everything gardens

poem 'bout me, by another

2008-06-17T06:45:00.000-04:00

garden lady

Come to the garden,

Come see what I see;

The dandelions, creeping charlie, wild strawberries intertwined among the blades of grass.

you see invasive weeds with gnarly roots

a chaotic array of disorder

tampering with the hours of neat

you create

i see medicinal herbs

growing freely in a spacious meadow

all in the shadows of the academy

nurturing the ground

in the acidic grounds of Lunenburg

Class Afloat community garden was approved

mint, herbs, tomatoes and more

to be for all in the summer sun

return

2008-03-02T14:39:00.004-05:00

I have not been to this site or writing here for a long time. Gillie called me back, sending me an email that she had read it. It is good to be called back again.

I cracked this morning. I have been being really hard on myself about how lame i am socially; how akward and boring I am. Within moments, a circle of my women friends circled me in support. And it sure does help me to cry.

It is okay and understandable to be grieving right now. It is a death. And it is Kili's impetus; we are beginning to cleave; I do feel rejected, and am projecting that onto all of my relationships, so am feeling broken over everything.

Candles inside while it snows outside. Fat white flakes through the black and white lace/architecture of trees, roads, and powerlines. A point to light in the warmth inside, to the bluster of an Atlantic blizzard outside.

I fell in love with Kili three years ago, hungry for the security of the Cortes Island family and his impassioned drive, to watch him leave me 4000km from home. Halifax. It is a wonderful place; I love it; I wonder when I will leave it.

It seems that there is an amazing family (families of connnected families) here that calls me to a higher level, as well as the working-class grub I am used to.

Yes, I feel like there is room for me here, but I am still so ashamed of myself. I feel socially incompetent: i don't even know what it is or is not, but that I just feel like not enough or too much: just not a like-able balance.

Kira and Leslie both heard me say that, and supported that these are neurotic notions and my friends love me. This makes me cry. I have never felt very loved. Never felt lovable, and never believed people loved me.

This framework sure causes a lot of pain and feelings of failure in me.

So, I have a mountain of sghoolwork in front of me. I have not yet approached any of my profs to say that I am going through a divorce and will need extensions yet.

While I have some questions about whether or not this is really what I want to be doing, I am deeply excited about my path and do not seek to change the trajectory. I will continue to work, step by slow step, to being more conscious: more awake, present, joyful, open, thinking. Less scared and reaction-ing.

Thanks for listening.
j

april

2007-04-14T02:44:00.000-04:00

I have flown Vancouver,
having finished the workshops,
and landed on Cortes Island.

the workshops:

In summary, the workshops went well, with room for improvement.

The first, about soil/compost/mulch: well attended, about 20 people in the pouring rain. We sat, and I talked too much. There was so much i wanted to get through, and that was my downfall. Next time I will talk less, about less, and invite others to speak more, providing a framework for our offerings. I only got back 4 feedback loops, and they were good, but I didnt feel so great after it.

The second, Eat your Weeds!, was a nice sunny morning and about 17 people showed. I had danced until 3 am to adham shaikh the night before; i felt so clear and grounded. I talked less, everyone talked more, and it was great. I got back 11 feedback loops and they were bright. Treasure phrases include "- gardening is the new black". People connected, interconnected, and we remembered to see our surroundings.

The third, gardening with the cosmos, even got some press! I prepared this workshop more carefully, knowing it was a dense amount of material in order to really get it, and in light of the first one, i knew i had be dynamic and facilitate the emerging of the knowledge, rather than the teaching of it. I thought of it almost as a square dance through some of the patterns. I scheduled out a timeframe and trajectory, with maps for people to follow. The energy was a bit scattered that day, and I was not fully on-it. It was a bit loose through the first part, and a bit sloppy in the second, but we pulled it together and people got it. There was a group eureka moment when all the pieces fell together. In hindsight I would have given that moment of getting it more time, then done another observation sit, and then closed the directions and circled out. And the map could be tightened up a bunch. But, all in all, it was great. I learned, others learnt. And more people met and engaged.

Some seeds planted.
I would love to hear what reverberations sound.

$35 went to Guerilla Gardeners Meetup site upkeep, of the $250 (minus printing costs) that i made.
thank you everyone for your support.

big Love.

and now!
Cortes sweet sacred island.
so gentle, so stormy.

i arrived sunday night, sweet rides with new friends all up and over. a graceful and interesting delivery.
straight to the door of the cabin claus built, with nigh a nail to be seen, on the edge of the western shoreline and the lamb-dotted fields of Joy's flock. redwinged blackbirds, deer 30 feet away jumping fences, and frogs in the pond.

if i could embed a sound file of the frogs at night,
i would. it is fun to try and pick out their particular voices.
the soundscape! eagles and hummingbirds.
eagles flirting, their high sweet notes playing above the trees,
boy hummingbirds do the zoommm-and-chir-chir divebomb in their mating dance.

it is amazing being in community here... to be recognized, remembered, seen again...

yeah, lots is amazing. conversations, politics, the shift, nudging, releasing, reconnecting...
derrick jensen is in vancouver on the 18th. new moon women's circle at linnaea on the 17th.

working again in kalaya's garden is wonderful.
i worked for her the year i took the linnaea garden program.
then all that following winter, when kili and i married,
and the following summer, up until i left.
then a summer has gone by, and now i return for another spring unpack and unferl.

it is wonderful to work in the gardens, and feel this soil!
when i began here, the soil was very warm and sandy, and a bit fine.
we began mulching, and tightened up the composting method.
kalaya gathered a lot of seaweed off their beach.
we began to sheet compost.

she has kept the gardens mulched,
and now the soil is dank!
the worms are huge,
the soil is salt and pepper, with the silver sand grains on
slick, round spheres of black soil. so rich, and infused with light the sand reflects down.

- composting is the new black .

things look better mulched i think. aren't they cute and cozy?
feel free to use this photo to sell someone on a mulched garden.
may the forest be with you!

so i started this whole blog because i wanted to post these photos.
i took them from the window of the a-frame today.
what a fantastically stormy, sexy day.

garden ninja: working with the source

2007-02-26T12:37:00.000-05:00

presents
workshops 2007, east vancouver,
three sessions for earthworkers on the ecosystems we live within, how to be better animals to our landbase.

* soil/compost/mulch march 24
* eat your weeds! march 31
* intro to gardening with the cosmos april 07

10 am to noon.
@the M.O.B.Y. gardens, between 10th & 11th on Commercial Drive, under the skytrain.
by donation. (suggested donation $5)

please rsvp so i can get an idea of numbers; ineffable@riseup.net

* soil/compost/mulch

Exposed soil is wounded soil. Soil is a living skin.
This session lays out the basis of soil components and their functions -bacteria, fungi, and carbon-nitrogen ratios- for a holistic perspective of how fertility is built and maintained by the soil ecosystem; and how to accelate and accentuate these processes with composts and mulch.

* eat your weeds!

What plants arrive first to wounded soil? 'Weeds', and as they are medicines for wounded soils, they are also medicines for animals. Learn which weeds are medicines, what they do for the soil, what they indicate, and how they help you.

* intro to gardening with the cosmos

The Egyptians, the Mayans, the Pagans, the ancient Chinese all gardened according to cosmological patterns. Biodynamics is a modern language for how to hold the cosmos in mind while dancing through the web of life. This class is an introductory class; I do not position myself as 'expert' but as fellow student. A base framework from which to begin observing patterns of moon, season, growth, and energy .

As Plato said, we are midwifes to knowledge,
and for the love of earth,
I want passionately to encourage a more engaged way of working with our land.
My motive is the love of life, of biodiversity, of Earth; of food and medicine; for the grace of the future.

My education comes from Linnaea Ecological Gardening Program, the 8 month intensive on Cortes Island that includes an indepth Permaculture component, taught by Oliver Kellhammer (of M.O.P., Greening the Grandview Cut, and Cottonwood Gardens). I worked in the Hollyhock gardens, farmed in Ontario, and landscaped. Last year in Ontario I ran the Garden Ninja school, and co-facilitated the Master Organic Gardeners course for Canadian Organic Growers, from which these workshops are based.

I use the term 'earthworker' after my summer working at Hollyhock (Retreat Center). There are a lot of bodyworkers - massage therapist, yoga instructors, reiki practitioners, - and on the island there are many gardeners. I love playing upon the parallel of working the help the bodies of healing humans and working to help our body of earth are both elements of healing ourselves. This is work.

*custom settings:
If there is a bunch of you interested, I can come to you. Email me: ineffable@riseup.net

PS. I am only in town until mid-April.
(Then out to Nova Scotia for schooling).

gardening season again...

2007-02-18T20:14:00.000-05:00

Gardening season again; this year I am in Vancouver, hanging out with mamaK and Naima bean, Ki Living Art and Kermodi Design.

Being pretty tired of hanging out on this box, i am going to make some miso and go for a walk. I am hanging out with my honey in Edmonton tonight: we are off to see the Glitch Mob. (It sureis nice to be in love, to be with someone synchronised to me, someone who 'gardens' me so well).

sweet violets

2007-01-19T01:07:00.000-05:00

Gueph, Ontario.
37 Macdonnell st.

kdub and the bump

2007-01-17T19:50:00.001-05:00

kdub has gardened herself. her mother knit the pants and booties. naima aurora wiley
is in the world. She is gorgeous. Quiet. Really sweet. Today is her fifth day. Every day she 'wakes up' more, her eyes open more.

Last night we were reading out of Starhawk's book The Earth Path, from the "Center: Patterns" section. We read of branching patterns, of relationships and ratios; of creeks flowing into rivers like the pattern of leaves flowing into trees, and also of a drumbeat, pattern and ratios.

These are the flow forms of transportation via water. Water is what is used by most everything to move things. ( That gives me some thoughts about how car culture liberates us from that, which could also be seen as unspringing a population control mechanism, and being a big part of the reason we are so disconnected from the land. ya think?!)

Water also moves in spirals, always. The bottom of a river is slowed by friction, as are the sides, especially the inside of the meander. The river is moving in a long, horizontal spiral, like a fluid drill, carving curves in the land.
There are different drumbeats.

So Keona and her wee antique-new-born treasure (how to possibly desribe all of the layers - fine, crystalline strands of connection, possibility, emotion, energy, history - like spider webs)
are sleeping in the room beside me.

I have worked three days since I arrived here. I have lots of work, but not right now. I have been able to be here all week, 'though I have done a lot of other work-related stuff - but a new mama needs someone around to keep on top of everything, like laundry and tiding, for the first week at least. The Universe is totally supporting us: I have secured work, I have pulled in a tad on income, then got a gst cheque, then one from my mama for my birthday, which was really nice. And I have work at the flower factory on Saturday.

It all feels really good.
Kay, then, to work with me.

Blessed be.

destabilizing the binary for enlarged spaces of the sayable:

2007-01-05T23:28:00.000-05:00

jayme melrose: 20226103
december 13, 2006

destabilizing the binary for enlarged spaces of the sayable:
reflections on Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva

“Let me go where I am not yet” is how Hanneke Canters translated Luce Irigaray’s “Laisse-moi aller ou je ne suis pas encore” (Canters &Jantzen, 2005, p. vii).

Those few words are a seed for the opening up of such possibility. If within patriarchy, women have been oppressed and constructed as (m)other, what has been excluded?

Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva are two French Feminists who inquired along the axes of exclusion and marginalization, asking after the ‘female’/’feminine’ subject.

It was Paris in the 60’s, there was a lot of talk about social subjects: Marxism and socialism were thriving; existentialism had met Simone de Beauvoir; the ideas of Michel Foucault and postmodernism were in circulation; and psychoanalysis was thriving via Lacan’s Ecole freudian. The women’s movement was still trying to get equality before the law.

Weaving together elements of these discourses feminist theory has helped create, among other things, “a set of discourses which have created feminist subject positions” (emphasis hers, Bury, 2003, p. 222).

Perhaps the two most influential feminist philosophers to emerge from this period are Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, though, Kristeva cannot strictly be called a ‘feminist’ as she refused to define her politics along the gender axis; for exactly this reason, her work is central to contemporary gender theory.

While Irigaray’s mission is to engage, expand, and explore the subjectivity of the silenced ‘feminine,’ Kristeva’s mission is the deconstruction of identity altogether to allow the sexual signifier room to move (Moi, 1985, p.172). This essay is a(n incomplete) mapping of the space their theories have opened up for alternative feminist subjectivities, helping to enlarge the “spaces of the sayable” (Foucault qtd in Charania, 205, p. 31).

By mapping out the key arguments of Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva I hope to do two things: get an idea of how their ideas may have helped open up ways of being through theorizing alternate subjectivities, and to disseminate these ideas to my peers to encourage the making of further meanings.

In this paper I will sketch out a bit of the context Irigaray and Kristeva emerge from, and their main trajectories, though in a much simplified framework, focusing on their theories regarding the social construction of gender. I will engage the critiques of Irigaray’s essentialism, and illustrate how I find their works useful in being taken up as part of the continuing work of enlarging our “spaces of the sayable” (Foucault qtd in Charania, 2005, p. 31).

to set the stage…

To set the stage, starting in the early 60’s, the ideas of ‘structuralism’ blossomed. Structuralism can be defined as the approach to academic disciplines that explores the relationships between elements of language, literature, and theory upon which some higher function of mental, linguistic, social, cultural structures, or “structural networks” can be drawn (Wikipedia, 2006a, para. 1). A major theory within structuralism is the existence of binary opposition in which “there are certain theoretical and conceptual opposites, often arranged in a hierarchy” (Wikipedia, 2006b, para. 10).

Structuralism was critiqued in the rising tide of alternative radical philosophies, including feminism, Marxism, and nihilism, which Foucault termed “subjugated knowledges” (Wikipedia, 2006b, para. 10). Rather than look at the underlying structures, post-structuralism emerged proposing to deconstruct them.

Post-structuralism views even the underlying structures as culturally constructed and therefore mired in the matrix of the knowledge system that produced it. Knowledge systems became seen as imbricated within power systems. Just as juridical systems represent their subjects, Foucault established that “juridical systems of power produce the subjects they subsequently come to represent” (Butler, 1990, p. 2). Likewise “representation is the normative function of language” (Bulter, 1990, p. 1), thus language also plays the multiple role of producing, restraining, and reflecting its subjects.

As Judith Butler (1990) says
“[f]or feminist theory, the development of a language that fully or adequately represents women has seemed necessary to foster the political visibility of women. This has seemed obviously important considering the pervasive cultural condition in which women’s lives were either misrepresented or not represented at all” (p.1).

In questioning the misrepresentation, those ‘subjected knowledges’, the excluded voices including feminism, turned the tool of deconstruction upon the structure of binary oppositional logic pervasive in patriarchal thought.

Going back to Pythagoreus’ table of opposites, deconstruction revealed that the gendered framework “form[s] a structure in which maleness is associated with a clear, determinate mode of thought while femaleness is linked to vagueness and the indeterminate” (Canters & Jantzen, 2005, p. 10).

This gendered framework constructs male subject as the norm, “leaves the woman described as not-man, and erases her as a subject in her own right” (Canters & Jantzen, 2005, p. 16). Not only are things divided on a gendered axis which relegates the feminine to the passive, fluid darkness, but simultaneously along the axis of same and Other, with self and same being synonomous, and Other, referring to the unconscious, silence, madness, and that unsaid in language (Wikipedia, 2006c, para. 5). The self is identified as distinct from the Other with the Excluded Middle in between. These concepts are part of the foundation upon which civilization built identity and philosophy which Kristeva and Irigaray deconstructed to build upon.

Luce Irigaray…

Luce Irigaray was born in Belguim in the 30’s, earned her Master’s and taught high school before moving to Paris in 60’s to do her Master’s in psychology. She then did her diploma in Psychopathology; in 1968 she received her Doctorate in Linguistics. She taught from 1970-1974 at Lacan’s University of Vincennes. In 1974 she published her second doctoral thesis, Speculum de l’autre femme, at the “prestigious and high scholarly French” doctrat d’Etat in philosophy (Moi, 1985, p.129). The publication of this work was quickly followed by her dismissal from employment with Lacan. The extremity of the reaction to her work hints at the investment of psychoanalysis in that which she was criticizing, and gained her a lot of attention. (She continued and continues to publish, and is now the Director of Research Philosophy at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique de Paris).

Speculum (1974) is an circular work in which the “architectonics of the text, or texts, confounds the linearity of an outline, the teleology of discourse” (Irigaray, 1977, p. 68). Her project is to upset the dualistic framework that positions ‘masculinity’, linearity, rationality, and
culture as dominant to ‘femininity’, poetry, hysteria/incoherence/women’s language, and nature.

She argues that psychoanalytic theory and conventional philosophy hold one subjectivity – the (disembodied) masculine which is proposed to be neutral and universal, but it is “constituted on the silent ground of woman “ (Moi, 1985, p.129-131). Her project then is to explore, articulate, and theorize the whole silent/suppressed realm of ‘woman’ and ‘femininity’ in order to create a ‘feminine’ subjectivity. Her argument though is not that women need only to step into the realm of culture, but also that men must become more embodied, so both sexes see themselves equally in nature and culture (Donovan, 2006, para. 5).

Her strategy relies heavily on the use of paradox; “hers is most strenuously a both-and logic” (Roberts, 2005, para. 1). She works not only within the literal level of language but associatively, symbolically, using both metaphor, and Fuss, (1991) argues, metonym (p.101). Irigaray requires her readers to think associatively and engage in a creative relationship with her work; she considers the creation of this subjectivity an emergent process, and identity as multiplicitous, dynamic, and emergent. According to Whitford (1991) the instructions for use of Irigaray are:

“Do not consume of devour. For symbolic exchange only” (p. 52).

Julia Kristeva…

Julia Kristeva came from Bulgaria at the age of 25 to Paris in 1966 with a doctoral research fellowship in hand (Moi, 1986, p. 1). She engaged immediately with the “blossoming structuralist milieu” by becoming involved with the Tel Quel group (Moi, 1986, p. 2-3), a “center of gravitation for almost all of the younger generation of structuralist and emerging post-structuralist theorists in France” (Moi, 1986, p. 4). Her Bulgarian background provided her with an intimate knowledge of Marxism to fuse with Hegelian philosophy and linguistics; as well, she studied Freudian and Lacanian psychanalysis. She worked as an analyst and academic, and was on the editorial board of Critque, the journal published by the TelQuel group. She published her doctoral thesis La Revolution du langage poetique in 1974. The publication of her thesis lead her to become chair of Linguistics at the University of Paris.

While Kristeva’s theories do center around the status of the subject and the questions of identity, her axis of inquiry is not into ‘female’/‘feminine’ subjectivity, but into those marginal
or dissident to patriarchy. She maintains that all signification is composed of two orders, not ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, but semiotic and symbolic. The semiotic is the “the endless flow of pulsions gathered up in the chora (from the Greek word for enclosed space, womb)” (Moi, 1986, p.12).

The semiotic is, according to psychoanalytic theory, from conception until the mirror stage at 6-8mos, after which one enters the Symbolic order through language. Kristeva considers the semiotic the site beyond contradiction, of paradox, fluidity, and multiplicity; it is disruptive, maternal, the site of the Other within self, beyond difference and gender, impossible for the Symbolic; it is associated with rhythms, tones, and drives, and the body.

Kristeva’s project then is to connect the body and semiotic into the symbolic order, not to create a stable identity, but rather “discourses that resist rigid and one-dimensional logic and instead engage in an ongoing process of writing the struggle within the impasse of language” (European Graduate School, 2005, para. 2).

Her explicit aim is to open the meaning of signs up to polysemous readings, emphasizing multiplicity of expression and subjectivity. She maintains that ‘feminine and ‘masculine’ are social constructions created, enforced and disrupted through language, refuses to define woman, and “remain[s] aloof from the call for explicitly feminist approaches” (Moi, 1986, p. 9); for this reason, she cannot really be called a ‘feminist’, but it is exactly for this reason that the work of Kristeva continues to be of such value.

essentially speaking…

Essentialism in perhaps the key conundrum in contemporary ontology. Essentialism is speaking of things as though they have a innate nature (such as ‘human nature’). But, if we position something as essence, ‘human nature’, for example, then agency and resistance are foreclosed. A deeper inquiry, and cross-cultural comparisons, often reveal variations in that which was thought to be essence, revealing that it was social construction all along. Despite the brilliance of Irigaray’s work, the label of essentialism haunts it.

Irigaray’s project is to alter “the status of the “female’ in the symbolic realm”, but her strategy is through “uncompromising stress not on the obliteration and overcoming of sexual differences, but on sexual difference itself” (Whitford, 1991, p. 15). Irigaray is leveled with the
charge of being a ‘biological essentialist’ because of her “unmediated casual relationship between biological sex and sexual identity” (Whitford, 1991, p. 14). This rationale posits sex and gender as indistinct; in this formula, biology is destiny. Indeed, Irigaray says “by our lips we are women” (qtd in Fuss, 1992, p. 99), locating the realm of the feminine directly in the female body.

As Toril Moi (1985) succinctly surmises, “[t]o posit all woman as necessarily feminine and all men as necessarily masculine is precisely the move that enables the patriarchal powers to define, not femininity, but all women as marginal to the symbolic order and to society” (p. 166).

As Whitford explains of Segal’s critcism of Irigaray, if the “differences between the sexes are seen as a construct of patriarchy and repressive of both” then theory based on the emphasis of feminine/female/woman’s identity just continues to prop up patriarchy (Whitford, 1991, p. 15-16).
Toril Moi (1985) argues that if “all efforts towards a definition of ‘woman’ are destined to be essentialist, it looks as if feminist theory might thrive better if it abandoned the minefield of femininity and femaleness for a while and approached the questions of oppression and emancipation from a different direction” (p. 148). This is exactly what Julia Kristeva did. In the words of Moi (1985)

“Kristeva does not have a theory of ‘femininity’ or even ‘femaleness’. What she does have is a theory of marginality, subversion and dissidence. In so far as women are defined as marginal by patriarchy, their struggle can be theorized in the same way as any other struggle can be against a centralized power structure” (p. 164).

Even into her theorization of sexual difference she maintains an anti-essentialist approach. Kristeva held firm to the theory that “all meaning is contextual” (Moi, 1985, p.155), mapping out the different levels of our social patterns that can be deconstructed to become visible as social constructions. She chose to see how language is used discursively but with different interests, so that “[t]he meaning of the sign is blown open – the sign becomes ‘polysemic’” (Moi, 1985, p.158). What Kristeva’s strategy does, that Luce Irigaray could (arguably) not do, is alter the status of the ‘female’ in the symbolic realm, by allowing the sign and the symbol freedom to move.

While the charge of essentialism repeatedly comes up against Irigaray, it is also repeatedly defended. Margaret Whitford (1991) positions Irigaray as frequently interpreted to have some static notion of ‘woman’/’femininity’, while, in actuality, Irigaray is arguing for “the relation of ‘woman’ [a]s precisely what needs to be rearticulated” (p. 14); Irigaray is pushing for the exploration of gender relations in the realm where we are not yet.

