Tag Archives: community

Visiting a neighbor’s fire

Though the work is easier together, we spread out in the darkest time of year to cozier burrows, diffusing the weight of winter, lighter on the land.
Though it is dark, we are warmed to know there are familiar others nearby. Our struggles are tied up together, and while one faces scarcity, someone else has more than enough to share, so that we may survive together and work together in brighter times.

So it has been through the ages. So it is still in little ways in overdeveloped places where big systems eclipse mutual aid: we turn to neighbors for power during long outages, for tool shares, for relationship. So it is still in big ways in underdeveloped places where small systems are made sufficient by human relationships: cooperating to cultivate land, to maintain infrastructure for basic needs, for relationship.

The lessons of the seasons proceed before us, though we may be distracted by a house on fire, our own or our neighbors.

May we be there for each other, so that we may all meet our needs, in mutual benefit with the sources of that sustenance and satisfaction. May peace be upon you.

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Make your community a better place ?

If you could do one thing to make your community a better place what would you do?

via J.T. @ https://www.facebook.com/jerome516/posts/1082094282191807

This is a great question Jerome, thanks for sharing it and your thoughts.
I would prioritize healthy, equitable agroforests through urban and rural landscapes. Trees that can help meet people’s basic needs (fiber, fuel, food, farmaceuticals, fun, +), in public parks and sidewalk green spaces, in yards, serving as bountiful fences, and texturing our agricultural landscapes, diets, and cultures. Acts of restoration, relinquishment, and resilience which ripple mass reforestation and good health.

Much love to the trees that have been with our northern climate ancestors who I’d hope to see in my area: hazelnuts, birches, maples, honeyberries, chestnuts, acorns, hickories, walnuts and pecans and that whole fam, elderberries, willows, spruces, and so many more.

More specifically, if it needs to be one single thing: cultivate a cooperatively-owned tree crop processing facility that can be used in the community and potentially as a regional hub, to help people meet their basic needs using trees. Areas of primary interest would be:

  • food (for biocultural restoration),
  • fuel (to heal fossil fuel addiction), and
  • fiber (to build resilience in the face of social environmental, and economic disturbances).

Interested in this also? Let’s talk and collaborate, let’s walk and exacerbate our own nuttiness, let’s squawck and walk the talk and elaborate on a way to initiate … do great or forsake. People ate acorns for millennia before they ate candy corns. Let’s make it happen.

Album playlist: Nate – Make It Happen

Nuts for Life, or “what does an ideal food system look like to you?”

From a food resiliency standpoint: collecting wild nuts, cleaning and drying them properly, and storing them in-shell with decent airflow in a cool space like a basement – it’s probably one of the highest levels of resiliency for fat and protein that you could store, I think. These hickories should be good for 10 years, I’ve heard for up to 15 years. Chestnuts when they’re dry, more or less indefinitely. Acorns, more or less indefinitely. These Japanese walnuts from 4 years ago…one out of 50 is a dud, the rest taste absolutely beautiful.

from Edible Acres (@4:31 of video below)

@ 5:34 some processing footage

“It feels like a critical base layer to food security, with gardening, wild foraging and hunting as additional layers of benefit.”

Replying to a comment about wild nuts being a most efficient form of hunting & gathering

Food sovereignty, good when times are good and when times are not so good.

An imaginative exercise – what does an ideal food system look like to you? When I envision optimal food systems and resilient, rewarding primary sectors that are grounded and guarded by ecological mutualism, I see trees are a key & core part.

Towering timber trees among their families and cohorts of diverse company, gifting staple crops for current and future generations with numerous co-benefits. Agroforest cows? Shiitake and other medicines? Trees of all types, hazel in the northeast alongside other handy hardy bushes. Alley & edge crops. Wildlife habitat. Connection to place and harmony with neighbors human and nonhuman. Productive conservation & restoration agriculture. Forest gardens. Community food hubs, gathering and processing.

How can we integrate ecological mutualism into our lives, at various scales? Go nuts

Immensely Rooted Webs of Wisdom

Love the way a forest floor is rich with roots. On a lawn or garden the roots you find are mostly of the plants proximate to them. In the woods, the soil is a fluff of organic matter and roots with nonspecific sources, almost impenetrable within its tightly woven softness. Roots everywhere, fibrous strands making up for lack of girth with their ubiquity.

I imagine this is akin to wizards (wise peoples): even if there is no apparent shoot (above ground plant), there’s likely a foundation full of fibrous roots. The source of those roots is effectively known yet ineffible: it’s from the trees! Sure, which one? It could hardly be said, and to declare it would neglect the interconnectedness of the root zone.

That said, is the wizard akin to a tree in that sense or to a forest? And how about the wizards woven through the world? An unseen sangha. שׁלום

Modular Air Prune Beds #0: Growing Bulk Hazelnuts from Seeds, Gathering and Short-Term Storage

I’m thankful for a good local community of agroforestry peoples, humans and trees.

A group of us gathered hazelnuts from a planting at the local university’s organic student farm. These decade-old bushes have ancestry from Badgersett Farm and Mark Shepard and are American x European hybrids, more American than European, rugged and highly productive.

  • Bag o’ nuts
  • Hybrid hazels in husks
  • Tiny snails
  • Left: hybrid American x European hazelnuts harvested
    Right: native American hazelnuts gifted
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Sincerely Heart Felt

Laughter and tears. How many days have both? Of those days are they mostly good or bad?

It’s not far to access both. How many thoughts and activities can bring you laughter? What puts a genuine smile on your face and giggle in your heart? How many tragedies and traumas bring tears to your eyes? How many deep and awe-some beauties bring tears to your eyes?

Be Sincere

Music Festivals: Venusian Love and the Sol that Illuminates

Being in the zone
With a crowd full of friendly people, all sharing that zone
And a few celebrated people, conducting that zone

Moving the movement

Music can be medicine, and each time I enjoy the privilege of a healthy dose of it among good community, I’m moved to write
Amused, a muse I sight
LVX : light

Life comes with highs and lows. Nature does not seem to prefer happiness. Rather, it seems to prefer balanced connections and equanimity. This is like light: it is of dual nature in balance. May one be contagiously content, engaged in high and low moments with the momentum of peace.

Some key themes distilled from the wonders of quality music festivals enjoyed well:

  • Fire: Accelerated social dynamic, a sort of adventure and free-flowing novelty as is common with travel or engaging with plants and animals as a group
    • A ‘Third Place’ or community space where one can get together with others flexibly on common level ground
  • Earth: Respect, with a baseline akin to kin
  • Air: Openness, with a baseline akin to like-minded friends
  • Water: Contentedness, engaging in the vibrations of life with a heartwood of equanimity

How may these qualities be cultivated beyond the boundaries of music festivals?