywater, and creating alternative currencies and timebanks?  Sounds like a rich possibility, perhaps one to keeping thinking on.  Of course, it isn’t like David Holmren and Bill Mollison and the other founding members of the Permaculture movement birthed their ideas out of nowhere -- they too studied the methods of traditional cultures.

I feel excited about where this is all going: Occupy, Permaculture, the Transition Town Movement, and the plethora of people studying nature-based healing arts and spiritual practices around the world.  It’s the beginning of 2012, a year that for many hallmarks the beginning of the end of the world -- yet another thing we learned from an indigenous culture, and like many of those things, was butchered during translation (aka appropriation).  This is not the end of the world.  It’s the beginning of a new way of living on this earth that involves reclaiming the wisdom of our ancestors, healing the miraculous life-giving systems and our own sanity, and deepening our understanding of balance, relationship, and our truest natures. 

Thrivability.  


Restorative.  


Spirals.  


Food forests.  


Earth working earth.  


Living harmony.  

Blessed be.


* * * * *

Want to be inspired?  Here are some good places to start:
Earth Activist Training
What is Permaculture? from Penny Livingston and the Regenerative Design Institute
Another article on Permaculture by my co-teacher Eric Ohlsen, owner of Permaculture Artisans
A good article on the Transition Town Movement at Huffington Post
Permaculture at Occupy Wall Street
A beautiful page about Edible Forest Gardens
More of Mona Caron's beautiful utopian images of the future

Obsessed

WOULD ANY SANE PERSON think dumpster diving would have stopped Hitler, or that composting would have ended slavery or brought about the eight-hour workday, or that chopping wood and carrying water would have gotten people out of Tsarist prisons, or that dancing naked around a fire would have helped put in place the Voting Rights Act of 1957 or the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Then why now, with all the world at stake, do so many people retreat into these entirely personal “solutions”?
-- Derrick Jensen, "Forget Shorter Showers: Why Personal Change Does Not Equal Political Change."

      Derrick Jensen is a man who's words have rippled through the environmental movement like a virus, leaving us unable to determine whether or not the man is more a blessing or a curse.  During the JM intensive, I took to reading his book, Endgame, which is a work that is about as depressing as the title sounds.  One of the main premises of the work (there are twenty three) is that "Civilization is not redeemable."  Another is that "Love does not imply pacifism."  I think I was attracted to his anger, because anger is hard for me to access within myself and hard for me to understand when others express it in ways that are not loving or pacifist.   One hundred and something pages into the book, with a thousand or so more to go, I found myself enshrouded in a gray cloak of dullness and dispassion.   I told Joanna about it, and she told me not to take Jensen too seriously.  "You've got to take that man with a grain of salt.  What Derrick Jensen has always needed was a good editor," she said. 

    But this post isn't really about Jensen (although I do think that the article quoted above is a very good read and am not ashamed to plug it one bit).  It's about dumpster diving.  Now, I'm not insane enough to believe that dumpster diving would have stopped Hitler, or that it can stop the corporations or agri-business industry or anything of the other big baddies of the world.  After all, the trash that is rebirthed back into food through dumpster diving comes from those corporations and the agri-business industry.  However, it seems to me that after a couple of weeks of diving that it can provide for many of my food needs in a way that reduces the amount of money (and life-force energy) that I pump into the IGS, and that it helps reduce waste.
    Moreover, I think its one of the best adventures I've engaged in in the urban world for quite some time.
    I'd heard about dumpster divers for years, and for the most part, have found the practice to be only somewhat shy of disgusting.  My mother (who is a devout reader of this blog) instilled in me a distinct wariness of possibly tainted foods, quite possibly because she contracted salmonella sometime very near the day of my birth.  We were always a family, in my memory, that was very concerned about how chicken was prepared, and what if there was any way it might have touched anything during its raw state.  Dishwashing was done with distinct fastidiousness or you'd be doing it again.   Suspicious milk was immediately released down the drain, no questions asked.
    But in my "adult" life, if one can call it that, things have changed slowly for me.  Part of that has to do with my love of Temporary Autonomous Zones, a term coined by anarchist Hakim Bey, which has to do with the socio-political tactic of creating temporary spaces that elude formal structures of control.   Here's just a tidbit to whet your appetite:

The T.A.Z is like an uprising which does not engage directly with the State, a guerilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen, before the State can crush it... Participants in insurrection invariably note its festive aspects, even in the midst of armed struggle, danger, and risk. The uprising is like a saturnalia which has slipped loose (or been forced to vanish) from its intercalary interval and is now at liberty to pop up anywhere or when. 
--Hakim Bey,  Temporary Autonomous Zones (Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism)   

    My experiences at "loosened saturnalias" such as Burning Man, Free Activist Witchcamp, Common Ground in New Orleans, and the like, started to chip away at my attachment to utterly unblemished, pristine foods and food preparation (one more quick side note -- Penny Livingston Stark, with whom I did my Permaculture Training with, often said that we needed to dump all of the doomed-humanity talk and instead talk about "sustainable hedonism."  I love that idea -- and it definitely seems on the same wavelength as Bey's "loosened saturnalias."). 
    Anyway, at some point last year, I realized that I'd eaten tons of dumpstered food -- I simply hadn't been involved in the dirty work of dumpstering it.  The straw that broke the camel's back was when Jason and I were shopping for organic yogurt and found ourselves face-to-face with a young, pimply, and rather arrogant grocery store clerk who was determined to toss the tubs we were considering purchasing into a large trash can in the middle of the aisle.  Apparently they'd reached their "sell-by" date, which might also be considered their date of execution.
    We asked him if we could have the yogurt, rather than see them go into the trash.  He refused.
   "Are you telling me that if we'd come into this store ten minutes ago, we could have bought this yogurt for four dollars, but now we can't buy it or take it for free because it has to go into the trash?" Jason asked, his face getting that dark glowering look that I like so much -- as long as it isn't directed at me.  The grocery store clerk wasn't daunted, however.  He simply ignored us and continued to toss the tubs of yogurt into the gray trash can.
   Growling, Jason took my hand and marched from the store in a way that stated, quite clearly, that they would never get a dime of his money ever again.  We hopped into the car, looked at one another, and then drove around to the back of the store and waited.  That yogurt, we were determined, would be ours.
    Since then, Jason and I have started to become dumpster-diving addicts.  I can't pass a store these days without wondering where the dumpster is, if its locked, and if its better to try and hit it up during the day or at night.  He's the same way.  Just yesterday, walking down to a little organic shop to get some ice cream with a friend for her birthday, I saw him slow up as we got near the doors, appearing for all the world to be reading a flier posted up on a telephone pole -- which just happened to be right next  to the large, rectangular, slightly-smelly green coffer of abandoned goods one can always find somewhere in the outlying perimeter of a grocery store.  Smiling, I asked him if he needed me to give him a hand with anything.  Oh no, he said.  He was perfectly able and willing to do a little scoping while we did our scooping.
    That dumpster turned out to be a bit of a bust, but a subsequent birthday jaunt yielded some valuable information about a different local independent grocery store -- it just so happens that they set out their white "compostables" dumpster on Sunday nights.  Quite nearly the Holy Grail of the diving world.  One little peek inside revealed a whole case of slightly-soft tomatoes, a gaggle of green beans, some apparently-alright avocados, and numerous loaves of wrapped fresh bread. 
    So that night, in spite of the fact that our refrigerator was already quite full of perishable edibles, we decided to hit up the new spots in addition to our most reliable donor, which just so happens to be our neighborhood Trader Joe's.  I had to stop buying food from TJ's some years ago when I realized that the amount of plastic they use to wrap things that in no way need to be wrapped -- such as broccoli -- could rival the Great Garbage Patch, an island twice the size of Texas currently floating in the Pacific Ocean that's made up of cola bottles and shoes and wrappers and bags.  But the very quality of over-wrapping that made me give up purchasing food at TJs has made it the perfect fledgling-dive spot for a woman who's ick-to-"I'm-out" ratio is rather small.  Our kitchen is filled with dried bananas (once fresh), melons of many varieties, artisan breads, baking products, and various types of berries collected from their trash.