Diana Fuss, (1992) concurs, viewing Irigaray’s mission as an attempt to explore the distinction of the sexes “in terms of how they inhabit or are inhabited by language” (p. 101) in an attempt to see what a “differently sexualized” (p. 101) language might be.

Whitford, (1991) argues that what both Irigaray and Kristeva hold in common is the idea of the “subject –in-process [ that is,] a subject in dialogue, engaged with the other” (p.48). From this perspective, it might be able to be argued that Irigaray does indeed leave room to be contingent, as Butler states is necessary.

Contingency implies allowing room for that which is not expected, allowing room for that which is not yet. In response to the question “what is woman?” Irigaray answers by asking “what is …?” (Irigaray, 1977, p. 122); to answer is to remain inside the phallocratic discourse, but to not answer is to remain outside of it, so Irigaray tries “to situate [her]self at its borders and move continuously from the inside to the outside” in an “attempt to overturn it” (Irigaray, 1977, p. 122).

While, in reading Irigaray, I truly do sense that Irigaray is calling for an emergent, contingent space to open within the social fabric that allows for and creates alternate subjectivities, specifically for those deemed ‘women’ by phallocratic discourse, I do still find supporting the gendered binary contrary to the political aims of reconstructing ontology, and for that reason, her reliance on the tem ’feminine’ remains problematic.

Kristeva’s account, on the other hand, by using the axis of marginalization to discourse, is more useful in collapsing binary logic completely. In remembering that the beliefs we hold have real world effect- they produce subjects, we are reminded to keep an eye on the ramifications of our theories.

enlarging spaces of the sayable…

Where Irigaray and Kristeva both explore that excites me so it their positioning of paradox at the core, calling for a both-and logic, instead of an either-or logic, as well as an understanding of and language for the world that is complex, multiplicitious, and emergent.

My personal perspective is based in an ecological understanding that views life as complex processes of relationship, interaction and mutuality. My interest in gender studies is born from the knowledge that we need a new ontological understanding from a feminist, ecological, and spiritual perspective that no longer allows for exploitation of ‘women’ and ‘nature’, (indeed, these need to be collapse as discreet categories).

As Irigaray and Kristeva worked to reveal, the gendered binary at the core of patriarchal discourse is not based in equal representation, guided by love, but rather sets up a framework that creates a hierarchy of marginalization that continues to produce women’s oppression.

Based on what I have read in the feminist, ecofeminist, and environmental discourses, binary oppositional logic is thoroughly deconstructed, regarded a patriarchal tool to justify exploitation. The next step is to reconstruct language that both reflects and produces the fluid and multiplicitous complexity of reality that does not trap us in an insincere, flattened, unitary identity.

In preparing for this paper, I discussed with a good friend of mine who is in the autistic spectrum the ideas of multiple subjectivites, including the idea of abandoning the subject-object construction. My friend became seriously excited, plying me for more information, concurring that autistics do not see the world with a subject-object or self-other perception, but rather as a fluid and undistinguished whole.

I began to observe more closely my speech patterns with ‘women’ and ‘men’, and in formal and intimate situations. With another close friend who is well-educated and shares with me a similar spiritual worldview, I began to notice our patterns of language becoming more and more abstract. We rarely finish our sentences, but rather use patterns of metonym to sketch out ideas and experiences as processes associated with other processes. Indeed I felt that we were trying “ceaselessly to embrace words and persistently to cast them off” (Fuss, 1982, p. 99), to avoid getting caught in flattened and insincere meanings, but convey experiences that we experienced on many levels simultaneously.

Irigaray’s focus is on parler femme which can translate into “speak (as) woman” (Whitford, 1991, p. 49). “Subjectivity is denied to women,” (Moi, 1985, p. 136) Irigaray claims; woman remains “exiled from representation”(Moi, 1985, p. 136) in order to provide the grounds upon which stable objects can be constructed. The “only place in Western history where woman speaks and acts in a public way” is in mystical discourse (Irigaray qtd. in Moi, 1985, p. 136).

Mystical experience involves the “loss of subjecthood… the mystic’s soul is transformed into a fluid stream dissolving all difference” (Moi, 1985, p. 136). In phallocratic discourse, “mysticism (like hysteria a few centuries later) offers women a real if limited possibility of discovering some aspects of pleasure that might be specific to their libidinal drives” (Moi, 1985, p. 138).

Women’s subjectivity, as Irigaray generalizes, is not unitary and divided like phallocratic subjectivity is constructed, but rather it is Woman neither two nor one but both at once, which “signifies that a woman is simultaneously singular and double; she is ‘already two - but not divisible into one(s)’ or, put another way, she is “neither one nor two’” (Fuss, 1992, p. 97). While the case for this can be made in a number of ways, the most obvious argument is in pregnancy and motherhood.

In pregnancy, a woman in both self and other, which blurs the unity of the subject, revealing the “subject in-process” (Oliver, 1993, p. 2). Julia Kristeva uses maternity as “a bridge between nature and culture, the drives and the Symbolic” (Oliver, 1993, p. 5). Drawn from this, Alison Weir “maintains that Kristeva provides a theory of a divided mother that allows the possibility for the mother to both participate in the symbolic and remain heterogeneous to it” (Oliver, 1993, p. 7).

Kristeva’s intent is to open discursive space to allow for the other within the self to be embraced, engaging a both-and logic. For Kristeva, the axis through which to access the Other, including women and those infantilized by patriarchy is the Semiotic, a core of fluid, multiplicitous, emergent contradiction and paradox, “which knows no sexual difference” (Moi, 1985, 165).

Language, in Kristevian terms, is an emergent “complex signifying process” (emphasis her, Moi, 1985, p.152), and it is not a universal, monolithic system, but rather sets of discourses which are “specific linguistic strategies in specific situations” (Moi, 1985, 154). Kristeva then “emphasizes the need to steer between stable identities” (Oliver, 1993, p. 8). In this way, Kristeva remains anti-essentialist, but also makes room for alternate subjectivites.

I enter this discourse with perhaps two generations between in which much expansion and critique of Luce Irigaray’s and Julia Kristeva’s work has rippled out through our social fabric. Born late in the seventies, I grew up in a rigid patriarchal household, with a hesitantly-feminist mother; it is interesting to reflect on the culture I was raised in, and the cultures I navigate through today; it seems that culture is much less rigid presently than it was for my mother’s generation.

While the direct action of grassroots feminist action began to expand life for women at the community level, Kristeva, Irigaray, (and others), were rattling the tap root of civilization: they were questioning the binary logic based in two discrete genders (and the law of the excluded middle), as neutral and universal ; they exposed that our very language, the symbolic order, is not neutral, universal, nor is the language of women is not represented.

In conclusion I see primarily the need to engage with these texts and disseminate this information. Our culture need to break and broaden our language base, so to shift ontology away from the ‘masculine’/ ‘feminine’ confines, collapsing the problematic binary towards a more fluid logic, with more room within the spaces of the sayable.

I feel we need to cross-reference our theories with an environmental ethic, and perhaps even more importantly, cross-reference our environmental ethic with these understandings of how power functions to ensure our means reflect our aims. While sex exists, is it useful explore the complexity and diversity of subjectivites, especially if we keep “a focus on the mechanisms of power” (Chanarnia, 2005, p. 36), we can perhaps expand the space that ‘woman’ is relegated and able to occupy.

Works Cited

Bury, R. (2003). Stories for Boys Girls: Female Fans Read the X-Files. Popular
Communication I(4), 217-242

Butler, J. (1990). “Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire” from Gender Trouble. New York:
Routeledge.

Canters, H. & Jantzen, G.M. (2005). Forever fluid: A reading of Luce Irigaray’s Elemental
Passions. New York: Manchester University Press.

Charnia, R. C. (2005). Regulated Narratives in Anti-homophobia Education: Complications in
Coming Out Stories. Canadian Women’s Studies, 24 (2-3). 31-36.

Cohn, J.S. (2004). Women & Society: Essentialism. University at Buffalo, archived at
http://www.womenandsociety.buffalo.edu/dictionary/essentialism.htm

Donovan, S.K. (2006). “Luce Irigaray: (1932-present).” The Internet Encyclopedia of
Philosophy. Retreived December 6, 2006, from http://www.iep.utm.edu/i/
irigaray.htm#H1

European Graduate School. (2006). “Julia Kristeva.” Retrieved from Philosophers Resource
database, December 6, 2006, from http://www.egs.edu/resources/kristeva.html

Fuss, D.J. (1992). Essentially Speaking. In N.Fraser & S.L. Bartky (Eds.), Revaluing French
Feminism (pp. 94-112). Indianapolis, IN, USA: Indiana University Press.

Irigaray, L. (1977) This sex which is not one. ( 1985 ed.) New York: Cornell University.

Holland, B. (1998). “Luce Irigaray; A Bibliography.” Feminist Theory Website; Virgina Tech
University. Archived Novermber 30, from http://www.cddc.vt.edu/
feminism/Irigaray.html

Moi, T. (1985). Sexual Textual Politics. New York: Routledge.

Moi, T. (1986). The Kristeva Reader. New York: Routledge.

Oliver, K. (1993). Introduction: Julia Kristeva’s Outlaw Ethics. K. Oliver (Ed). Ethics, Politics,
and Difference in Julia Kristeva’s Writing. (pp. 1-11). New York: Routledge.

Roberts, S. (2005). “Burn the Panopticon: Irigaray’s Ethics, Difference, Poetics.”
Reconstruction: studies in contemporary culture, 5.1. Retrieved December 3, 2006,
from http://reconstruction.eserver.org/051/robertsintro.shtml

Wikipedia. (2006a). Structuralism. Retrieved Dec 11, 2006, from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuralism

Wikipedia. (2006b). Post-structuralism. Retrieved Dec 11, 2006, from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-structuralism

Wikipedia. (2006c). Other. Retrieved Dec 11, 2006, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other

Whitford, M. (1991). Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine. New York: Routledge.

Beyond Economy: a Critical Participation (my best essay to date)

2007-01-05T23:23:00.000-05:00

jayme melrose
october 21, 2006

Beyond Economy: a Critical Participation with The Great Work

The human project and the Earth project must come into alignment or we risk undoing 65 million years of evolution; this imperative is the subject of Thomas Berry’s book The Great Work: Our Way Into the Future.

Our mission is, in his words, to reinvent the human at the species level, with a critical language, within the community of life systems, in a time-developmental context, by means of story and shared dream experience, and it is hope for me just to recite this set of phrases.

While Father Thomas Berry stresses clearly the dire urgency and horrific reality of our present planetary situation, he helps us to create a framework for survival by conjuring the possibility of a viable human in the Ecozoic Era.

This transition includes the creation of a new ontological Story, a shift in viewing the world as “a collection of objects [to] a communion of subjects” (16), and a reformation of the “four fundamental establishments that control the human realm: governments, corporations, universities, and religions - the political, economic, intellectual and religious establishments” (4) of the present era.

Following the economic strand, this paper will explore how Berry frames the pathway to becoming viable humans, while reflecting on how the work of Derrick Jensen supports and expands on Berry’s ideas. These two great thinkers are of different generations and come from very different backgrounds, yet cross-reference each other in these books. I will look at how they share perspective and politics, and where their trajectories differ.

Finally, in order to make a little more room for agency in some of Berry’s arguments, I will also weave in some post-structuralist perspectives regarding essentialism in my attempt of participating in the Great Work for a vibrant future.

To Thomas Berry every people has had a Great Work, such as building pyramids, or singing the patterns of the stars. Our Great Work is to shift from our present way of life, which is based on exploitation and destruction of not only our physical reality but also our psychic-spiritual realm, to a way of life that honors Life with every action, creating mutual enhancement for the community, environment, bioregion and, therefore, the entire cosmos.

Our bodies, minds, and worldviews are affected by our physicality, as the opposite is true: our material reality if affected by worldviews. How we acquire our basic life supplies, -our food, water, song, etc- is imbricated with affects on and from other beings and systems.

For centuries, humans gleaned their physical, artistic and spiritual needs from the ecosystem they participated in. This is no longer so. This entire realm is now the economic sphere and it has been colonized by corporations. Economics have become our primary referent. Not only does this shift affect our bodies, but also our planet.

Berry is insistently gentle in his language and does not call directly for the dismantling of the industrial, commercial, financial complex as do many others, such as Derrick Jensen, though Berry does make clear that a complete shift is urgently necessary. For both Jensen and Berry, this shift begins with taking a critical look at the history of our land acquisition, economic systems, and the history of our corporations.

How we view the land we live on, how Canada and America came to be, is part of our ontological Story. Our Story is imbricated in our identities, culture, politics, resource use, and energy expenditures. Both Thomas Berry and Derrick Jensen work through history to show that the normative North American Story is not rooted in a full and clear version of history.

North America is occupied land, taken though violent colonization and genocide; in the large-scale takings of land, corporations were born (Berry 121). The political and economic growth of North American is intimately entangled with corporations and large large-scale resource exploitation for economic gain. But, while lip service has always been that these gains are for every citizen, a critical look at history makes clear that an elite few prosper, while the masses, the non-humans, and the planet’s very life-processes suffer, to serve an elite few.

Derrick Jensen works deeper into this realm, dredging up piles of bloody facts, creating what Foucault would call a genealogy: a critical history that works to include what was omitted, deconstructing the reigning discourses, and considers the complex positions of the subjects in the storylines.

While Jensen explores these stories in visceral depth and aching length, Thomas Berry sketches a simple frame of five phases in our resource use, a device that allows the book to stay focused on transitioning to a mutually enhancing way of life. Berry’s tactic also allow polysemy for readers to participate in the re-making of meaning. The five phases Berry picks out can be summarized as: beginning in the land takings; the creation of canal and rail lines; the integration of electricity and petroleum into industrial and daily life, including the automobile; the rise of chemicals after WWII; and the Ecozoic Era.

Thomas Berry describes the Ecozoic Era as a time when communities learn to “align their own functioning and the limits of their activities to the possibilities of the Earth” (133), when the only “viable economic programs … are those that have an intimate relation to the land” (134) function, and when people “take responsibility for doing the essential things themselves” (135).

Berry does not give precise directions as to how exactly this transition can occur; in this way Thomas Berry and Derrick Jensen take a similar stance by providing only a framework for the work to be done. This allows and demands each person to listen to his/her own landbase and community to discern what actions are best. Earth needs us all to take responsibility, to learn how to live in our bioregion, as a community, in a mutually enhancing way.

There are many people working on creating models for change through enhancing local economic systems. The very concept of bioregionalism is gaining popularity. This year, the idea of the “100 mile diet” gained notoriety. This goal of this meal plan, as you might guess, is to eat only that which is created in a 100 mile radius from your home. Small organic farms are gaining customers as more people realize that local, organic food is healthy in innumerable ways.

People are even beginning to think beyond organics, looking to Permaculture, which is a method of design based on mimicking natural systems, as it aims to create healthy ecosystems that provide food, fuel and fiber for the human inhabitants in a way which not only respects healthy, natural limits, but is mutually enhancing for the biosphere (Quinney 54). One of the four main ethics of Permaculture is to give away surplus, precisely because of the effect this has on shifting our economic system.

Another major affirmation of this shift in thinking was the awarding of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize to Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank for their work in providing micro-credit to “create economic and social change from below” as a key method to creating lasting peace, true democracy, and gains in human rights (Nobel Committee 2006).

The successful colonization of our economy by the corporations Berry blames on their evocation of “the deepest of psychic compulsions towards limitless consumption” (120). It is here that I would like to use a post-structuralist argument to re-position this tendency as a not an essential human “compulsion”, but rather as a social construct of this culture, primarily because this positioning allows space for transcendence of the tendency, and also because a cross-cultural comparison might lead us to the conclusion that some communities did not exhibit such compulsions.

As Berry states repeatedly, life is an emergent process; everything is in a process of continual co-creation. Through our repeated daily actions, we form our material selves (Bulter 33), including our brain patterns. This positioning gives us agency. As Thomas Berry says, we must reinvent ourselves, with critical language, in a time-developmental context.
We need a new understanding of ourselves and the world.

Both Thomas Berry and Derrick Jensen are working towards developing a new ontological Story that positions humans as not the almighty species, entitled to exploit all, but rather as integral components of the cosmos. We must learn, through story and shared dream experience, that this land was and is sacred, that the world is to be venerated, that we are not ourselves without everything else.

The deleterious hyper-exploitation of our landbase in the name of economic gain must stop. We need to shift to a small market system of local production and consumption that functions within the community of life-systems in a mutually enhancing way. This imperative is our Great Work, and while patience is a virtue, the transition to an Ecozoic Era will be more graceful the sooner it occurs.

Works Cited

Berry, Thomas. The Great Work: Our Way Into the Future. New York: Bell
Tower, 1999.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Jensen, Derrick. Endgame. New York: Seven Stories P, 2006.

Norwegian Nobel Committee. “The Nobel Peace Prize for 2006” 13 Oct. 2006.
Nobel Foundation. Retrived Oct. 28, 2006, from

Quinney, John. “Designing Sustainable Small Farms” The Mother Earth News,
July/August (1984): 54.

Sacred Space: design for an interfaith garden

2007-01-05T23:11:00.000-05:00

space for the sacred

an inter-faith garden design

jayme melrose
ineffable@riseup.net
nov 28, 2006

table of contents

intention

the garden
introduction
the pathways
thematic organization
the center

elements
entering
in the East
in the South
in the West
in the North
in the center
throughout
somewhere

things omitted

signage
general
entering
in the East
in the South
in the West
in the North
in the center
throughout
somewhere

works cited

intention

My intention is to design (and manifest) a garden that offers possibilities for sacred experiences. Using a combination of plant, path, sculpture and sign, small pilgrimages can be made through a multi-dimensional space of life and symbol. Labyrithine paths weave towards a center dome which offers a space for a multiplicity of worship and practice. Symbolism, iconography, and reference from many spiritual traditions guide the pilgrim through diversity and unity.

The design as follows can be used freely by anyone with good intentions, in piece or in entirety.

Before manifestation, consultation with the local spiritual communities should occur to insure that the symboligies and arrangements are conducive to everyone’s engagement. Ideally, a community design process is used to bring all interested persons and groups together. It is important for everybody to be given the chance to name themselves, to be represented and with their own voice; instead of speaking for others, lets allow people to speak for themselves. Through the sharing of process and discussion education, understanding, and community can be fostered. The communal investment of love and time will make the garden sacred above everything else.

It is my hope to manifest a garden that offers glimpses of the sweet sacred in each of the represented spiritual traditions, fostering affection, understanding, and accessability for ‘Others’. I wish for it to be a space where people can go into, talk to god/God/Goddess/etc, be inspired, shed tears of joy and/or sorrow, engage directly and indirectly with the sacred, and be in community.

Some things may be problematic, such as overt references to sexuality and queerness. I hope everyone can take a position of acceptance, embracing diversity. Let’s work with love; let’s all name ourselves; let’s love and honor what we love and honor, and work towards creating beauty. Holding this in mind, dialogue between groups during the community design process, hopefully, can organize the garden according to the needs of the community in a way that eliminates problematic conventions, or places them into a contextual distance. Anything knowingly omitted should be acknowledged at least. I pray that all parties involved work from hearts brimming with creative love.

In the building of the garden, the least amount possible of petroleum energy should be used, including material transportation. (Petroleum energy is ideally used only to retrieve or contain energy already invested, such as welding recycled metals into a functional long-term use.) As much as possible use biological resources, native species, natural patterns, renewable energies, and recycled materials. I hope for the local Indigenous community to be involved, especially, perhaps, with siting and aligning the garden.

Creative Commons, some rights reserved. Email me and respond, suggest, expand or critique. Please pass on to anyone you know who might help create such a space. How wonderful would it be to have more and more across the nation, all regionally variable!

the garden introduction

What constitutes a sacred place? Where does one find such a space? Mircea Eliade describes in his “System of the World” that a) a break occurs in the homogeneity of space, b) this forms an opening for c) connection to higher forces of the cosmos, forming an axis mundi, d) around which the known world turns (37). In the colloquial, there is daily life, oft called the mundane, the profane, the daily grind; our bodies can numb and our senses shut down.

The healing traditions of yoga, massage, dance, etc., speak of opening ourselves up to breathing, sensing, letting go, and experiencing. Through opening connection to ‘source’ is possible. I think of whirling dervishes, of moments in the forest, of the alter during mass; these moments or places of connection form an axis mundi, an axis around which the world turns. This sensation or realization of deep connection is sacred experience. And then, inevitably, our gaze is re-directed back outward, to the mundane, profane, daily grind.

This description of the world appeals to me in how it positions sacred experience as a circular part of life, not only horizontally but vertically as well, directing our gaze up and larger, then back down and out, to return around again. This description also allows for polysemy: the process may be experienced in either primarily a space or time context, and as either a communal or personal experience.

The physical layout of the garden will accentuate Eliade’s description of the world. The garden is shaped as a circle, with four main gates aligned to the four directions. These entrances are ‘guarded’ by large sculptures of recycled and welded metal that act to break the homogeneity of space/time. On and throughout these, guardian symbols from many different faith traditions can be incorporated; gothic gargoyles, Japanese temple-guarding dogs, fierce Hebrew cherubium, and the cute little dudes from the movie Princess Mononeke are some possible examples.

These creatures and the gates serve the dual function of guarding the sacred space from ‘evil spirits’, and warning the pilgrims to shed their egos and defense mechanisms. Shedding the ego (the outward sense of self we hold on to, the projected face of who we hope the world sees us as, the stories we tell of ourselves and others to make sense of ourselves, also called our illusion) is also a reoccurring theme in spiritual discourse. The recycled metal sculptures can play with metaphors of scraping the ego away as we pass, as though our egos belong with the constructed and produced elements of the world as do metal and modernity. I imagine these metal sculptures as jaggedly peaked and made of many pieces, emphasizing the idea of breaking or splintering.

The quest for the sacred finds a long history in humanity. “[B]orn of desire and belief,” (Morinas, 1) people have been known to traverse great distances on pilgrimages to in “pursuit of the ideal” (Morinas, 2). Throughout this paper I will refer to guests of the garden as ‘pilgrims’. In doing so I may run the risk of preemptively glorifying the garden, but, if the garden is indeed manifested through a community design process, it has the potential of being a community repository of spiritual ideals ( Morinas, 5) and the people journeying through can be called pilgrims by proxy.

Passing through the ego-scraping forest of metal and guardians, a few meters must be traversed before the garden opens to the pilgrim. For both entrance and exit, this acts as a liminal phase of pilgrimage, of the time of being in between, or in transition. This buffer zone between the sacred and the mundane allows people some time to process and prepare for the steps beyond.

An undulating border of hedges obscures a clear vision of the center dome to where the pilgrim is drawn. The hedges frame the circle of the space. Passing through them the garden opens to us, an expanse of color, texture, and path. In their vibrancy the plants create air inspiring us to deepen our breathing, further opening our chests, lungs and hearts. The primary goal of the garden is to encourage people to open themselves up, if even for a moment, to a heightened awareness with greater mindfulness.

the pathways
From the four gates, the paths curve inwards. Though neither a proper maze nor labyrinth, the paths allow for circumambulation, guided wanderings, and a process of moving towards the center. The garden’s layout is based on the chlorophyll molecule. As the building block of all life, plants have evolved the ingenious capacity to translate solar radiation into physical manifestation that creates the atmosphere we all need to survive, as well as the food that all creatures use either directly or indirectly. In the garden layout the pathways are the connections between, intersecting where the component molecules are situated, marked by labeled tiles or stones embedded in the earth.

