Monday, August 29, 2016

Burned

You never want to believe that the brother you love has a mental illness. You want to call it alcoholism or drug addiction and put him in a box that you can understand because you can only see the world through your own squinting eyes.

Two hours ago, less than two weeks after your father’s death you get a phone call that he went into the garage of his ex wife’s house, doused himself in gasoline and then lit a match. He was found only because her visiting friend heard screaming and came up from the basement to find him in flames.

When you learn to write, there is an exercise that many teachers will give to allow you to pry into your own subconscious. They have you wander into the basement of a childhood home and feel around, feel the cinder block walls, smell the soot and mildew, let the dampness around the sump pump touch your skin. Then find a hole, a hole that never existed when you lived in the house, and walk through. Describe what you see:

A brother, rail thin, running through the yard and down to the creek. A brother running after me. A brother that wants to be in our club, that wants to swing across the rope we tied to the tree above the creek, a brother that you trained to wrestle and fight and not to be afraid of anything, and then a brother lost, a brother bearded, a brother with eyeballs the size of gumdrops and then you see this brother running, alone and lost, nineteen years old in the same city where you grew up and you hear that this brother now believes that he is Jim Morrison and Jesus Christ.

And then you hear the voices of the people that unintentionally killed your love for putting words on paper. You hear them yelling about redundancy and self consciousness and Sigmund Freud and commas. You want so much to get back to the place where words made everything make sense. But you cannot.

You can only know that you do not know, and that should be enough. Knowing is not up to you. Knowing is hubris. Knowing is you at age sixteen, forcing your brother to put Copenhagen in his lip and not spit out any of the juice, you telling his twelve year old mind that tobacco will make him a man. Then you play catch. Catch consists of you using his swaying body as a target, of you aiming the ball like a bullet into his chest.

And you wonder if it was you that killed him. You wonder if it was you that somehow brought on this mental illness. And you wonder what it feels like to be on fire. You wonder what they wrapped him in before loading his body into the helicopter. You wonder about whether or not you will be able to feel his spirit if he dies in the sky.

You know that the love you have for your father rides with you in your mother’s car. You know that this love sits beside you on a plane. You also know that you were never able to understand exactly why your brother did what he did or felt what he felt.

You have this gift of the moment. Do not let any tell you what to do or what to write or how to grow or who to befriend. Do not let anyone tell you anything. Walk with love, filled with the spirit of all that connects us. Run with the notion that you will never get there. Look out to the clouds when sitting next to the airplane window, and if he dies, should he die, know that he exists within there. Know that you need not know the chemical composition of a cloud or a rose in order to appreciate the sensation you receive.

Know you do not need a mind or a body to inhale the love that is within. Know there are some not made to stay on this earth. Know that this is their journey. Know that this is yours.





Wednesday, August 24, 2016

Regenerate

Most people I meet seem to think that they can learn something from me when it comes to growing. I write not to say that what I do is the right way or the only way or even that it is mine. I write to share my experience over the years.

Nature abhors a bare ground. Walk through a forest and you will notice that every inch is covered, each plant, each log, each bit of moss and lichen serve their purpose. I do not blame myself or others for thinking that the best way to grow something is to make sure that there are no "weeds" or anything else growing between the targeted species. It started with industrial agriculture. It made the harvesting of crops easier and more economical. Now it is destroying the soil. 

Take a moment to imagine that you are your favorite bug and that you have just flown into a field of your favorite fruit or vegetable. A smorgasbord. A free for all. You eat, unimpeded, hopping or flying from one leaf to the next until you are so full that you can eat no more. You call your brothers and sisters and friends and cousins. That's what this type of growing provides. So the people come in and try to save what is being taken. People have this idea of mine and not yours. People have this idea of existing separately from nature. 

Then the people that are mad at the people that use chemicals from paint companies and from the war machine decide that they will no longer eat this "conventional" food. They think that they are doing their bodies a a service, and they may be. Their eating organic may be better for their body than eating conventional. What most don't know is that both crops are sprayed. Both crops are heavily managed. Both crops are unnatural. And both crops harm the earth by killing the very mycorrizae, bacteria, and nutrients that exist within the soil. Anybody remember a little state called Oklahoma? The Dustbowl.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't? No. There is another way.

You are still your favorite bug. You are still searching for your favorite fruit or vegetable. This time there is no smorgasbord. This time there are smells and sounds and different colors and shapes and the sky is buzzing with enemies and allies and you don't know which are which. It is a goddamn jungle out there. That's life. That's how we share. That's how we get back to serving nature. That is the beginning of the end of every problem. 

How you ask?

Well…every problem stems from the false notion of separation. Most of us see this problem, if we are even aware enough to see it, as separation from one another. It runs much deeper. It starts with our separation from the earth and spreads like a virus, like a plague of your favorite bugs attacking all that you hold dear. And you sit back and think that there is nothing you can do.

Find out where you food comes from. Is the farmer regenerating the land on which he grows? Is the farmer creating an ecosystem that fosters a variety of species that serve not only her but each other. Search the web for regenerative farms. Can't find any in your area, ask the farmers near you why they aren't practicing regenerative farming. 

