permaculture

["Healing Hawk" <healinghawk@earthlink.net>]

I'm wondering how Ecopsychology fits into Permaculture.  For the culture to
be permanent, doesn't it have to meet our psychological needs and heal our
psychological wounds?  I surely have them, from being opened up to nature's
suffering and watching corporatists march roughshod over the landscape for
money both in Sonoma County, CA and here in Austin.  I have this idea, too,
that a good Permaculture design places the residents of the design in a
position to fall in love with the land and its critters and tend that
relationship as carefully as they tend their marriage, and their
relationship with their kids and pets.  I have this idea that this is
intentional, and that, in a place where several families live on
Permaculture designs, there are social structures which allow people to heal
the wounds that arise from not getting relations with the land right the
first time, or second, or. . .   

 

Paul Shepard had quite a bit to say about not being able to mature as humans
without a healthy relationship with nature.  Theodore Rozak, et. al., wrote
Ecopsychology, that says a lot more.  Andy Fisher wrote Radical
Ecopsychology, that I'm re-reading, hoping to get some way to approach this
from it.  Is anyone else pondering this?

 

I've also practiced core shamanism for thirteen years.  The shaman, usually
a woman in European cultures (most were eliminated in the Inquisition), came
around to heal the people of their spiritual wounds.  I think that's the
sort of wounds we get when our relationships don't work.  Jung said we
aren't healed until we heal spiritually.  I do shamanic work with the land,
such as cleansings for disrespected land, soul retrievals for abused land,
and journeying to ask the soul of the land what it wants.  The land in Santa
Rosa where I lived with my wife, for instance, told me it wanted me to clean
it up and keep it covered.  That's when I found out how trashed it had been.


 

Isn't Permaculture, by default, in the business of creating culture?  If so,
how does it address this aspect?  Martin Prectel, a white guy who became a
Mayan shaman, says we in the US don't HAVE a culture, according to what he
calls a real culture.  

 

I see that my ecopsychological wounds, the wounds I carry from feeling at
one with nature and bearing witness to its destruction (thus my
destruction), get in my way, from time to time, and when they're driving my
bus, I'm hurtful.  When I was still drinking, I used to hospitalize people
now and again, especially when they mistreated the dog who lived with me
from the time he was five weeks old until he was seventeen years old.  I'm
here because that dog loved me strong enough that I knew it through all my
pain and it kept me from killing myself all those times when I wanted to.
Then I got rid of all my guns (in therapy at the Vet Center in Houston) and
I've not got any more.  But that's different, somehow, from hurting people,
people I respect, when I fall into one of my wounds today.  Joanna Macy and
John Seed hold The Council of All Beings.  The Cuyamungue Institute has
their Masked Trance Dance.  Various Native American tribes hold the Ghost
Dance.  What does Permaculture do?  

 

Tommy Tolson

Austin, TX