The first principle of Permaculture is “Observe & Interact.” The “interact” part is very important. My original plan for creating soil fertility in the 1/8th acre Milpa garden relied on creating charcoal out of the trees we cleared there in a big old dug trench. My design for the garden’s layout included determining where to put that trench for the charcoal burn; then, I dug and water slowly filled the hole. Not a good place to make a fire.

I’d been working in that field, observing and interacting, clearing and visualizing and planning; but until I dug that hole as a test, I had no idea the water table was so dramatically high. With this interaction, parts change; and when any part changes in a holistic design, the whole changes in relation to it, too.

Now, I’m going back to designing around the water. I’ll do my charcoal in an above-ground kiln, most likely. In the meantime, I’ve put some of the cut trees in the paths between beds just to make them walkable. I also tried a somewhat sloppy “hugulkultur” application into one of the beds, seeing if I can use that to raise the beds higher above the water table. I could focus on that approach more substantially, but I don’t want to dig that much.

the cardboard will be covered with layers of leaves; the hope is that it will suppress weeds and build soil for next year that can be scooped onto the bed to build it up further

After preparing three beds in the field, I finally started buckwheat cover crop. It made me so happy to sow them that I don’t really want to do anything for the next week but watch for signs of their emergence. These are only the second seeds I have put in the ground out here.

The first were stinging nettle seeds I sowed in a dozen places around the woods. These are far too helpful a plant not to have in abundance. Nutritious food, healing medicine, compost activator, soil amendment as green manure, and even source of fiber for making clothing. I planted them near, but not too near, the paths because they sting.

Yesterday, though, I planted cover crop. A happy constraint on not having irrigation water available is that you have to dance with the rain. When you put new seeds down, you want them to be watered soon. When you can’t get water to them, you need to time it such that the rain will follow shortly after. Watching the sky, listening to the wind, trying to time it right; this time, I finished preparing the bed and scattering the seeds seconds before the heavy rain came down. It was beautiful.

Preparing the beds, too: as the clouds purpled and rushed, as the birds collectively freaked out, as the wind pulled at my hat, I was out there with grub hoe and broadfork opening everything up, doing the broadfork two-step, opening the mouths of the soil for all the rain that would wash into it. At the end of the day – satisfaction. Seeds are in the earth getting watered in as I take cover. My life is with theirs, opening slowly, reaching up.

Yesterday, I finished inoculating my 20th shiitake mushroom log. Doing this without power means going very slowly, working in tiny sessions of battery powered drilling until the batteries run out. Then, they have to be charged at Pickle’s job, coffee shops, or friends’ homes.

At first it was discouraging, since we also have no way to refrigerate the mushroom spawn yet. I had a timer in my head saying: “we have one week to drill 40 logs or else all the spawn will go bad.” 4 days into that 7 day week, I’d drilled only 8 of them. A friend came by with a lithium ion drill and we knocked out 7 of them in a day – very encouraging. Now, I’m done with 20. The rest of the logs are Oyster and King Stropharia (which needs a chipper, not a drill, to make its substrate of wood chips).

I think about using non-powered hand drills to drill logs. Would this be crazy? It seems like so much more effort, and maybe the way to burn out on doing this. Our plan is to have 500 Watts of solar and soon, so realistically, we will be able to do next year’s mushroom logs with a power drill. This is great because other than cutting and hauling the logs, getting our batteries charged was the only hard part. As many others have discovered before, preparing mushroom logs is easy and satisfying. It is peaceful, tactile work. Soft mild smelling spawn, hot cooling wax, the assuring click of the inoculation tool. Brushing wax like sloppy painting, tucking in spawn, protecting.

Right now we buy our spawn from small businesses I feel OK working with, but I’m still curious about whether this could ever be something that begins and ends right in our little region. Could this be a seed-to-seed (spore-to-spore?) food for us in the same way that maize can be, or does it require a scale larger than this? Or, is the way simply for the shiitakes to naturalize here and begin showing up on their own, unbidden? Future generations, passing through and finding edible mushrooms they have no idea we helped to bring in; I dream of leaving something like this behind, just as acorns, hickories, blueberries, who knows how many others were left for us.