Figure 1. Diagram of a chlorophyll molecule, Figure 2. Diagram of garden layout,
taken from (http://metallo.scripps.edu/promise/chlb_s.gif) Based on chlorophyll molecule.

The inspiration for using the chlorophyll molecule came from Starhawk’s book, The Earth Path, in which she offers a new ontological story based on our scientific knowledge of the evolution of life on the planet but told as a creation myth in which the Goddess (creativity incarnate) is playing with elements as though drawing pictures in the sand.

Placing the magnesium atom in the center loosely connected to four nitrogen, and supported by carbon combonations, the magnesium began to vibrate when touched by sunlight, creating a transference of energy into the connecting atoms. None other but this twelvefold symmetrical pattern seems capable of such energetic translation (Lawlor, 5).

In mythological thought, “twelve most often occurs as the number of the universal mother of life” (Lawlor, 5). This idea existed long before the technology was created to visually experience this miraculous construction, revealing the possibility of “geometrical knowledge as innate in us” (Lawlor, 9). This layout fulfills a number of patterns I was inspired to use, such as mandalas, Islamic geometric patterns, labyrinths, and concentric circles. Using the chlorophyll inspired shape concentric circles are imbricated, as well as the idea of a matrix, or interconnected web which is not linear nor hierarchical.

The essence of sacred space in many ways is cosmography, the mapping of the cosmos. As Eliade describes in the iconic function of sacred space, “sacred spaces are natural maps that provide direction to life and a shape to the world”, especially the existential (530). As Steve Higgins pointed out when speaking of Buddhist mandalas, external forms are analogous to internal states and process.

The circular mandalas of Buddhism are echoed throughout India, Tibet, Islam, and medieval Europe through the form of a circle and a square divided into four quadrants showing difference, interrelation and unity (Lawlor, 16). They are most often symbolically cosmological, representing the organization of the elements of the cosmos as a unified whole.

This garden then is an attempt to create a cosmic map that incorporates elements of multiple known cosmologies, both spiritual and scientific, ancient and modern. The framework of the chlorophyll molecule encased in a circle reflects the ‘squaring of the circle’, sacred geometry of number and pattern, scientific knowledge of molecular constructions, and ancient wisdoms.
Overlaying the chlorophyll-inspired layout is a medicine wheel theme.

The garden is divided into four main quadrants aligned with the four directions as is the medicine wheel. The organization that I have used for the medicine wheel is based on West Coast Indigenous cultures that I have experienced; organizations differ widely even throughout North America; again, consultation with the local Indigenous populations should occur to choose the most appropriate correlations.

The organization that I have chosen to work with is: North – winter, dreaming, Indigenous and ancient UK traditions, white, stone, alder and tamarack, and moss; East – spring, Asia, bright, wood, yellow, ginko, and poetry; South – summer, chaos, vibrant lushness, Pagan, Wiccan, and ancient European traditions, corn, red, berries; and West – autumn, black, Western traditions and the Abrahamic three, elder and apple trees.

thematic organization

The four gates allow for the garden to be loosely organized into four main sections though not distinctly divided.

The path leading in from the East will highlight some of the wisdoms and traditions of Asia; the South will play with the fecundity and fertility of Goddess worship, of systems theory, postmodernism, and of Dionysis; Apollo, geometry and the Abrahamic three will be referenced in the Western quadrant; and in the North, stones reminiscent of Inukshuks and ancient European megaliths will be combined with cosmographical indicators.

This paper provides a list of elements and quotes that could be incorporated into the sections. The precise organization of these will need to occur with the help of a community design process including consultation with local religious communities, and according to the space and resources available in the particular context. Further details of the four quadrants will be discussed in the Elements section, supported by quotes within the Signage section of this paper.

The pervasive theme throughout the garden is the dialogue between duality, paradox, and unity.

Western thought is based on a dualistic framework of oppositional binaries. They are ingrained within the very structure of European languages; henceforth I will speak primarily of English, though this problematic structure is not confined to English, nor only to Europe, or Western thought. Our symbolic order of language creates meaning through oppositional logic: the normal hinges on not-normal (Epstien, 10), black has its partner white, from birth we are divided into male and female; a thing can only occupy one position at a time; it is either male or female, subject or object.

These sets of binaries pervade our language and form relations with each other that result in a hierarchy that discursively posit rich, rational, white males at the top and poor, intuitive, colored women at the bottom. Feminism, ecofeminism, postmodernism, and queer theory, to name a few, have taken aim at this symbolic arrangement and presently much reconstructive work is being done. These emerging discourses, as well as systems theory, are working towards creating discourses that allows for multiple subject positionings, so as to avoid the flattening of our complex reality.

Many Indigenous creation myths do not over-simplify reality into oppositional binaries, but rather embrace multiple possibilities simultaneously. For example, in a creation myth of the Keres, as told by Paula Gunn Allen, tells how they were ”All of it and only a small piece of it” (36). This embracing of both possibilities may appear to the western mind to be a paradox, contradictory, and nonsensical. Many eastern philosophies in fact use paradoxes as tools to aid their students in their journey to enlightenment, of grasping the great ineffable unity beyond the dualistic illusion. (For example,“What is the sound of one hand clapping?” is a commonly known Zen Buddhist koan.)

The mystical experience is “precisely an experience of the loss of subjecthood, of the disappearance of the subject/object opposition” (Irigaray, qtd in Moi, 136). With the loss of subjectivity/subjecthood, “[t]ouched by the flames of the divine, the mystic’s soul is transformed into a fluid stream dissolving all difference” (Moi, 136), allowing us to grasp the cosmos as a unified whole of which we are simultaneously all and a part.

It is my thesis that a transition from an ‘either/or’ mentality to a ‘both/and’ mentality (Riley, 479) is necessary for the human species and planet to survive, considering our present technological and planetary situation.

As Thomas Berry so eloquently articulates in his beautiful book, The Great Work: Our Way Into The Future, we are in danger of undoing 67 million years of planetary co-evolution; it is our Great Work to transition to the ‘Ecozoic Era’, living lovingly in complex interdependence (10). Berry uses language very similar to systems theory to explain our interconnected reality, free of the subject – object oppositions that allow us to exploit that of which we are made.

Through using quotes as guidance, and religious/philosophical symbology that reveal the interconnections and mystical experience, I hope to help people see that our world is indeed ‘both/and’, complex, interdependent, and sacred to the very core.

the center
At the center of the garden, where the magnesium atom of the chlorophyll molecule resonates with energy, is a circular pad, encased in a dome. The pilgrims have made the journey to the center, taking whatever route they have chosen, and the arrangement of the symbols have hopefully helped to lead them from the dualistic disconnect of the mundane, towards the mystical interconnection of the great unity symbolized by the circular center. Here is the axis mundi.

The garden’s center is a circular pad mosaicked with flowing Islamic geometry, and encased with a dome of ornate wrought iron.

The center of the dome is open, representing “another door or window, accessible only by a ‘ladder’ or ‘rope’ by which our being is suspended from above, and through which one can emerge from the dimensional structure” (Coomaraswamy, 6). The portal frames the sky, and embedded within the design in the iron are stars, constellations, planets, indeed, the cosmos.

The dome is held up by 12 pillars, reflecting again the twelvefold pattern of the universal mother (Lawlor, 5). Nestled amongst the pillars are four benches made of cob (a mud, sand, straw material) that can be sculpted into beautiful organic forms, representing the four directions/seasons/elements/aspects of life.

In the center of the circle there is a large, black, square stone; on top sits a round cob hearth with four openings to cast light and heat, and a smooth, shallow dish above. The stone is to represent Earth, manifestation, ancient stone alters, and the Ka’baa in Mecca. The hearth atop represents the light, heat, heart, and fire of spirit, as well as the Eternal Light so important to Judiasm and Christianity. The fire possible in the hearth allows for fire to be honored, food prepared, and the power of transformation observed. The shallow dish that crowns the hearth can be used as an offering dish, an alter, to hold water, or as a warming plate for the people who may use the hearth for creating food. This alter and hearth can be also for Hindus for the “Agnihotra, or burnt offering…[which is] an interior self sacrifice, in which the heart is the alter,the outer man the offering, and the flame the dompted self” (Coomaraswamy, 6).

Returning to Eliade’s System of the World, the pilgrim has found a break in the homogeneity of life in entering the garden of the sacred, created an opening in themselves in which communication with cosmos can occur, the act which creates the axis mundi. This axis is represented in a physical form to aid the pilgrim’s connection. The concept of transcending duality is embodied in the circular dome which represents One, the place of transformation.

As Joseph Campbell writes “the essence of the image of the axial point or pole that it should symbolize the way or place of passage from motion to rest, time to eternity, separation to union; but then, also, conversely, rest to motion, eternity to time, unity to multiplicity” (194). In this space/state we can bring our disparate parts together into integrity, allowing us a deeper understanding and connection to the complexity of life.

It is hoped that the design is multi-functional, allowing space for ritual, gathering, and/or practice for many spiritual traditions. I have imagined the circle to be 3.5m in diameter, with the center stone being less than 1m across, allowing room for a number of people, space for dance, chi gong, meditation, and rest. The sculpted hearth should have openings to many sides, casting heat and light in a circle.

elements

The following list of elements is not intended to be complete and concrete, but negotiable and to be added to. Any elements omitted from the garden should be added to the list of things omitted so that they are not rendered invisible and unacknowledged.

general:
∑ 2 silver hoops that form ellipses over the whole garden from east to west, like the rings of Saturn, to inspire the sense of turning, orbit, axis.
∑ labyrinth-inspired layout. In this design, the garden layout is inpired by the chlorophyll molecule.
∑ tiles embedded in the pathways indicating the molecular component of the chlorophyll structure
∑ overlaying pattern of the medicine wheel, using the local pattern, color, element, season, animal, direction correlations
∑ childrens area with a good open and dynamic place to play that is outside the garden, but located in a way that does not exclude and separate, but honors and facilitates.

entering:
∑ ego-scrapers and guardians; break in homogeneity. The four gates can be swathed for a private ceremony. Chinese demons more in straight lines, so make sure the ego-scrapers are aligned to prevent clear trajectories into the garden.
∑ Fierce Herbrew cherubium.
∑ koma-inu: Japanese temple guardian dogs
∑ mythic Japanese warriors
∑ Chinese guard dogs with orbs held in their teeth
∑ gargoyles
∑ liminal zone between gates and the garden.
∑ the cute little dudes from the movie Princess Mononeke, whose heads click sideways

in East:
∑ Torii: traditional Japanese gate at entrances to Shinto (and sometimes Buddhist) shrines, usually Kamakura vermillion
∑ Temizu-ya: Japanese style carved stone basin with flowing water for cleansing hands and mouth
∑ rakable pebble zen garden area, with bamboo rake available
∑ shishidoshi: deer-scaring device: a piece of bamboo hinged on an axis, into which water pours; when it fills, it snaps up, hitting a rock making a sharp noise; it empties, and the process begins again.
∑ Ishi-dourou: large Japanese stone latern for the garden
∑ Nepalese prayer flags strung for the wind to carry on their prayers
∑ prayer tree to tie wishes on paper or fabric to
∑ Hindu temples face eastward because the gods come from the west.
∑ a reference to Mt. Meru/ Mt. Kailas/ Mt. Sharapada/ Phang Rinpoche: Precious Jewel of Snow; mountain sacred to Jains, Buddists, Hindus.
∑ Ginko tree
∑ an Asian lotus, (blooming of course).
∑ a Borobadur Buddha, and a map of the stuppa's mandala shape

in the South:
∑ 'Venus figurines'
∑ Dionysis references; the African Goddess Oshun;
∑ Quetzalcoatl- the plumed serpant of the ancient Aztecs
∑ full moon references
∑ medicinal herb garden
∑ lush and chaotic flower gardens, vegetables too
∑ a corn patch, perhaps the Three Sisters: corn, beans, and squash. Heritage varieties.
∑ (SouthWest corner, playing the transition) Egyptian Goddess Nut. egyptian eye, papyrus patch
∑ Greek symbolism plays on the western border as well, especially through Dionysis.

in the West:
∑ Mt Sinai, with a 'Burning Bush' planted at the base!
∑ Illusion to Adam's Peak, where Chrisitians and Muslims believe Adam stood 1000 years on one leg as penance (Molyneaux and Vitebsky, 41)
∑ minaret
∑ minora (and the connection between minaret and minora)
∑ Water
∑ a Wudu for Muslims to wash hands and feet.
∑ Serpent: play upon the dual meanings of temptation/evil and wisdom
∑ an apple tree
∑ Symbology that plays upon the connection of the Abrahamic Three: Judiasm, Islam, and Christianity.
∑ A book: The book.
∑ Roman symbolism
∑ 'Venus' figures again, the traditions of ancient Europe
∑ an Elder tree with the compost pile beneath it
∑ illusion to the Holy Grail
∑ some sort of monolithic church-spire/skyscraper, complimentary to the minaret, but taller (not because its better, but because such constructions are usually trying to be taller).

in the North:
∑ cosmological observatories, nature, stone, winter, Dreaming, moon
∑ color scheme of mainly green, greys, and whites: moss, stones, lichen, ferns.
∑ solitude
∑ a marker which points to the constant North Star.
∑ stars mapped somehow, perhaps a the sky as it would appear at solstice could be mapped throughout the northern quadrant using thin and tall poles with stylized stars atop.
∑ Megaliths, reminiscent of Stonehenge or Carnac
∑ Two standing stones with a circle stone in the middle; Men-an-Tol, near Morvah in Cornwall, England, (Molyneaux and Vitebsky, 57)
∑ Grove of alders
∑ heather
∑ tamarac or larch trees
∑ Spiral embedded in earth
∑ Medicine wheel in stone enbedded
∑ Totem pole
∑ Maple trees – scarlet Japanese maple (if possible), sugar, or big-leafed.
∑ a story of the local Native spirit creatures –serpant, little people, etc.
∑ cultures of reference: Indigenous, Celtic, ancient UK

in the Center:
∑ Axis mundi.
∑ Dome: map of cosmos within dome
∑ Portal hole in dome through which sky is visible and also provides metaphor of the eye of God, the ‘rope ladder’ to the door from which spirit can emerge into the spirit plane
∑ North star indicator
∑ alter made of stone and earth
∑ A hearth.
∑ Fire.
∑ Omphallos.
∑ Ka'baa.
∑ Shabbat.
∑ Meditation.
∑ Commons.
∑ Kaleidescope on a pole for people to look through!
∑ Symbolic hole in the floor, inspired by Anasazi people who built such holes, believing their ancestors emerged from them (Molyneaux and Vitebsky, 30)

throughout:
∑ frames through out the garden. Window frames on posts, and suspended from frames.
∑ cosmographical images from different cultures.
∑ golden mean: fibannocci spiral
∑ conversation between order and chaos, duality and paradox, Apollo and Dionysis
∑ body parts correlations
∑ safe cozy sitting spots throughout for different views and ambiances.
∑ signage indicating that this is a lgtbq positive space.

Things omitted

While not all things can be included, the omission of elements can render them invisible, causing great harm. Learning from feminist discourse, things we knowingly omit, for whatever reason, can be listed here to acknowledge to give honor and render visible.
The following is a list of things I have knowingly omitted, and/or wished that I could have included.

∑ amphitheatre, meeting grounds.
∑ community gardens
∑ sphinx
∑ flock of doves
∑ holy cow
∑ bees
∑ womb enclosure for people to be birthed from
∑ sweat lodge
∑ sauna
∑ lake
∑ river (for people to float little candle-boats down)
∑ orchard
∑ working farm that provides food for those who maintain the garden.
∑ vinyard
∑ cultivation of sacred herbal allies.
∑ Many Indigenous belief symbols: (local communities should be contacted)
∑ Hotsprings!

Signage
General
acknowledgements and thanks:
Dr. Meena Sharify-Funk. Steve Higgins.. Dr. Rhiannon Bury.
Kili Akua, my beloved honey

entering:
«…a puddle that reflects the sun,
a piece of paper with my name on it.
I am surrounded.
I surrender.
All that I am I have been;
All I have been has been a long time coming;
I am becoming all that I am…
The spittle the surrounds the mouthpiece of the flute,
That which is not heard but felt…» (Saul Williams, Release)

«The body, the temple, and the universe being thus analogous, it follows that whatever worship is outwardly and visibly performed can also be celebrated inwardly and invisibly» (Coomaraswamy, 1978).

«What we call the beginning is often the end and to make and end is to make a beginning./
The end is where we start from…/
We shall not cease from exploration and te end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started/
And know the place for the first time.» ( T.S.Eliot, Four Quartlets)

May the forest be with you.

«Your sacred space is where you can find yourself again and again» Joseph Cambell

«To those of aberrant minds, the place is just earth, stone, water, and trees.
To mistaken intellects, it apprears as solid, innanimate objects.
To practitioners, apperances have no intrinsic nature.
To those of pure vision, it is a celestial palace full of deities.To those with realization, it is the radieant luminosity of innate awareness.» ( Jamgon Kongrul the Great)

«it is only in the end that I am beginning to see» (Michelangelo)

«Nature of this Flower is to Bloom». (Alice Walker)

in North
-maybe not so many words; perhaps some signage to contextualize the standing stones and star maps, but otherwise, silence.

«Dreaming –the time beyond memory when ancestral being roamed the land and formed its features» (Molyneaux and Vitebsky, 6)

in East
«Thirty spokes unite in one nave,
And because of the space between the spokes, we have the use of the wheel.
Clay is molded into vessels,
And because of the space where nothing exists we are able to use them as vessels.
Doors and windows are cut in the walls of a house,
And because of the space which is empty, we are able to use them.» Tao Te Ching

«Bit by bit a narrow path was formed beneath
the apple orchard's trees and when you asked
whose first steps does that remember
your question was my treasure.» (Shimazaki Toson)

Emptied of prayers
for the life to come
or even for this one
my heart is filled
with the falling cherry blossoms (Tomiko Yamakawa)

in south
“A healthy ecosystem might be one that is characterized by co-operative and interdependent relationships among its members, and that it is diverse and complex enough to be resilient, to maintain itself in the face of change. Energy and resources are spread through the system so that diversity can thrive.” (Starhawk, 31)

EVERYTHING IS COMPOSED OF A SUBATOMIC FLUX OF WAVELETS AND PARTICLES, CHAOS AND PATTERN. BOUNDARIES ARE FLUID. POSSIBILITIES ARE ENDLESS. UNRELATED SEPARATENESS IS AN ILLUSION. INTERCONNECTEDNESS IS REALITY. PROCESS IS ALL. REVISE YOUR PERCEPTIONS, CONCEPTS, AND LIFE ACCORDINGLY. ANY QUESTIONS? (Spretnak, 21)

“A healthy, balance ecosystem, including human and non-human inhabitants, must maintain diversity. Ecologically, environmental simplification is as significant a problem as environmental pollution…Therefore we need a decentralized global movement that is founded on common interests yet celebrates diversity and is opposed to all forms of domination and violence.” (King, 459)

“Systems don’t change from within,” I heard the forest say, “Systems try to maintain themselves”. (Starhawk 29)

“I figured that the forest, being a complex system itself, ought to know. But I say, ‘The forest told me,’ is already to create a simplified frame. It’s a frame I find useful: it’s a way of perceiving that’s comfortable for human awareness and allows me to hear something I might otherwise miss. But it is also a simplification of a larger framework, one that might perceive me and my mind and my question and the forest around me and the moment that includes my long-term relationship with that particular spot as a whole in which my mind and the forest’s mind are not separate being talking to each other but one process that together produced that insight.” (Starhawk, 29)

Bachelard's monumental work and the descriptions of phenomenologists have taught us that we do not live in a homogeneous and empty space, but on the contrary in a space thoroughly imbued with quantities and perhaps thoroughly fantasmatic as well. The space of our primary perception, the space of our dreams and that of our passions hold within themselves qualities that seem intrinsic: there is a light, ethereal, transparent space, or again a dark, rough, encumbered space; a space from above, of summits, or on the contrary a space from below of mud; or again a space that can be flowing like sparkling water, or space that is fixed, congealed, like stone or crystal. Yet these analyses, while fundamental for reflection in our time, primarily concern internal space. I should like to speak now of external space. (Foucault, para 8)

“The margin of abundance is the free gift of the sun’s energy, which is constantly showered on the earth, the only true margin of profit that exists.” (Starhawk, 32)

in west
“Know thyself”

“God is an intelligent sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” (Jose and Miriam Arguelles)

Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy; for the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are. (I Corinthians 3, 16-17)

-please consult local community for input: Islamic, Christian and Jewish.

in center
“(It should be pointed out that, ideally paramita practice is based on enough understanding of interdependence that the practice is nondualistiic. Therefore, the question of giver and receiver of generosity or discipline does not arise, There is simply one spontaneous field of action)” (Gross 169).

«-an interior self-sacrifice, in which the heart is the alter, he outer man[/woman/self/ego/defense-system] is the offering, and the flame the dompted self» (Coomaraswamy, 6)

“Now it is of the essence of the image of the axial point or pole that it should symbolize the way or place of passage from motion to rest, time to eternity, separation to union; but then, also, conversely, rest to motion, eternity to time, unity to multiplicity.” (Joseph Campbell: the place of transformation II –194)

throughout
rumi poems
haiku poems
poems!

somewhere
“When discipline is well established, responsible and generous action is spontaneous and joyful, rather than onerous” (Gross, 170)

"Our strategy should be not only to confront empire but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness - and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different than the ones we have been brainwashed to believe.
The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling - their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.
Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.
Another world is possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing."
Arundhanti Roy (2001, quoted in Rebick, 257)

«As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. This is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t' know we don't know.»
Donald Rumsfeld, US defense minister, 2003 (qtd in Starhawk, 2004)

Real democracy is not about power in numbers, it is about collaboration as an organizational system. Real democracy includes the right of the minority to a remedy, one that is unhampered by the tyranny of a complacent or aggressive majority. Its collaborative decision-making engages everyone in the process; decisions are not handed down by leaders “empowered” to decide for everyone. It is a negotiated process that creates trust and consensus because the solution belongs to everyone for all their own reasons. The process empowers the community, creating unity and strength for the long term. Because land is seen as a fundamental part of the self, along with family and community, it requires and insures sustainable practice in its practice. (Armstrong, 1999)

50,000 nuclear warheads
tucked away, it drifts
in indigo space:
our
earth (Kato Katsumi)

Works cited

Armstrong, Jeanette. “Let Us Begin with Courage”. Blowing Drifts Moon: Center for Ecoliteracy,
1999.

Berry, Thomas. The Great Work: Our Way Into the Future. New York: Bell
Tower, 1999.

Campbell, Joseph. “The Place of Transformation”. Mystic Images. Princeton University P,
1974: 184-189.

Chlorophyll Protiens. Retrieved from http://metallo.scripps.edu/promise/chlb_s.gif, Nov. 23, 2006.

