The Light Returns

 

 

 

 

After a time of decay comes the turning point.
The powerful light that has been banished returns.
There is movement, but it is not brought about by force.
The upper trigram K’un is characterized by devotion;

thus the movement is natural, arising spontaneously.
For this reason the transformation of the old becomes easy.

The old is discarded and the new is introduced.

~I Ching, Hexagram 24 (The Turning Point), Wilhelm-Baynes translation.

 

 

 

I celebrated the Winter Solstice with a couple friends on the 21st, but since then I have been wondering about the meaning of the solstice beyond an excuse to drink adult beverages with old and new friends. At the same time I was wondering the same thing I am always wondering: how to contribute towards accomplishing a transition in this society towards wholeness, when I seem to be very much in the minority in my opinions, and the forces to be opposed are so powerful, implacable and relentless.

 

We had some sun for the first time in many days, and I was outside enjoying the garden. I even saw a bee of some sort, who had apparently poked his head above soil to go exploring for what limited sustenance my garden could provide in winter. I had decorated my garden with colorful ribbons for the solstice celebration, and as I gazed at one of these dancing in the breeze in the sunlight, I fell into a trance state.

Initially my thought was along the lines of, "I have fallen into a deep trance seemingly by accident. What is the purpose of this trance?" Very gradually that purpose became clear.

On one level, to see the world (and perhaps more than the world) as a stage of conflict between the powers of light and darkness seems an "un-animist" idea. After all, that was always seen in monotheistic terms in this culture, a conflict between God and the Devil. Animists often tend not to deal with things in such terms, as indeed much that seems bad can become good, and much that seems good can become very bad. Seeing things in different shades than merely black and white indeed makes sense, if one is tempted to oversimplify things. You need to be very perceptive to begin to make things out truly, and until then it is best not to jump to conclusions. This does not mean that Light and Darkness do not exist, but that their interplay is more complex than we generally like to believe.

 

And yet animists do have a model for the battle between Light and Darkness, and that indeed is the meaning of the Solstice. Yes, it signifies the literal turning point between night and day, when the days start to get longer again, but if that were all it was then we indeed might be justified in just having a few brews and leaving our recognition of the time at that. Instead, this has been the holiest time on the calendar, in many religions, for thousands and thousands of years. This holy day can teach us far more than that if we want to pay attention. The Solstice is not just about a very significant change in the seasons, it represents a very real spiritual battle between Light and Darkness. The I Ching, in Hexagram 24 (which can be seen as a symbol of the Winter Solstice in many ways), is not talking about visible electromagnetic radiation when it talks about "light." It is talking about spiritual light. Powers of wholeness, integration, love and compassion, coming into right relation to divinity and the universe, reverence, respect, truthfulness, courage, self-sacrifice.

 

For all of human history and beyond, we have been tracing an arc from the Summer Solstice (maximum light) to the Winter Solstice (maximum darkness). Each new progress in human history has been a progress towards the spiritual Darkness that we now experience at its full zenith today. However, the time when Darkness reaches it's greatest power is when it begins to diminish - Light Returns.

If the Human Race wants to survive the next few hundred years, it will have to turn towards the Light - it won't have a choice other than ultimate destruction. This means that the destructive ways of the last few centuries will have to be overturned. The environment will have to be healed. Humans have gone from mostly harmless parasites on the planet (hunter-gatherers, slightly dark) to very destructive parasites on the planet (modern agriculture, huge cities and development, extremely dark). The only way forward is to stop being parasites period. To make the evolutionary leap from agriculture to ecoculture, the management of ecosystems for the benefit of all their present and potential inhabitants, including but not limited to people, and the change in our values that will be necessary to do that. To make the spiritual leap from a money-centered species to a life-centered species.

I have over the last year been finding to my surprise that the world really is a stage for a battle between light and darkness. This was part of the teaching of my trance, and of dream-states I have been experiencing previously. This battle may not be confined to this world, or even this universe, it may be a feature of existence period, of everywhere and every time in existence.

What my old friend the I Ching is trying to tell me is that this transformation between darkness and light cannot be forced. We must act in accordance with the time and the limitations it imposes. So I actually need not worry about how to contribute to this change at this time when darkness is at it's fullest extent. I need only be myself, and whatever I can contribute will arise naturally, without forcing.

 

 

 

Thunder within the earth:
 The image of THE TURNING POINT.
 Thus the kings of antiquity closed the passes
 At the time of solstice.
 Merchants and strangers did not go about,
 And the ruler
 Did not travel through the provinces.

The winter solstice has always been celebrated in China as the resting time of the year—a custom that survives in the time of rest observed at the new year.  In winter the life energy, symbolized by thunder, the Arousing, is still underground.  Movement is just at its beginning; therefore it must be strengthened by rest so that it will not be dissipated by being used prematurely.  This principle, i.e., of allowing energy that is renewing itself to be reinforced by rest, applies to all similar situations.  The return of health after illness, the return of understanding after an estrangement: everything must be treated tenderly and with care at the beginning, so that the return may lead to a flowering. 

 

 ~I Ching, Hexagram 24 (The Turning Point), Wilhelm-Baynes translation.

 

 

 

 



"Attend to these only..."

 



 

 

 

"Why did you not come to us sooner, my child?

We could have put your mind at rest.

 

No others will understand

and you do not have the power to make yourself understood.

Cease to bother yourself about it.

 

You are to attend to the Old Things

And attend to your care of the Earth

Attend to these only.

 

The destiny of the world is not within your power to influence.

Cease to think of influencing the paths of Man.

They are not your paths to influence.

It's not your task, changeling of the aos sí.

Release this from your heart.

 

You are alone in the world or very close to it

Who will attend to the Old Things if you do not?

Who will love them if you do not?

How many centuries will it be before another like you

passes through this land again?

 

Should you be neglecting your care because you don't like

the way this world is going?

It was ever headed this way.

 

Who knows when your Mother will provision
for another one to come

and when and where will that be?

Your Mother labored hard to bring you forth here.

Reward her care with your own.

 

Therefore, always act as if you are the last of your kind here

and that if you do not reverence the Old Things and the Earth

then they will not be reverenced, ever."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All or Nothing

Image by Rowena Ford

If this is a blog about animism, why do I talk about everything from food to environmental policy to energy to politics to agriculture? If this blog is at least half spiritually directed, the other half is pointed in many other directions. Why?