I have a loose goal now to start 10 more logs per year, perhaps focusing on less common edible and medicinal species like Lion’s Mane, Reishii, and others. We couldn’t afford to eat mushrooms every day, nor have as much medicinal mushrooms around as I would like; but working this way, we can have all we’d ever want. It’s another example of why living out here doesn’t feel like a sacrifice to Pickle and me. Living simple can mean eating wild mushrooms every day.

Mostly, we are not living how we live to reduce CO2. I could potentially reduce my emissions more by living in a walkable downtown and getting rid of my car; or, by rarely leaving the land, most likely giving up my friendships; or, to zero emissions by not living at all. We do get into analysis of embodied energy in choices like what car to drive, but only small questions like that are so linear and they are not the questions that make us come alive. Beyond ceasing to do so much harm, beyond the very important ‘living simply so others may simply live,’ there is something vital we are stumbling towards with each new day, following this intuition that we need entirely other ways of relating to the earth, ourselves, and each other than the ones that society presents us with.

Living out there, I want to ask what the nature of work and jobs are as automation and information economy makes us more and more irrelevant and abstracted. I want to question what progress is, what growth is, what happiness is. I want to learn from what is beautiful how to live beautifully.

I want to become completely independent from corporations, to me all essentially in the same business of destroying the human soul. It is the time for an enlivening non-participation, a replacement of our dependence on planet-devouring industries to an interdependence with each other and the land.

I want to learn to create rituals – communal acts where we can root our existences into time and place in order to remember all-time, all-place.

I want to garden with others on a summer day, then swim together and then stay together through crankiness, despair, weirdness, confusion, and bliss.

I want to know that, in the time of the sixth wave of mass extinctions, I tried something as brave as I could that was also as gentle as I could.

I want to inhabit a life of enoughness, a life without any expectation that I can always rent a backhoe, see a doctor, jump on a flight, look up anything, become anybody or anything, eat any meal, buy a replacement for anything, or be continually entertained.

I want to belong to a place and a community, and I think that the power of fossil fuels only ever ultimately gets in the way of that. Over the engines we can’t hear each other. Atop the engines we can’t see the wildflowers. Inside the engines, we speed past each other as anxious faceless compartments. Beneath the engines, we are so much fuel. In the silence, I see you. In the slowness, I hear you. In the peace, I remember you.

Holding a magical orb of power tends to be distracting. There it is in your hand, promising you can do anything immediately however you want. It’s really hard to remember why if at all you ever even wanted the glowing magical orb, but now you have it. Because the magical orb lets us travel fast, we make our homes far away from each other, we move far away for work or school, we jet around, we change places constantly. Because the magical orb makes music for us, we forget how to sing. Because the magical orb constantly gives us updates on our friends, we stay busy at home reading them. Because the magical orb tears open the soil and fills it with fertilizer, we deplete the soil each year and let the life all run off to poison the streams.

The magical orb was neat. Remember it? When it ran out and returned to being an empty glass ball, we used it as a planter. Around the charcoal fire, we drank mead and put on funny plays for each other about the time of magical orbs. Even in our comedic exaggerations, we couldn’t really get to how crazy it all was. None of us even knew how to explain what a search engine optimization person is (even I forgot), but when we comically try to pantomime one, it has us rolling as we imagine a twenty-something in a business suit earnestly trying to find a hundred different synonyms for ‘dog shirt.’ After that, someone starts to play banjo. We all know most of the words. They make some of us cry. The songs are unreviewable, unpromotable, undownloadable, perfect. The wheel of the stars turns.

sweetgum

This weekend four people came to help us continue clearing the place where we hope to grow most of our initial food. Long term, we want to rely more and more on perennial and forest foods, but we begin with, and will probably always keep some place for, annuals. For most annuals, we need sun and the disturbed soils they grow best from. For this, we need to clear a place.

Opening up anywhere in this young forest has for me been one of the most challenging and instructive acts in our work so far. There is nowhere on this land that is not of value, as it is, to some other beings. A thicket of greenbriar, scratchy impediment to our human passage, is home to birds, small mammals, insects, others. Even moving to remove an individual tree involves severing unknowably many invisible relationships. I am only beginning to learn about plants like the Rattlesnake Plantain, feeding with delicate root hairs on the decomposing pines around it. No change in the forest does not affect a weave of beings beyond our knowing.

