Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Tommy Tolson <healinghawk@earthlink.net>]

Thomas Jefferson's struggle remains central to the political project of a free people: maintaining their freedom.  We can't DO anything for which we're unwilling to suffer the consequences, as I learned in my continuing process of recovery from substance addiction, and remain in integrity with nature.  This idea is central to the corporation's reason for existence: to externalize, as much as possible, responsibility for ownership's (the ruling elite's) behavior in the world.  Paul sets a great example of countering this abdication by taking responsibility for changing his own behavior to suit himself, so that he sleeps nights. 

Descartes, by abstracting humans out of nature, set the stage for modernity, the most ecologically destructive epoch in human history.  Derrida said that the guiding metaphysic of western culture is the arbitrary division of life into binary oppositions - nature/human, rich/poor, white/black, male/female - and arbitrarily privileging one term while subjecting the other term to the privilege of the first.  Privilege/subjection is thus the central binary opposition in western culture, the very core of its meaningfulness in the only *real* world, the natural world. 

Those working to relieve the corporation of responsibility, on the other hand, sought/seek to breach, through lumping the corporation's fictitious personhood and the human's natural personhood together under the law, an inconvenient division which was not a social construction but a natural construction,  Bridging this division rendered the law as absurd as all law that chooses to violate nature. 

The thing about responsibility is that, in any choice, responsibility for the consequences of behavior *does* exist.  Evading this responsibility by hijacking the law is a thread one can follow back in history to the early days of western culture, when the ruling elite took up agriculture, forced the people out of The Garden (the social practice of horticulture, working with nature rather than against it by only partially domesticating it), and put them to work producing a surplus with which to finance armies constituting the credible threat which enforces the false abstraction of human independence from nature and a priesthood to rationalize nature's violation, the true original sin. 

Later, Descartes said that he could think without his body, and a humanity traumatized into submission did not challenge this idiocy until recently.  Political freedom means the ability to respond to nature in real time in such a way that our behavior remains within nature's constraints, because nature produced our species and we can never remove ourselves from this central fact of human existence.  Composed of the same substances as the land and all other material manifestations of nature's creative process of symbiosis, we *are* nature.

We are free to do as we please until we present an imagined threat to the ruling elite (the same ruling elite it's always been) and we are subjected to organized force, the horror of being subjected to centralized violence by the soldiers of the status quo who do, rather than being with the truth embedded in their action.  They just "do as they are told."  In this way, the responsibility for the behavior of these soldiers is abstracted into the behavior of the state.  If political power derives from the consent of the governed, then we, the governed, have had the responsibility for oppressing ourselves foisted off on us.  The utter absurdity of this, I think, is rarely appreciated.  Those who fear the responsibility of freedom become the purveyors of the "cop in the head" idea driving the state's social control apparatus.

Thus to grow a garden is a profoundly political act today - an exercise of freedom.  But it's not enough.  Responsibility cannot be abstracted out of behavior in any naturally ethical human settlement pattern.  We are responsible for our behavior in nature, and if standing on the brink of the abyss of extinction doesn't get this point across to us, we are extinct in the next blink of nature's eye, after having ruined the planet's life support system, Gaia, who lives at the convergence of earth, water, and sun, producing beings who, through living, maintain homeostasis in Earth's biosphere.  We, along with all other material beings running on the energy produced by nature, life, ARE Gaia.  When we encounter nature as a living subject, like us, and seek to have a relationship with it rather than to know it, we can then internalize the way of being rather than of doing, and live out the responsibility for the behavior of walking off the brink and joining life in process, having found the path to our home within the grace of nature's constraints. 

Through this face to face encounter with nature, as Freya Mathews analyzes in her wonderful book, For Love of Matter, we scrape the muck of fear off of responsibility.

With my embodied mind, nature's mind, I think.

Smiles.
Tommy       

   
On 6/24/10 7:31 PM, Tradingpost wrote:

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 “I hope we shall... crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our government in a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”
-- Thomas Jefferson, 1816