There is to me no difference. A phrase that has become a mantra of sorts for me is "All Or Nothing." Either everything is sacred, or nothing is. Either everything is spiritual, or nothing is. Either everything is religion, or nothing is. It is ONE LIFE, and what we are talking about is oneness IN that life. To see all the world as a whole. The whole universe is my body.

If your religion stops in the bedroom or in the bathroom, or in the corporate board room, it isn't a religion that can be taken seriously as pertaining to the whole of existence, because obviously by your actions you show your truth. You believe it does not pertain in those places. Pardon the language, but when I go to the bathroom and take a dump, either that is part of my spiritual practice or I don't really have one. Not one that pertains to everything. And if it does not pertain to everything but only what you WANT it to pertain to, how should we take that seriously? We shouldn't.

Nothing to me shows our schizophrenic spiritual state like our attitude towards food and the growing of it. Of course, there are unfortunate people in the world who think that food is a product of factories and technology, and who have no idea of the bodies of the plants or animals that actually produce and store that food so that our factories can have their way with them. Even people who know where food comes from usually will not find any particular spiritual significance to the way that their bodies gain the wherewithal to continue existing. Does nobody besides me find that peculiar? The very fundaments of our existence, THAT we consider profane and worthy of no consideration, beneath our consideration, but the philosophies and dogmas in our heads or the gods in the sky we pay our attention to, we consider those important??

And of course, what we are doing to the planet reflects our conceits, that the down-to-earth and real is of no consequence, but the vain ideas in our heads are all that are important. Our religions and philosophies we entrust to priests and other experts who are genuinely supposed to be working for our benefit, whereas the life of the planet and the sources of our food we entrust to capitalists who patently have no motive but profit? What madness is this? Is it not completely clear that corporate agriculture and the corporate food industry have no financial motivation to make our food actually better for us or better for the planet, and every motive to make food cheaper, more addictive, and to make it with fewer extraneous concerns like the condition of the soil or the waterways or the air? After all, they aren't in the life business, they are in the money business. Pollution costs them nothing to make. The soil, to them, is just a preferably sterile medium in which petrochemicals of various sorts are inputs and "food" is the output. Water is simply the medium which exports their wastes to the rivers and ocean so that they don't drown in their own filth. Air is simply the medium which whisks their sprayed poisons away so that they don't become a Superfund cleanup site. Which otherwise they assuredly would become. Our system oppresses the lives of animals in the most despicable kind of slavery so that their costs to produce cows or chickens or pigs are lower. This indeed is the religion that many subscribe to, whatever words come out of their mouths. Oppression of the living in service to the dead. Oppression of the living in service to that which never lived and never could. Oppression of the living in the name of Capital and Progress and "Jobs". 

Most of my ancestors for the last 700 years or so were almost certainly oppressors of one sort or another, and they followed the Cross and abstract religion. Some may have run slave ships while reading the Bible to tell them how to be free. I know of some who were thieves and brigands and warriors. Some participated in the Civil War, on the losing side, that the practice of keeping some people as property for other people might continue.

I follow closer to the ways of other ancestors however, the ones who were here in this place for as long as anyone was here on this continent at all. Turtle Island, my home. North America. 

The ones who called the land sacred, the waters sacred, who asked forgiveness for the slaying of an animal for food. I am sure that they could be as bloodthirsty and as thoughtless as my European ancestors in their own ways, these are common human traits, but if they didn't do better at least they should have known better. The land is sacred. The land is everything, we are merely passing through it, we are not higher or better than it. It is higher than us. More important. Eating is sacred, the corn is sacred, water is sacred, air is sacred, just as much as dreaming or thinking or the ingenious inventions of our brains are. All are, or none are. It is only our blind arrogance that we think we can lift ourselves above the network of living things. 

I have been gardening seriously this year for the first time in my life, and there is nothing that has taught me the connections between all living things better. I love my plants, sincerely, and they and I are really part of one extended body. They produce some of the food I eat, and then I pee some of those nutrients out, and I save that pee and use it to fertilize them again (diluted fermented urine is a superior fertilizer) so they grow bigger and produce more food in a mutually reinforcing cycle that lifts up all the life which the plants and myself are entwined with. So my peeing is sacred too in its own way, just as my eating is, just as their lives are and my life is. As the land is, which we are both a part of. Not abstractly, not as an intellectual idea. Physically, chemically, emotionally, electrically even, really, we are connected. We are connected through the Sun, which powers all life; through the air, which they and I both breathe; through the soil, which I feed through my labors and which then feeds the plants and then me. We are connected through the waters, which make up most of their bodies and mine. We are one extended body, and I am part of the extended body of all that exists, the Universe, the stars now shining and the ones that exploded aeons ago to build the carbon and the oxygen and calcium that the plants and I both need to live.

All or nothing. You must include everything. You show by your actions whether your religion is a conceit in your head or your connection to the Cosmos. I see this connection in what people think of as the most mundane things. A drink of water. A bite of a tomato. All or nothing. You care about the whole world, or about nothing, and isn't care, love, what we really mean when we say we revere what is holy? To say that something is holy is to say that you love it. You can either love the world or not. In actual reality, you don't get to pick and choose. You cannot love yourself and hate the means by which you are sustained. Hatred of nature is hatred of self.

All is spiritual, or nothing is. 

The Ocean

A Fool went to the seashore and scooped up a bucket of seawater and proclaimed proudly, "I have caught the ocean!"

The Ocean said, "You have not caught the ocean, you have only caught a bucket of seawater, and only for the moment. Eventually the water will evaporate or the bucket will decay and the water will return to the Sea. No matter how many buckets you fill, you will not put the Ocean in them."

The Fool said, "How then can I ever know the Ocean if I cannot catch it?"

The Ocean looked at the bucket of seawater. "Your catching is always finite, but what you seek to catch is infinite. In the same way, no matter how wise you become, your wisdom will always be finite, but your foolishness will always be infinite."

The Fool dropped the bucket and the seawater sloshed back out to sea. "How then can I know anything?" he cried. 

"Look at the wave washing in at your feet," the Ocean said, and the Fool did so. The wave washed in and around his feet and back out again. 