Coomaraswamy, Ananda K.. “An Indian Temple”, Parabola 3:1. (1978): 4-11.

Eliade, Mircea. “Sacred Space.” The Encyclopedia of Religion 12. (1987): 526-535.

Eliade, Mircea. “The Sacredness of Nature and Cosmic Religion” The Sacred and The Profane: The
Nature of Religion. Trans. W.R. Trask. Harcourt Brace, (1959): 116-159.

Epstien, Rachel. “Queer Parenting in the New Millennium: Resisting Normal.” Canadian Women’s
Studies 24:2,3. (2005): 7-14.

Foltz, Richard C., Ed. Worldviews, Religion, and the Environment: A Global Anthology. Wadsworth
Thomas, 2003.

Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces (1967), Heterotopias.” Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité,
1984. para 8 –9.

Gross, Rita M., “Towards a Buddist Environmental Ethic.” Foltz 163-171.

Gunn Allen, Paula. “Cosmogyny: The Goddesses; A New Wrinkle.” Grandmothers of the Light: A
medicine woman’s sourcebook. Beacon Press, 1991.

Higgins, Steve. “Sacred Space in Buddism.” RS272: Guest Lecturer, University of Waterloo.
8 November, 2006.

Katsumi, Kato. “50,000 nuclear warheads.” Makoto 41.

King, Ynestra. “The Ecology of Feminism and the Feminism of Ecology.” Foltz 457 –463.

Lawlor, Robert. Sacred Geometry. Thames and Hudson, (1982): 4-25.

Makoto, Ooka, and Beichman, Janine. Oriori no Uta: Poems for All Seasons: An Anthology of
Japanese Poems from Ancient Times to the Present. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2000.

Moi, Toril. Sexual Textual Politics. New York: Routledge, 1985.

Molyneaux, Brian L., and Vitebsky, Piers. Sacred Earth, Sacred Stones. London, Laurel Glen: 2000.

Rebick, Judy. Ten Thousand Roses: The Making of a Feminist Revolution. Penguin Canada: 2005.

Riley, Shamara Shantu. “Ecology Is a Sista’s Issue Too: The Politics of Emergent Afrocentric
Ecowomanism.” Foltz 473-481.

Spretnak, Charlene. States of Grace: The Recovery of Meaning in the Postmodern Era.
San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1991.

Starhawk. The Earth Path. San Francisco:: Harper Collins, 2004.

The Trend: Dictionary of Things Japanese, First Ed. Shogakukan: Japan, 1999.

Toson, Shimazaki. “Bit by bit” Makoto 135.

Williams, Saul. “Release” on the album “Blazing Arrow” by Blackalicious. MCA, 2002.

Yamakawa, Tomiko. “Emptied of Prayers.” Makoto 55.

Each operational computer’s ecological footprint

2007-01-05T23:09:00.000-05:00

383 kg of natural resources
1.17 million kg of water (= 1.17 billion L of water; each of us in Canada personally uses about 0.01 billion over our entire lifetime)
4.67 kg of fossil fuels
36 kg of solid waste - could be diverted
0.25 tonnes of air emissions - could be scrubbed

The above does not consider manufacture of computer or indirect environmental impacts

response to reading from Worldviews: Foltz

2007-01-05T22:58:00.000-05:00

Worldviews, Religion, and the Environment. Richard Foltz (Ed)

Living within the land: becoming native to the land.

It has long been my understanding the indigenous peoples have a fundamentally different relationship with the land than conventional culture does.

Both the Graham and the Omari pieces speak to me a of way of living that I believe will be again, in the not so distant future. Mary Graham’s piece speaks of a mind-frame, a way of living within our lands, where Nature is teacher, and “You are Not Alone” (89). This way of living is much more gentle on my soul than the tendency of conventional civilization towards binary logic. The Omari piece inspires me in its clarity. He argues that, for Tanzanian Aboriginals, sustainable living evolves through spirituality. For them, communal land ownership, with rights and responsibilities, is foundation. Every family must have “access to the means of production” (98). These ideas I have heard discussed at length on Cortes Island, especially regarding the designing of their Community Forest.

I think it is possible that the continued denial of living on stolen land haunts our culture to a degree much underestimated. This is one area of Thomas Berry’s book that I felt was touched on too lightly, though understandably so. Lakota Sioux activist Vine Deloria further explains the theft of culture through the theft of land, which the law facilitates. Many works in the genre are taking a critical look through history, to re-tell the Stories, included the versions often omitted and oppressed.

As Thomas Berry says, “Nature abhors uniformity”, so Nabhan makes a great point about the incorrectness of a unified category of North American Native. He does make clear though that they were co-managers of the ecosytems, which is an understanding that I have long held, and I am glad to hear it affirmed, again. “Everything gardens” is a tenant of Permaculture. It only seems logical. Both quantum theory and post-positivism argue that we are indeed participatory in nature, what changes is out consciousness of the effects of our actions. Both of these discourses leave room for agency which is essential if we are to move to an Ecozoic Era.

November 1, 2006
Judiasm and Buddism

Rita M. Gross introduces her piece as working “Toward a Buddist Environmental Ethic” as “the process of working within a traditional symbol system and worldview while doing reconstructive work to eliminate certain problematic conventions” (163).

I like the way this is positioned: gardening conventions. It helps me to understand the purpose of endless scholarship.

Gross emphasis the need for to practice to accompany theory (185), as does Waskow in his description of the two strands of Doing and Being, creating the I-Thou spiral as the driving force of nature (308). Waskow’s description of the I-Thou spiral is very similar to the process I have imagined in the yin-yang.

In my own scholarship am looking for methods for transcending dualism and these cross-cultural examples are useful.

It is wonderful to see how ancient Judiasm saw the patterns of the cosmos, and how Jewish mystics explained it. ( I have read of the similarities between Buddism and quantum theory; now I am learning the language of systems theory through Fritof Capra’s The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems. )

In systems theory, we have a language we can see (and therefore experience) patterns and relationships of interconnection, spontaneously self-emergent systems nested within systems, that resonates with both scientific discourse as well as spiritual; I could cite examples from all four articles.

Swearer speaks beautifully of anurak as the bodily, “intrinsic act of “caring for’ that issues forth from the very nature of our being” (184), which I know as Love, as rooted in the “ontological realization of interdependent co-arising” (184).

All of these discourses are working towards created a new language, gardening conventions, and revising our ontological Stories, as necessary to shift our way of living; only systemic change, involving whole populations, on multiple levels simultaneously, will succeed.

(The specific mechanisms that scholars use to lever discourses are what flowers are in a grey-water system: while functional and necessary, the spontaneous creativity embodied in both are fueled by the forces of generosity and discipline, which have a dual function, also inspiring joy and wonder.)

Response: Ecofeminism
November 14, 2006

This journal will be a little long as I want to respond to your comments of my Nov 1 journal, then move into my response to the four readings assigned for this week. I will begin with the response to clarify my strategy for this exercise. I perceive the journaling exercise to be an intentional engagement with the process of learning and building ideas; in order to engage with the text at the level that interests me currently, I am assuming a base of knowledge similar to my own. The 300 word target limits my ability to position my arguments in their greater context. As this is an exercise of process, I am focusing mainly on articulating useful building blocks as I discover them, as well as exercising my muscles of critique when I see good opportunity.

As I unsuccessfully tried to explain in my Nov 1 journal, the academic tendency towards seemingly endless theory and scholarship that stifles action has often irritated me, but I know that, as Rita M. Gross explains, there is great value in “doing reconstructive work to eliminate certain problematic conventions” (163).

As I come to understand power from a postmodern perspective, I can see how language is both produced by us as subjects, and that it produces us as subjects, as well as our subjectivity (Foucault).

Working through theory, through our ontological stories, our socio-cultural symbol sets, religions, and worldviews, we must ‘garden’ our conventions to incorporate the ever-emerging knowledge(s), ‘composting’ problematic conventions, and cultivating deeper understandings. In these journal responses, I have been focusing on specific strategies used by the authors which I find either wonderfully useful in creating an ontological shift, or problematic in that they somehow hinder our capacity to shift to a healthy, diverse, ecological worldview.

Rosemary Radford Ruether’s article was fantastic. It is wonderful to hear that such radical suggestions for shifting the Christian paradigm are being proposed from within. I felt that her article was deeply loyal to her Christian faith, while offering an intense criticism and radical restructuring. Her rejection of dualistic thinking leads her to use the a lot of the same language that systems theory uses in understand our complex reality. Ruether spoke of the “continuity of matter-energy dynamics” (467) and “the matrix [of]…interdependency” (469). I found useful how she and Gerbera position Jesus as an anitmessiah (470) as a way for Christians to reject our current social structure without denying their religion. Another direction I would like to hear her explore is connections between the Abrahamic 3, and an environmental ethic.

Heather Eaton’s response to Ruether I found both useful and problematic. While she expands fantastically on the possible trajectories for expanding and transforming Christian thought also using a systems understanding, she occasionally fell back on binary language.

Throughout the article she uses the phrase ‘being held in tension’ to describe the relationship between idea sets, such as nature and history, of religion and culture. The language intimates that these idea sets are discrete, separate from each other, that they are in opposition somehow, and must be brought together by effort and force. This language, I think, is exactly this mode of thinking that Ruether is challenging.

(I could go on to critique other details of Eaton’s language use, and positioning of arguments as possibly problematic, but for the parameters of the assignment, it will suffice to say that the value in doing these readings I am finding where, why, and how to be careful with our arguments and language; as Thomas Berry says, we must reinvent the human with critical language.)

I think it is very important to not see the world as made of oppositional dualities of either/or’s, but rather, as Riley says, as interdependent, dynamic processes with a “both/and perspective” (479). I understand that for the planet to be able to sustain human life, humanity must stop living in such a destructive way; there is no one strategy that is going to create this change; it will take many many strategies to succeed, as Eaton as well suggests.

The value I am gaining from these readings then is learning of different strategies and tactics, from some of the many different perspectives; learning these, I believe, will help me guide people of different religious/traditional backgrounds to deeply understand ecological and cosmological patterns in a way that allows them to continue to love their faith tradition(s).

voices from the global South: chapter 14
response

I feel I have read quite prolifically in this realm of critiques emerging from the ‘global south’ regarding the effects of colonialism, globalization, industrialism, and centralization, etc., and still, everytime, the stories make me ache.

Through reading so many papers regarding the forces and implications of social change, I am beginning to be able to articulate where I see the unity (that allows for difference) in trajectory throughout. I am continually weaving together the languages of ecology, philosophy, resistance, and love. I can take these through everything, to the domain of the everything/nothing vortex, where the intersections collapse into a black hole of ineffability, and re-emerge from the yin-yang kaliedescope, which is to say I can travel through theory, thought, poetry, spirit, and back out again. While comforting to me to have found ‘trails’, the challenge now is articulation into language that remains complex while being clear.

Language is key; what we can name, we can identify, and what we can identify then exists. As Boff (and Waring) articulate, “[w]hat is not in the marketplace does not exist” (Boff, 501). As Potigaura articulates, “Brazilian society will respect Indians only when it recognizes them as a part of its own culture, language and traditions” (520), which really means when the entangled histories are thoroughly discussed.

With this dialogue comes education, and understanding , but most importantly, the creation of consensual language, making events, people, and contexts ‘legible’ (Foucault). Being able to self-name and morph/expand/shift identities is critically important, especially for the oppressed.

Most articles end in a connection to, or plan for, action/praxis. “Eco-justice in these churches takes shape as a life style rather than a written code of conduct.” (Daneel, 512-513). On Dec. 28 I fly to Vancouver to move in with a friend and support her while she births and begins to parent. I will support her health, cradle her business, and expand my knowledge of plant medicine in regards to mothers and babes. It is comforting for me to know that soon I will shift my focus to celebratory service for a new life and for community.

“We believe that life and vivacity in its totality can be perceived, experienced, and realized only in the microcosms of community and family” (Sharma, 499).

resistance!
nov 29

The Sprituality of Resistance; I am a believer.

When I saw Derrick Jensen speak he said repeatedly, “The Jews who participated in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising had a much higher rate of survival” (Guelph, April 2006).

Again, I hear the recurrent theme of “fully engag[ing] that which frightens and depresses us the most” (557) as a spiritual and personal necessity to become fully realized, and indeed, this is often my strategy when speaking with my peers in discussion of the future.

Gottlieb raises the essential question: what do we hold on to, and what do we let go of? (556). The answer is a continual negotiation.

In Korten’s article he articulates well how the division now is no longer so much between “between northern and southern nations… it is class” (565). Indeed I have thought this for a while; it is interesting to hear his support for this argument.

Another figure he raised that I am happy to now have to cite is “that for every $1 circulating in the productive economy today, $20 to $50 circulates in the world of pure finance” (567). His conclusion is decentralization and localization, and, again, I am happy to know his argument to support mine.

Norberg-Hodge (a person I would like to meet) articulates so well the affects of globalization and industrialization. I find it very interesting that she cites polyandry as a cultural population control (574). This is an argument I am interested in researching.

The piece by James Profit is beautiful; I can relate through my similar childhood embedded in Nature, experience participating in Native ceremonies, and living intimately with the ocean. His positioning of passion for the Earth as the passion of Jesus is both useful and understandable to me. Praise be to Ignatius, all of the amazing work they are doing, and to thinkers like these.

Ecological Water Cleaning Systems

2007-01-05T13:16:00.000-05:00

November 6, 2006

Ecological Water Cleaning Systems

Table of Contents
1.0 Regional Water Use
1.1 Water Problems
2.0 Region of Waterloo Water Use: Introduction
2.1 Effects of Municipal Water Discharge
2.2 Region of Waterloo: Conclusions
3.0 Alternatives: Towards Sustainability
3.1 Alternate Solutions
3.1.1 Greywater Systems
3.2 Vision of the Ideal: the Community Greywater Garden
3.3 Alternatives: Conclusions
4.0 Anticipated Side Effects
5.0 Conclusions
References

1.0 Regional Water Use

Water is pumped from 126 wells in the Waterloo Region, servicing 450, 467 people a daily average of 161 200m3 in 2005 (Region of Waterloo, 2006). The wastewater is pumped to 7 wastewater treatment plants which are operated by the Ontario Clean Water Agency (OCWA) , providing a minimum of secondary treatment under Ministry of Environment (MOE) regulations (Region of Waterloo, 2006).

1.1 Water Problems

Groundwater Contamination:
Agriculture runoff, industry discharge, landfill seepage, and urban runoff all affect groundwater. Only a few aquifers have been studied, and usually only as result of posioning, such as a case of pesticide contamination in Elmira, Ontario, (Environment Canada, 2006a).

Groundwater Mining:
If groundwater is pumped at a rate faster than which the aquifer natural recharges itself then water levels will be reduced, leading to the possibility of depletion. Such a case is illustrated by the well W4 located on University of Waterloo main campus which is no longer in use (Nyp, 2000).

Industrial Discharge:
Exact data regarding quantities of chemicals discharged by industry is challenging to gather. In 2005, the Ministry of Environment (MOE) gave 300 tickets to the Industrial Waste Haulers sector, and 185 fines for further violations (Government of Ontario, 2006).

Municipal Discharge:
Municipalities supply both residential and industrial process with freshwater. It is first treated with a chlorinating process that is known to create trihlomethanes which are suspected carcinogens (Nyp, 2000). After use, the wastewater is treated with chlorine again before it is discharged (Region of Waterloo, 2003).

Pharmaceutical contamination:
A recent study of the Kitchener Waterloo area shows extensive existence of pharmaceutical mixtures (Lissemore et al., 2005). While comparatively little knowledge exists regarding quantity or effect this has, it is known that some of these chemicals have strong effect with little dosage, and that non-target effects occur. Estimates of contamination quantity are in the range of thousands of tones.

2.0 Waterloo Regional Water Use: Introduction

Water is a fundamental need of all life, and while it is reusable, it is not renewable. It is a global system and therefore complex. It is imbricated in everything, making it challenging to define system boundaries. Freshwater is but 3% of Earth’s supply. Our freshwater is increasingly polluted from multiple sources creating chemical combinations that are also increasingly complex.

In 1996 Canada used 64 421 million cubic meters (MCM); just less than 20 000 MCM was re-circulated, and 90% of it discharged post use (Environment Canada, 2006b). The average Canadian municipal breakdown was residential 52%, commercial 19%, industrial 16% and leakage13% (Environment Canada, 2006b). Each Canadian used an average of 335L a day in 1996 (Environment Canada, 2006b).

As an example of a municipal water system I will look at Galt, an area of the City of Cambridge, in the Region of Waterloo, in southern Ontario. It is a good example for its complexity, the systems nested within systems, for the dense population, and high pollution levels. The Integrated Urban Water Supply (IUS) includes Waterloo, Kitchener, Cambridge, Elmira and St. Jacob’s, draws from 126 wells an average of 171.5 million liters/day (MLD) (Region of Waterloo, 2006).

The groundwater is tested for more than 150 chemical contaminants and undergoes a chlorinating process (Nyp, 2000). Chlorine reacts with organic matter, creating trihlomethanes which are suspected carcinogens (Nyp, 2000). From the treatment plant, the water runs through an underground network of metal pipes serviced by the city.

Average daily water use for the IUS in 2005 was 161 200 MCM. Cambridge received a daily average of 51 331m3 from the IUS ( City of Cambridge, 2005). Most of the wastewater in Cambridge is processed in the Galt Waste Water Treatment Plant (GWWTP) which is operated by Ontario Clean Water Agency (OWCA) and monitored by the Ministry of Environment (MOE). The GWWTP treated a daily average flow of 30 301 m3/day in 2005 (Region of Waterloo, 2006a).

Conventional wastewater is treated in roughly a five stage process. First the waste is screened, then solids are allowed to settle out. The water carries on the third stage, called secondary treatment, which aerates and uses biological processes in mimicry of how water is cleaned in natural ecosystem. Solids are allowed to settle out again. The water is treated with chlorine before it is discharged, and the solids are let to compost before being either incinerated, put in landfill, or used as fertilizer.

2.1 Effects of Municipal Water Discharge
The following information is based on the Grand River Conservation Authority’s 2006 report, Water Quality in the Grand River: Summary of Current Conditions (2000-2004) And Long Term Trends ( Cooke, 2006).

Generally, nutrient levels in the Grand River are high, and metal levels are within the guidelines. Agricultural runoff and wastewater discharge are cited as the main contributors, and exacerbated by the underlying clay pan which contributes a high sediment load. The central portion of the river, around the confluence of the Conestoga and Speed Rivers, is the “most impaired”.

Wastewater plants, intense agriculture, and urban runoff are cited as the main contributors. Effects are seen in downstream eutrophication., Increasing concentrations of total ammonium, chloride, and phosphorus are being seen in Waterloo Region. Chlorides are particularly high in the lower Speed River, likely from road de-icing and water softening salts persisting through wastewater treatment. Spills from the wastewater treatment plant bypasses pose “significant threat” to the river of “acute and immediate impairment to water quality”. In 2004 there were over 70 spills in the Grand River, most of which were from wastewater treatment plants of secondary treated water.

Pesticides are not thoroughly tested for. Neither are pathogens or bacteria. No mention is made of testing for pharmaceuticals, petroleum, or other toxins.

The recent discovery of chromatography and spectroscopy technology has made possible testing for more complex chemicals, but the lack of economic resources limits the availability of equipment and staff to do such testing. As well, the knowledge regarding how chemicals exist in combination and in context is incomplete. Recent studies using this technology have shown that wastewater treatment plants “only partially eliminate[d]” antibiotics such as tetracyclines and sulfonamides and are considered “point sources for antibiotic contamination (Yang et al., 2004).

Global change is another vector of large impact upon the system. The continuing trends of urban development and population growth are increasing pressure upon already stressed groundwater supplies. High water use is contributing to lower water quality; this is a local and global trend. As well, increasing water sales to American markets are also placing pressure on many Canadian areas, such as nearby Guelph, which is considering building a freshwater pipeline to the stateside market.

2.2 Region of Waterloo: Conclusions

The Region of Waterloo operates a very large water supply and treatment system. This system is leading to groundwater contamination and depletion in the area. Concurrently, pollution and contamination levels are rising. A major limitation is our lack of capacity to test for many contaminants: the time, man-power, technology, and research have not been funded yet. Of our known pollution, it is wastewater treatment plants that pose the highest threat to the health of the Grand River.

3.0 Alternatives: Towards Sustainability

Clean water is necessary for life; not only is it a prerequisite for human life but planetary health depends on it. We are polluting water at a rate higher than natural planetary processes can purify it. As a result “nearly all surface water bodies within and near urban-industrial centers are now highly polluted” (Biswas, 2005). According to Biswas a water crisis might occur, but not for a lack of water, but because of failing water quality, and insufficient for water treatment technology. Large, high-tech, treatment plants have a high cost and large ecological footprint. They require a high energy input to construct and to maintain. Especially for developing nations, which is most of the global population, currently insufficient investment is available for the treatment facilities necessary to maintain a high quality water supply (Biswas, 2005).

While some argue that large, high-technology systems hold the most hope for the task of cleaning our ever-increasing load of polluted water, many will argue that biological systems are more affordable, and truly sustainable. The success of a wastewater treatment system is dependant on how well the system functions as a whole and within its environment. It must be suited to the bioregion and to the community.

A sustainable treatment process must be: a viable economic investment for a community in both the developed and developing worlds; of mutual benefit to the community and the ecosystem; provide habitat for biodiversity; and be designed for flexibility in its long term biological functioning.

3.1 Alternative Solutions
Alternative methods do exist. If, to begin with, human feces and urine (blackwater) and washing water (greywater) are allowed to remain separate, our task of maintaining a clean water supply and cleaning dirtied water is greatly eased. Feces and urine are both very high nitrogen sources, a requisite of all soil and plant processes. Composting human waste before returning it to the fields is an ancient practice, and currently being cautiously used in the Waterloo Region (Region of Waterloo, 2006b). Saying goodbye to the flush toilet has the dual effect of conserving water while greatly reducing the toxicity of the municipal water treatment load.

Many methods exist for the cleaning of water. The following is a list of techniques and the vector they are effective in. Often, these methods are used in combination with another.

Table 1. Techniques, method, and results for water cleaning strategies.
Adapted from Adin and Asanno, 1998, except for * taken from Bononomo et al, 1997.

Technique Method Results

Aerobic bioactivity metabolism by bacteria removal of organic matter
Oxidation pond: aeration and sunlight reduce solids, BOD, coliforms, bacterial,
and ammonia
activated carbon physical adsorbtion removals hydrophobic, and organic
compounds
lime treatment precipitate metals softens and disinfects
from solution using lime
reverse osmosis pressure membrane removes salts, and pathogens
UV radiation ultraviolet exposure disinfects, purifies
duckweed * removes organic cleans, denitrifies

3.1.1 Greywater Systems

Two trends in greywater systems currently prevail, roughly categorized as the constructed wetland and a Living Machine (patented). A constructed wetland is an outdoor system that uses soil, water, plants, and microorganisms to purify water mimicking the natural wetland system (Magmedov, 2003). A Living Machine is primarily an indoor system constructed of a series of tanks each containing a different mini-ecosystem which function together to clean water in up to four days (Wolovitz, 2000). Both systems cultivate water-cleaning microorganisms through accentuation of habitat.

