The Garden as Metaphor

My husband and son are sleeping, bellies full of braised beef and cabbage from our farm. Tomorrow’s pot of beans sits next to a rattling teakettle on the wood stove. As my favorite cup gets filled with Light of Day tea, I look forward to my writing assignment: How do we apply permaculture to our lives? I sense that my first two sentences have already begun to answer that question. (See article and more at https://healingtreefarm.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/permprogress2.pdf).

                                            Exactly a year ago my husband was recovering from cancer surgery. (He's
cancer-free now).

During that time we met "the look" with a practiced response.

"No, you're thinking of somebody else. That's not our story." 

Cancer wasn't the story. It was just a backdrop to the real story, a story about community.

I feel the same way about Permaculture. It's the backdrop to the story, not the story itself.  The real story is about the people, the work, the projects, the yields. It too is a story about communities.

I attended a Permaculture Design Course (PDC ) in February of 2010 because I wanted to learn how to be a better steward of our land.  It became apparent that the land was a metaphor in the framework I was learning. This was about whole systems thinking and decision-making. It was about designing solutions that could be applied liberally and universally. The take-away was a neural App, of sorts. The PDC training was the installation and initial tutorial of this App. It was up to me to learn and master how to apply it.

    

   What does the land want to be? 

The very first place this new application showed up was in a farm business planning class. After 10-weeks I proudly presented a blank sheet of paper.

It represented the realization that we should immediately stop trying to impose our business ideas upon this land. That maybe the best thing we could do was step outside, observe and ask the land what it wanted to be. What would happen if we allowed the land to make all the decisions about the size, the species, the carrying capacity and the type of farming we would do?

Yes, I drank the Kombucha.

Mistakes and an interview with PDC teacher,  Larry Santoyo helped keep it real. When pressed to define permaculture in an elevator speech lasting three floors, Larry flatly stated  “ I would get out on the next floor; I’d get the hell out of the elevator.” Later in the interview he defines Permaculture by what it is not. "So what, if it's a platinum LEED certified building [if] it's in the wrong place?!"  http://www.thepermaculturepodcast.com/2013/larry-santoyo/.

That's when I made the decision to let the work do the talking. By work, I mean the internal as much as external.

What happens when we read the patterns of our inner landscape? For me this has led to increasing clarity about the particular niche I occupy in this oddball polyculture I find myself. My default activity is holistic designing. Whether it's an image for a salon client, a master plan for a planning commission, a garden or any other desired outcome, that's what I do.  Whether interpreting the pattern in a cloud formation, the land or the bass line in a Motown R&B tune. 

Paul's default activity is playing in the background. He's always laying down the bottom, looking for the pocket.  

And at 17, it would be easy to say that Avery's default activity is texting! Raising a child is like reading a great novel. Only in retrospect do you see the foreshadowing. 

In the current chapter, my hero has had a powerful shift in his inner landscape. His heart broke open by a classmate's death, in the aftermath rose a clear decision to become a Navy Air Rescue Swimmer, "So Others May Live".  After the initial shock came the unmistakable recognition of that foreshadowing and existing pattern all along.

And so I pick up all these contrasting threads,  the warp and weft of all these roles and connections,  and
try to weave them into a tapestry.

The strongest thread is agricultural and connected to this land, this place. lt weaves over our family dinner table and under other tables, over the health of the land and under the health of the community; over  our livelihoods and under a local economy, over a master plan and under a zoning ordinance, over farm and food system projects and under a viable rural economy. This is social and financial permaculture letting the work do the talking. 

Brush removal

Some practical examples of the letting the work do the talking on our farm can be seen in the techniques used to establish a new garden area. After a site and sector analysis, we chose a spot that was overgrown with brambles and saplings. Our goats were more than happy to provide brush removal services while we did other things. 

Rototillers

The next crew had a blast digging up roots and rototilling the manure, bedding and fall leaves, making compost onsite. Unlike a rototiller, they are a renewable resource. Unlike a rototiller they gifted us with bacon. Among the ways I am able reconcile this as a recovering vegetarian is by remembering that none of us gets out alive. I honor their lives so full of joy and purpose, in service to others. Living this close and connected to a place and the circle of life within it has a moral and spiritual value inexplicable to the disconnected. 

Another technique successfully implemented was using water harvesting swales to solve long standing flooding issue while passively watering a productive array of edible perennials.

The garden and the landscape are fitting metaphors for life.

Day after day we strive to remove the 'brambles' to create something intentional. As humans in succession on this landscape, we have slipped past the pioneering phase and are looking toward the next stage of succession. 

What will it bring?


I think we know the drill:


observe...


interact...


watch for the pattern


to emerge.