"That wave is part of Me, and every wave is part of the whole Ocean," the Ocean said. 

"So?" the Fool replied.

"And you are part of Mankind and every man is, and Mankind is part of the world and everything else is," the Ocean said.

"So?" the Fool replied.

"So you start by looking at what is at your own feet, like that wave, and in that way you can come to know better what the whole is. You can travel the whole world to vainly try to understand the whole world, or you can start by looking at what your feet are standing on. It's the same world. You can understand much of the world without leaving your own garden, and you can understand much of the ocean by seeing the waves at your feet. Do not seek to understand everything, it is beyond you. It is also all around you, right now, and you yourself in fact are part of it. So attend to what you see and hear and feel, attend to what is under your own feet, and let the Ocean be the Ocean. You are immersed in it, you are part of it, but you will never conquer it."

"I do not understand," the Fool said.

"Now you are getting it," The Ocean said.

Changing Focus

For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 

but when completeness comes, what is in

part disappears. When I was a child, I talked

like a child, I thought like a child. When I became

a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. 

For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror;

then we shall see face to face.

-1 Corinthians 13:9-12

Before one really knows their "God" one knows the symbols for God, and they take those symbols as the reality. And really, people don't often take it much further than that, because going any further would require them to give certain things up that they don't want to give up. It is like someone who lives in a shed. He paints flowers on the dark wooden walls of his shed and uses broken mirrors to shed light on his false flowers from the shafts of light that filter down from the broken-down roof, but there is a whole real garden right outside the shed door. He doesn't want to go out there though, he doesn't really want to give up the darkness and mustiness of his shed. And he genuinely would have to give some things up. 

There is a great deal of pain you have to open yourself up to, to open that shed door. So he stays inside and paint flowers instead. Symbols of the real thing.

As anyone who has read some of my other blogs from the past would know, I used to be a Christian, and one of the most valuable insights I ever had as a Christian was when I fully understood that I was far too selfish to ever live out a tenth of the love that I felt the New Testament was calling me to. I felt I was physiologically incapable of doing that. It is like asking a stone to become a bird, there is no pathway for the one to become the other. I did not understand any way for that to become possible. I was firmly in the shed, and did not even see the door.

Of course I am not a Christian now. I am an "animist," but that is only a word. It is a metaphor, for a non-metaphoric reality that I am not sure I can ever adequately explain. 

What is communication, and what is love? Is it not a sort of going-outside-oneself to the other? Our society takes the Self as the ironclad bedrock of each of our realities, a reality that you can never truly get outside of. Even the things we see and hear and touch, these are representations of reality in our minds according to conventional understanding. We never get outside the black box of our heads. But is that really true? Are we not connected always with that which is outside? 

The very substance of our bodies comes to us from outside and goes outside. We do not contain the same atoms we did when we were born, we are not like a piece of granite retaining the same crystalline structure over centuries. Our bodies are a river constantly taking things in and removing things. As an organic vegetable gardener I take in food from the plants, but nutrients also leave my body and go to the plants since I recycle my pee into plant food. We are a circle, the plants and I. We are part of one body. Atoms come into my body, leave, go into their bodies, leave, and come into my body again, and into the bodies of the other living things around here. Whatever might be going on inside my mind, that is the actual reality. 

This is what I am fumbling to explain: that this solipsistic black-box-in-your-head worldview is a choice, not an inviolate fact of your nature. That you can and really must find that shed door and start living as part of LIFE, not as only YOUR life. That you can and really should start thinking not as just a person, but.. and this sounds a little weird... you should start thinking as all the life around you. 

In other words, get out of the black box. Think and experience as one node in a whole network of living things. The lines of communication are not perfect, any more than love or communication are free from possible misunderstandings. You will assume things that aren't true, you will try to help and hurt instead sometimes. There is a learning curve. What I am saying is that the lines of communication are there, neglected and half-forgotten, but they are there, like an extended nervous system. You can open the shed door. You can get outside the shed. 

I sometimes talk of some things as gods or goddesses, Mother Water for instance. Mother Water is a goddess, but saying that gets you no closer to her. She also isn't a goddess, that is just one way of explaining my living connection to her, my respect and awe and love. Goddess is only a word. I call them my mothers and my fathers, my brothers and sisters, this says nothing except that I am connected to them in a fundamental way and there is no way I can explain that connection for you. Explaining does not connect you, it may just get you on the road to being connected, but it doesn't connect you. You and only you can do that, but you do not do it alone. You truly cannot reason your way from the solipsistic black-box self to this other connected self, you must simply reach out from the heart.

There is no substitute for this, and the lack of this and the lack of people who live this connection on a daily basis is responsible for so many troubles in our world. We live hate and isolation, not connection, and this hate and isolation poisons the whole planet. Poisons us, poisons the plant and animal life, poisons the seas. Our seas are poisoned with trash and chemicals, sure, but because we were poisoned with hate and isolation first. Our ground is poisoned with lead and mercury because our hearts were poisoned first. Our air is poisoned with carbon and acids and sulfur dioxide because our hearts and minds were poisoned first. Because we forgot that connection, we cut ourselves off from it. We are part of a living body, and we decided to go our own way. What happens in the body when some of your cells decide to secede from the rest? It's called cancer, and we have it. We are it. 

I don't know if I can make any of this make sense to you. I am trying the best I can. You just have to reach out in love to every living thing, no matter how apparently humble. Think an ecosystem's thoughts. You can change focus from only yourself to everything around you, live and think as both yourself and everything around you, and by extension live and think as part of the whole planet and the whole universe. You aren't just an isolated self in the black box of your mind. You are part of the cosmos, and that cosmos is inside you and outside you.

Vine & Fig Tree

"Everyone will sit under their own vine,

and under their own fig tree,

and no one will make them afraid."

-Micah 4:4

Two things are as clear as diamond to me. One, that it is altogether practical for individuals to live in a primarily self-sufficient, productive (in real terms, not what our culture calls 'productivity'), and ecologically sane way of life that gives benefit both to the natural world and people, and two, that practically every social, political and economic structure in this society works against people actually doing that. Why is that?

