Look around
Your immediate surroundings and select an object
What is it, how is it interacted with? By you, by others, by the ambient space, by invisible forces
Where did it come from? Before it was where it is now, where has it been over the past day? Over the past weeks and months and years?
“Here
Now”
From whence did it come?
From what origin or source?
Before it is what it is now, what was it? What would you have called it before it reached the state in which you’d call it as you do now?
What is its relationship with The Source?
This one thing, how is it divisible or degradable, and how does it aggregate, enlarge, and accumulate if at all?
Let’s find its constituent parts and ways. Ways and means and matters…
Before this object joined you here
Before you ever met it
Where was it?
Imagine being with this object in the moments before you actually met it
Can you track its momentum backwards?
What was its path over time? Its physical steps through space en route to you? Its transformations? Its self-becoming?
What is self actualization?
Does it breathe?
Did it come from China?
How many places did its original materials come from, Earthling?
How many beings involved in its becoming?
How much love? I ask with thanks.
How much hardship? I&I ask with sorrow.
If we follow the object back, through its steps in spacetime dimensions we’re familiar with,
It probably came to us from an interaction with a human, or from itself in the wild…
Of the humans involved, the supply chain from cradle to current-condition to grave could be very short or very long, in space or in time
<4×4 table labeled distance and duration
columns=space, time; rows=short, long; examples TBD>
Step by step
What’s the best next step?
Be Here Now
===
Mission: optimize for resilient sun-to-life ratio
Minimize harm
This transmission brought to you by a mind picking up litter, detritus, debris
Wearing 3M gear to clean up toxins originating with Big Chem in the first place
Legacy legacy legacy, feeling like a disgrace
Our world sour and what’s it like to be displaced? O habitat
O the grief
O the mass extinction
O the habitat
I give thanks to the Source for the Present
For Home
I try
I participate
What’s the best next step?
Tag Archives: succession
Winter setting
The nights are cold
Days short, nights growing longer
Darker, deeper,
What is the adjective that would describe what the trees are doing now?
Are they relaxing? Are they cold? Are they panicking? Are they feeling old?
Are they feeling new, already longing and looking forward to the days ahead?
Trees like Jews seeing evening as emergence, night as new beginning
I don’t know what adjective would describe trees in these dark times
Where does their sap go?
Does it freeze? Actually, I beleafs it is sweetened to reduce its freezability, but for the most part deciduous trees dehydrate in winter to avoid frost damage.
What is the underground part of trees’ character? Is it alike the subconscious of the you’s and the me’s and the like? What memes and patterns might we see, below the knees of the trees?
What is at the foot, the root tips, the forefront of the trees, underground and above ground?
And what is the answer to that question, for your own slice of life?
What is one growing towards? What is my goal, for this day or this week or this month or this year or this lifetime or this <cycle>?
As the seasons change, mad things rearrange,
May the force of forest succession be with you, and may peace be up on you
Halloween pollenticks – sticky seeds of futures
(A short essay – tl;dr vote harris walz, minimize harm, which ‘worst’ you want to be making the best of with our precious time?)
Happy Halloween. I’ve come out of months long social media posting break to offer something scary for you. Trigger warning: political opinions, environmental catastrophes, collapse of safety critical systems.
Dear many friends who see that things cannot go on as they are,
The supply chains too brittle,
The relationships too strained,
Many of you plan a 3rd party vote in this most polarized presidential election of “the most powerful nation in the world”, or you might even be following RFK’s lead, or you might skip it altogether for any number of defensible reasons.
Many of you, dear friends, I see sympathize with a kind of accelerationist approach
Accepting how bad things are and responding with willingness for it to get worse, just to break out of terrible trajectories – is that minimizing harm? WIth all the harm caused by the hour in the over-developed world…
The sooner this self destruction grinds to a halt, the safer, some say
That’s the gist of conclusions I’ve heard from more than one thoughtful, experienced and educated person – active environmental stewards, tactful business people, balanced martial artists, all kinds of folks
I write this mainly to you, accelerationists and “never status quo”ers, especially those in swing states
This perspective is understandable. The status quo is very bad, and it is adapting very poorly overall to immediate catastrophes hammering away at itself and then some
Habitat loss, resource depletion, biodiversity catastrophe…the heavy grief of wars, of power abuses, I cannot even speak it, and yet overshadowing it all is -an extinction crisis-
The disregard for life
My heart is heavy. The world is heavy. And the systems that sustain us are, … It is hard to fathom or accept
Most of you reading this live better than most animals *ever* in terms of basic needs and safety and freedom and potential and
Yet we are struggling, in astonishing debt despite ¿ever?-growing profits, in chronic illness, in an alarming fertility crisis!, inoculated ¡¿forever?! with microplastics and >forever< chemicals
Depressed, anxious, angry, outraged at the systems that
…
What sustains us?
