When our Quaker meeting decided to re-do our backyard at the
meetinghouse, I was initially disturbed.
I liked it the way it was. I have
a hard time accepting change and therefore decided not to participate. I had some grieving to do.
Hearing members of our community describe the back yard as
muddy, and too shady was heart breaking.
I felt ashamed for having loved it so much.
All of the aspects of the back yard that people were complaining about were treasures to me.
It was as if these people had to fall out of love with the back yard in
order to begin visualizing a change.
These
people had a dream.
It was a dream that
the land could be shared with other creatures.
Regardless of other aspects of the new model that did not reflect this
vision, good compromises were made.
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| Borage by Glee |
I wanted some time to say good-bye to the previous
landscape, the memories, the celebrations, the times when I sought grounding
there. I was so filled with emotion, I couldn’t
ask for what I wanted. I was concerned
it would make me look as if I were weak or afraid of change, like I didn’t care
about our elders who couldn’t go out there and enjoy it. I didn’t want to stop the project, I just
felt tender about the place and the spiritual experiences I’d had there.
At home, new neighbors had just moved in next door and began
pulling out all of the landscaping, putting in a fence with small solar lights
on the top of each post. They put in a
roll out lawn in the front and back yard, trimmed the old tree and removed a
deck from the side of the house. I’m not
sure why I had any attachment to the house or to what was around it, but I did. It is part of the land where I live and I knew
someone before them had loved it, loved the plants they’d planted there, and
had nurtured the land for over 20 years.
There were so many things about what my new neighbors were doing that upset
me. I felt angry and helpless, but mostly,
it was change I was concerned about.
Faith, the woman who had just moved in, is a friendly
person, and a kind, conscientious neighbor.
She said the plants that had been there were dying. I scoffed and tried not to glare, as I
complained to my family on the side.
Soon after the neighbor’s lawn was rolled out, the ants came over to our
house with a hunger unmatched by any I had seen. The pest control measures the neighbors had
taken to remove all unwanted guests were extreme. Because we try not to use poison, we began a
long, embroiled relationship with the ants, eventually settling for a permanent
line in the kitchen and in the upstairs bathroom.
I had more reasons to grumble about my new neighbors and all
the changes to our environment. I didn’t
ask for anything from them, because I feel I have no right to complain. I just had to accept that what they do on
their half acre is their own business. The lines were drawn a hundred years
ago. In the end, this is all about
ownership, or stewardship, if you like. If we are privileged, we buy our bit of land and
do our best to tend to it. But, owning
property is not without community interdependence. After all, we have rules about noise, trees, water,
sidewalks, parking, pests, pets, pollution, trash and more.
Even if we hardly know the people on our street, or in our
neighborhood, we have expectations about neighborly conduct. When we live so close together, we kind of
need one another. We need trust,
respect, acceptance, help, communication, safety, and sometimes friendship. I know I feel better when I know the people on
my street, for better or for worse.
Though my neighbors don’t have to ask permission to change their
landscaping, they might need to feel accepted by those who live around
them. Over time, my husband and I have
grown to love and understand our new neighbors.
Our children play together, I bring her vegetables from my garden, and
she gives me a ride to our children’s school.
From this, my kids have learned to bring their child a piece of left
over birthday cake and in turn, he makes them brownies. They are learning the gifts of
relationship.
Several years ago, my husband and I decided to transform our
land into a place where we could grow food, and raise chickens. We wanted to be part of the local food
movement, understanding that much urban land is not used for growing food, and
instead, food is brought from hundreds of miles away, and grown on industrial
farms using chemicals, and genetically modified seeds to give us what we need
or want at all times of the year. We wanted to be part of the solution. So, we dug up portions of our lawn, amended
the soil, and put in vegetable gardens.
We composted our food waste to go back into this tiny system we were
building.
We studied permaculture and tried our hand at
gardening. I grew up in the country and
had helped with our family garden throughout my childhood. No matter where my mother moved us when I was
a child, even in the city, we always had a garden. Within a month of moving into a new house, a
dump truck full of wood chips would arrive next to our house, or the old rusty
rototiller would come out and spend the day transforming a side yard into a
vegetable garden. My mother needed the soil
like she needed air. I learned to have
food growing around us everywhere we lived.
It was fruit trees, tomatoes, beans, peppers, cucumbers, squash. So, that’s what we stared with. I thought I knew how to grow food. What I thought was an innate ability for us,
proved to be a challenging and disappointing experience. We had to study and ask questions. We had to make friends with other gardeners
and farmers.
By the fourth year, we have graduated to potatoes, a fig
tree, berries, and winter squash. We are
very proud of our accomplishment. With
permaculture, my family has even started to understand how these veggies and
other plants get along together in the garden. The next step is to cultivate a
safe place for bees, and get more involved in our community garden or a CSA. With these changes, humans might continue to
live together in community without destroying the delicate balance of our
ecosystem. We feel like we are helping to keep our
city sustainable (said sarcastically with thumbs in invisible coveralls).
There’s something else we humans share. There is the soil, the water, the air, the
wood, the seeds, the pollinators, and the land, and we share it all with the
rest of the living creatures who connect us to this grand biosphere of Earth
and beyond. It’s much bigger! Just when I thought I was done!
I began to explore the difference between stewardship and
permaculture.
Here we were trying to use the land responsibly, by asking
her to make food. We asked the food to
grow and to give us sustenance and seeds.
We put energy, water, and compost back into her. The water alone was costing us a pretty
penny. At the end of it all, we were
barely breaking even financially. Our
garden was functioning like a hobby. It
is a thing of privilege.
When I started learning more about the other things my
garden needs, I realized there’s very little I can control when it comes to
growing our own food. The amount of
sunlight and rain and the pollinators were all things we need the ecosystem to
provide. What I realized is that we are
all in this together.