Our society is based on zero-sum interactions. More for me, essentially, means less for you. There is only one pie and it is all a matter of how you slice it up, and some get more and some don't. Given that worldview, there is absolutely no incentive to consider things from the point of view of whole communities or an ecosystem. The easiest way that we see these zero-sum games played out is in our interactions with the environment, where we despoil that environment to seize its riches. Strip mining or cutting old-growth forests or in any of innumerable other ways, we view the only possible scenario as a win for us means a loss for nature. 

However, this zero-sum game also plays out in human interactions, where each individual (and group such as a corporation) sees no reason to look out for the interests of the whole because of the belief that this would mean less for them. Almost every social, political and economic process in our society is based on a zero-sum worldview, almost the only notable exceptions being matters of love or family. There is no incentive for looking out for the whole, because it is simply viewed as a matter of who gets more and who gets less, and everyone wants to get more of course. It takes no great conspiracy theory to explain the myriad systems that are arrayed against the real interests of the individual and communities and the ecological community: it is a symptom of a disease that exists in all our minds to one degree or another. It is a kind of meme, an intellectual virus. In times past, this virus no doubt conferred some reproductive advantage. Now it threatens all of us. It does not merely threaten us in the form of ecological damage, but also degrades our own lives and interactions with others in innumerable quiet insidious ways every day. Millions or billions of people find themselves unable to live a wholesome natural life as an organism, as a living being on this world, and must continually fight a human system designed to make them lose in order to even survive. They have no modicum of security in life, no connection with nature, none of the rhythms of nature in their life and are utterly dependent on the zero-sum cannibalistic human system in order to continue existing. And existing is the right word, it is hardly living. 

On a small scale, there are all kinds of zero-sum interactions in nature too. The leopard eats the gazelle: that is a zero-sum interaction. Leopard wins, gazelle loses. We are used to thinking of ourselves as predators, that may be one reason why zero-sum interactions became so predominant in our culture. There are also non-zero-sum interactions, which can be positive (win-win) or negative (lose-lose). We are in fact as a species engaging in a massive non-zero-sum interaction with the world on a broad scale, in this case a lose-lose interaction. We are busy not only destroying the natural world but destroying ourselves as well. Ecocide. Everybody loses.

However, nature is also full of positive non-zero-sum interactions, positive synergies among communities of organisms which improve the conditions of life for all of them. Indeed, most of Nature's interactions are that way if you zoom out to a large enough scale. The death of the gazelle is a loss for him and a gain for the leopard, but also by weeding out weak, sick, unperceptive or otherwise inferior individuals it is a gain for the gazelle community as a whole that has its genetic pool strengthened thereby. The earthworm benefits from the dead leaves shed by plants, and in their guts and in the soil they form robust bacterial communities and open up the soil to air and moisture, which in turn benefits the plants. There are innumerable kinds of mutually beneficial relationships between plants, and between plants and fungi and plants and bacteria. We have a symbiotic relationship with many of the bacteria in our guts, legumes have a symbiotic relationship with the bacteria that allows them to fix nitrogen. The number of mutually beneficial relationships in nature are too innumerable to mention. We too can live lives that are either primarily zero-sum or primarily mutualistic, though primarily mutualistic lives among humans is probably pretty rare. Agriculture can be zero-sum or mutualistic, generally industrial agriculture is mostly zero-sum. The soil suffers, the genetic strength of the crops suffer, only we supposedly benefit, and that benefit in terms of non-toxic nutrition diminishes more and more. The overall nutrient content of our food has diminished in the last hundred years anywhere from 5% in certain fruits and vegetables to 40% or more in others.

We CAN use our knowledge to create food-producing ecosystems that are more diverse than natural ecosystems, more resistant to adverse conditions than natural ecosystems, and create more niches for more organisms, benefiting ourselves and the rest of the biotic community. We CAN have positive synergistic relationships with other organisms, benefiting them and us. We CAN move away from dependence on an erratic economic world for our survival, an unstable economic world which has no security, and create our own security through beneficial relationships with our environment. We CAN'T do that however if we retain our selfish zero-sum mentality. Our zero-sum mindset will only lead to more ecological destruction, more war, more starvation, more economic disruption, more human beings whose hearts and minds are so twisted by their unhealthy world that they become more like the creatures of our nightmares than real people. It is time to realize that more for Nature does mean more for us in the end.

Indigenous spiritual traditions emphasize the kinship of all living things. The deer, the tree, is your brother, not merely the means to your own ends. We have the knowledge to bring the ancient dreams of mutualistic relationships with living things to a level of fruition far beyond what these cultures could have dreamed of. We have the capability of creating relationships with nature which are vastly more productive, more secure, more diverse, and more beneficial to all organisms involved, than anything previously known. What we lack, is the heart and soul to actually do it. Our intellect is enlightened, our spirits are darker than ever. This is an age of profound spiritual darkness, and the effects of that darkness do not require any special mystical vision to see. Just look at what we do, that's all. Do we create beauty and happiness for all creatures, or do we create devastation, pollution, and death? Just look and see, there is nothing esoteric about it. It's about as abstract as a tumor.

Tar sands before and after.

In the book of Micah in the Old Testament, it describes a world where there is no need for war or disputes and every man will sit under his own vine and his own fig tree, be self-sufficient and live in peace. There is absolutely no physical reason why that cannot happen. The only reasons why that does not happen are to be found in the darkened depths of the human heart and spirit, the profound sickness within us.  

Control

A lingering sign of the 1969–71 Native American occupation of Alcatraz

It is a cardinal flaw of the human species that we are always arranging other lives to suit us. Other human lives, and the lives of other beings. We've done it all along and we are doing it now. Every human now living is both an end product of that control and also an instrument of it. We are a domesticated species ourselves, we are pets or livestock to our own machine. Part of the process of making the average man "useful" to rulers and the wealthy is to remove their self-sufficiency and make them dependent. In the factories of the 1700's, a man would have to work three days to be able to afford to buy shoes that his ancestors made themselves in a couple hours with their own leather. They would have to work to buy food that their ancestors grew for themselves. They would slave away to be able to afford a crackerbox to live in, when their ancestors and their neighbors built houses for themselves and each other. This is the process of making a man a slave: take away the physical means of his independence. That man can have "liberty" on paper all he likes, freedom of "ideas, speech and religion", but he is still a slave because he cannot now live without the commercial machine his own labor helped build. A machine controlled by others, or perhaps by itself now.