A constructed wetland is based on the ecology of a natural wetland. They generally consist of multiple beds containing media, such as sand, soil and gravel, planted with aquatic plants, such as cattails, bulrushes, reeds, and sedges. Multiple mediums of varying diameters are critical for cultivating quantity and diversity of microorganisms, as is a diversity of plants. Plant roots provide habitat and the carbon necessary for microorganisms to denitrify water. Often systems will incorporate vertical and horizontal flows to increase aerobic activity.

The following list is a few of the many research projects containing elements that might successfully be integrated into a sustainable, community water treatment system:

- Vertical Flow Constructed Wetlands (Kantawanichkul et al., 1999). Researchers in Thailand are using constructed tanks filled with gravel and planted with grasses or papyrus, and vertical flow to filter water from Chang Mai University; results show coliform removal was 99.9% and overall 90% removal efficiencies even when in high flow.

- Constructed Wetlands for Cold Climates (Smith et al., 2006). Researchers in Atlantic Canada have run dairy wastewater through a constructed wetland year-round to determine that, with continuous and steady hydrolic flows, and with mulch and snow for insulation, biological activity can remain high enough to remove 62%-99%.

-Duckweed Wastewater Treatment ponds (Bonomo et al, 1997): Italian researchers concluded that while cold winters limited this method, otherwise results proved high cleaning efficiency and high production of biomass and habitat.

Living Machines were created and patented by John and Nancy Todd of the Ocean Arks Institute. These systems involve a set of connected tanks containing complete aquatic ecosystems, providing habitat for a diversity of beneficial bacteria indoor environments to clean greywater. In these systems, the water is first collected and held in a closed anaerobic environment and treated to anaerobic decomposition for about three days; the water then is transferred to a closed aerobic tank, where it is aerated and allowed to off-gas. From there, the water is run through a series of tanks housing aquatic ecosystems of varying depths and species; these tanks are designed to maximize surface area to house high beneficial bacterial population.

The Living Machine at Findhorn, Scotland was designed in 1993 and serves approximately 300 people per day. It lives in a 10m x 30m greenhouse, and takes approximately 8 days to clean water (Findhorn, 2005). Living Machine systems are currently used in the Toronto Body Shop bottling plant, at Ben & Jerry’s headquarters, and a number of other high profile locations.

3.2 Vision of the Ideal: the Community Greywater Garden

Water, food production, humans, and human waste are a connected system. Currently this system is primarily fueled by petroleum at every stage, and heavily dependant on water subsidies. Regardless of the remaining quantity of available oil, the high environmental and economic costs will likely necessitate that we produce and maintain the majority of our basic resource in our own bioregions. History is revealing a lack of efficiency in centralized systems. Scientists, philosophers, activists, even theologians are calling for an urgent shift to bioregionalism (see Thomas Berry, Jane Jacobs, David Suzuki). If we look at the impressive new bodies of knowledge collected through systems theory, community development, and permaculture, then the idea of mimicking natural systems, using the pattern of systems nesting within systems, becomes imperative (see Fritof Capra, Donnella Meadows, David Holgrem).

Water and food are linked; everything needs water to grow, clean, to digest, and cook. Both plant growth and water cleansing occurs through bacterial action. Becoming more aware of these processes, so to create responsible, efficient and healthy food and water production is imperative. Linking these systems at a home, community, and watershed level is necessary. An entire social, system shift is necessary to accompany these structural changes to our living patterns.

For the city of Cambridge, Galt in particular, I imagine three or four large, community managed, water treatment centers. Consisting of multiple constructed wetland systems, multiple Living Machine systems, compost areas, and systems for specific contaminations, a variety of local bacteria, fungi, ecosystems, and knowledge can be cultivated there. These centers can process any water that has no other system, process heavily contaminated waters, and supply biological and intellectual resources. These local water treatment centers have the dual function of water treatment and nursery centers, supplying appropriate and adapted varietals of the micro and macro organisms necessary to create home greywater systems. The community level systems could create a level of knowledge sharing within the watershed, and cross-watersheds.

As water becomes a more lucrative resource, more households and communities will want to, and need to, reuse water. Clean water is preferable. In some cases, households will want to have a garden, thereby having the knowledge, energy, feasibility and desire to maintain a greywater system. They might have their own system of rainwater collection, water storage, water cleaning, and food creation. In other cases, groups of dwellings will chose to share the chores of garden and water system. Ideally, the community would care for both indoor and outdoor systems; especially in a climate with a more severe winter, a greenhouse with a LM would cleans water much quicker, contribute to winter food production, and could provide a great community space for the winter months. Good design, with close attention to the particular ecology, community, and local needs, will be specific to the site and context.

3.4 Alternatives: Conclusions
Globally, we are polluting our water at a rate faster than natural process can clean it. Conventional wastewater treatments plants are expensive, have a large ecological footprint, and, as revealed by studies of the Grand River, they create the most known pollution. Current research stresses the need for more efficient water treatment, and attention to water quality. Knowing that investment for new, expensive WWTPs is not always available, sustainability must be defined as economically viable for both developed and developing communities, consisting of a small ecological footprint, of mutual benefit to the community and local ecosystems, fostering biodiversity, and designed for flexibility in its long term functioning.

By keeping separate our greywater from blackwater, we greatly increase our capacity to efficiently clean water. Greywater systems have been created on a many scales, both indoor and outdoor, in warm and cold climates. Constructed wetlands are usually for outdoor application and can be designed for varying scale and climate. Living Machines are a patented design from Ocean Arks Institute have been functioning successfully in a number of indoor locations for over ten years.

Ideally, while still subsidized by inexpensive energy sources, we begin to shift WWTPs to using biological systems. WWTPs can cultivate locally adapted and effective species for greywater treatment, functioning as both treatment plant and nursery. The community can then support the building of more indoor and outdoor greywater systems of varying scales, for households and communities, facilitating greater water re-use with less embodied energy.

4.0 Side Effects
The effects of the implementation of an integrated system of bioregional food production and biological water treatment both creates and necessitates a complete social, cultural, and ontological shift. This shift is being widely called for throughout the peace movement ( see Thomas Berry, David Suzuki, Derrick Jensen). If one looks only at the economic vector, such a shift is inconceivable and unprofitable. However, if one looks at the effects of such an integrated system on local biodiversity, global and community health – physically, socially, and spiritually-, as well as food and water quality, a positive relationship of mutual enhancement is found.

Some possible side effects might include an increase in biodiversity as habitat is created, increasing air quality, an increase in groundwater quality and recharge, deepening sense of community pride, deeper understanding of biological process, an increase of knowledge regarding biological process capable of decomposing the residues of chemical era, etc. Side effects would likely also include an increase in local food productions, which would affect the local economy and employment. The effects of such a systems on the planet, humans and non-humans would be overwhelmingly positive if one deems biodiversity and life as positive.

The greatest challenge to this proposition is creating a social movement towards saying goodbye to the flush toilet. This idea is incomprehensible to most. From this perspective the greatest resistance would be met. The implications of such a move would be mass water conservation as well as much less water contamination. It is possible, indeed likely, that tertiary industries would be created to process and recycle the composting of human waste.
As stated, looking through the economic vector such a system is not plausible; indeed, it is problematic. Such self-sufficient, ecological models of local production do not fit profitably in current economic frameworks.

From a short-term perspective, it is possible that the transition of WWTPs from conventional to ecological models could provide job opportunities in research, and community education. Community design processes could greatly help ameliorate the shifting economic patterns. It is in the transition from our current economic system to an ecological system that possible negative side effects lie, as it is uncertain that the transition will occur without crises. Indeed, if we can shift to a network of resilient, locally adapted, flexible systems with built-in redundancy, while subsidized by petroleum energy, maintaining our water quality would be more likely, and fostering of sustainable community development could be supported.

5.0 Conclusions

The Region of Waterloo supplies water to nearly half a million people from 126 wells, and treats the wastewater in seven main WWTPs. This is resulting in the depletion and contamination of groundwater. As well, the watershed is becoming increasingly polluted from urban and agricultural runoff, as well as from pharmaceuticals in municipal discharge. The greatest known damage is occurring from spills from the municipal WWTPs. The current organization responsible for testing the Grand River’s water quality is not equipped with the necessary equipment to test for presence of quantity of many known contaminants.

The first step in improving water quality is keeping solid waste separate from wastewater. Greywater can be treated much more safely and easily than blackwater. Methods alternative to convention are being explored in both the scientific and sustainability communities. Constructed wetland systems are receiving much scientific attention currently, and have shown the most positive results in warm, though strategies are being studied for cool climates. Living Machines are a patented design from Ocean Arks Institute; they are for indoor or greenhouse application and have been successfully installed in a number of high-use, high-visibility commercial locations. Both systems rely on biological processes to cleanse water of toxins and impurities.

Natural systems have the capacity for self-organization, self-repair, self-reproduction, and a great ability to adapt thereby fitting our definition of sustainable. By first creating a nursery and research site in our municipal WWTPs and using a community design process, we can create a network of systems that function in to create food and community while cleaning our water for reuse.

References

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P.W., Payne, M. 2006. Prediction of liquid municipal biosolid and precipitation induced
tile flow in a Southern Ontario agricultural field using MACRO. Agricultural Water Management 83: 37 – 50.

Adin, A., Asanno, T., 1998. The Role of Physical-Chemical Treatment in
Wastewater Reclamation and Reuse. Wat. Sci. Tech. Vol 37, No 10: 78-90.

Biswas, A.K., 2005. An Assessment of Future Global Water Issues. Water Resources
Development, Vol. 21, No. 2: 229-237.

Bonomo, L., Pastorelli, G., Zambon, N., 1997. Advantages and Limitations of Duck-Weed Based Wastewater Treatment Systems. Wat. Sci Tech. Vol. 35, No. 5: 239-246.

Capra, F. 1996. The Web of Life:A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems. New York:
Anchor Books, p 37.

City of Cambridge, 2005. Water Summary Report: 6.

Cooke, S., 2006. Water Quality in the Grand River: A Summary of Current Conditions (2000-
2004) and Long Term Trends. Grand River Conservation Authority: vii-ix.

Environment Canada, 2006. Toxic chemicals: the legacy of a chemical society. Retrieved
October 16, 2006, at http://www.ec.gc.ca/water/en/manage/poll/e_legacy.htm: para 1.

Environment Canada, 2006a. How we contaminate groundwater. Retrieved Ocober 16, 2006 at http://www.ec.gc.ca/water/en/manage/poll/e_howgrd.htm: para 7

Environment Canada, 2006b. http://www.ece.gc.ca/water,

Findhorn Foundation, 2005. The Living Machine. Retrieved from
http://www.findhorn.org/ecovillage/livingmach2_new.php. Paragraph 4-12.

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para 13.

Katawanichkul, S., Pilalila, S., Tanapiyawanich, W., Tikampornittay, W., Kamrua, S., 1999.
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assessment for selected pharmaceuticals within a watershed in Southern Ontario.
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Biodegradation systems for petroleum hydrocarbons

2007-01-05T13:12:00.000-05:00

November 6, 2006

Biodegradation systems for petroleum hydrocarbons

Abstract: Crude oil is processed into petroleum, plastics, and many other substances. Oil is composed of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), which, because of their resistance to decomposition, are persistent, as well as toxic. Researchers are studying the capacity of white rot fungi, of co-evolved micro-organisms on natural oil seeps, and of bacteria to decompose hydrocarbons. Looking to scientific research for biophysical guidance, to the sustainability community for ecological models, and to the emerging wisdom of systems theory for design and process considerations, an integrated approach to waste management can be considered. Locally adapted ecosystems cultivated for PAH decomposition could turn a problem into a resource both biologically and socio-economically through job-creation.

Introduction

Modern life uses vast quantities of oil. It is transported, refined, and manufactured into a huge number of products, including plastics. Oil is composed of tightly bonded hydrocarbon chains. Total petroleum hydrocarbons (TPH) are a large family of chemicals derived from crude oil which enter the environment through soil or air, and cause nervous system, lung, kidney, and liver damage (ASTDR, 1999). From the incomplete burning of oil comes polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), which are suspected carcinogens, and are found in medicines, plastics, pesticides, and asphalt ( ATSDR 1995). PAH are persistent toxins that are mainly of anthropogenic origin, and are found to accumulate in areas of exposure (Trapido, 1998). Gaseous and condensed PAH can be carried long distances before being deposited (Wania & MacKay, 1996). Occasionally, crises occur where large quantities oil enter the ecosystem, such as oil spills, or storms, such as Hurricane Katrina. Both in manufacture and in disposal, more and more hydrocarbon compounds are being introduced into the environment.
Research regarding the biodegradation of hydrocarbons has mainly centered around the family of white rot fungi (WRF) because of their lignin-degrading capacity. Tests show greater decompositional efficiency by WRF in a water substrate and less efficiency in soil substrate (Boyle et al., 1998). Research testing a number of varieties of WRF for PAH removal from gas-manufacturing contaminated soil showed an overall average of 30% PAH decrease in the first month (Sasek et al., 2003; Rudd et al., 1996). Growth seems negatively affected by nitrogen additions, and additions of alfalfa or sawdust also impede remediation slightly (Boyle et al., 1998). Of note, WRF that had been previously exposed to PAH exhibited faster decomposition, inferring induciblity (Boyle et al., 1998).

Another area of research regarding hydrocarbon biodegradation is observing the co-evolved ecosystems of natural oil seeps. At an active natural oil seep along the Dorset Coast, UK, researchers analyzed acidophilic microbial communities, and recorded complete degradation of PAH as well as other compounds by both bacterial and fungi (Roling et al., 2005).
Operating in parallel to the academic community is what I will refer to as the sustainability community, by which I mean the movements and institutes of permaculture and sustainable design. Combining science, ancient wisdoms, traditional knowledge, ecology, and system theory, this community has created a large body of knowledge on low-technology, low-impact, ways of living in a relationship of mutual enhancement with the earth. The ability of fungi to bioremediate has been of much interest here for while, with Paul Stamets leading the research. Recently, Battelle, a global (Ohio-based) science and technology enterprise, performed tests involving a number of strategies to bioremediate crude-oil saturated soil: while the conventional chemical and bacterial attempts revealed little noticeable change four weeks after treatment, the area that was inoculated by Stamets with a diversity of fungi, including the common and delicious Oyster mushroom, showed not only rapid decomposition, but a much accelerated succession to a vegetated state (Stamets, 1999). Analyses showed PAH degradation to be 95%, and constituents reduced to non-toxic components; the mushrooms even tested free of toxins (Stamets, 1999).

Bridging the gap between these communities is systems theory. System theory/thinking/dynamics has given us whole new ways of looking at how everything works in relationship. From this exciting, emergent body of knowledge, we better understand how ecological systems and social processes function and evolve. This gives us tools for designing and altering physical systems, as well as tools for creating change in existing social systems. Through observant design that mimic natural systems, incorporating feedback and meta-feedback loops, we can support the forces and processes that help a system to run itself (Meadows, 2001). Biological systems are multi-functional, self-producing, self-cleaning, co-evolving processes, making them viable options if a strict definition of sustainable is adopted and aspired to (Capra, 1996).

A system is truly sustainable if it is: mutually enhancing to the human and non-human communities; provides habitat for biodiversity; is economically viable to create and maintain by both wealthy and poor communities; and is designed for flexibility in its long term functioning. Using this definition, this paper will examine what systems are creatable at a local level to deal with the plethora of hydrocarbons, and what some strategies to create change may be.

Methods
The main method used was research through both the academic and sustainability cannons, supported by observation of natural systems. This paper combines both scientific, peer-reviewed journal articles, and case studies performed by players in the sustainability arena. Three years of soil observations in a variety of ecosystems and while provides my framework for understanding.
I will focus mainly on the praxis of addressing the problem in the bulk of this paper, rather than the socio-political systems that function to create, propagate, and exacerbate the problem. My biases towards decentralization and a devotion to an environmental ethic are visible within my definition of sustainable.

Discussion
Analysis
Current oil production is around 83.3 million barrels a day (Worldwatch, 2006). Crude oil is a persistent toxin. It is made of a tightly-bonded structure of hydrocarbon chains, and comes mainly from anthropogenic sources; these hydrocarbons are resistant to decomposition. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) are of particular concern as they are potentially carcinogenic, according to the US EPA (ASTDR, 1995). PAH can be found in medicines, plastics, dyes, asphalt, oil, smoke, charcoal, and tar (ASTDR, 1995). They are beginning to be found globally in increasing amounts in the humus layers of soil (Roling et al., 2005).
In 2000, Ontario produced 67,916 tonnes of plastic garbage, 22, 040 tonnes of which were recovered (Envirosis, 2001). Current waste management involves the conventional practices of creating landfills, incineration, and recycling. These practices do not involve the direct and efficient decomposition of persistent toxins, but rather only function to contain or proliferate them. The production and externality costs of landfilling are high (Miranda and Hale, 2004), as landfills are filling up, and governments are facing an inability to site new waste disposal locations (Hostovsky, 2006). In exacerbation, the predicted energy crisis will negatively affect our current centralized waste management system. High production of TPH and PAH are coinciding with problematic waste management strategies. As well, crises such as spills and storms, can contribute to TPH and PAH to the environment in a disastrously abrupt way. New Orleans, after Hurricane Katrina, is an example of a post-crisis site with heavy terrestrial and aquatic contamination; clean-up efforts are still underway.

Conventional methods for treatment of TPH and PAH contaminated sites often involve a pump-and-treat strategy, involving excavation before treatment, but excavation demands a high cost in energy, footprint and finance, limiting the possibility of its application. Treatment can also occur in situ: these include incineration, containment, oxidation, and biological means. Incineration offers the potential to harvest energy through waste-to-energy (WTE) technologies, and could potentially be economically viable (Miranda and Hale, 2004), but it creates more PAH, making it a much less efficient option in the long term. Containment creates anaerobic environments, slowing decomposition; oxidation is used to accelerate decomposition. Oxidation and aeration can occur through physical or chemical processes; hydrogen peroxide and ozone oxides can be used; increased levels of oxygen work to increase microbial metabolism as well as accelerate chemical reactions (Wikipedia, 2006a).

Current biological methods involve the metabolism of microbial populations, including bacteria, fungi and enzymes, as well as the possible use of plants, to convert problematic hydrocarbons to bio-available components (Wikipedia, 2006a). Biostimulation, through enhancing conditions for native populations, and bioaugmentation, by the addition of suitable but non-native species, are used depending on the situational context. Biostimulation generally involves the addition of nutrients, such as potassium, nitrogen, calcium and molasses (Wikipedia, 2006b); the environmental affects of such inputs must be monitored for tertiary impact, as some research suggest that nitrogen inputs may actually act to reduce fungal activity (Boyle et al,1998).

Scientific study around the biological degradation of problematic hydrocarbons has primarily explored the capacity for white rot fungi (WRF) to decompose PAH. WRF are a large family with the unique capacity to biodegrade lignin completely down to carbon dioxide; lignin is a natural polymer of cell walls in trees which give strength and contains the cellulose molecule that WRF can use as an energy source (Aust & Bensen, 1993). The fungi uses an extra-cellular and non-specific system of chemical production to decompose the tight carbon bonds, which also explains their resistance to toxic or mutagenic chemicals (Aust & Bensen, 1993). Results reveal faster decomposition in water substrates, and slower decompositional processes in soil (Boyle et al.,1998). Research testing PAH removal from gas-manufacturing contaminated soil by WRF Irpex lacteus and Pleurotus ostreatus, with bacterium Psuedomonas putida, showed, though all to be capable at decomposition, I.lactues to be most efficient, alone or in co-culture with bacteria (Sasek et al., 2003). The fungi to be capable of decomposing PAH and TPH down to bioavailable carbon dioxide and water (Sasek et al., 2003). Decreases in mutagenicity of crude oil have also been observed by decomposition by Cunninghammella elegans and Penicillium zonatum (Rudd et al., 1996).The growth of WRF, in this case Trametes versicolor Pilat strain 52P, was negatively affected by nitrogen inputs (Boyle et al., 1998), an observation supported by the decrease in agricultural mycorrhizae with increase in soluble potassium fertilizers (Kramer & Morely, 1990). Of note, it has been observed that WRF previously exposed to PAH exhibited faster decomposition, inferring the capacity for fungi to be cultivated for greater efficiency (Boyle et al., 1998).

Another area of research regarding hydrocarbon biodegradation is observing the co-evolved ecosystems of natural oil seeps. At an active natural oil seep along the Dorset Coast, UK, researchers analyzed acidophilic microbial communities, and recorded complete degradation of PAH as well as other compounds by both bacterial and fungi (Roling et al., 2005). This knowledge can aid bioremediation design to create optimal conditions, and asses measurement parameters (Roling et al., 2005).

The sustainability community has been looking at biological methods of pollution clean-up for the past 30 years from more of a low-tech, low-cost perspective. Working between this group and the scientific community, Paul Stamets has helped fungi reveal its potential to render hydrocarbons bioavailable; the difference is that Stamets is not using only WRF, but a broad variety of fungal species, including the delicious edible ‘oyster’ mushroom. In 1999, Battelle, a science and technology enterprise based in Ohio, conducted an experiment; they invited leading groups with the leading bioremediation technologies together to conduct a simultaneous test on crude oil saturated soil: while chemical, and bacterial strategies showed little improvement, the fungi inoculated pile by Stamets not only showed PAH reduction of 95%, but the fungi acted as a keystone species in accelerating succession: by attracting insects, birds came, bringing seeds, an accelerated succession to vibrant vegetation occurred, without intervention (Stamets, 1999). The mushrooms were even tested free of toxicity (Stamets, 1999). Battelle concluded that mycoremediation is safe, economical, fast, does not generate any toxic side-effects, and in fact, produces a useful end-product, turning a liability into an opportunity (Thomas, 2000).

Assessment
It is known that PAH and TPH are persistent toxins increasing in our environment from primarily anthropogenic sources, and that conventional methods do not sufficiently remediate these compounds. High technology solutions requiring high energy inputs are not available in many situations for economic reasons, nor are they sustainable. Definitions of ‘sustainable’ are subjective, resulting in a high variability of ‘sustainable’ practices. To be clear, a system is only truly sustainable if it is: mutually enhancing to the human and non-human communities; provides habitat for biodiversity; is economically viable to create and maintain by both wealthy and poor communities; and is designed for flexibility in its long term functioning. Using this definition, this paper will examine what systems are creatable at a local level to deal with the plethora of hydrocarbons, and what some implications of such a system may be.
Scientific research enhances our understanding of specific, detailed processes, such as rates of decomposition by various species of fungi, as well as helps us understand the environment as a co-evolving ecosystem. The sustainability community has been working to integrate science and ancient wisdoms to design ways of living with low impact on the planet. While these movements are parallel, they also often diverge. Systems dynamics is scientific theory that can ecosystems in a holistic way shared by the sustainability community. It gives us scientific language and theory through which to frame our strategies.