   This was the first night that we've ever brought along anyone other than our two selves, and also, coincidentally or not, the first night that we've ever been caught by the staff.  My friend Erin was waiting in the car, breastfeeding her little baby Bella (who is a freegan of the best sort), when suddenly the door to the trash bin area opened and two TJ workers stumbled upon Jason and me, he holding up a box of countless figs, me shaking my head no and going in for a second dive in hopes of another bottle of vanilla extract (can you really ever have too much?).
     It was an uncomfortable moment.  I mumbled something about needing boxes for moving.  Jason, not hearing my embarrassed mumbles, rumbled something about looking for food.  The TJ guys blinked, clearly surprised to find people in their bin area.  Finally, the one wearing a white beanie asked, slightly incredulously, "Are you guys dumpster diving?"
   "Um... yeah," I said.  "I guess so."  I felt amazingly ashamed, and found myself wanting to tell him that we weren't poor, we're simply anarchists.  On the one hand, it's true that we're unlikely dumpsterers -- Jason runs his own contracting business, and I have a successful massage therapist practice.  Erin is married to a successful software engineer.  All said and done, we each take numerous vacations a year and have it relatively easy where eating and survival are concerned.  On the other hand, it doesn't matter what we do for a living or how often we travel, because no matter what, there is no reason to be ashamed.  If anyone should be ashamed, it's Trader Joes, throwing out as much food as they do when there are so many people who go hungry in this world.  As many smarter people have said before me, starvation has much more to do with political will than scarcity of food.   If I didn't know that viscerally before, I certainly do.  This is the other side of abundance, the abundance that blends into excess.
   "That's so cool!"  Beanie Joe smiled.   His co-worker, slightly stockier, wore a wary expression that  clearly expressed that he didn't find it nearly so cool.  Either not caring or not seeing him, Beanie Joe went on, "I always want to keep the stuff that we're throwing away, and sometimes I try to, but if they find out they'll fire me, so..."
   "Yeah, we're, uh, not supposed to let anyone be back here," Stocky Joe said. 
    "Well, maybe we can just go around the corner for a bit and let you guys do what you're going to do, then," I said.  "We don't want you to get in trouble."
   That seemed to pacify Stocky Joe, so we did just that.  As we waited, I began to get worried about Erin and Bella, who didn't know what was going on -- it was taking he Joes quite some time to finish dealing withthe trash.
    Finally, once all was quiet on the dumpster front, we headed back.  I stopped by the car first, where Bella was still contentedly suckling at Erin's breast.  Erin said that the two guys had been by and had brought some eggs with them, which they were worried would be broken in the fall into the dumpster.  One, and I can only guess it was Beanie Joe, had asked us not to take all the flowers because he wanted to bring some home to his girl.  Like we can possibly bring all the flowers, I thought, once we headed back in to collect the last of the night's loot.  Inside the dumpster were lawn-bags full of cut blooms: roses, orchids, gerber daises, dahlias.
   We had so much food after our Trader Joes stop that it was apparent, even to our adventure-hungry hearts that there was no point in going to the compostables dumpster on Piedmont that had kindled the evening's adventure: our three green cloth bags and the milk crate we keep in the car (along with our rubber gloves) just for these occasions were full, and our refrigerator and freezer at home were near to bursting as it was.  Alas.  So, leaving it for another day, we jumped back into the car and started for home.
    As we headed out of Rockridge, I spotted a white dumpster by the Bart station -- peering more closely, I read that it was, indeed, another Compostables.  Sighing to myself, I mentally noted its location and turned back to the road. After all, really, we already had too much food. 
    Jason was laughing.
    "You saw it, too?" I said.
    He nodded.  "Couldn't miss it," he said.