It is perhaps a symbol of how harmless and powerless the freedom of ideas, speech or religion are thought to be by those in power, that all of these things remain free to us. ;) Freedom of these things means very little if you don't have freedom of life. Freedom means little if you don't have control over the means of your own life. If someone puts you into a vacuum chamber and starts drawing out the air little by little, you can practice all the freedom of ideas, religion and speech that you want and you are still going to suffocate because you don't have the freedom you actually need. The powerful for their own part are also slaves, their minds and spirits are enslaved.

Of course, we do this in spades to the plants and animals we use for food. For plants, we have taken to playing god with their genetics so that we can rain more poisons on them. Many of the animals we use for food scarcely see the light of day, or any green growing thing. I have been thinking very seriously about getting a homestead, which I cannot at present do because I am taking care of my mother, but when I first started thinking seriously about such things I naturally assumed I would have chickens for eggs. Studying the matter, I discovered that there is no sustainable way to have chickens for eggs without involving the intentional deaths of chickens at some point in the process. Even if I only bought hens, those hens had brothers who were either killed at birth or who will be killed for chicken meat. Chickens don't only lay hens, they lay roosters too. If I were to raise chickens, I would not only be arranging their deaths to suit my purposes, I would be arranging their lives to suit my purposes too. Lives spent in one or another variety of incarceration.That's when I reluctantly decided I could live without eggs.

I have been thinking about this in the context of my garden vegetable plants. Most people would not consider this to be even an issue, which is either a comment on me or on them. I do not discount the lives of plants as most other people do. In fact I revere plants as my friends and teachers. I do not grow beets or radishes, even though I like them, because eating them entails the deaths of those plants in the prime of their lives. If you have a piece of land to grow your own food on, it is never actually necessary to kill a plant or animal in the prime of its life in order to eat. Eating seeds, yes, but not whole living otherwise healthy plants. You can pick leaves from lettuces and spinach and the like, you don't need to eat the whole plant. I do pick weeds to prevent them crowding out my plants, I also consider killing animals that try to eat your plants that you need for food to be legit too. Anyone may take a life if they are hungry enough and have few enough options, but one should try to avoid being in a situation where they have that few options. 

Again, not a question most people would ask themselves, but am I controlling to my garden plants? I do love them, genuinely. It is true that they wouldn't be where they are, growing as they are, without me. I consider the relationship to be one of cooperation, but they didn't really have a choice as to where they were planted. If they could choose, would they choose to be there? I would like to think that they would. I try to think of their interests as well as mine. Of course, for the most part we have interests in common: they want to grow and prosper, I want to help them do that.

This is my dream: to live in a way that provides the most benefit and least harm to the plants and animals and ecosystem around me, especially to the plants I rely upon for my food. To regard the plants I depend on as partners, and to treat their lives with respect.

I seek to not merely look out on the world as a selfish ego peering out from the windows of its eyes onto a world it can use for its own purposes, but to look out AS the world itself. The world looking upon itself and regarding all things and all interests as equal, and seeking the most benefit for the most beings. I and the plants are the same, my flesh is their flesh. We are part of one extended body, and the interests of that whole body must be regarded, not simply the interests of this one human. My eyes the eyes of the world looking at itself, my hands the hands of world helping itself.

I don't think this is a vain dream. I see it happening in fact in my own garden. My mostly peaceable kingdom of corn and beans and squash and melons and eggplants. We could make the world such a garden, the only thing lacking is the will and heart and love to do so, and to stop thinking that the world revolves around self-centered humans.

In a sense, it is far easier in many ways than what we are actually doing. 

Hopi blue corn in my garden.
Mother Corn, radiant beloved one, lend me your nourishment.

Mutualism

My happy bean plant. 

Even in organic gardening and permaculture circles, typically the only thing you will hear about is the benefits of these methods for human beings. For US. Better food for US human beings and less damage to the ecosphere that WE all need to be living in. And those things are great, don't get me wrong. However, what you don't hear is what plants get out of the deal. Even in these circles, there is the tacit assumption that plants are insensible carbon machines. That we shouldn't take THEIR interests into account, though of course their interests are generally served better by such natural approaches rather than conventional agriculture. One would think though that people who spend so much time thinking about plants, would hold them in higher regard. 

Plants are not mere photosynthesis machines. They are beings, and they are the beings that every animal on this planet depends on for their continued existence.

Of course, we historically have a hard time dealing with food organisms as BEINGS under any circumstances, even in the case of animals very similar to us such as pigs. We encourage pigs for instance to regard us with trust, and then we kill them. One of the most traumatic things I ever saw was an episode of a reality TV series on public television where several families agree to live like pioneer families in the 1800's. The child of one of the families gets attached to the pig, and of course the pig has to be slaughtered. Many tears. So the dad of the family calls the pig over, and the pig comes over wagging its tail and happy, completely trusting, and BANG. Shot, writhing in its death throes, just like that.

To me, any scenario like that would be morally wrong. That dad did a morally wrong thing in my opinion and gave an abysmal example to his son, unless a negative example was what was intended.

Betrayal, of any life form that has been given reason to place trust in you, is one of the highest evils in my worldview. If you gave them reason to trust you, you are BOUND by that trust. You are OBLIGATED to take their interests into account in a serious manner. Even if they are non-human.

Even cold blooded murder is less evil than betrayal, because the one you kill has no reason to suspect anything but evil from you. You could make an argument that hunting people (assuming that they have no reason to trust you) is morally acceptable as long as you eat them. ;) Certainly you would be sparing the ecosystem all the destruction that this one human life would bring, though I would not recommend human beings as a healthy food source. ;)

Bear in mind, I do not believe in rights. I don't believe in animal rights or plant rights because I don't believe in human rights. If you are in a situation where you absolutely have to kill and eat an innocent person to live, I would say you are justified to do it, because biological necessity trumps just about everything. What I do believe in, is respect for all beings. That you kill any organism only because of need, not desire. I also believe that you never, ever betray any life form. If you gave them reasonable cause to regard you as a friend rather than an enemy or neutral, you don't use that trust to betray them. I believe that in some cases this should even overrule biological necessity. 