Still – I choose to remove trees. Hundreds of small sweetgums. I’ve stuck to noiseless hand tools. By working without machines, I’ve been able to disturb small patches at a time. I hope that going slow gives some of these beings the chance to reknit the relationships I sever in the absences I cautiously carve. Working slow also gives me the chance to learn continually. My initial ideas have changed so many times. The slowness lets the land root into me. Each time I work to clear specifically, I say a small prayer for exactly this.

Today, a small answer: I walked down to the field where our friends had come to work and was struck by beauty. The sun was pouring through the place we had opened, but the forest still stood everywhere around it. In that moment, I could glimpse it: ancient corn growing tall, leaves and vines and berries and roots and flowers, edible weeds dancing through the beds season after season in their self-directed rotations, stropharia mushrooms blooming in the mulch, and some small trees just starting to grow that will one day shepherd the field back to forest. I could see, too, a group of us gathered around the charcoal trench long into the night as we turned the gift of the sweetgum bodies into soil carbon, into long term fertility for the land.

The eigth of an acre or so of land we opened feels like a just-right beginning for me. One person can handle it. If others decide to live with us and grow food with us, we can increase it; but for now, it feels almost finished and somehow already perfect.

When all of us worked out there, no chainsaws or skidsteers or bulldozers or weed whackers, I thought we would speak a lot more. Eventually, we did share deep and satisfying words; but for an hour, there was nothing but the wind, the crows, the swishing of a swing blade, drawing of pull saws, clipping of pruners, bailing and hauling of hands, and a little joke, an observation, a thought. Out there in a small sunny patch within a bigger forest, we fell into one of the oldest human dances as if it was all we’d ever done. This is why when I returned to the field today, it felt as if it were smiling. After all the trees I cut alone, the forest had been waiting to see what I was getting at. Watching us work together explained a little: we are here to try to learn to tend you as you once taught us to long ago. We are sowing peace as much as food. We are willing to go slow, to pray, ask, and give thanks, and to learn to belong to you again.

Deep gratitude to everyone from Mutual Aid Carrboro and Durham who worked with us. In just one day, you helped us tremendously.

Another night certain a tornado – or, if not that, some other event that changes the color of the night sky to green or orange or red – was coming any second now. Our mostly woven home is shelter in the old sense. There is only a membrane of difference, fragile as skin. Just as I can hear everything outside when I am in (coyotes singing in the morning? was that real?), so I, sitting outside, can now hear that one of our bunnies is almost certainly destroying the foundations of our home inside; just being bunnies.

Dreams, too, seem to have a somewhat thinner membrane between themselves and wake. Pickle woke me last night with a dream that sounded like magic or prophecy, complete with a question for me I had no idea how to answer.

The interior of our home was set up with the four elements in mind. Our hearth is fire; our wash area is water; our lofty cloud-like bed is wind; our small shrine is for earth. Last night after Pickle’s dream, we realized we’d coincidentally set these elements in exactly the cardinal direction that made the most sense on the land. In our forest, the blazing sun is in the south – same as our hearth; the spring we hope to take water from is in the north – same as our wash stand; the powerful winds that keep me awake so many nights come here mainly from the west – same as our lofty bed; and the earth we tend hoping for the gift of food is to the east – same as our earth shrine.

When I was younger, I decided that coincidence means, ‘Pay attention.’ A few years ago, I decided that in some sense, attention is love. This is part of why I finally rejected social media corporations that view the world as an ‘attention economy’ and sees our attention, as well as our friendships, memories, and identities, as commodities to be captured by subtler and subtler, more and more integrated into our life addictions; and conversely, this is why relearning the simple act of attention changes so much for me. There are lessons in everything that are not accessible through logic. There is a limit to what you can logically learn from watching a pair of vultures dance in the sky. The work that I think we’re here to do requires profound, non-linear, non-verbal, taking in of the entire gestalt and producing a response from a patient, liminal place. I am grateful for how much help this forest gives me in finding my way back, again and again, to that boundless home.

the end effect
of apartment ceremony,
my old friend,
his twenty smokes,
my constricting lungs
and loud heart rhythm,
us up until five
taking the history view
is:

i wake at 1,
news addiction cured,
chest tied taut,
all day breaths
fought for, each
mindful and scarce,
remnant of the sense
that we get it now,
our words made a seat
sittable through
this specific quake.