What sustains us?
This question has burned before me for a long time
What sustains us,
And how can we reciprocate?
OK
Let me get to the point, to why I do this emotional labor to try to establish some same pageness, for you to at least entertain if not accept
I will vote for Harris Walz, not because I want them as president, or want to validate and further a severely broken 2-party system, the DNC, etc etc
But because I do not have a workable alternative to this democracy-esque experiment
And not because I can accept the horrors of investment in the military-industrial complex,
Or petrochemicals,
Or over-development,
Or disrespectfully degrading rather than lovingly regenerating that which sustains us
I cannot accept that
But if I must face that
If we face these realities, and if we have a finite amount of time before safety critical systems fail under their many strains
Then what is in my power to really refuse is doing anything that could hasten or exacerbate harm
Using what little time we have, struggling under a politic that is actively agitating, suppressing environmental regulation and investment, violating women’s rights, taking an isolationist nationalist and what else *ist path to destroying the world that sustains us
A world that begets many worlds, vs. a world that devours and homogenizes
I cannot vote in any way that risks obstructing deep adaptation
And the only choice this election season that puts my puny power against 4?+ years of Trump, is the democratic ticket
I’ll do what I can to keep a chaos agent from making it harder to deeply adapt and build alternative safety-critical systems, /while we still can/
The more time we buy, the more harm we can minimize, before the next storm, the next fire, the next pandemic and supply chain collapse and
What is it that sustains us, and how do we relate to it?
We have so much important work to do
I cannot waste time and attention on a power hungry pedo friend of Jeffrey E and corporate cosmophagia
I cannot accept wasting the time we have with this historic level of capacity, of ways and means as a whole, historic
When we need more than ever to build capacity
Forestablishingaliveablefuturity
The Adapters Movement, in summary
Adapt in place, live in the here and now, and truly make the world a better place whether times are good or . . .
This post summarizes the defining features of ‘The Adapters Movement’. I hope this post fills a gap, offering a healthy framework to respond to the critical time we are living in. As it becomes clearer that many systems we rely on will not suffice or survive in the future, I hope this and similar movements will serve as popular and robust alternatives to inaction or to isolationist (and sometimes extremist) forms of preparedness and survivalism. Let us lessen, not worsen, inevitable harm.
This movement was first introduced to me in the form of a long, winding thread that was posted by a widely appreciated blogger Ross Raven aka Category5 on Permies.com: C5 Defines The Adapters Movement – Acceptance and Triage. Permies is the world’s largest permaculture forum (or so I’ve heard from them), and this Permies post was being discussed in an online community of the Deep Adaptation movement (which I introduce below).
I read the long thread introducing The Adapters Movement over a few days, and I found a lot of gems in it, representing the best of the ‘prepper’ and ‘survivalist’ movements, while explicitly revising many of those movements’ most off-putting and self-destructive problems. To help make the Adapters movement more accessible, I am sharing this relatively-short write-up introducing it and outlining its key themes. A heads up about what’s ahead: This post prints as four pages, which is much shorter than the many essay-length posts in the original Permies.com thread that this intends to summarize.
A little more context. This ‘Adapters Movement’ fits the wisdom of Deep Adaptation well. Here is Deep Adaptation in a nut shell: What are the chances of catastrophic natural disasters? Practically certain. What about the collapse of safety-critical systems? Very likely. Could humanity go extinct? Possible but not probable. Many systems we rely on for basic safety and well-being (e.g. food, housing, medicine, water, wood, ‘waste’, wildlife, social systems) are in the process of collapsing and some will fail. The way to adapt to these realities, according to the Deep Adaptation movement, can be summarized with the “Four R’s framework for inquiry“:
- Relinquish what we need to stop to avoid more harm
- Resilience is a priority for what we have that we need to preserve
- Restore what we need from the past to live in ways that remedy and reduce harm
- Reconcile relationships to remedy and reduce harm
With that introduction, here is a summary of key points I took from that long Adapters Movement post linked to above. I hope this helps inspire and clarify paths forward that are well adapted to grow bright, solarpunk futures out of collapse and change.