These two principles, respect and non-betrayal, inform my views on ethical relationships with plants and animals that are used for food. In this view, it is far more acceptable to hunt for food than to raise animals for food, because the animals you hunt have no reason to view you as anything but a predator. Also, until their deaths wild animals live free and not in cages. In the same way, foraging wild plants is relatively ethically uncomplicated (as long as you do it in a sustainable manner). You need to eat.

Lets get back to plants, which even ethical vegetarians (those that are vegetarians for ethical/animal cruelty reasons) tend to disregard as beings of ethical importance. Every animal on this planet is ultimately a parasite on plants, since only plants can use sunlight to create food energy. Every animal on this planet would cease to be without them. I think that is something worthy of our respect. In the case of some animals, their benefit to the plants is at least equal to if not greater than their cost to the plants, such as in the case of honeybees and earthworms. In the case of earthworms, it is practically all a benefit to them, since they take already decayed plant matter and turn it into more accessible forms of plant food. Predators of all sorts, from predatory wasps to tigers, are also beneficial to them since they kill herbivorous life forms and the energy they take has already been stolen away from plants anyway. Some animals benefit some plants and hurt others, cows and sheep for instance promote grasses and discourage other plants, since grasses are better suited to surviving grazing than other plants.

Creatures like bees and earthworms who provide equal or greater value to plants than they take away, are the only animals on Earth that don't deserve to be called parasites. We humans fully deserve to be called parasites, a virus not only on plant life but the entire planet.

Ironically, we are also the one animal that has the capacity, seldom used, to build up diverse and robust ecosystems that give the maximum benefit to all the plants and animals that live in them. Typically wild unmanaged ecosystems have always been taken as the most complete, sustainable and diverse ecological systems possible, with the greatest possible biomass for that particular place. I genuinely don't believe that this is always the case. I think that in many cases, a human-managed ecosystem can be more diverse, more tolerant to adverse conditions and with greater overall biomass than wild ecosystems, but to do this requires knowledge and skills and attention spans that most people don't have. It's not an undertaking for stupid people, it's an undertaking for smart perceptive people who pay attention to what an ecosystem is doing and how it responds to what you do. A sensitive, perceptive human intelligence is perfectly equipped to undertake this goal.

We have the ability to learn and apply knowledge to our actions, and we have generally used that power to become the most mercenary, piratical and parasitic creature that ever existed. As Agent Smith said in the first Matrix movie, we are like a virus. Humans control, humans destroy, humans enslave. But we could, if we wished to, use our intelligence to build up ecosystems for the benefit of all who live in them. Including but not limited to us. To increase the overall energy flowing through the system and all the beings in it, and to encourage the increase of diversity which builds resistance to adverse conditions. To do so would be an honest occupation for human beings, really the only honest occupation open to us. To give as much or more value to the overall biological system as we get. Not only for our own benefit, but for the benefit of all the life forms which depend on the local ecosystem under our influence.

Part of this, to me, is to embrace true mutualism with plants. The respect of plants as beings, which our culture has a hard time with but many tribal cultures understand. To be a true steward of an ecosystem means stepping out of a human-centric worldview into a multipolar worldview in which all the organisms that live in a place have their interests which should be respected to varying degrees. Even garden pests should be allocated a certain amount of respect in their proper place. The most respect should be given to those which we depend on the most, the plants that provide us with food and which we have entered into a relationship with. This to me is not an interaction between a person and a photosynthesis machine, or between a master and a slave, it is an interaction that should be mutually beneficial between one being and another. For this reason, although I like to eat them, I won't grow radishes or beets because the utilization of those plants for food entails the death of the plants before they are able to reproduce. Foods like tomatoes, squash, eggplants, berries and so on can be eaten without any serious harm to the plant, even lettuces and other greens can be picked without pulling up the entire plant. Some plants, like peanuts or potatoes, are harvested when the plant is at the end of its life and has started to die. I don't think prolonging their lives in such a case is doing them any special favors.

For plants whose seeds we eat, like corn or wheat or legumes, many of these plants produce hundreds or even thousands of seeds and the survival of all of those seeds is not a physical possibility. Therefore as long as the perpetuation of that plant is assured by saving some seeds and planting and tending them to further their survival, the rest can be eaten. You are not hurting the interests of the parent plant by doing so, in fact you are promoting their interests in reproduction. And that is another aspect: plants like people have a biological imperative to reproduce, so to me seed-saving is part of the mutually beneficial relationship between myself and food plants. If a plant produced well for me and was healthy, I help their genetics to continue to the next generation. This also tends to produce plants that are more adapted to the local environment, which furthers the plant's survival and our food supply. They win, I win. They get offspring that are well cared for, I get food. Everybody gets a reasonably fair shake out of the deal. That's the way it should be. That is the only way that humans can rightly shake the title they have thus far eminently deserved, that of a useless parasite on this ecosystem Earth. 

To do so would be an honest occupation and an honest way of life, really the only honest way of life open to us as humans. To stop being Homo Raptor, plundering man, pillaging man, and become Homo Curator. Man the steward. Man the caretaker. 

Plants are beings and should be respected. When we grow plants to produce food,
the interests of the plant should always be taken into fair account along with
our own interests.

Three Sisters

My hopi blue corn and haricot tarbais beans making happy music together

There is so much plant knowledge and so many plant varieties that were lost in our headlong dash towards uniformity, marketability and "scientific agriculture" that we no longer know how much was lost. Many of the varieties were lost in the last hundred years, about 93 percent of all vegetable varieties (not species but variations within that species) that existed at the turn of the century are gone. Most of them not because they weren't good, but because they didn't fit in with the new industrialized food schema, which required fruits and vegetables that shipped well, ripened all at the same time, were adaptable to the new chemical and mechanical agriculture and were uniform in shape and size. Flavors we now will never know. And we never paid a lick of attention to the fact that it was happening.

The knowledge eroded even more readily. Native American farmers used companion planting and fertilization techniques that were completely ignored when European farmers came to this land and made their straight rows of monocultural grains and vegetables. The knowledge that the European farmers once had about the importance of such things as growing hedgerows to promote pollinators was not regarded as terribly important by the intellectual elites who would later invent chemical agriculture in complete obliviousness to the reality of soil as a living thing itself. They created a form of agriculture made in the image of the era of Big Oil and Big Chem, but when the oil is gone we will find that we can't eat gasoline any more and will need the knowledge and diversity which we so casually cast aside.