The way my neighbor does her landscaping makes a difference
for all of us. If she wants a big lawn,
lots of water, and dislikes bees, other living things in the neighborhood don’t
have enough to survive. The birds, the
worms, the ants, the flowers, the grubs, the snails, the raccoons, the microbes
and bacterium in the soil, all suffer because the continuation of a connected
system requires health and balance. Some
will grow large and wide, while others will grow narrow and sparse, each according
to its own need. This is something like
equity.
There are some theories behind this. Keeping the system moving, growing,
adjusting, and changing, mirrors the way the biosphere of our Gaia organism functions. All things belong to all places. Like the butterfly effect, Quantum theory, and
like the god particle named by the Quantum Activist. If we look at the form that follows function,
the form is the ecosystem at its most infinite.
Each smaller circle drawn within is a mirror of the larger pattern, as
it feeds back into itself. A feedback
loop, which is part of understanding systems theory describes nutrients feeding
back into the system.
You’ve maybe seen drawings of a tree’s ecosystem, becoming its
own nutrients by dropping its leaves to mulch its roots, taking again a bit of
itself mixed back into the life and growing again and again until the tree
itself dies and goes back to feed the myriad
of selves. (Myriad of selves is an analogy of everlasting life of the Spirit
beyond the earth body. It is a way of
conceptualizing how souls die and return to the whole, and then return to a
vessel, through which the energy of the universe travels.) And on and on it goes, like the Buddhist
mantra Gatte Gatte Para Gatte Para Sam
Gatte Bodhi Swaha.
Not done yet…
Within each cycle of this tree is another cycle just like it
and yet completely unique. A tangible,
real, moving, changing system is constantly creating itself, and by this
process, it appears, reflects, expresses, and goes back into the myriad of
selves. For only one unique moment will
it ever be like that moment, it is but a pattern of itself becoming itself. It
is all existing at once, as long into the future as one can fathom and as far
back into the past as one can sense in the skin, the bones, earth, all in the
womb of our constant becoming. Keep
doing this. Keep with this pattern. Think of it as a rhythm on a drum or the
breath in Buddhist mediation. Go back to
it when you feel far from it. It might
feel releasing, without fear, and a sense of never being alone, never separate,
because it is not possible to be separate.
The notion of separate
was kept for us, on our behalf, for eons, so that we may return to
wholeness. What? Think of it like
breathing. We cannot breath in forever;
we have to stop and breath out. It was
always becoming and it will always be becoming, meaning the moment we are in
now is always gone the moment we notice it.
It is moving and changing, dying
and being reborn. It is an offering from
our future myriad selves of the
ecosystem, to look, to feel, and to listen, for the principles that have been
sleeping, for seeds planted during eons before the eon where our spiritual
ancestors were told about our separateness.
There is an analogy of this becoming in the Garden of Eden, and in the many gardens all around
us. (Becoming,
here, refers to the acceptance of a perspective by a group of people which
eventually leads to a paradigm shift, in this case the idea that the soul is
trapped in this earthly body, separate from God and separate from Goddess.)
Okay, back to Earth.
We often fret and moan over the gardens around our homes in urban
settings. Portland, Oregon was a deep
forest of trees, with layers of wet, spongy mulch below and together with the
plants that found a home in wet shade.
The love of the tree shelters life.
My wooden house is made of that forest, the ancient beams hold her
history and the place from which the wood comes. Here, we are lucky to know the wood that we
took from the earth.
These houses quietly hold a memory of the hundred or so
years of deforestation in their wood. I
recall that my family and I are still in love with the forest here around
us. When we try to return what we can to
the order humans found long ago, we become the creators once again, like the US
who built the houses and used the wood, the water, and the soil to create what
we are now. We are so in love with this
place that we continue to keep the system going. How will we ever create the shade again
unless we relinquish our power over,
our separateness, and let time continue to move and fold into future and
past. I see this as letting the
earthquake come and shake us around, let the trees fall in our path and we can
learn to go around it.
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| From Ad Busters 2013 |
If we come back to the circle we are part of, the
system will reflect our presence among the myriad
of selves. We will know our wholeness and it will
appear so. It is for us together, the myriad of selves (our relations) to envision
our wholeness, whose seeds are already planted by our future and coming from
our past. What does this mean? It means the Earth will regenerate herself to
accommodate life. It just may not look
the way it looks now.
Humans alone, and certainly not a select few humans cannot
do the creating. It would soon be out of balance and they will feel a nudge to
come back into alignment, to let the others (our non-human relations) express
their life to the whole. In the now of
letting go, we will glimpse it as it moves, as if sensing a ghost. Look at it, listen to it, and we will begin
to see it more and more. It will
continue to wake up in the heart of the One.
And yes, our cities will change, our gardens will be set free, and we
will return to the garden where we are whole.
This means we are going to have to get okay with death. Not just death of a system we have built and
helped to maintain, but death in general.
Dying isn’t separation; it is a return to the whole.
By now, I can
understand that it’s all connected in one inseparable system. What my neighbor does effects the whole
planet. What’s more, my fabulous
vegetable garden and fruit trees were part of the problem, too. What? But, I thought, I was part of the
solution! I was part of a solution,
but not the solution.
Wrapping my head around all of this change was hard, but not
impossible. Climate change is the kind
of change that comes in spite of my reluctance.
Choosing non-participation isn’t going to work. It’s not people and process this time. It’s
grief, loss, and imbalance on a grand scale.
It’s the kind of change that makes it impossible for some people to
continue living on their piece of the planet.
We’re going to have to share, change our way of living, and mourn the
loss of our way of life.