System thinking is an emergent body of knowledge about living, moving, dynamic processes and patterns. Life is change and movement; everything is interdependent; the ancients knew this; systems dynamics give us scientific language to speak of these complexities. Systems thinking is, in a way, a whole new ontological Story that can completely shift one’s view on life, from seeing a collection of atoms and chemical processes, to seeing the planet as an organism, including everything upon and within the planet. This ontological shift is necessary in reducing the toxicity of the environment, and in shifting the strategy we use to address existing toxins (Berry, 1999). Systems theory is language we can use to bridge the connections between science, spirituality, ecology, and society, as it is the language of connection. Some specific tools from systems dynamics include Donella Meadows’ “Leverage Points; places to intervene a system” (1999). Here she lists twelve such ‘locations’ in order of increasing effectiveness; within stocks and flows ratios, delay to change ratios, in feedback mechanisms, in information flows, rules, and goals of the system, are leverage points (Meadows, 1999). Another tool from the systems thinkers comes in the form of “Action to Outcome Mapping” (Jones & Seville, 2003). This is a strategy-testing tool for groups trying to achieve a broad, long-term outcome. By mapping out 1) existing causal theories, 2) adding feedback, 3) mapping critical mindsets, 4) accounting for external forces, and 5) identifying opportunities for learning, a strategy can be designed to be flexible, sustainable, and successful (Jones & Seville, 2003).
This gives us tools for designing and altering physical systems, as well as tools for creating change in existing social systems. Through observant design, feedback and meta-feedback loops, we can support the forces and processes that help a system to run itself (Meadows, 2001). Biological systems are multi-functional, self-producing, self-cleaning, co-evolving processes, making them viable options for the definition of sustainable aspired to.

Action
Goal
Sustainable waste management for TPH and PAH can occur through cultivating biological processes. Bioregionally adapted microbial species, both fungal and bacterial, capable of metabolizing hydrocarbons completely, should be cultivated at every waste management site. Through local development and sharing, microbial populations that are increasingly effective at metabolizing hydrocarbons can be cultivated with the wisdom of what functions efficiently at the local level. These sites can serve as nurseries for innoculant distribution, with the goal of increasing small systems that responsibly deal with waste. A network of systems within systems, integrating waste decomposition, resource creation, food production, and human habitation, can be created by the community, for the community, consciously using the wisdom of science, ancient knowing, and systems theory.

Tactics
The deeper goal of systemic change must accompany the discussion of waste management strategies. I stress the word discussion as it will also take much community dialogue, education, and planning to create the taking and sharing of responsibility that this
vision entails. Community design charrettes, designed and subsidized by CMHC, are a valuable method of bringing together the scientific community, the sustainability communities, planners, builders, specialists, government officials, and citizens. A community design charrette gives a format for a meaningful and constructive discussion to occur which produces a workable body of knowledge.

Preceding and concurrent to the community design charrette, effort would be necessary to educate the public, lobby government and industry, and create community support for a shift to biological methods of waste management. Media plays a key role in public awareness and opinion, and should be innovatively used. Ultimately, a closer intimacy with natural systems must be fostered so that people can better understand the planet as an organism, made of interdependent systems within complex system, with every action having affect. Becoming intimate with natural systems will help us integrate the many available knowledge sets into a well-designed strategy for sustainable waste management.

Conclusions
It is known that PAH and TPH are persistent toxins increasing in our environment from primarily anthropogenic sources, and that conventional methods are not able to completely remediate these compounds. Sufficient research exists in the scientific community, as well as in the sustainability community, to deem biological remediation safe, effective, and affordable. Certainly, case studies show that bioremediation using a diverse range of fungi species can biodegrade PAH to benign bio-available substances, and accelerates succession; in a mutually beneficial way they can turn a liability into a resource. Biological methods of waste management should be incorporated into every municipal waste management site. These sites can function as research stations and nurseries to support a multiplicity of responsible small systems. Decentralization of the system will reduce transportation and energy expenditures, and will distribute resources more widely. Using community design charrettes and action-to-outcome mapping, a locally viable system of multiple systems that work in a mutually enhancing way can be designed.

Literature Cited

ATSDR: Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. U.S. Department of Health and
Human Services. 1999. ToxFAQs for Total Petroleum Hydrocarbons. http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/tfacts123.html

ATSDR: Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. U.S. Department of Health and
Human Services. 1995. ToxFAQs for Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons.
http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/phs69.html

Aust, S; Benson, J. 1993. The fungus among us: the use of white rot fungus to
biodegrade environmental pollutants. Environmental Health Perspectives, Vol
101(3): 232-233.

Berry, T. 1999 The Great Work: Our way into the future. Bell Tower, New York.

Boyle, D; Wiesner, C; Richardson, A. 1998. Factors Affecting the Degradation of
Polyaromatic Hydrocarbons in Soil by White Rot Fungi. Soil Biol. Biochem. Vol 30, No 7: 873-882.

Capra, F. 1996. The Web Of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems. Anchor
Books, New York.

Envirosris. Plastic Waste Management Strategy for Ontario. 2001.

Hostovsky, C.2006. The paradox of ration comprehensive model of planning: tales
from waste management planning in Ontario, Canada. Journal of Planning,
Education and Research 25: 382-395.

Jones, A; Seville, D. 2003. Action to Outcome Mapping: testing strategy with systems thinking.
Systems Thinker Vol. 14 (2): 9-11.

Kramer, D; Morely, P. 1990. “The Hidden World of Mycorrhizae”. Gleanings from
Canadian Organic Growers. Canadian Organic Growers, Ottawa, Ontario; 59-61.

Meadows, D. 1999. Leverage Points: places to intervene in a system. Sustainability Institute.
http://www.sustainer.org/tools_resources/papers.html

Meadows, D, 2001. Dancing with Systems. Whole Earth, Winter: 27 –234.

Miranda, M; Hale, B. 2004. Paradise recovered: energy production and waste
management in island environments. Energy Policy 33: 1691-1702.

Roling, W; Ortega-Lucach, S; Larter, S; Head, I. 2006. Acidophilic microbial
communities associated with a natural, biodegraded hydrocarbon seepage.
Journal of Applied Microbiology 101:290 - 299.

Rudd, L; Perry, J; Houk, V; Williams, R; Claxton, L. 1996. Changes in mutagenicity
during crude oil degradation by fungi. Biodegradation 7: 335 – 343.

Sasek, V; Cajthaml, T; Bhatt, M. 2003. Use of Fungal Technology in Soil Remediation:
A Case Study. Water, Air and Soil Pollution; Focus 3: 5-14.

Stamets, P. 1999. Helping the ecosystem through mushroom cultivation. Whole Earth,
Fall. http://www.fungi.com/mycotech/mycova.html.

Thomas, S. 2000. Mushrooms: higher macrofungi to clean up the environment. Battelle
Environmental Updates, Fall. http://www.battelle.org/Environment/
publications/EnvUpdates/Fall00/article4.html

Trapido, M. 1998. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in Estonian Soil: contaminations
and profiles. Environmental Pollution 105: 67 –74.

Wania, F., MacKay, D. 1996. Tracking the distribution of persistent organic pollutants.
Environmental Science and Technology 30: 390A-396A.

Wikipedia, 2006a. Bioremediation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioremediation

Wikipedia, 2006b. Biostimulation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biostimulation

Worldwatch Institute, 2006. Fossil Fuel Use Continues to Rise.
http://www.worldwatch.org/node/4243.

States of Grace: book review

2007-01-05T13:07:00.000-05:00

october 3, 2006

~book review~
Charlene Spretnak: States of Grace:
The Recovery of Meaning in the Postmodern Age

Using a multi-disciplinary and multi-leveled approach, Charelene Spretnak has written a book that is both a passionate call to reconnection and a guide on how to do so. States of Grace weaves together four of the great wisdom traditions and deconstructive postmodernism into a gestalt worldview she calls “ecological postmodernism”(230). Considering our current planetary situation, States of Grace is a concise illumination of worldviews that practice sane and sustainable ways of living. While the real key is personal experience, practice, process itself, Charlene Spretnak engages eloquently in ontological discourse, blending ancient with post-modern for a perspective broad and deep. Her hope is to give each reader some of the ancient spiritual keys in hopes that we can collectively shift away from hyper-exploiting our surroundings, and enjoy living, once again, in grace.

Charlene Spretnak has subtitled the book Recovery of Meaning in the Postmodern Age, referring to our current age as ‘postmodern’ in both to the philosophical movement characterized by Foucault and deconstructionism, and to the failure of modernity to deliver the great freedom it promised. Modernity chopped the world into little pieces, dividing and dissecting it into tidy, individually known bits of substance. Science became the worldview. In this century much soul and culture searching has been done in an attempt to understand humanity and whether/how we have wrought so much havoc. Postmodernism looks hard into culture creation through a process of deconstruction to see how culture is a self-organizing system: while the culture is a reflection of its citizens, it creates its citizens; while language is used as a symbolic order, it also works to create meaning, and further, these meanings then create reality. While postmodernism has been very useful in untangling how ideology is naturalized, normalized, and self-policed, Spretnak argues vehemently against the final discursive step of ‘Deconstuctionist Postmodern’ that is anti-essentialist, declaring there is no essential meaning in anything aside from social construction. Spretnak argues that this worldview is a continuation of the destructive disconnection of science and patriarchy, which has facilitated the hyper-exploitation of our habitat. Modernity devalued relationships and reformed life into mechanical metaphors; postmodernity gave us some powerful ontological tools, but also emptied everything of any essential meaning. The recovery of meaning is then by necessity a reconstructive journey, and the state of our habitat begs for immediacy. Where better for us to look than the spiritual traditions that have been around for hundreds upon hundreds of years.

The four wisdom traditions the book engages are Buddism, Native American Spirituality, Goddess-worship, and the Abrahamic religions. Though she focuses an aspect of each worldview, she cautions against taking only a piece and leaving the rest: it is better for one to hold the philosophy with integrity and engage the wisdom within its context. Buddism has focused intensely on the mind and has much to teach about observing patterns, meditation, gaining perspective, re-patterning ourselves, and engaging in the participatory universe. Native American spirituality has much to teach about living with this land, about living in prayer and gratitude for the generosity of life and land. The traditions of the great Goddess give deep and beautiful attention to the body, the senses, the erotic, the awesome wonder of fertility, and the power of ritual. The Abrahamic traditions offer guidance regarding our sense of social justice, describing how looking after others is part of the path to spiritual fulfillment.

Spretnak’s core intention is to move people beyond theory, apathy and meaninglessness into actively living in a passionate, conscious, and harmonious way. The key to creating these deep changes is in practice/ process/ experience/ ritual; the truth of our lives exists in our repeated daily actions. The four wisdom traditions herein all emphasize honoring the process, using ritual, and daily life as spiritual practice. She integrates postmodern science to support how we continually create ourselves through our experiences. Systems theory is post-mechanistic science that begins to understand relationship and process as equally important to substance. We and everything else exist in a continual state of relationship and flux, in which we affect everything and are affected by everything; in the language of Permaculture, everything gardens. We are interconnected in a continuous dance of interbeing, to use a term coined by Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh. This knowledge, though perhaps more poetic than scientific, lay at the core of most ancient worldviews. Disconnected mind and disconnected theory will not bring us into the deep understanding we need to live harmonious. We need to move back into relation, back into the continual process of our bodies, our environment, and our infinite interconnectedness.

As science now knows the Buddists knew long ago through their practice of observing the mind and nature: all is transitory and we are but vibration and oscillation. We are solid but in a continual state of flux; we are substance made of wave. There is paradox at core of life, referred to by Buddism in the Everything and the Nothing. I have taken to calling this the Great Paradox, and vision it as a yin-yang of two forces, each with a bit of the other, continually flowing, concurrently, creating possibility like a kaliedescope creates pattern. Western thought tends to see two forces as contradictory and tries to simplify them, but much is lost in the process. The ancient traditions honored the paradox, understanding that this flow is the creative matrix. I have encountered this idea in so many Indigenous paradigms that I have come to believe that the acceptance of this apparent paradox as non-problematic at the core of all things is essential to our paradigm shift. Spretnak has helped me to articulate myself regarding my position. She makes visceral an essentialist argument that at the core there is interconnection, continual flux and paradox: regardless of our social constructions there is something essential and with meaning. She uses a Christian term for this experience of this deep state: grace.

To be critical, there is a section in which I find her language a bit problematic. Her chapter on the Goddess tradition begins with pegging biological evolution as rooted in the male-female split, making it a duality is at our very core. The way she uses language in his chapter supports the idea that we are trapped in this binary. Spretnak goes on to compare patriarchal societies with gynocentric communities in a very bad-good sort of way. The stark contrast of these comparisons does not sit well with me. To me, they reinforce the concept of the binary, which I see as a false construction. I do not see things as a duality, or even a continuum, as both concepts imply a two-dimensional linearity; I see reality as more web-like, better visualized as a sphere. Beyond these two examples she does speak from a place of honoring the paradox, acceptance of the multivalent complexities, indeed, of grace.

In conclusion, I felt the book to be wonderful. It is academic, indexed, and well cited, while also being passionate and useful. This one book has helped my articulate my discomfort with Postmodernism, and realize that I do hold an essentialist viewpoint. Most importantly, the book has encouraged my resolve to commit to practicing Vipassanna meditation and ritual. I am deeply grateful for the read, for the academic dialogue through personal spirituality, combining discourse with physical practice. It is an eloquent map in ways to shift ideologies and ontologies, which is what our planet urgently needs.

~Works Cited~
Spretnak, Charlene. States of Grace: The Recovery of Meaning in the Postmodern Era. San
Francisco: Harper Collins, 1991.

The Cosmos In Lady Manzanita: process and the Great Paradox

2007-01-05T12:59:00.000-05:00

On the land between two lakes, just south of the centre of Cortes Island there is a park called Kw’as. The road wraps around the northwest side and takes not long to pass by. There is a small parking lot with a great big signs, a map, and a bucket of handmade walking sticks.

The trees are big, and occasionally cars rest in the parking lot; otherwise the park is somewhat nondescript from the roadside. As the road wraps around, the land comes to rest at the edge of little Gunflint Lake, opal in shape and energy. For a couple of hundred meters the road runs right along the lake, affording beautiful views of moon reflections, simple shorelines, and the thriving forests of Kw’as.

I lived on the other side of this lake on a 300 acre land trust home to the Linnaea Garden program. From the Linnaea farmhouse there was a trail that headed down through the orchard, and up the hill towards Cortes Bay. At the crest of the hill, a much smaller path crossed. Going left, the trail climbs up to the dome of views known as Easter Bluff; by banking right, the trail skitters along a steep side, ducking down through a huge stand of second growth, and then either cross into Kw’as or up into town. (What wondrous land that one can still walk distances through forests!).

The ridge is finger of granite, carved by the paths of the ice flows long ago. It is fairly high, harboring huge trees and an incredible diversity of fungi that only makes itself visible only occasionally in a perfect autumn. From the heights, the lake glimmers in sky whites, clear blues, and forest greens.
The spine submerges its nose to allow the water a passage. A handmade bridge of a simple curve spans the pass. The water is a blue necklace, framed in veils of Sweet Gail, detailed with yellow water lilies.

You are standing on a bridge between the two lakes, on an island the ocean, cozy in the Strait of Georgia.

With forests in two directions and lakes front and back there is reflection, repetitions and differences; oftentimes I got the sense of dizziness, of being at the centre of a spiral or of a kaliedescope.

Years ago I sought the word for this sensation, asking what the word was for the sense of vertigo one gets from looking up, but no one could tell me of a single word. Now I know it is a part of axis mundi.

An axis mundi is, as it sounds, an axis of the world. In his 1957 book, The Sacred and the Profane, Mircea Eliade described Systems of the World his sense of order of the known world, in four parts. First there is a break in the homogeneity; the sacred becomes visible; there is communication with the cosmos and this forms an axis mundi; surrounding this axis is the known world.

I am not so magnificent in my metaphors as Eliade yet. I see the experience of spirit manifest is a mind-frame, a framework even. It is a choice. ( There are different social locations with different levels of privilege, imbricated in the physical world, limiting choices, and for some survival is priority). The sacred is everywhere, not only in the heavens, it is in every form and pattern. I must agree though that this acknowledgement does so often leads one’s attention up and open to the cosmos in gratious ( is there a connection between grace and gratitide: gracious and gratious?)

I am a child of quantum theory and celebrated that if science measured the wave, they could not measure the particle, and if they measured the particle, they could not measure the wave. I knew that there was more than one way; I know that reality occurred on a number of levels, as I can now see in post-structural theory that articulates how the axis of inquiry affects what and how we see.

After taking my time speak to each of the directions, to ask for help, give gratitude and let go, I would dive into the grand old growth of Kw’as.

Her trees are huge. Western Red Cedar and Douglas Fir grow in a thick duff floor. The trails branch: to the right many trails wind through the gentle lowlands that border Gunflint Lake, sweet and soft in their protection. To the left, the land borders Haigh Lake, an area with more of a tough-love energy, a bit like a bigger sibling.

It is closer to the ocean on the western side: the winds gather strength as they travel up the channel from the southwest, coming over the land, and dancing down into the lake’s open expanse. The feeling is more open and transparent, though almost demanding in that clarity. The forest all along the lake’s edge is laced with the tall silver watchtowers of standing -dead trees, often holding one, or a number of, big bald eagles.

I would head left, using the rope ladder to aid my way up the granite blocks sporting their graffiti of lichen. A thick cloak of moss held in the graceful forms of Arbutus trees, stretching their strength from cracks in the stone to a puff of leaves in the sky. Pine and huckleberry grew here and there on the high and dry; choruses of fir and hemlock grew thick and regal where the water was. The trail ran along the edge of land, say 50m above the lake, affording views of the lakes edge most of the way around: the world is a goddess wearing jewels of sky and full skirts of forest: patterns of stunning beauty.

I arrived on Cortes with all my arrogance and ache. It took a few months before the health of those near exposed me to my own set of defenses, how those defenses affected my relationships, how the quality of individual relationships form a community, and how a healthy community is in relationship with the land.

I was forced to accept that I was not all I made myself out to be; I could no longer ignore the things I pretended were not hurting me. In the colloquial, my issues were coming up and I starting working on my sh*t. As I did when I was a child, I went to the forest to shed my tears and work myself out. While the community reflected my health back to me, the forest was free of judgment and expectation.

In all of the healing arts that I have engaged in since, -Process painting, Heller work, 5 Rhythms Dance, Ecstatic Dance, yoga,- as with emergency response, the first step is to find or create a safe place. A place free of danger, expectation and judgment is necessary for a person to begin healing, trusting, and engaging in personal work. (Although recently I heard someone begin with, "I do not believe in safety." And now, to me, that ressonates).

I went to the forest with my shame and my courage to lay myself bare. It judges not, nor rushes me, but patiently and supportively listens. It does not take it on, take it personally, or hold it against me. I offered up my pain to get composted back in the food chain, letting Earth have all that energy back, trusting that I will receive everything I need. At times I felt the forest loud and jubilant in its support of me, singing as a gospel chorus in a southern church rejoicing a miracle, and bursting forth in praise of creation.

I began to shed my illusion.

I began to open myself up to darkness as a teacher, to my imperfections becoming my strengths. I worked to reroute thought patterns, and untangle my skeleton back to litheness. In my steps, in my breaths, in my cells, I began to accept and cleanse each fiber of me, and began to rebuild my relationships. I worked to get back into my body, and into the present. More of the forest and less of me, I breathed the forest in and everything I did not need out. I remembered that the forest needs my healthiness too. I tried to be aware of all the levels of life occurring concurrently, and to be a healthy vortex of energy moving through it.

The process of healing and the practice of religion stem from the same root. The word ‘healing’, and the world ‘holy’ are both rooted in the word ‘whole’, coming from the German halig. To be whole denotes connection, relationship, and integration. In health, all parts of ourselves are integrated, and we are intimately integrated with our landbase. We exist in various dimensions concurrently, -the mental, emotional, financial, romantic, physical and cosmic; I began to see integrity as being able to move through all of these levels gracefully and without fracture, without losing parts of myself to panic and doubt. Both healing and the great wisdom traditions work to cultivate this harmony of the microcosm to the macrocosm, within each person, and for the greater good.

Micea Eliade begins with saying that sacred space is a defined space. My initial reaction to this was to argue and think that sacred space is wherever I want it to be. When we spoke in groups, after watching Joseph Cambell, a number of people expressed the notion that they felt the sacred could be anywhere, in anything, anytime. As I think more about Kw’as Park I see that it does have boundaries and it has signs that point to it. Cortes Island also has a very distinct boundary, and it is a place rich with the sacred.

I participated in a ten-day shaman workshop at Hollyhock, on the island: two people led the session, and another two acted as vessel keepers; we did a lot of personal work there, and there was a clear ritual for entering and exiting the space. I can see the importance of a clearly defined space for creating safety necessary for personal journeys into the sacred. Still, I think the sacred can be found anywhere and does exist within us all the time. It makes sense then a clear sense of one’s boundaries is important.

Eliade said that sacred place constituted a break in the homogeneity of space. I have heard this idea recently from a Belgian philosopher Leiven De Couter, who was speaking of heterotopia back to Aristotle and the Agora, to Foucault and the present, at the school of architecture. De Couter was extolling the need for heterotopia in the modern landscape as a place to check your head, get perspective, reconnect, just sit, to have a spacial ‘Sunday’. In becoming whole again we need the time, space, and perspective to help open our perceptions. In the repetitions of daily life it is easy to forget the cosmic and the minute, and the infinite interconnections. Sacred space and heterotopia function offer us a break from the banality and a safe seat from which to stare with our eyes closed.

So often in the depths of things there appears to be contradiction. This can cause tension;I think it lies at the root of binary thinking; it can appear as hypocrisy. But deeper yet is yin-yang where both are true equally. I have taken to calling this The Great Paradox, short-handing it into my book margins as ‘tGP!’. The idea of paradox is built into the creation myths of the Keres people of North America as Paula Gunn Allen tells in her book Cosmogyny; “They were two, but they were the same thing”(35); “They were the song and the mystery. All of it and only a small piece of it”(36). Beyond the binary, or duality, there is the great paradox, which is the creative matrix from which possibility is continually generated. Rudolf Otto spoke of the paradox of transcendence and immanence, leading to a third concept: that of the numinous.

And perhaps it is here that I should return to Kw’as park.

At the point along the lakeshore furthest from either of the trailheads, the trail drops down to touch the water. Not far from the lakes edge, in its own patch of clear, grows a Manzanita tree. She rises in one smooth flowing and twisting trunk, leafing out above head height, driving her roots between the cracks in the granite. Her skin is plum colored and matte, almost as though spun of the finest velvet.

I stopped when I saw her, paused in the stillness. Touching her, I melted into her smoothness and strength. I put my ear to her, and I heard the cool silence of the infinite cosmos. I listened. I heard the great Emptiness, the great void: the everything and the nothing. I could hear the cosmos in her and in me. I knew that we are all made of patterns. I felt the great paradox, simultaneously single and multiplicitous.

I gave thanks and back I ran. Back over the big rocks, along the blueberry bushes, over the trunks and roots, past the eagles and down the rope-run cliff-chunk back to the bridge where the four directions converge with wind and water.