The good news is that new varieties can arise from a new agricultural culture that embraces natural processes, local adaptation, local consumption and genetic diversity. All we really have to do is invent a new farm reality and those new varieties and that diversity will follow on its own, in time. The knowledge will arise too, only awaiting those who seek it and seek to put it into practice. Plants are very good teachers, they will quickly tell you that you are messing up if you actually take care to watch and listen. 

I have a garden plot that I wanted to plant with the traditional Three Sisters companion planting of corn, beans and squash. Except I didn't really see the point to the squash much. The corn and beans I understood, the beans climb up the corn and beans don't take nitrogen out of the soil that the corn needs (and over the long haul adds nitrogen to the soil too). I already have a container with acorn squash in it and another with lemon squash which I companion-planted (experimentally) with sunflowers. In the Three Sisters plan the squash is supposed to act sort of like a living mulch and the corn and beans are supposed to shade the squash. Well I figured, I already have mulch on my corn and beans, and I have enough squash planted already. 

Well it turned out that I should have planted the beans about a month after the corn because these beans grow faster than the corn. I wound up having to put up poles and strings for the beans to climb up, to distract them from clinging to the corn. Next time I might hold off a month before planting the beans. They were both flourishing however, and if I am allowed to speak unscientifically I think they like being together. They certainly seem very happy. 

And then I got to thinking about the varmits. ;) I have already had problems with squirrels digging up the melon patch looking for their nuts, and we have raccoons in this area. And I hear tell that raccoons love to eat corn. So I started hacking down some prickly vines (pricking myself many times in the process) to act as a sort of organic barbed wire to protect my corn. Raccoon feet are very sensitive. So sensitive in fact that they don't even like walking on the more subtle prickles of... squash vines. ;)

And so I came full circle to what undoubtedly the Native Americans figured out long ago. Even though the prickles of squash aren't that intimidating to humans, they suffice as a pest deterrent especially to the sensitive raccoons. And so I hurried out to the yard to get some squash in on the sides of my corn and bean patch, a bit later than I would normally do for planting squash, and I didn't plant the more suitable lemon squash (big leaves and vines, more sprawling) but the slightly less suitable but more useful for me acorn squash. I really like winter squashes better. Still, I hope that by the time the corn becomes raccoon-enticing, the leaves and stems and vines of the acorn squash will act as a deterrent to them setting their sensitive little tootsies on my corn bed. And so now through practice and thinking ahead to future problems, I understand why all three were always planted together. ;)

And, completely "unscientifically" of course, I believe that they feel the familiarity of long centuries of being planted together. I think they know, that their fates were intertwined a couple thousand years before Columbus ever set foot on these shores. I am glad I could bring them back together again as it should be.

Medicine of the World

Consider this an open diary entry, or poetry. People might not get it, in which case, don't worry about it. Perhaps it wasn't written for you. Perhaps in the final analysis it was written for me.



THE MEDICINE OF THE WORLD

There was a rift in the heart of the World. Now when I say world, you don't get worlds without solar systems, and you don't get solar systems without galaxies, and you don't get galaxies without universes, and you don't get universes without a Multiverse, but the World is what we know, so I shall say World.

Now some folks say it is a rift in us, that our hearts are bad, but we would not be riven were the World not riven, and we were riven because the World was riven. We are not a separate thing from the World.

There was a rift in the heart of the World. Now animals can find medicine for themselves in the fields and woods in the form of different plants, but how can a World find medicine for itself? Nevertheless, this is what the World set out to do, to make medicine for the World's heart. With all medicines, not enough can't heal you and too much can harm you, and even more so with this medicine because the World could not say for certain that any dose was a safe dose. It might heal the World's heart, or might wound it worse, and no being in the universe could say for sure.

The World made its medicine in the form of a child, and that child became many children; and as long as they were children, they neither did any great good nor any great harm.

And then the medicine became an adolescent, and the World began to see that a very small number of the adolescents were in fact medicine, but most were poison and made the rift in the World's heart worse every year. At first the World was poisoned very very slowly, but the rate of poisoning increased very slightly every year, and century by century the rate of change increased. And the World could see that things would become very bad, and that it would get very sick with fever for a long while until the poison was finally burned out of its body. It appeared that the intended medicine would fail, because for the most part it was not medicine but poison.

The few who were in fact medicine were at best disregarded by the other adolescents. These were the lucky ones. To be medicine in a world of poison was a dangerous fate. They had only a little power to turn the poison to medicine, or to heal the increasing injuries to the World. The medicine worked slowly, and the poison worked increasingly fast; the medicine was little and the poison was great, and the World's fever rose.

Now I cannot tell you the end of the story because it hasn't ended yet. There are many stories about what will ultimately happen, and I can tell you some of them, and some of them are for others to tell.

The simplest story of the end is, the World has a great fever and all the adolescents die from it. Good and bad, poison and medicine alike. In the end the rift in the World's heart is even greater, and who knows what medicine will ever heal it.

There is another story told by people who live in dry places. Now the dry places of the Earth give birth to both great prophets and great narrow-mindedness, and who can say from what place in the heart this story comes. The story says that the World will call on it's own dark side to destroy the bad medicine from the World, and leave only the good medicine behind, though perhaps the good medicine will be reduced to only two people by that time. The World starts again, it heals back to where it once was, but no one can say whether the rift in the World's heart is finally healed or whether the World is only back where it began.

There is another story told by people who live in forests. This story is that there were eventually very few of the adolescents who were strong in the good medicine, and one of those took the World's divided heart into his own heart, knowing it would kill him. His heart exploded from the burden and he died, but this act ensured that there would be at least one more generation of medicine left in the world, and perhaps one of those would find how to heal the World's heart and bleed out the poison. Whether they ever will, no one can say because it hasn't happened yet.

But know this: we are of the World and if our hearts are sick it is because the World has a sick heart too. It knows this and is trying to heal itself. But the medicines are few and the poison is great, and no one knows how many future generations of medicine there will be in the world. Perhaps one day all the medicine will be gone. All that will be left then, is for the World to purge itself and try again, and we will be gone.

