Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Spirituality came easy for me, being “normal” was hard. As a child I was allowed to wander alone in the woods, old farm buildings, pasture, and along the creek. We lived in the small house on my grandparent’s farm, while my grandmother and uncle lived in the big house. I would tell my mother I was going over to Grandma’s house and head off exploring.
We’re new to this, all of us. Whether banished from Eden or evolved from hunting and gathering is irrelevant. Either way, we’re a collective eye-blink from integration. There was a time when I wouldn’t have fussed much over sparrows or hummingbirds. There was a time when I wouldn’t have been alone, but in a band, right here, tight-knit and stitched by kinship. It’s no energy bar that would’ve sustained me, but knowledge, the same knowledge as the wolves and bears.
It is from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, that Stefan Geyer, an artist and hotelier with many talents, models his book Zen in the Art of Permaculture Design on. The book, a light, bright blue novelette, is Geyer’s meditation on a life of permaculture and meaning, and hints how to use permaculture design to shift one’s perception to both the natural world and our own human nature using the lens of Zen Buddhism techniques.
What, if anything, is sacred? ‘Nothing should be sacred!’ comes the impatient answer from the enthusiasts for gene-splicing and geoengineering, the singularitarians eager to upload their consciousness into a disembodied digital eternity. To call anything sacred is to set it off-limits to improvement by the application of human ingenuity – to stand in the way of progress.
To be as clear about this as I can, I am still hoping for a sort of drastic cultural change, a new way of seeing and believing, a new paradigm, a reorientation of wants and expectations, dreams and desires—and all the more so for abandoning some of the pragmatic and logistical aspirations that initially led the way in many a Transition imagination. In other words, I’m rather simply asking this: what if we focus mainly, now, on all the inner change that has happened along the road to Totnes?
What animates you? What is the spiritual or religious impulse underneath the work you do to save those parts of our world that you want to protect and nurture? Is there a spiritual or religious teacher or movement that inspires you to do the uncomfortable work of politics or social change? What role, if any, does faith play in whatever you do that brings you out of your private life and into the public square? How do you “keep the faith” as commentator Tavis Smiley often says in signing off?
The word that keeps coming to my mind to describe this evening is ‘fragile’. It captures both the strength and the vulnerability of my situation, of the puffins and of the islands themselves.
I think it also matters politically, because spirituality, a whole life lived in the way Potter was describing, is of enormous importance in the struggle for social change. This may sound odd given the common image of mystics as people who are removed from the world, but I’m convinced that spiritual experience is one of the keys to the radical transformation of society.
The mid-morning office is a sun office and the heart of the workday on a small farm. It is the sweat-of-the-brow, hands-in-the-dirt, muscle-to-the-posthole-digger time of day, the time to get it done and not waste time.
What does it mean to honor Grace Limits? Dowd considers Grace Limits to be “the inescapable, geological, ecological, and thermodynamic constraints to which humanity must rapidly adjust.”
This frees us from the need to answers to the question “how should we live?”, at least in any grand manner.
On a hot day in late June, about ten of us, and some of our children, gathered at the water’s edge of Lake Michigan.