I walked the park many times, opening myself away from negative patterns, singing with trees, guided by birds. I met Lady Manzanita only that once, in my last journey through the park from Linnaea. I was smitten with her then; I had a crush on her; I was enamored, and dreamt of returning to become her disciple. At that very same time, I met a man who could meet with clear depth and openness. We spent a week on the floor, staring into each other’s eyes, and then agreed to marry. I did not return to see Lady Manzanita, but she remains clear in my memory, and I know she remains clear in herself, rooted in granite on the shores of a lake, on an island, cozy in the Strait of Georgia.

time

2006-10-13T22:48:00.000-04:00

my time has been colonized by school, and work,
but tonight, I made soup and salve.
I jarred the dill I'd been drying, and brought in rosehips.
I laid the plants-in-their-pots along the counter.
I took some time to attend to the physical.

It is almost a rebellion in some ways, it is 'luxurious' time, a priviledge of the wealthy nations, and the knowledge that my life is imbricated with the political, collective, spiritual and all that.

Our daily acts, how we spend our time, our praxis are the core of meaning on many levels, discursive and ontological. Foucault saw power as a microprocess; people become subjects through their daily acts. "Acts, gestures and desire produce the effect of an internal core of substance".

Judith Butler a couple of decades later included gender as the foundation of identity: "Gender is the repeared stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts with in a highly rigid regulatory frome that congeal over time to produce the appearance of a substance, of a natural sort of being" (p.33).

We are disciplined and created as subjects of the state through "the organization and refulation of the time, space, and movements of our daily lives, our bodies are trained, shaped", we are made legible. This is Susan Bordo's brief of Foucault's description on how the 'docile body' is produced.

She explores how to leave room for rebellions. "And, third, we need a discourse that will enable us to account for the subversion of potential rebellion, a discouse that, while insisting on the necessity of objective analysis of power relation, social heirarachy, political backlash, and so forth, will nonetheless allow us to confront the mechanisms by which the subject at times becomes enmeshed in collusion witht foreces thtat sustain her own oppression."

How I am spending my time these days..

autumn and closing

2006-08-29T18:28:00.000-04:00

Harvest time.
Autumn is coming, and I begin to work circles, pulling all the ends in and storing up for winter.

I have half put the garden to bed at rare.
I harvested these tomatos, some catnip, lemon verbena, dill, mint,
and about 30lbs of potatoes. All of that felt really good.

I mean to move two thilictrum from the perrenial beds into the center circles of the demo garden, and move the three little thymes in at their feet.

I will write out a little map and guide to the garden for whoever does it next year, and I do wish that I could be here to do that.

The Garden Ninja school was fun, and super-educational for me.
I learned a lot about my own time, energy and organization,
as well as how I teach.

I am still sculpting myself,
especially socially.

If I did it again I would, in every class, make something for the office. I think that would give the class more purpose, demand our creativity, and integrate the humility and offering that comes of gardening.

Next time too, I will leave more time for the class to create their own discussion, and I will give out feedback forms.

So I did the Garden Ninja school for the first half of the year, and then I folded it in. It got too hot, me too tired, not enough committment, and there was no interest or support from rare. The energy needed to be put in did not compensate for the energy return.

The lack of integration and support from rare weighed heavy on me. There was no continuity with my little project! There was no one there who would take it on from me, no one who had any clue of what I was doing to help pass it on. I did email all emails in through the office, but no one ever came. I know that no one came because no one had time; the problems are systemic within the charity.

So I put much of the garden to bed this weekend, though tomatos, basil, peppers, sorguhm, chinese motherwort and sunflowers remain. And beets. I hope the beets get left to go to seed: they are chiogga beets ( white with concentric magenta circles).

The workshops are done.
I thank all those who came.
I hope you all learned some,
and I certainly learnt a lot.

As for rare, it is a very sick organization and I worry about its future.
Such potential...
but there is something there unspoken -
some undercurrent that is not on the table, is not healed,
and is not appeased.

blessed be.
i pray for peace, safety, and Love for the land

weed to the wise

2006-07-23T13:17:00.000-04:00

There is lovely article in The Dominion about edible 'weeds', called
Weed to the Wise.

I did the Eat Your Weeds! workshop for the Galt Horticulture Society yesterday. The few that came absorbed much and were fed by it. Aiding the process of reingaging with our landbase is nourishing, sacred work.

shifting, friends and zuchini brownies

2006-07-12T21:19:00.000-04:00

well, it is july and i feel myself shifting from outward movement, back into preparing and maintaining of self.

garden ninja school is tucked in: i am holding no more classes, but i do wish to have an evening soon when we can all hang out in the garden and share.

I will also do one more session out at rare: soil/compost/mulch: if I could simmer down the key to intentional gardening in one workshop, this is it.

I will also do a few more workshops with the Galt Hort Society, herbology and flower arranging, for those here in Cambridge.

* * *

Shifting away from teaching, and from the production agriculture of rare organics, I am now working on more creative projects of my own. I love having a bunch of jobs, things to do, and being able to shuffle them into morning and afternoon blocks, weather dependant and flexible.
I am feeling great about my work, about where I am in my journey of building skills and networking.

I am making a fleet of salves now too. Lavender salve with frankinsence and myrrh, packaged with Derrick Jensen quotes on the lids of Mason jam jars! It feels good to be creative.

"All it would take to bring (our civilization) to a halt is creativity,persistent creativity."

* * *

So most of the photos Kili took, obviously, as I am in them! Great hey?. We are taking lots of photos and playing around lots. It is good: I am learning lots from his learnings.

The last two photos are of our porch, which has become more colorful and gorgeous than I had expected. Joel and Zoe were through, visiting, on their way to Halifax. Damn it is nice to see old friends. I am excited to set up in Halifax, have chickens, and work with Zoe. May it be, may it be.

* * *
The Zuchinis are ripening, growing as quickly out of control as zuchinis do: wait two days and the dildo sized squash becomes large as the average housepet. Today I made the first batch of chocolate zuchini brownies, topped with cinnamon-roasted sunflower seeds. Mmmmm.

I love days off. Today was a rain day, the first in months. Seriously, it has barely rained since April. Today was the first day that rain kept me in this summer, and I admit to loving these days. I always have. When I was a child, these days meant that i did not have to work outside, but could cozy up and read peacefully. I still snuggle into that magic of the coziness and safety inside.

Before the brownies, I purified a bunch of raw beeswax that I am using to make salves, and played on the computer making labels, and playing on MySpace. What a multilayered existance us moderns can inhabit! And I know the crash is coming.

I am asking myself more and more seriously these days, every day, what is it and how am I going to help take down civilization? What can i do, and precisely how will I achieve it? What risks will I take, and what will be the most useful, the most amplified and effective action I can participate in?

I wish peace and clarity to all of us.

namaste

images: june 4

2006-06-04T23:48:00.000-04:00

energy. money. sighs. and amens for the days.

2006-06-03T19:53:00.000-04:00

I have not been blogging as much as I want to be, as much as I envision myself writing. I have been busy in the fields the last few weeks -steady on-the-go.

The demo gardens at rare, where 'garden ninja school' takes place, are looking fantastic. (In my humble opinion). Last Tuesday, Alexander and Leah showed up early in the day so the three of us watered and mulched as much of that sweet little garden as we could. We built the compost up another layer using more of the kitchen-office compost and a fat, fresh harvest of vetch, cut to free the rhubarb and siberian irises.

After class I put in a lot of transplants that I had brought from home, and taken from the greenhouse on the production fields. Tomatos, peppers, chinese motherwort, ground cherries, tobacco, clary sage, lemon verbena, valerian, cleomes, orange cosmos.

That class was fantastic. It was the first in herbology series. We wandered the gardens, then went in the kitchen with our handfuls of green. We began a tincture and an infused oil, and made salve with an infused oil I began a few weeks ago. It was rosemary, lemonbalm and oregano, and it smells fantastic. It was a great class.

I have have been having a series of major realisations about energy, specifically petroleum and money and personal, human energy.

One Tuesday, I was in the demo garden, and I realised that I had forgotten something at home.

I considered riding home - which is about 30 mins by bicycle each way. I wondered if someone would lend me their car.

I realised that, if I chose to go, the energy it takes to get me home and back must be expended whether it is by me or by the combustion of oil. The laws of physics demand energy to move me place to place.

I get there faster on my bicycle, expending less energy, but even that equation is subsidised by the amount of energy it took to make the steel, and to make the bike. (One might argue that in riding, I do not expend less energy than I would if I walked, which is quite likely, but the time that I save does afford me more energy.)

Oil is like credit, roughly metaphored.
It is instant, and not of your own making. It is high-powered, and is more expensive than it first appears.

But, by using a money system we can give something a value that does not reflect the true 'value', but only one aspect of it.
We can make oil cheap.

'Economics is a form of brain damage'. (Goodness if I can find where I read that! It was in the new Permaculture Activist, and someone was quoting someone as saying this. I have looked, and could not find it again. )

Whether or not I knit the sweater I am wearing the energy needs to be expeded.
Money is a way of skimming the energy and re-allocating it. Subsidies, wages, 'value', coal and petroleum, all distort the true energy production and consumtion balance.

Items that are cheap - refering only to their designated monetary value- are a key to making money. Florists need to keep their container costs low, so the industry supplies stoneware and ceramic pots for $4-$8, mostly from Asia. The cute little pots are drenched in petroleum and factory labour.

Going the cheap way supports degredation somehwere else; it is a credit taken in other humans energy, and Earth's energy stores. Money has made acceptable and possible lynching another into repaying your debt.

Derrick Jensen, at some point in 'Culture of Make Believe' says something to the effect that true and persistant creativity will create the change.

Grow your own mulch. Make beads. Make medicine from herbs you grew, and art from roadside plants. Write, and observe.

Grow your own mulch. Provide for your own scene. Figure out how to work what you got into what you need. Yes, I am now veering towards a rant that stems from a difference of perspectives between the boss and I.

So often, less is more.

garden ninja school: may 23 and 30

2006-05-21T13:30:00.000-04:00

garden ninja school: the seed to seed ecological gardening course
tues eve, 5-8pm,
@ rare headquarters (the big yellow building on the curve in the township of Blair)

may 23.
biodynamics and flowforms.

To be a ninja is to use the source. Ideally we take the oncoming and present energies, and do not fight them, but help them move on, directing them with our actions.
To do this, we need to be able to 'see' the energy flows and patterns.

Biodynamics is a huge subject. I intend to give an overview of Biodynamics, which is the "spiritual science" of agriculture as described by Rudolf Stiener in 1924. He draws on the ancient vision of Earth as a living creature of the cosmos, pulled by and connected to the cosmos. Biodynamics can give us a common language of the different forces and how they affect plants, animals and elements, which helps us to 'see' and 'garden' these forces.

Though it sounds a bit 'woo-woo' to us modern humans, the ideas are ancient. I really like these ideas - not as rules, but as insight.

may 30
herbology 1

On the syllabus, I scheduled soil and plant nutrition, but I feel we have covered these ideas already. The guest speaker I was hoping to bring in is not available for a few weeks. But some herbs are ready!

Lets get some tinctures and oils on the go, and begin to dry some herbs for tea. We can go over the basics of home-made herbal medicines and explore some of the better resources. Lets talk about a dehyrdator making workshop, for which we need to secure some materials.

june 6
-break-
perhaps a field trip?

images

2006-05-20T23:02:00.000-04:00

ladies mantle.
fern poppy.
chives.

ah, the mighty kale!
just 2 inches tall and perfect is the day is blue.
this is in my front yard sheet-compost garden,
mulched round with straw.
with a large squirrel population, a groundhog, a cat and 10 loud grackls
sharing the garden with me, not too much has survived out there.
a few gorgeous milk thistle, shingiku, lettuce, kale and favas rise perfect and true.

milk thistle.
The only plant which actually repairs your liver;
eat the seeds, or take them in tincture.
(I know that when transplanting it is important to keep the hearts free of soil.
It is interesting to see that these, which have come up from seed here,
are cloaked in earth.)

in the fields of Springbank farm, farmed by rare.

mark, zara, heather and i transplant leeks.
early may, 2006.
photo by martha gaye, team leader, woman who orchestrates much.

the may 20th sunset reflected in our front door.

2006-05-14T20:44:00.000-04:00

awakening to
this present instant
we realize the infinite is
the finite of
each instant

(unknown author)

weeds

2006-04-23T13:15:00.000-04:00

those wild annuals we called 'weeds' are a secondary succession of plants that come to a wounded ecology to make it fertile enough for the next succession, which is grasses and brambles, usually.

the 'weeds', -such as plantain, dandelion, burdock, lamsquarters, pigweed, vetch, clover- help the soil by adding their tough fibre, pulling up nutrients from deep in the soil, and holding the soil tight together in protection from erosion and the harsh sun.

soil always wants a cover.

the toughest, most medicinal little plants come in and build the fertility of the soil. these plants are most often medicinal for humans too.

the soil condition -alkali, acid, fertile, etc.- can be infered by some observation of the weed guilds. Here are some indicators; (from Burbidge, Jean. "Reading Weeds on the Farm", Winter 2000, Eco-Farms and Gardens. pg13)

high soil fertility:
chickweed
chickory
groundsel
lambsquarters

acid soil:
hawkweed
dock
wild strawberry
mullein
knapweed

alkali soil:
bladder campion
wild carrot
black henbane
perrenial sowthistle

heavy clay soil:
buttercup
plantain
coltsfoot
dandelion
dock

low potassium:
eastern bracken
corn chamomile
yarrow

high potassium:
spotted water hemlock
red clover
knapweed

weeds can act as companion plants, significantly reducing insect damage.

cultivating certains weeds can as a cover crop or within your cover crop can be a free, super-nutritions, pest-controlling way of nourishing the soil.

i say 'can' because it is up to the gardener to listen to what combination and timing is going to create what ecosystem.

grasses compete with vegetable roots for nutrients: they are the next succession after weeds, and should be kept out of the garden.

nitrogen fixers:
clover
vetch
legumes
alfalfa

companion plantings

2006-04-22T14:13:00.000-04:00

companion plantings

(from the book Culture and Horticulture, by Wolf Storl, (Wyoming, 1979) and others.

for earthworms:
stinging nettle
plantain
dandelion
thistles

strawberries: dandelions
solanacea: amaranthus
esp. pigweed.

corn: pigweed
The Three Sisters; bean, corn and squash go well together

vegetables: yarrow
valerian
for erosion:
ragweed
pigweed
clover
plantain
all the deep rooters ( burdock, dandelion, dock, thistle)

Gathered notes from hither and tither...

carrots love tomatos

things that taste good together, grow well together

legumes and alliums do not fraternize well.

brassicas like lime/alkali
potatoes do like lime
after potatoes add alkali for brassicas
potatoes do not like to follow peas

squash, cucurbitacea, solanacea: heaviest feeders
can also use second stage compost (which is less composted, still volatile: still hot)

snakes and lizards: rock piles

* * * please leave comments of other good companions you know of...

weeds

From Wolf Storl again,
Weeds act as companion plants. They reduce damage by insects. The deep rooted weeds pump up the leached-out nutrients. They add a lot of fiber for the soil. Weeds are the primary succession, the first repair after a big damage. They are tough, medicinal, small annuals that add to the soil.
Grass add brambles are the next succession: they compete with your vegetables. The weeds - they are nursing the soil.

some alleopaths:

cedar
walnut
sunflower
rye
fennel
wormwood
poppies

Seed to Seed: syllabus overview

2006-04-01T17:39:00.000-05:00

April 18 the Garden Ninja School's
seed to seed ecological gardening program
working with the source

*the structure*
Loosely, the structure will be one hour of talking ideas, details and theory
and 2 hours of working outside. Weather and sunlight dependant, we can be inside first, or after.

*the mission*
To provide the basic skills to empower good people to grow their own, produce a surplus, and live closer to Earth in a good way.
I see it as 'cottage industry' training,
and an exploration of cottage industry possiblities.

*the vision*
Imagine, (put on your rose-tinted glasses)
at the *rare* headquarters, the Lamb's Head Inn, there is a stylish and hip cafe, eatery, and art gallery, with flowers and plants for sale.

It functions as a gathering place, market and triage center for the rest of the activities on site.

The cafe has gourmet food from the fields, garnished with edible flowers, there are flowers on the tables; people can sit in the garden, amidst the birds and flowers, drinking teas grown right there.
Imagine....
I know it is a bit of a long shot, but lets garden to that end.

Growing tea herbs, culinary herbs, edible flowers and ornamental flowers seems a natural choice for the location, and provides us with a broad range of gardening experiences that can help people prepare their own future project.

While learning the basics of gardening, we can explore marketable crops, value-added products, and skills useful for the market and future.

Herbology, growing and arranging flowers, learning tea and culinary herbs, how to save seed and propogate plants, are all skills that can be further explored. This course offers a grounding in those and gardening basics.

*the syllabus*
- this is an overview, still subject to editing-

April 18. garden planning
April 25. phenology. sense of place. Permaculture overview.
May 2. compost. mulch. living mulch.
May 9. -break-
May 16. rotations. intercropping.
May 23. water. biodynamics.
May 30. soil. plant nutrition.
June 6. -break-
June 13. seed saving. seed stewarding.
June 20. solstice celebration.
June 27. herbology
July 4. -break-
July 11. weeds. pests.
July 18. flower arranging.
July 25. herbology.
August 1. -break-
August 8. bees.
August 15. marketing. business. funding.
August 22. flower arranging.
August 29. -break-
Sept 5. pesto.
Sept 12. pickling.
Sept 19. drying.
Sept 26. -break-
Oct 3. storing seed.
Oct 10. root cellaring.
Oct 17. seedy release party.

*cost*
$30/month.

Money, passion, needs, and responsibility do not often balance in our current economy. I am doing this from passion and what I feel is my responsiblity; I do need some cash flow to pay rent too. I do not want anyone to not attend because they cannot afford it; but the question of fairness to all arises, despite my knowledge of the deeper truth. If you are interested, and money is an obstacle, let's talk.

*what you will come out with*
An good idea of some things you can make and grow; the knowledge, ears, and skills to approach a piece of land and determine what the possibilities are; the growth of an intentional season.

You will go home with flowers, herbs, tinctures, salves and teas (and very possibly other treasures) at various times.

Permaculture Principles

2006-04-01T17:04:00.001-05:00

these are some of my notes from permaculture class with Liz and Oliver.
they are a bit vague, written for myself, but hopefully the essence of the idea is still communicated.

Permaculture Principles

*relative location*

put stuff where it makes the most sense.
zones: are a series of proximities, according to use, with zone 1 being highest use and zone 9 being lowest use. Plant high maintanence thing in zone 1, low maintanence in further zones. ie. woodshed on the way to the outhouse
ergonomics. efficiency. convinience. balance.
be honest about behaviour, and go the lazy route.

*each element supports many functions*

three functions for every element
three elements for every function
An used resource becomes a pollutant.

*each function supports many elements*

mulitple elements for single fuctions
Nature always has a backup plan
eg. multiple varieties and successions
eg. how many ways can you put out a fire

*use biological resources*

use living resources
all biological resources can be multifunctional. Dead things are often single use.
eg. animal tractors, and living fences

*succession*

accelerate natural succession
cycles through time

*edge*

edge supports more biodiversity: edges are dynamic systems
maximize edge efficiency
eg. keyhole beds

Permaculture Ethics

1. Care of the Earth

2. Care of the Earth and people
self reliance, community support and interdependance (helps avoid war)

3. Give away surplus
keeps the energy flowing. Try to produce more than you consume, if possible.

4. Everything has intrinsic value
in and of themselves.

respect
balance
effeciency
simplicity

Some Mollisonisms

"Everything gardens."
"The problem is the solution."
"The solution is the problem."

Derrick Jensen in Guelph

2006-03-24T14:58:00.000-05:00

April 6,
Derrick Jensen

will be speaking in Guelph in a talk titled
Endgame: The Collapse of Civilization and the Rebirth of Community.
Put on by CRFU and Healing The Earth.

After the talk, Declining Amphibian Phenomena,
some environmental anarchist, hick-hop cats from Vancouver Island will play.

big thoughts and dancing. yum.

Seed to Seed Gardening Course

2006-03-23T21:32:00.001-05:00

Tuesday Evenings, 5-8 at @ *rare*. Mid-April – October.

*Seed to Seed Ecological Gardening Course – Gardening with the source*

This full season course will provide a comprehensive grounding in gardening basics. Combining permaculture and a variety of gardening methods, prepare to get inspired by seed-saving, medicinal herbs, heritage flowers, and storing food for winter. Resistance is fertile, colorful, fragrant, healing and delicious.

$30 for 4 weeks or $12 drop-in.

To sign up, contact Jayme Melrose; 623 0194 or ineffable@riseup.net
Course syllabus:http://thresh_and_winnow.blogspot.com

April 11 5-7pm
@ *rare*
Introduction to Organic Gardening.

Get your hands dirty, we will seed indoors, and
outdoors, prep a bed, talk garden design,
and check out the composts. It will be very activity orientated.

It's a good time to bring out all your questions about starting a garden,
and how to plan it to be the least amount of work,
for the most amount of beauty, life and food.

To register, contact *rare*: 519.650.9336

benevolant allies

2006-03-14T00:19:00.000-05:00

Bioremediation. Inciting life back into wounded soil.

Compacted, contaminated, and misused soils need help if we plan to grow food, or anything else. I do not buy the technology-will-save-us argument, and most of us earthworkers could not afford the technology anyway. One of the main permaculture tenents is "Use biological resources whenever possible." Benevolant biological allies abound: here, I have gathered what I know, and have found, regarding using life to bring life back to wounded Earth.

To start with, OM.
The sound that began the universe, in Hindu mythology, is also the acronym for Organic Matter. Biodegraded biomass, humus, compost, black soil.
Organic matter seems to buffer all defeciencies and excesses for plants. Plants can take up more nutrients when soil has high levels of organic matter, and the harmful effects of allelopathic debris, like cedar needles or walnut leaves, are ameolierated.

Compost is a shrapnel approach, as Oliver would say, in that you get a lot of coverage for your bang. Not only does compost help retain moisture, and supply nutrients, but it is full of the biological activity that breaks down complex chemical bonds into useable units that plants can uptake.

Go into a forest and observe the forest floor. Think about the leaf cycles and how the forest maintains its fertility. Think about the primary decomposers: birds, beetles, fungi, worms, and the itty-bitty bugs and bacteria we don't often see.

Ideally, as humans our intervention is an acceleration of succession.

To conceptualize succession, imagine a landslide or a clearcut. What are the first plants to appear after the devastation? What next, which prepares the way for what? What is the ecosystem climax?

A good way to observe succession is to observe ruderal ecologies. The plants that first come in to heal the Earth are, poignantly, the plants which heal humans as well. Many 'weeds' are also indicator species, revealing a content of the soil below. Biomining is a large scale application of it.

In the clearcuts of BC, first come the annuals, then the alders -which are a deciduous, fast growing, nitrogen-fixer that support mushroom growth and add lots of organic matter,- and provide a shade layer for the next succession of trees. And so on, the forest builds until it reaches its stable climax we see as 'old growth'.