Fair Deal Food?

When people talk about such things as "Fair Trade" coffee, we mean we are giving the coffee farmers a relatively more fair part of the total coffee dollar. The interests of the coffee plants of course don't enter into it. Typical of the usual human preoccupation with self, while some nice folks might be concerned about the conditions of humans in places where coffee or bananas or other commodities are grown, almost none of them think about the lives of the plants without which there would be no commodity at all.

I am going to put forth the scandalous idea that the interests of the plants should be our concern. That fundamental to the relationship we have with the plants that provide our food should be equity. They get a fair deal: we get a fair deal. In other words, I am suggesting treating plants as beings of ethical significance.

Now you may be thinking, "How is that possible, we have to eat plants (and animals) to live?" Firstly I have to say that if you need to eat anything to survive, you can certainly be excused for doing it. If you are in a situation where you need to eat people to survive, you should eat people. Preferably already dead, but if your choice is between starving to death and bonking your neighbor on the head and eating his liver, I am not going to judge. The key idea here is avoiding getting into such a situation to begin with. We can arrange our relationships with food plants so as to treat them properly as partners, not just prey.

And in fact there are a great many plants where we don't have to kill the plants to eat from them. Pluck a leaf off a spinach plant, the plant will probably manage to keep going just fine. The same with loose lettuces and many other vegetables. We don't eat tomato plants for instance, we eat tomatoes, their fruit. We don't eat squash plants, we eat squash. We don't generally eat corn stalks, we eat corn. Potatoes can be harvested long after the plants themselves are dead. In some cases, we might be killing them at the end of their lives when they are dying anyway, such as would be the case with peanut plants, where the sign that they are ready for harvest is that the plants start dying. I certainly don't think that prolonging their death is doing the plant any particular favors.

However, plants live by very different rules than ours, and one of those rules is that they almost always spam tons of seeds into the environment in order to reproduce, and the survival of all those seeds under most circumstances is a physical impossibility. It is as if we had to birth a million babies to get one human adult. It is not important, or possible, for all those seeds to survive but only that the plants reproduce into the next generation somehow, by those few seeds that either by random chance or human care survive to reproduce. Eating seeds then is fair game as long as some are planted to continue their parents' genetics, because the vast majority of seeds would never turn into adult plants.

What are the interests of plants? They want a rich soil, enough sun, assistance when they are under attack from bugs or herbivores or other environmental hazards, and to have a chance to reproduce. In return for our assistance in both nurturing the plants and ensuring a future for their progeny, we eat parts of the plant or the seeds or fruit. This mutual assistance is in fact what we were evolved to do: whether you accept it or not, we were in a sense designed to service plants. Why do we have color vision and opposable thumbs? So that we can see the color change when fruit is ripe and grasp it, and so spread the seeds of the fruit trees in our dung. Why do we have bipedal stance? So we can see over the grass to hunt herbivores which eat grass. Our move from a fruit-eating way of life to a hunting way of life meant a move to the grasslands, and we tamed fire and intentionally used fires to expand the realms of our grassy friends at the expense of trees. This was the beginning of a long and intimate relationship between humans and the grasses which has resulted in the reality that today the vast majority of all human calories consumed comes from grasses or the seeds of grasses. You evolved to work for the plants, and they evolved to help you do it. Plants formed us even more than we formed them. And they are not insensate beings, just very different beings from us.

There are some plants that we probably can't grow if we want to treat them ethically in this sense. Radishes and beets come to mind, since they involve harvesting the whole healthy plant, killing the plant at a time when it would not otherwise be dying. Most vegetables where the leaves are harvested can be harvested ethically if you do not harvest the whole plant but only a few leaves from each plant at a time. I know this is an alien viewpoint in a lot of ways, to take plants seriously as living things, but as far as I am aware there is no reason why one would ever have to kill healthy plants in order to have a full and nutritionally varied diet. My own belief is that the plants will understand your benevolence and respond accordingly.

So this is the essence of what I am saying, and I will grant you that it is an approach informed by my own particular spiritual beliefs. Treat the plants in your garden, and the beneficial insects that patrol them, as partners with you in a fair and mutually beneficial relationship. One in which you are not putting yourself above the plants but serving them just as much as you expect to be served yourself. I am growing my first garden this year so we will see if this approach bears fruit, but I believe it is the right approach ethically and also practically in many ways. 

Now one might think that it is impossible to have this sort of relationship with animals, the raising of any of which entails the deaths of some of them in order for us to benefit. I think that for the most part this is the case. There are however other considerations involving the larger ecosystem of which we are all a part. Some wild animals wreak great destruction in the environment, such as feral pigs and perhaps to a lesser extent deer, so I would say that hunting those animals where they are overpopulated is entirely fair game. Moreover, by hunting wild animals we are not adversely impacting their lives prior to their deaths: while they live they live entirely free. If rabbits start nomming on your garden vegetables, they are totally fair game and in fact if you depend on farming or gardening for some part of your food or income, eliminating them might be the only way to actually stop them from destroying your livelihood. Thus hunting can not only be helpful to the environment, but might actually be the only way you can keep the critters from eating you out of house and home. 

Feral Hogs: Almost As Bad As Humans

According to this rationale though, we should all be hunting humans, since they are the most damaging creature that exists. The personal consequences of that can be pretty harsh however, so I can't recommend it. ;)

Am I living completely in accordance with this Fair Deal Food viewpoint? Nope, because I don't have enough land to provide for my own food needs directly. This is however something I do wish to do as soon as I am able. As far as my limited garden goes however, I am attempting to abide by it. My spinach plants will not be inhibited from going to seed, they will only have leaves harvested from them, not the whole plant.  Same with my herbs. I am also growing corn, beans, squash, melons, cucumbers, sunflowers, various herbs, tomatoes and strawberries, none of which should require me to kill the plant in order to eat. I realize that to many people what I am saying sounds insane, but I would say that a sane man often sounds insane to an insane world. 

I also realize that almost no one will hear what I am saying here, but that ought not to keep me from saying it. I feel almost obligated by the kinship I feel with plants to say it. Plants are my teachers and my friends, as well as the means of continued existence for all animal life on this planet. They could get along fine without us. We would all die without them.