badgerboy
6th October 2015, 18:12
From my blog this morn--thanks for reading.http://davidastuart.wordpress.com
In abandoning the world we are lost; we are lost again and again. We may speak poignantly of the experience of being lost; but we cannot be clear about ourselves and our situation in so far as our thinking is dominated by that experience. Disillusionment with the world knows nothing of the sacrament of co-existence. It can find no place for the sacramental act. It can conjure out of itself no philosophy of action, for its ultimate implication is inaction.
Henry Bugbee
Even when I was a very sick child with chronic asthma, I had no desire to transcend any portion of the world, of “human suffering.” I learned (out of necessity?) that although I was not my body but an infinite soul, I should want that body intact to engage the earth. Blessed with a rural setting, I was in the natural world daily and all the ecology spoke to me–literally. Every grass, sedge and rush. Every snake and the frogs they hunted. This was the 1970’s and my mom explored many ’70’s crunchy things, like Linus Pauling, Uri Geller,and the Findhorn Foundation, where original co-founder Dorothy Maclean was communing with ‘nature spirits,’ which she called devas, stemming from her study of Sufism. The farmers at Findhorn credited communing with the plant devas for their huge and early vegetables. Some locals said that the vigor was just due to horse manure.
As I gardened by my mom it became second nature to talk silently to the seeds planted, the seedlings first breaking ground and the mature crops when harvested–gently twisting off tomatoes, holding back the branches so they would not break. So I was already deeply in this mindset when I grew up and took mushrooms in the woods and on the beach. Taking the mushrooms was not necessary to fuel my resident ability to commune with plants but it nailed it down, with iron railroad spikes. The author feels a need for hyperbole here.
I kept my hands in the soil as much as locale afforded, over the years. In Montana, with wheelbarrow loads of potatoes, to Eugene Oregon, reclaiming hard-pan clay soils. The I went back to school, got a degree in science and went out into the rangelands of central Oregon to conduct massive plant inventories. Trend and health of the land–why are these plants here? What was/is historically here? What might happen, given what is here? What is the hard science, what is the nature of every spirit in these plants, what is the god/goddess within the ecology of this whole site? So when you see government ecologists in the field, know they are often more than “the man.” They are in church and getting paid for it.
This autumn, 2015, I am beginning the winter garden for the new farm I am partnering in. The relics from the first white people on this land go back to around 1900-1920’s. One of these is the rose “Harrison’s Yellow.” It originated as a cultivar from the garden of a lawyer in NYC named Harrison in the 19th century. Pioneers took it west along the Oregon Trail, where they planted it like crazy, because they wanted later folks to know they were the first white people. I found this Harrison’s Yellow choked by a young filbert tree, rooted in completely parched clay, with bricks and other pioneer garbage at its base. I took out the tree, broke open the clays and mounded horse manure. I watered the rose and it said more, that its roots were deep and could I just leave the hose going for a while until it was saturated.
Stewardship is an often used word within the teaching of “Natural Resource Management”. Coexistence is implied to a degree in the teaching of what is stewardship. We have to understand the wants, needs and desires of the ecology we strive to protect. How does our living daily partner with that? You can’t “manage” a marriage, or a love based partnership. Some people do (okay,probably many do) but then those situations if “manageable”, are probably low on passion. I think we should always give passion its due. I believe sustainable farmers are driven by healthy doses of passion and faith that they are coexisting the best they can with the ecology of their farm and garden. This not only results in food, but it extends to a world view and action that is both in and of the world. Disillusionment with the world knows nothing of the sacrament of co-existence. It can find no place for the sacramental act. It can conjure out of itself no philosophy of action, for its ultimate implication is inaction.
In abandoning the world we are lost; we are lost again and again. We may speak poignantly of the experience of being lost; but we cannot be clear about ourselves and our situation in so far as our thinking is dominated by that experience. Disillusionment with the world knows nothing of the sacrament of co-existence. It can find no place for the sacramental act. It can conjure out of itself no philosophy of action, for its ultimate implication is inaction.
Henry Bugbee
Even when I was a very sick child with chronic asthma, I had no desire to transcend any portion of the world, of “human suffering.” I learned (out of necessity?) that although I was not my body but an infinite soul, I should want that body intact to engage the earth. Blessed with a rural setting, I was in the natural world daily and all the ecology spoke to me–literally. Every grass, sedge and rush. Every snake and the frogs they hunted. This was the 1970’s and my mom explored many ’70’s crunchy things, like Linus Pauling, Uri Geller,and the Findhorn Foundation, where original co-founder Dorothy Maclean was communing with ‘nature spirits,’ which she called devas, stemming from her study of Sufism. The farmers at Findhorn credited communing with the plant devas for their huge and early vegetables. Some locals said that the vigor was just due to horse manure.
As I gardened by my mom it became second nature to talk silently to the seeds planted, the seedlings first breaking ground and the mature crops when harvested–gently twisting off tomatoes, holding back the branches so they would not break. So I was already deeply in this mindset when I grew up and took mushrooms in the woods and on the beach. Taking the mushrooms was not necessary to fuel my resident ability to commune with plants but it nailed it down, with iron railroad spikes. The author feels a need for hyperbole here.
I kept my hands in the soil as much as locale afforded, over the years. In Montana, with wheelbarrow loads of potatoes, to Eugene Oregon, reclaiming hard-pan clay soils. The I went back to school, got a degree in science and went out into the rangelands of central Oregon to conduct massive plant inventories. Trend and health of the land–why are these plants here? What was/is historically here? What might happen, given what is here? What is the hard science, what is the nature of every spirit in these plants, what is the god/goddess within the ecology of this whole site? So when you see government ecologists in the field, know they are often more than “the man.” They are in church and getting paid for it.
This autumn, 2015, I am beginning the winter garden for the new farm I am partnering in. The relics from the first white people on this land go back to around 1900-1920’s. One of these is the rose “Harrison’s Yellow.” It originated as a cultivar from the garden of a lawyer in NYC named Harrison in the 19th century. Pioneers took it west along the Oregon Trail, where they planted it like crazy, because they wanted later folks to know they were the first white people. I found this Harrison’s Yellow choked by a young filbert tree, rooted in completely parched clay, with bricks and other pioneer garbage at its base. I took out the tree, broke open the clays and mounded horse manure. I watered the rose and it said more, that its roots were deep and could I just leave the hose going for a while until it was saturated.
Stewardship is an often used word within the teaching of “Natural Resource Management”. Coexistence is implied to a degree in the teaching of what is stewardship. We have to understand the wants, needs and desires of the ecology we strive to protect. How does our living daily partner with that? You can’t “manage” a marriage, or a love based partnership. Some people do (okay,probably many do) but then those situations if “manageable”, are probably low on passion. I think we should always give passion its due. I believe sustainable farmers are driven by healthy doses of passion and faith that they are coexisting the best they can with the ecology of their farm and garden. This not only results in food, but it extends to a world view and action that is both in and of the world. Disillusionment with the world knows nothing of the sacrament of co-existence. It can find no place for the sacramental act. It can conjure out of itself no philosophy of action, for its ultimate implication is inaction.