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permaculture - Re: [permaculture] the gardener's shadow falls both ways

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  • From: Lee Flier <leeflier@comcast.net>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] the gardener's shadow falls both ways
  • Date: Sun, 13 Dec 2009 16:11:32 -0500

fdnokes@hotmail.com wrote:
Interesting discussion...
Truly, community will move ahead or fall apart on lines of culture...
Yes, having courses that are free of it will offer something to everybody.
But, they will not create community.
I disagree... at my PDC there was a wonderful sense of community, and there was no mention (by the instructors) of any specific spiritual directive.
Wouldn't it be a part of a course to have people introduce themselves, where they're coming from, why they're in the course, etc.?

Absolutely, and in my class, each person did just that. We even had a talent show at the end of the course, where each student or a group of students could put on a skit or play, or sing a song, do a comedy act, make a flint tool, any kind of talent of their choosing.

We also had class hikes through the mountains, nightly campfires where we sat around talking and telling stories.

None of this served to alienate anybody of any particular spiritual or religious belief, including atheists. And none of it contradicted any accepted science or observable reality. :)

On another note, there is a whole body of course work about building community with awareness of other dimensions of life beyond the overt focus of our modern global culture.
In particular, I took a course with Carol Heywood Bebrauskas, a NW pacific 'seer', who had been to Findhorn and wanted to share with us the exercises for building community that she had learned there.
Interestingly, if you really look into 'presence', you'll find that it takes some work to bring people into presence. People have analyzed where people really are half the time, and mostly it's not here and now.
Absolutely, and I think this speaks to an underlying issue of trust. Part of the reason we are where we are in the modern age is because we don't trust nature to provide for us. Regardless what the ideal of science is (to find truth), the *application* of science has been mostly to solve problems - problems that we see as having been caused by the vagaries of nature. Disease, climate, natural disasters, accidents - all of these are things that science has helped to mitigate and keep at bay. And we can't ignore that, but on the other hand... we've also sort of forgotten that while nature can be cruel when something in her systems breaks down or isn't favoring us at the moment - when natural systems are working as they should, they work wonderfully well - better than anything man could devise! And the interesting thing is that you don't have to have any particular spiritual bent to recognize this. You may believe we are the handiwork of the divine, and/or the product of billions of years of evolution... either way, it should be obvious that nature works pretty well all things considered. :)

But we (in the scientific age) tend to think of ourselves as our own saviors, our own conquerors of Nature the Enemy, and feel that the greater the degree of control we can exercise over Nature, the better our lives will be. That even includes the parts of ourselves and our humanity that are closest to our animal nature - those, too, are "base instincts" to be overcome by logic and reason, and not to be trusted. We think of "animalistic behavior" as barbaric, regardless which animal you're talking about. :) When most animals' behavior seems to make more sense than most humans.' :)

So it's no wonder that people aren't very "present" - they're afraid to be in reality, afraid to be inside their own minds and bodies, afraid to be in the natural world to the extent that they can't "control" it. But since there's no real way to escape any of those things, denial and being "not present" is where they end up.

And this is just as true of many people claiming spiritual awareness as someone with a mechanistic worldview. So long as "spiritual" is something "other," something outside of the world we live in, or something far in the future or the past, then we are not present.

So I think permaculture is really about rebuilding a sense of trust in nature, and in ourselves, and each other. A sense that we're in a partnership with nature, not in opposition to it. That means exercising control where we really need to or really think it will be beneficial, sitting back and trusting nature to do the work when we can, and gaining the wisdom to know the difference. :) In that sense, we're obligated to reject anything that smacks of denial or falsehood or speculation, and unfortunately that includes many people's ideas of "spirituality" as well as many people's ideas of scientific thought.




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