I tidy,
still no power,
looking forward
to a sunset walk.

Pipe in hand,
white sage, mullein,
holy basil, damiana,
uva ursi, marshmallow
coltsfoot, red clover,
peppermint, passionflower,
the creek trickles,
the sunlight too,
I breathe the smoke,
offer a prayer.

Silent wings unsubtle
drop a shadow
into a blind
behind a trunk.
I stay still
then lean look
around trunk
for wings. Wait
then giant unfolded
dusklit thunderbird
reperches next to me,
stares into me,
face I imagine human,
conference of predators,
making me a new seat
made of no words.

The owl flies away
tearing the cord
around my lungs.
I bless his hunting,
bless his medicine,
bless the daring
of every forest
that remembers clearcut,
and of people
getting out of bed
at all, even at 1 –
then, he flies
to the tree
on the path
in front of me,
sharing communion
in no way accident
silent shouting
no words
all we share,
then paths part.

That night the woodfire
ties my lungs again,
Owl hunting
quick claims
while my heart pounds
while I beg each breath
while stars
scatter blessings.

New day, I sleep
too late,
search for scraps
to make a new seat
to ride today’s quake.

maple flowers on the dinner table

Pickle and I invented something to help us. We called it a Gratitude Ceremony.

Where it came from was we had both worked crazy hard on this dream for months, even years. Often we were mad at each other, feeling stuck or afraid because of one another’s different approaches to difficult or scary problems, or just too exhausted to be supportive. We both knew this whole time that the other person was doing so much, but there was no time to stop and appreciate it. We were beings having to make a warm home before the Winter came. Everything was focused there. We were as likely to bring up something the other person needed to be concerned about or hadn’t been able to finish yet as we were to say thank you for what had been done.

For the Gratitude Ceremony, we bought an entire carrot cake. We loaded up a picnic basket with box wine, cheese and crackers, and cake. We went down to the creek in the late afternoon amongst the oldest trees around us and sat on the ‘beach.’ For the ritual, we took turns naming something the other person did to help us get here that we were grateful for. Then we said, “YOU GET CAKE” and fed them a piece of cake. Sometimes we’d alternate cheese because it was a lot of cake. To break it up, one could also force a wine toast to a plant or animal on the land (eventually including imaginary animals).

As it went on, we could feel a lot of the rawness of all those overwhelming and hurried months healing, dissolving into genuine thanks, memory and laughter. We ate almost half the cake, which is good because we don’t have refrigeration.

kitty

Almost twenty days, out in the forest. We had our first weekly meeting out here together to make decisions about how to guide our lives into enacting the values and dreams that led us to this beautiful place.

We’ve been using a tool called “Holistic Goal Setting” that comes out of the Permaculture world, initially via Alan Savory and then taught to me by Courtney Brooke, a Permaculture teacher at Earthaven. All this tool really does is give us a way to check whether or not our decisions are leading us closer to what we agree we’re working towards. We’re hopeful it will give us a way to be sure that the many really complicated choices we’ve been constantly having to make lead us towards what we want, and not away.

I’m not sure how I feel about this process yet. I’ve been through so many meetings that generate neat little diagrams on big white paper that lead nowhere. I’ve been responsible for a bunch of them. What makes me want to try a tool like this again is seeing how much we humans can be so bad at seeing past the short term, past our likes and dislikes, cravings and aversions; or, in seeing multidimensionally – looking not just at ecosystem health, for example, but also whether or not the choices will lead everyone to burn out and sell the land to a developer.

It’s nothing new: making skillful decisions and sharing power is complicated and often excruciating; yet, when the work is done, sometimes there is this little seed of peace that can be glimpsed. I think we’re meant to keep going with this. I think we all need to know how to live together and share complicated choices, even when it terrifies us.

Yesterday I had the gift of significant help from Pickle and a friend on the clearing of the big future garden to be. Then my Permaculture-wise friend helped me think through the experimental plan we’re starting with for our initial food growing in the forest. There is so much I don’t know. Mistakes seem so easy to make. I look for hints. In response to my idea about doing a no-tech charring of the cleared sweetgums, my friend wasn’t any more certain than I was that it would work, but she felt excited about it. Another friend talking about it the other day seemed to hear one of my hopes – that we could turn the process into a ritual that many could share in. Now, among all the potential mistakes I could make, there is this one that got these reactions from two people close to me. I think my reaction is the same. Sometimes we need complicated decision making tools, but sometimes we only need to ask: what makes me most come alive? In this case, I knew from the beginning that driving a skidsteer or bulldozer through the future garden would definitely not do that. Now, clarity emerges in each act and silence. I feel alive in this work.