Continue reading →Northeastern Indigenous Agroforestry
Thanks first peoples for simply living so that others may simply live. Thanks Jono Neiger for sharing this 1984 paper on indigenous agroforestry to the Northeast Permaculture Listserv.
Some Ecological Aspects of
Northeastern American Indian Agroforestry Practices
This paper was written in 1984 while I was a student of Professor Arthur Lieberman at Cornell University. Professor Lieberman was then Director of the Cornell Tree Crops Research Project and taught landscape ecology in the Department of Landscape Architecture. This version was submitted to the international journal Agroforestry Systems in 1988, but never published there due to its length. A somewhat condensed version was later published in the 1994 Annual Report of the Northern Nut Growers Association (Volume 85). For a broader perspective on Native Americans’ land management practices, see this online article by Doug MacCleery.
http://www.daviesand.com/Papers/Tree_Crops/Indian_Agroforestry/
What will come of this?
Year 2222 200 winters away How many generations will have passed? What will I&I enjoy in life? What of one's own ways will continue? What lessons will I&I have learned? What challenges will I&I face? What will I&I have of the essential gifts to sustain oneself? Wood, water, air, soil, energy? How will one reciprocate One's gifts and All's abundance? #TreesAreTheAnswer #WeAlreadyKnow #Hózhó
Tikkun O’lam תיקון עולם
“Tikkun Olam-the repair of the world.
via https://www.facebook.com/lightsofkabbalah/posts/1678432628972544
If you see what needs to be repaired and how to repair it,then you have found a piece of the world that G-d has left for you to complete.But if you only see what is ugly in the world,then it is you yourself that needs repair.”
Rebbe Menachem M Schneerson (Lubavitcher Rebbe)
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
Predation & Evolution
I poem I originally shared July 15, 2014:
SPLASH
FIGHT
BITE
All was alright in the world, as I was moving toward the light
Looking for some food so I’d sleep well through the night
And awaken another day
My mouth becomes open
!!! Woah I am awoken !
I spread my wings and make like a cross
Then my world is tossed – tension to release; anticipation to closure; potential to kinetic
So,
It is written
Now I make like the moss (gratitude to the roots, foundations of the Kingdom)
Growing slowly through the churning fires of Time
Now at the turning of the rhyme, I ask:
Have I eaten or been eaten?
Solarpunk Snapshot: O Sunny Days, Reflections on Heat Waves
Journal entry, JD175, YR2174
Location: New Heartwood, Great Lakes water unit East 37.
Heat waves
The mainstream still grows a harder gap to cross. It meanders more turbulent and wider. Its degraded soils worsen the waters. Bridge building continues, bank stabilization continues (thank stars for the willows), and inland waters are being healed. On days like today, I can’t help but think of all the heat and friction in the mainstream. Those high temperatures can hardly hold any dissolved oxygen, and life is slowly choked out. May the ocean of histories heal and renew.
I knew today would be like this. Most are. Hot. Dry. Dry. Even the winters are feeling drier. And even the good days are reminiscent of conditions in the mainstream now that I think of it: when we get water, it is heaved violently, it thrashes and impacts, it erodes. The waters crash down and wash up, and as they pass the ground is lost to downstream. The waters are like reflections from history, and those remaining islands and land bridges around the mainstream are generational systems, built on . . .
I won’t go on. Much progress to be made here and on the shorelines of the mainstream. Ladders, lamps, lifeboats . . . It is better inland, and I hope more life will find its way out of the mainstream and onto land, onto the earth element.
Despite being of a different world than that of the mainstream, we are still in the same world. Same goes for all the different niches in the mainstream, which fight so fiercely against each other and themselves to squeeze out what life is left.
Life is better here. Where we are a regenerative part of the landscape and not degrading or even dominating it. Where as many of our knobs are turned, as are the dials of ecosystem conditions which we try to control. Where the ways and wisdoms of the local first peoples are followed, and where we all connect with our own first personhood. Where there is ecological mutualism. Where generations behind us and ahead of us grow with us, actively in mind as we steward life and vice versa, in succession.
Life is mind, and may peace be upon yours.