Wild Blackberries Need No Intermediary

Today, for the first time since I've returned home, I finally found time to reflect on my time with Joanna Macy at the Land of Medicine Buddah.  It was a very powerful experience, one that is continuing to have reverberations and aftershocks in my life as time passes.  I feel more present with the work that I have long felt called to do in this world: as an earth-priestess, as a healer doing the work of the Great Turning.  The threads that seem to be pulling me with the most consistency and passion are bringing me ever deeper into a life that is different from what I'd ever imagined I would want at 31, or 35, or 70.  I'm trying to be open to that, to simply let go -- let go and go to Pittsburgh for the G20 actions, or to Copenhagen for the Climate Talks, or to wherever this wild ride takes me.

All day, as I've picked wild blackberries and made homemade yogurt and read about herbs and urban foraging and been loving and open with Jason, my partner, I've continued to feel peaceful and joyous  like I did at the retreat.  There is a sense of Time Magic happening -- it started in those woods, at a Buddhist monastery steeped in ancient practices and silence and tall redwood trees, yet continues even now that I've come home to my little pad in Oakland, surrounded by invasive and elegant Eucalyptus trees and the California Bays that in spite of their lush fragrance point to recent environmental destruction in these hills.  Every moment seems to stretch out, to open up, like a blossom that closed in the harsh darkness of the Industrial Growth Society and is now unfurling, petal by petal, in the pink dawn of new possibility.

Earlier today, picking the blackberries that are so profuse at this time of year that I can hardly keep up with them (that in fact I need to will myself to stop picking, for it seems they go on forever) I realized that I was learning about abundance in a way that I have never in my life understood it.  No matter how my friends have tried to tell me otherwise, it has long been one of my core beliefs that one of the unavoidable facts of life is that we must struggle in order to live, struggle to "make a living."  I may have wished it and even said otherwise, but in my heart I bought the myth inherent in that phrase: that the basic experience of living is something that must be made, willed, constructed.  There may be loopholes here and there, lucky breaks, but those are the exceptions that make the rule.  I've even found a couple of those loopholes here and there in my life, but those experiences didn't have the power to change the overall belief that I've carried with me since adolescence -- one that my intellectual father posited over and over again in my young life, the creed coming through in his actions even when his words said otherwise.

The Industrial Growth Society is completely dependent on a pervasive Myth of Scarcity: we are kept in chains by our belief that at the end of the day our survival is contingent on having money to buy food, to have a place to live, having water to drink. 

A couple of months ago, I went to a talk given by the urban homesteaders that founded the Freedom Farm movement -- home gardens that provide enough food to live on, even on a small city lot.  It was hearing them speak that helped me make the connection between freedom and food.

My epiphany, though it felt mind-blowing and intense, was quite simple: "Oh, right.  They have our food."

They -- the corporations, the IGS, the landowners -- whatever incarnation "they" are taking at the moment doesn't change the predicament.   "They" have the things that are essential to our survival, and if we don't do what "they" want (like working for them), we won't be able to have those things, and we will die.

The wild blackberries tell a different story, one that I could sink my teeth into in a way that made the truth of it unavoidable.   Abundance comes from the earth; it is natural -- it is the way of things when they are in balance -- it is ripeness waiting to be realized, and when it seems gone or lost, that is only because it is being stolen, suppressed, or adulterated.  The earth, of her own accord, nurtures us throughout our lives if we open ourselves to the juicy fertility of her and surrender our stubborn ideas about what wealth is, what happiness and success should look like, what it means to be satisfied.  She does not need to be paid -- nobody needs to be paid in order for our most primal, essential needs to be satisfied -- food, shelter, water, sunshine, sex.  Abundance and diversity-- not the scarcity of the IGS -- is the quintessential nature of life on earth, and has been since life began on this garden planet.

Just as Time, freed from the confines of the IGS during the retreat, seemed to unfold and blossom before me, today I found that so too does abundance.  The earth herself provides the sweetness and sustenance of the blackberries and elderberries and the miner's lettuce in the hills all around me.  No corporate power acts as intermediary or granter -- it simply is.  No man pays me so that I may in turn pay another.  She simply Is.