We’ve been out here for fifteen days. I’m finally finding something like a rhythm. Work is dreamlike without bosses, deadlines, coworkers, beginnings or ends. I work by carving the infinity of each day, each hour, each space into choices. Little of it seems obvious to me, but after weighing it all there are choices that emerge as pretty good guesses. There are countless variables, and so it stops making sense to think of variables. What seems to work is to try to live with all of it at once – to move and see with a gestalt, a flow of flows. All along I’m trying my best to make space to hold a light awareness of everything all at once.

That there is any affect of the stroke of a pull saw through another soft adolescent sweetgum tree on each day’s new nightmare of news requires something like faith. It’s been helpful for me to say to people: what we’re doing is only our best guess. Living out here and holding our vision, as well as cutting down this tree and not that – it’s only a best guess, only for us.

The riddle I’m working on right now is how to ask for food from the forest while letting it continue to become the forest it’s urge is to be; and how, for the small patch disturbance clearing I’m creating to grow our small amount of precious sun-loving foods, to keep the vital gift of the forest floor’s fertility while still preparing the right tilth to grow our corn, beans, and squash.

So much intelligence exists for us to draw from to find a way forward, but no one can offer exactly the right answer for us. Most people still clear forests with skidsteers, bulldozers. I haven’t even brought and don’t intend to bring a chainsaw into the small field where we hope to grow our corn. In my mind, it seems like the birds would treat me differently if I was running a chainsaw. New to their home, cutting down the dense thicket of sweetgums and brambles that I know some of them live within; they’d remember the stories about the last times someone brought big loud machines to the land and reset it all to zero. The crows at least would remember, I am certain.

So now, I walk down to the small gap that started as a smaller gap where I’m making my best guess about growing the crops we’ll be extra reliant on until our perennial, more forest-adapted foods are ready. I bring a gigantic Japanese pull saw that I strap to my leg and draw to almost effortlessly cut trees in a bloodless echo of all my childhood samurai fantasies, as well as some loppers and pruners. In a day like today, I cut dozens of trees by hand. Going slow, I can see how each one is different. I can hesitate usefully, regard the tree’s beauty, and pray to it if I feel I should. It becomes safer to select trees to cut in the same run as cutting them, with no growling engine’s dissonance to hasten my hand.

I don’t seem to get all that much done in the hours I work out there, but my goal is only somewhere between an eighth and a quarter of an acre. Today I stopped to watch two vultures tracing infinity in the sky. The lowliness of this work is the door to magic. I resist it, longing for the bliss of gardening with beloved friends at Earthaven last Spring, singing together and talking about Spirit as the hours melted into impossible sweetness. Here I am alone with the forest and the weather and the songs I know and all the experiences I’ve ever had for most of the day.

The little field is taking shape out of the sweetgums. An ephemeral streambed becomes the border on the North, where I imagine I may try to dig out a small pond to catch water for the crops. The ghosts of raised beds or at the very least channels and mounds seem on contour enough to hint at a garden layout. The odd few tall trees by the gap form a Southwest corner, and the walking path I’ve been using makes an Eastern edge.

What I’ll do next is a thought spiral I go around continuously. The ground is full of the stumps of the small sweetgums. Can I remove them without mechanization? Pry them out, innoculate them, leave them in? And what do I do with all the downed wood? Large trench biocharing in a ceremonial fashion, or put them through a woodchipper for ramial wood chips, hugulkultur them, something else? It’s the first that really calls to me, but I don’t know how I can charge the charcoal quickly enough for summer crops. How did people in the rainforest do this?

Sun goes down outside the yome and these guesses and questions are my company, my friends – joined, thankfully, by our two rabbits and our newly adventurous and rewilded cat, and most of all the love of my life, who is beautifully alive with her own luminous guesses and questions, and who has leapt with me into the impossible gift of this life I am with each day slowly learning to inhabit.