The problem is deep. The problem is concrete, and more, the problem is the control that we think we need to exert over what lies beyond the concrete. Am I getting too far out there? I'm not just talking about cement anymore, so I will reign it back in and let you know what you can do should you wish to leave this earth in halfway decent shape for your children and your children's children.

Do not spray anything. Write letters to the companies and businesses that sell the poisons that cause our cancer. Write to politicians. Buy from the farmers that live closest to you. Grow your own damn food. But I don't know how.

Start with mint. Don't like mint, start with arugula. Don't like arugula, start with rhubarb. Don't like any of that? Change your tastes because when did health become about what feels good? I'll tell you…when they started planting in rows and spraying poison on the earth and realizing that as long as what was packaged was filled with salt, sugar, and fat, we would eat it. We would buy it like fat, mindless gluttons while lining their pockets. Once the people with money decided for us what we wanted, got us hooked on these drugs, and then made them available in mass quantities while phasing out nutrients and other necessities a new business could be born. Keeping us sick! Enter pharmacy…ah, but I digress.

Look at any problem. You cannot fight the problem. You must know who is benefitted by keeping the problem a problem. These are the people you must fight. 

I began writing this with the idea that I would talk about what you might do to make the place where you live more like nature while still feeding yourself and your health and your spirit and your neighbors. I want to help you, wherever you are to enter into a relationship with from what you came. 

Look around your neighborhood. What grows naturally? What grows without inputs from you or others. Find edibles that are in the same genus. What perennials grow well in your are? What do you want to experiment with?

Waste nothing. Some of your neighbors will be gracious enough to leave brown paper bags filled with biomass on their curbs. These are there for the taking. Find a corner of your yard where you might store these. Have a water source for birds. Another for frogs. If you are growing a fruit tree, plant other coppice trees around it. Don't know what coppice means? I'm going to pull a Leon George: "Look it up." In New Orleans I use moringa and cassia pendula. These can also protect the young fruit tree because both are slow growing. 

Practice STUN: a term coined by Mark Shephard that stands for sheer and total utter neglect. Want to grow a tree? Start fifty seeds and give none of them any love other than a passing I LOVE YOU. I am not kidding. Have fun. Nature has no word for failure. Nature has no word for mistake.

I grow malabar spinach and longevity spinach and molokhia and chives and other plants that need no care right outside my back door. If you live in Wisconsin, maybe you don't get to eat oranges. Maybe that's they way it should be. Maybe you should get them only on Christmas like my grandmother did. 

There are some books, too.

My favorites are:

One Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukoaka
Sowing Seeds in the Desert by Masanobu Fukuoka
Perennial Vegetables by Eric Toensmiller
Edible Forest I and II by Dave Jacke with Eric Toensmiller
Restoration Agriculture by Mark Shephard


Tuesday, August 23, 2016

Awake

Maybe you need to be okay with four in the morning and seven dogs out in the Georgia countryside. Maybe you need to be blessed by your father's death and the fact that you get to live out all of what he never got, and maybe the heat of this evening has nothing to do with why you can't sleep. You may give all that is in you and never get what you think that you should. This is not the end of the world. This is quite the opposite. It is the beginning.

You have never shot guns at roadsigns or ran people of another color out of your little countryside. You have never settled in these hills and lived off the land and bent trees to show others in your tribe how to get to water. You have never been separated from the pack and howled so the others could hear you. Or have you? What makes you think that you might be able to predict the future?

There is an ocean of blessings with your name written on the surface and yet you fill only a bottle. You come to the mouth and quit because you don't know how to drink salt water. You are a cow without knowledge, a bowing sow of iniquity, a manatee at best, living within the chains of infamy. I may say this is tomfoolery, words spilling at four in the morning, but you know about the golden thread that runs through everything and will sew all of them together if only your eyes are open.

What about your ideas? What about everything that falls? What about everything that exists within the soil that is fed by all that falls and the fact that you have been sitting around waiting for something to rise, waiting to be noticed, afraid that you are not like him or her. You ARE NOT like him or her. There can be only one you. This is what is beautiful: you and the world exist within one another. You are the world and the fly and the grass and each peach pit and the cyanide inside that even a horse knows enough to spit out. You are alive. Yet you are not the you that cannot stop thinking. You are the you that wonders why can't I stop thinking like this.

Revel in this. Those you have met that have met those that have been affected by those you met before meeting them. It is a tongue twister of connection you damn well better serve with reverence for the tree, reverence for the bird, reverence for the leaf that drops, the leaf you touch, the stem, your eyeballs and the book she pulls off the shelf and tells you, "I think you should read this."

Listen to all you meet, especially those that you do not agree with for they are showing you a side of yourself that you cannot see. Listen and read, but most importantly, touch, get down on your knees and look at what is beneath your feet, crawl back into the ocean, realize that you are the sun. You are the receded water, the seed, the one celled being that once lived only in water.

What a mystery, not knowing where the spirit that has always been there goes when someone dies. What a gift to be able to imagine it to be anything that you want it to be. Like god. Like that man you met years ago, that man that was yourself, that man that knew there was no way out but refused to stop fighting. That man that then asked for help. Who and what is god? Not you.