Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
My garden is a plenum – a spatially continuous living community which includes me, its caretaker – and I intuitively experience it as such while simultaneously perceiving a visual panorama, an audible space filled with the music of cicadas, crickets and birds as well as an expanse of floral perfume.
Every sip of water, every breath of air, every morsel of food, and every time my heart beats. Gaia is within and around me. Who better to learn from than that?
I’ve always wondered where the myth of the “nature-starved city kid” originated. Who first penned the story about urbanites who are chronically disconnected from their natural environments, and how has this parable persisted into the present day?
It is my hope that we do not have many more summer solstices that pass largely unheralded. It is my belief that this aberrant time will, indeed, pass and there will be holy days again.
In fact, we don’t seem to realize that this living soil is the necessary foundation of a garden. Soil is not dirt.
Our initiative, Restore Forward, weaves ancestral and traditional methods of healing: for the Earth itself as we restore the land, for each other as we restore broken relationships, and for ourselves as we rebalance connection, at a time when our world feels more fractured than ever.
Pay attention to context, sight tells me. Design our society, lives and communities within the ecological framework, and we will prosper, maybe even find some genuinely founded happiness in this life.
In May our new book Det levande (The Living) will be published in Sweden. As can be gleaned from the title, the book’s theme is the relation between us and the rest of the living nature.
I think we are born with an innate sense of relationship; it has to be “educated” out of us to accept and participate in the current industrial food system.
In attending to my surroundings—from grasses to fences to building—my shoulders unclench and my breath slows. Any healing that might emerge in the environment, then, is mutual.
Eventually – and I’m still working on it – I accept that Nature is just doing her thing. She is communicating to me her boundaries and keeping me at bay, protecting her blue jays and possums and raccoons.
Delighting in being an expression of Earth in human form – not because it’s good, right or moral – but because it’s who we are.
