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  • From: "Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lflj@intrex.net>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [permaculture] Fwd: Can You See This [Revolution] Coming?
  • Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2007 22:55:08 -0500

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [SANET-MG] Can You See This [Revolution] Coming?
Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2007 18:00:24 -0800
From: Woody Wodraska <wodraska@MAC.COM>
To: SANET-MG@LISTS.IFAS.UFL.EDU

Can You See This [Revolution] Coming?

I have written from time to time about how we will all be
gardeners in the future, that it’s in our genes to grow food and
provide for ourselves. This is the way it was a couple of hundred
years ago and further back for ten thousand years.

I don’t mean every one of us will be a gardener--there have
always been classes of people who ordered the others about, or
interceded with the gods, or made a living by trading--but by far the
majority will be pretty close to the earth and live out its rhythms.

It’s only been people of the past few generations who have
lived in a culture that forced their estrangement from the land, with
the authorities-that-be, the prevailing economic and political Pooh-
Bahs, always abstracting themselves one step further away from the
realities of seasons and harvests, of reproduction and germination.
But, I will assert, it is there in the land and its produce that true
Power resides. When the authority-mongers go out for a power lunch,
the food is more real than their conversation.

Meanwhile, for the peons and wages slaves, the cubicle
dwellers and the clerks and the grunts, the connection with realities
of existence is a little less remote. True, in some measure all of us
in this category have swallowed the lure the culture puts out there
to make consumers, dupes and taxpayers of us all. However redemption
is possible. What will redeem is real food grown in real soil, by
real individuals manifesting real intent.

How’s that? Redemptive food? Rudolf Steiner, who gave us
Biodynamic agriculture, put it this way: “Nutrition as it is today
does not supply the strength necessary for manifesting the spirit in
physical life. A bridge can no longer be built from thinking to will
and action. Food plants no longer contain the forces people need for
this.”

TV has dumbed us down for 60 years; the conventional
education system has been at the job even longer. Organized religion
longer still. Why would the Pooh-Bahs want a populace smarter than
they are? For their purposes, we only have to be smart enough to find
our way around the mall.

What Steiner is promising is food with force enough in it
to give people WILL…to make them able to ACT. Who in the despot class
wants that? Clever, active people incite revolutions.

What I’m asking you to see emerging, as the title of this
rave suggests, is the revolution coming at us from the ground up, as
manifested in the CSA movement, the Slow Food movement, the Urban
Gardens movement, the Localvore movement, the Farm to School
movement, the organic this-n-that movement, home schooling…meditation…
raw foods…yoga…healthier this-n-that. Amidst all the hype and
buzzwords and fads there is a unifying groundswell, a soil-swell,
that has this flavor:

“Pooh-Bahs and authority-mongers of all stripes: we don’t
believe you any more, we don’t believe your shills and political
stooges, your institutional bureaucracies and media. What we believe
in is what we’re standing on. Earth will provide if we encourage her.
We hereby give fair warning that we will engage in guerilla
gardening, in Amish economics, in sidelong systems and people-
centered technology to make it happen.

“We like our food local and our watershed clean. We embrace
community and compassion. We can entertain each other. Just leave us
alone to sort out this dreadful mess we have visited upon the Earth
and to grope our way out of the consumerist spell you have cast. ”

We will begin, we must begin, by growing our own food.
Already a lettuce leaf, if it comes from the backyard 10 minutes
before it goes in the salad bowl, is immeasurably better for you than
one from the store, from the truck, from the factory farm. If you’ve
grown it yourself you remember preparing the soil, the feel of the
seeds between your fingertips, the long anxious wait for germination,
the thinning and weeding, the first exquisite dew-spangled taste of
it. This is food with your face on it, your attention in it, your
intention.

It’s not enough to stay away from pesticides and chemical
fertilizers and call your gardening organic. Let’s do it Rudolf
Steiner’s way. If you want food that feeds the will as well as the
body, that makes right action more likely in your life, the soil is
going to have to be enlivened with the Biodynamic techniques. Some of
the basics are here.


Woody Wodraska
wodraska@mac.com
Free chapters from
"Deep Gardening: Soul Lessons from 17 Gardens" at
http://www.soulmedicinejourney.com/Book.html






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