Suddenly, Fall

The one storm exhales. The wind is blowing from the wrong side of the forest. At 11am I heard coyotes singing a round down past the stream. Why are they singing now?

The forest feels completely in every way a different being than it did a month ago. Meanwhile, those clouds and I find myself pacing, unable to settle on a task for long.

Saw a small grass green snake I almost chopped beneath my peasant hoe. Moving biomass into piles. This is what animals do, I think. We use our bodies to concentrate the green life from distributed all over to built up in certain places. I’m trying to guide the dream of the young healing forest into the dream of a forest garden. If I get confused and start to think I’m the dreamer, I only need to stand still in the small clearing and feel those backwards winds, feel how I and the soil are holding in the same breath in the same waiting.

Storms rains and winds have this way of totally ruining the work my fear has done all life long to see me and the land as separate beings. Actually what it’s like is the looping anxiety of tired stories falls away as a more elemental fear / awareness / sharpening / reality takes the stage. Here I’m pacing watching the trees, scanning like the vultures, moving down the same paths with new efficiency in response to the chill in our fur each of us mammals in this young forest are feeling alike.

I see ahead a season of winds and rains punctuated by small charcoal fires and then more winds and rains and all along something in our cells saying let go, get ready, grow fur, get light, burrow, nest, prepare, walk fast, eat lots. It isn’t yet the season of the scythe and it also already is and always has been.

Somewhere in me I know there is only one storm. A storm has no beginning and end. You can never draw its limits. There isn’t a place that isn’t the storm. There isn’t a place that isn’t the calm. Here the awakening chill is just the distant whisper of a roar happening to places we know or have heard of. We are flooded and we are dry.

Our way of life makes hurricanes. This isn’t because we’re bad. We’re trapped and we don’t know how to do it different. I drive to the coffee shop because I am lonely and I am a hurricane maker.

I think if I didn’t have permaculture and all the permaculture teachers I’ve learned from I’d have given up by now; even then, all I really expect from permaculture is to slightly control the fall. Permaculture is a parachute for civilization – we will certainly fall but we can have a little say of where we land. The best dream I seem to be able keep is that we’re falling together holding hands, singing songs about the beautiful fall and seeing and telling from the high vantage point of people falling the vision of a land and people restored and healed on some day to come.

Like coyotes we will learn to sing as the storm winds begin at once to blow.

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