So what can we add to accelerate this natural succession?

Soil needs to be alive. Organic matter, insects, micro-organisms and fungi are the primary decomposers that work in harmony to break it all down so that the plants can use it.

Currently, Paul Stamets is researching, discovering, and cultivating fungi that break down petrochemicals, filter water, denature toxic wastes, accelerate the growth of planted trees, hold together eroding roads, and improve human health. This Alternet article on him is great.

He has created a series of products called MycoGrow, which are mycorhyzal innoculants that improve plant growth. I have seen some experiments done with them, all that showed noticably improved growth with of the innoculated plants. I ordered some this spring and am doing my own set of experiments this summer.

Back on Cortes, our permaculture class spent a day with Paul Stamets and his crew, helping haul buckets of innoculated bark mulch up the clearcut he bought. There is even a photo of Gillie and I in action on Oli's blog.

Right now in New Orleans some really interesting projects are going on. In the aftermath of the hurricane, the land is toxified, houses are mold ridden, and the government could only provide some short term 'help'. A grassroots, low-tech, permaculture movement has created the Common Ground Collective. The little flick they posted, Solidarity Not Charity, is worth watching.
In the aftermath of the hurricane, the EPA did a series of soil tests which revealed varying soil toxicisity. There are lots of heavy metals in the soil, and some serious petroleum spills that occured. Starhawk, -author, witch, and permaculture designer-, is doing some large scale bioremediation projects there. On the bottom of her site, she has 5 blogs on the project, best read from the bottom up.

We spend the day going over the toxins that have been found in New Orleans’ soil, and the three basic methods of bioremediating them—using microorganisms, using fungi and mushrooms, and using plants. We divide people into different groups for hands-on practice, making compost, starting worm bins (worm castings are the major source for the microorganisms we culture), starting seeds and taking cuttings, and inoculating strata with mushroom spawn.

Some toxins, like diesel range organics, are big, chainlike molecules mostly composed of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, and can be broken down into harmless substances like carbon dioxide and water. Beneficial bacteria can do the job, and so can enzymes released from fungal mycelium, the underground weblike matrix from which mushrooms emerge. We intend to do some trials with mushrooms, but its harder to grow mushrooms on a mass scale than it is to culture bacteria, so we’re starting with the brews of aerated compost tea. We’re also using a different preparation of micro-organisms, known as Efficient Micro-organisms, which is anaerobic and has many different uses. The house-gutting crews have been spraying it to counteract mold, with great effectiveness. They’ve had assistance from someone who does professional mold abatement and who has the equipment to do spore counts before and after. The bacteria and yeasts in the EM spray eat the mold spores and then colonize the surfaces mold grows on, preventing its regrowth. It’s non-toxic and much safer to use than bleach, and more effective. It’s success against mold has made me wonder if it would also be effective against Sudden Oak Death, the fungus-like disease that is devastating our forests in Northern California. The company that produces EM, and has donated a lot of it to Common Ground, has offered to bring a mobile processing unit down to New Orleans to produce it on a mass scale. But they have been unable to get the funding—nearly $200,000—they need in order to do so.

EM is mostly anaerobic—the organisms involved do not need or want air in order to reproduce. We’re also experimenting with EM sprayed on the soil, to see if it will help get life back into the dead, compacted, muddy sediments.

It’s exciting. It’s also uncharted territory. Lots of people have worked on bioremediation, in the lab, on highly toxic sites, in well funded cleanup efforts. We don’t know of anyone who has tried it on a low-budget, mass movement backyard scale.

And more, some underlying force of health and life and serendipity that we tap into when we do this healing work. There’s an excitement, a sheer raw energy unleashed that animates the digging forks and keeps us working joyfully and eagerly into the twilight. It’s as if the earth herself wants to be healed, and when we take on that work, we tap into an upwelling spring of life giving power. Out of nowhere, benevolent allies appear.

Somewhere in there she mentions they are using worm castings as the base for their 'biobrew'. It sure makes a lot of sense to me: worms are like little moving tubes that digest and purify all that passes through them, leaving life behind them.

UWaterloo community garden

2006-03-13T11:47:00.000-05:00

UWaterloo Community Garden
Spring 2006

Resistance is fertile.

Next community garden meeting will be April 12 at 5pm, at the EScourtyard.
We will all head out for a tour of the garden and check it out.

I am not going to worry about set up any times to run workshops. I am going to focus on *rare* for all of that, and learn from the community garden experience. If anybody wants to learn something specific that I can help accelerate, I will do my best.

I do hope to put in a patch of perrenial herbs for culinary and medicinal uses. Permanent mulch styles if possible. We will see how the land allocation settles out.
I would love to help cultivate a herbology collective.

Intro to the workshops

2006-03-13T10:53:00.000-05:00

I am offering a passle of workshops for spring 2006.
This first set is aimed at getting the garden in,
with enough thought that summer maintenance is graceful.

The learning curve with gardening tends to be steep at the beginning;
there are so many seeds and gardening styles; planning for height, water needs, yield, and aesthetics.

Gardening is really simple and really complex at the same time.
Every seed wants to grow. It does. It will do everything it can to grow.
Plants have also been cultivating us to take care of them for years. The conversation between plants and people is a long one.
In my workshops I hope to help simplify, and deepen,
the gardening experience.

Ecological gardening includes organic practices, but goes beyond just not using pesticides, and the methods condoned by certification.
Ecological gardening is basically looking at different ecosystems, -natural and ruderal, forest and grassland- and *observing* the causes and effects. Using observations from nature, the flow forms and growth patterns, natural fertility and fertility builders, etc, an ecosystem can be cultivated to the ends desired. Everything gardens: every plant cultivates its world, birds plant seeds they like to eat... Everything gardens.

There are an infinite number of ways to garden. There is no right or wrong, contrary to the idea that the gardening industry tends to sell. I think that is why so many are intimidated by gardening. The reality is that there is only cause and effect, the continual conversation between people and plants.

My gardening is based in the mimicking natural ecosystems, building soil fertility, and using biological resources. Throughout my Permaculture training *observation* of nature was key.
Observation connotes the absence of judgment or knowing, or even trying to know, thereby leaving the mind open. This concept is resonated in Ecstatic Dance, Process Painting, HellerWork, and most other healing modalities I have encountered. To simply observe, to bear witness, to others and yourself, can open the big doors of perception.

I learned most of what I know from the Linnaea Ecological Gardening Program on Cortes Island. It is an 8 month intensive, and super intense in all ways. David Buckner, who runs the program, studied at the Farrellones Institute in California, and came up to BC with the Gypsy Gardeners, which included Joel Solomon and Nori Fletcher, now of Hollyhock fame.

spring storm and the aching river

2006-03-13T09:48:00.000-05:00

Spring sprung today. There are many new bird voices in the open air choir.
There was a storm last night.
Suddenly, in the middle of the night,
Kili and I sat blot-upright in bed in terror
to the louded crashing rumble -
It was terrifying. Then it was dead silent.

Then a sharp flash of lightening
and the sound of the rain. It moved on quickly.

I wonder how everyone here in Cambridge did;
were there any heartattacks? people up all night?
I imagine mamas praying, and some long thought wanders
in the small hours of the morning.

I came to the conclusion that I am a crazy fool to think that I could get out of here on my bike if shit goes sideways! Kili reassured me that I could this morning.

Earlier, on this warm, warm day
- i sit here nowin silky camisole and skirt, mmhmmm-
I walked down to river to see traces of the storm.

There were trees freshly fallen. Grass caught in the branches about a foot or so above the current water level. The grass was all pointed the same way, straight out, as though a fast moving stream were pulling it fiercely.

The whole surface of downtown is sealed up. All of the water runs off the roofs, over the pavement, off the roads, down into the gutters. All the natural run-off streams that once drained the area where the city is, and now funnelled into pipes.

Earth that once was a big recycling and purifying sponge would absorb so much water, and discharge it into the river slowly. Now it is all just shot into the river all at once.

The they build flood walls. Which destroyed the ecosystems on the bank, which are her only way cultivate enough life to digest the river on its way. I ache for the river. It is too much and too fast for her to clean.

[photo]

There is an area where the bank is eroding inches from the concrete path, that leads under the bay windows of something. I would like to plant willow in the manner that Oliver Kellehammer did in Grandveiw cut.

The Grandview cut is a steep, narrow, manmade ravine that was made the railway, back when. They put the a second skytrain in that ran through a section of the cut. They had to deforest to build, and of course the banks quickly began to erode once they did. The city of Vancouver was threatening to lace concerete blocks up the sides of the cut to stop the erosion. Houses would soon be in danger.

Oliver put in a proposal, as an artist and gardener. He would reforest the cut with willow and locus, it would only cost 30 thousand, not the 200 thousand of concrete and manpower. It would look better and we can market it as art. The city agreed. In gumboots on the muddy slope with a backback of cuttings, he stuck the slope with hundreds of willows, one every 10 feet or so, and laced black lotus in between.

Now people live in there. There are bird counts to document all changing numbers of bird activity in the corridor. Now when I google *Grandview Cut*, all that comes up is Vancouver's second largest greenspace.

Oliver Kellhammer, -artist, activist, and intellect, founder of the Cottonwood Community Gardens,- was one of my two fantastic permaculture teachers at Linnaea.

There is that section of the river which does desperately need to be held gently, and with life, in place. I should like to talk to all parties involved, and hopefully all can be convinced to help protect them. Basket willow is native to this area, and so useful. It would encourage the constant pruning of the willow too. If you are interested in helping, please let me know.

"Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul." Edward Abbey

herbology notes from Josee's

2006-03-12T23:11:00.000-05:00

at Josees, june 15, 2004

Hypericum perforatum
topical, in oil; sciatica, nerves, sunburn, burns, anti-inflamitory.
internal; mild depression, seasonal disorders; stimulates serantonin.

Nettles
infusion for hair. nutritive. seeds- make vinegar. freeze like spinach. facial steam for oily skin.
releives food sensitivities.

Calendula
to make oil, wilt the flowers for a day to avoid rancidity.
skin. burns, cuts, insect bites. anti-inflamitory. nourishing. anti-fungal. anti-septic.
use tea like arnica.

Ratios.
wet 1:2 100g herb/ 200mL liquid
dry 1:5

Colic calmer; for stomachs. in glycerin. sweet.
catnip, fennel seed, mint, camomile

Dried herbs
nettle mint lemonbalm dandelion root, el campe root

Usnia; lichen, old mans beard
tinture 100%
strong anti-fungal, anti biotic.

Valerian root
internal, tincture or tea,
nerves, sleep anxiety.
with Skullcap for deep sleep. wait 3 years for root.

Red clover
for blood and lymphatic system

Plantain
skin, bites

Yellowdock
gets the bile going. good before eating.
liver, excema. IRON.

Marshmallow
leaf and root for coughs and lungs. skin. urinary tracts. nourishing. nourishes dry skin.
oil; daiper rash, skin. varicose viens

Astralagus
root. immune booster.
mixed with echinacea and propolis

Teasel
eye wash from tea.
itchy skin.
internal; liver and blood.

Stevia
hard to propogate. yummy yummy.
int; mental and physical fatigue

Angelica
biennial
root; cough syrup
seeds; indigestion liver
stock; candies
leaves; vegtable, use to wrap food.

Arnica;
use flower fresh, topically oil.

Bergamont

Ladies Mantle
internal; blood coagulation, bleeding, menstral, astingent, diarhea
tea of flower and leaf as douche for infections

Motherwort
menopause sleepy bouyancy
tea and tincture

Meadowsweet
digestion, goes well with to mellow bitters.
leaves like asprin.
shrub

Wormwood
bitter. bitter. bitter.
worms parasites anemia

Blue vervain.

Wood betony
ext; sore throat, mouth wash, hair rinse
internal; stress fear anxiety worry sedative

Skullcap
immunity

Hyssop
bitter. cough syrup. tea

Cylandine
bitter. liver. dye worts.

fatkatshis

2006-03-02T21:48:00.000-05:00

Two cats in one!
Zan is on holiday, or gone to Heaven, or
safely stashed in her sisters belly.
Two in one and this way Kashis can get both servings of food.
Peace be both the sweetie heads.

jayme*s first sweater

2006-02-26T12:38:00.000-05:00

there it is.
my first sweater.
the cuffs and bottom
are in the same pattern at the neck:
deeply ribbed and a bit flared.

it is a bit of a funny picture, but I really like the neckline.
A little bit puffy, too big, but good.

This next little chunk of words is extracted from an outgoing email that I just wrote, feeling expressable. I wish I could engage in such good nice connection more often, and with the people I love all over out there.
A snapshot, a one sided affair:

I sure do miss the ocean landforms, the ocean ecology, the ocean west coast aesthetic. ( That word even looks good.)
We were talking about ocean landforms in Geography last night, and I ached for Cortes.
Life is strange, no?.
-who you meet, who you are, how people react to you.

So university part time,
which is great. I am loving the stretching of my head,
of gaining the tools I could sense that I was missing.
Money is fucking stressful though.

I was working today, in Guelph. In the best little flowershop in
the area. A big area. It is really great to work there.
Aesthetics....
Style....
flowers and planters, eve candy, things looking good and fresh, alive sweet.
The girls there- Kelli, 33, rehead, gorgeous, hardworking funny straightup grounded, and her sidekick, trusty Fun Sara, with brains to back her looks, little brunettte with side ponytails.
Yeah, I like it.

I knit.
In school and on the bus, I knit.
I knit the sweater I am wearing. It is the color of arbutus bark.
I knit one armwarmer, heathered beige and ornately cabled.
Kelli loves it. She said I could sell them, and I think I could. Could I?
self discipline.

Betty Basement and the Flower Designer

2005-11-27T13:00:00.000-05:00

The flower industry is bereft with irony. Flowers are symbols of Nature. We bring them inside to remind us of beauty, of simplicity and complexity, of our connection to nature. Yet the flower industry is a giant petroleum burn that comes out smelling like roses. Starting, often in the laboratory with some genetic manipulations, most commercial flowers are grown in the slave labour greenhouses of South America. They heavily douse the product with pesticides and fungicides, fertilzers and growth hormones, most of which are petroleum based. Once cut, the flowers are treated, packaged in disposable plastic, stored in massive cooler systems, then sent on the private commercial cargo flights to the North American auction sites. Trucks and coolers support and transport these precious cargo, guzzling the hydrocarbons, until the flower arrangers and designers set their minions to treating them again for retail.
The flower shop. I have worked in a few now. The first one I worked for here in Ontario was The Flower Basket up in the strip mall. A bunch of clucking old birds doing funeral wreaths with babys breath and carnations gives you a bit of a picture. One day I was asked to make up a planter in a lovely zen-style basket. When I finished, the proprietor asked me to give it a little spray with Floralife Leafshine. I read the contents: propane, butane, heptane, propranol, isopropranol. So I went outside to spray. Around this time I was studying the Holocaust. Suddenly I could understand part of how the atrocities happen: there I was spraying petroleum on a living creature because I was told to, and with an attitude that it is a small and necessary compromise.
A few days later while working there, I witnessed the owner make one of the most cliche racist statements I have ever heard. An Indian lady came into the store and was asking some prices. She left without buying anything. Once gone, Julia said, "Just like that other Indian lady that goes to Janice's church... It is something in their very ethnicity that makes them want everything for nothing. Always." Well I didn't quit on the spot, I am ashamed to say. I waited until I cooled down, and then spoke to her the next day. She was as defensive as you can imagine, and so I wrote her a two page letter on how I want to approach all things from a place of compassion and integrity. I dont make beauty for people who speak hateful ignorance.

Okay, so the po-dunk flower shop was not a nice place. So off I go, seeking another lovely flower shop where I can play amidst the beauty and life. I want to twist up life and symbology, medicine and antiquity into art that makes you smile when you enter the bathroom....
And there is another flower shop near by that feels young and funky, more of the west coast style that I am used to. I checked back in with them, they called me in right away to work a day so we could all get the feel for each other.
It is a friday, one month before Christmas. The shop is busy like Granville Island flower shop on a Saturday. There are three ladies and the big handsome gay newfie owner. There is playful banter, but no asks me anything about myself. Until the big guy asks,
" So, are you a flower *arranger* or flower *designer*? Because there is a difference."
"Oh? What is it?" I ask.
" Well, a flower *arranger* just does it recipe style, you know. I think of Betty Basements. Flower *designers* are artistic and creative, they are creating art in their designs. When I hear flower arrangers I just think of Betty Basement."
I am thinking of the picnic table beneath the apple tree in the Hollyhock garden, and asking Pam, Denise and Nori which they are. I imagine this man saying he is a "flower designer" to them, and the slight raise of Nori's eyebrows. This haughty snob at the end of the life line, who deals in death to feed his ego and thinks it is beyond both.
When he calls me back to offer me work, I hope I have the wherewithall it tell him to take his whole teeny little ego trip of a world and shove it up his fat designer ass. I should phone him first and tell him not to waste his time thinking about me, because I couldn't fit into his world so small anyway.
Bah!

To all the Betty Basements out there, keep puking on their shoes, and keep your shit tight. We will usurp them without them even noticing, their heads are so fat and that world so small. To all the people still alive, praise be. The goddess is listening.

teetering owl and a whiskered kangaroo

2005-11-22T21:40:00.000-05:00

yup.
the camera is good.
the girls are cute.
teetering and pouncing in this here ontario
town.
i get my bike tomorrow.
oh, am i excited.
hey jes and ali, i miss you.
kirsten nettle, you and emmett too.
cortes, manzanita, kw'as park...
here we are, art admiring itself while missing you.

the kittens

2005-11-11T23:14:00.000-05:00

hey zoe, kdub

2005-11-11T22:37:00.001-05:00

apple pie : love

2005-11-09T00:38:00.000-05:00

apple pie.
crust is appropriated from JD's *pate brise* recipe

3/4 cup organic butter. unsalted.
3 or 4 teaspoons organic cane sugar.
1 and 3/4 cups organic flour.
intention.
love.
presence of mind:

With two silver, long pronged forks, using left and right arms, whole body in fact, cut the ingredients together, until they are in pea sized balls.
I was the dough, I was a farm mama, I was a church lady, making the best pie crust, the ones that people remark on and remember. "... yup. She makes a mean pie."
Apple pie was the all-american desert. I say was because I would guess some sort of fast food, pre-processed and packaged desert is now, like the donut or twinkie. But home baked apple pie! Back in the days of pioneers, the 13 colonies, of the America that grew its own food, apples were the main source of sweetness. In his book The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollen talks about Johnny Appleseed carring his canoe loads of appleseeds all throughout america. Applepie and applejack. Stories and these apples lace me through history, through farm mamas, housewives, mothers baking sweetness for their families: women and domestic detail: the variable genetics of apples carried along in seeds, and propagated in graftings; the story of the versatile apple; butter and flour, our metabolic staples; the alchemy that can be created by the different ways of processing these ingredients. I let my mind drop into the process of the butter and flour being cut together, forming little balls that would layer into flakes. Each bit of butter dusted in flour.
I do get immense pleasure out of doing a task with patience, intention, and observation. Doing it with integrity, careful selection of each part, guided by intuition, embeded in the craft. The pleasing feel of quality. There is for me a deep joy in being present. In sinking into the depths of the action, of the moment, the moment becomes eternal and the action becomes infinite.

The man pulling daikon
pointed the way
with a daikon.
Isso

So cut the dough until it is mostly all those little flour covered, pea sized balls.
Then, and here is the trick, instead of using 4 tablespoons of ice water, use cold, bubbly mineral water; I used Gerolstiener. (It also mixes very well with the Frangelico to sip while you work with the other elements to combine). I remember someone telling me to use 7up years ago; it is the bubbly the helps the flake. San Pelligrino would work. With the water tossed in, form it into a ball. I was concious of how the consistancy changed as I did. What new structure is forming? What pattern am I cultivating?
There is a balance between being gentle and forceful. Roll it out, put it in an ungreased pie pan, and bake it at 375 for 20 minutes or so. I tend to overcook mine. Don't forget to prick the bottom with a fork so that it doesnt inflate with air bubbles.

Baking two is better than one. The timing works out nicely. I make each separately, and it almost takes twice the time, but the clean up is better, and it feels a more rounded experience somehow.

Peel your apples, cut them how you like.
I laid pears in the bottom in a lovely starry dynamo, ( too bad I didnt take a picture, but duely noted), then chucks of apples, getting smaller for the top layers. I rolled all the apples in a sauce made of one shot of Frangelico (hazelnut liquour), and one shot of maple syrup, fresh ground cinnamon (lots), green cardamom, and a few cloves.
Bake at 375 for a while, until it is golden and fragrant. 40 minutes or so.

On half I layed slices of blue cheese. They were too baked to be of much flavor. Chunks of blue within the pie though, all baked in with the apples and syrup and liquior... ummmm.

I served it with pinapple cashew cream, instead of ice cream or whip. Cashew creams are easy to make, quick, vegan and raw, just healthy, and so tasty- creamy- rich. Soak some cashews and any dried fruit, like a date, in crisp water for the afternoon. Toss it into the blender...not too much liquid, and viola! Raw whipping cream. With pinapple. ( Joy showed me this).

* *

It moves me to tears to be able to make this. I have the time, I have the ingredients. I do. I am whelmed full. As we manifest ourselves, this manifestation of all that has come together to bring this to me. This manifestation of my love, of our love, of each of our choices, of the love that I have shown along the way to bring me to here. I pull it from the oven and serve it up, calling my lover from his studies. It is flakey and light and sweet and healthy and scrumptious.
To tears. My eyes pour forth with emotion nearly every morning and night. A story, someone's story, an email from a sweet friend. The openings whe hurl ourselves through, the emotional cliffs we leap, throw ourselves off; How a bit of support and sincerity from someone is like a gallon of clear, sweet water.
I am in love with life, with me, with my lover, with our choices. It is not all easy, I am not all sane, it is all terrifying in its way: and I love who I am, that I am here, and that everywhere I turn I have gorgeous friends who are full too. Ingrid, Sarahbee, Karen Louise, Kdub, Zoella...
(hey does anybody know how to put in accents into here? for the e in Zoe?)

Sarahbee wrote to me this, which is what inspired the recipe, and who is mainly to whom the blog was narrated. The beauty of it all is that it is all so connected, about so many things, to everyone; we all learn from each other so beautifully well.

it is raining slightly in east van, and the moss on the huge ornamental cherry outside my brother's living room window is bright, excited green.

i struggle sometimes to let myself be full - to express and be real.  to let emotion and thought stream out and in, full size.  taking the space they deserve.  respected.

i have apples that i bought at the apple festival on salt spring this fall... wolfe river and bramley's seedling... i was planning to bake pie this weekend - if you have a recipe, i would LOVE to bake a jayme style pie. a perfect physical manifestation of the lovin you have supported me with this week.  oh goddess goddess thank you so.

i'm off to study chemistry today, and fix bicycles.  i got an intern job at the local bike shop on campus. it's so much fun jayme.  if my hands can't bear traces of soil all winter, then bike grease will do just
fine.

i spent last night with ~*~ again.  i have so many fragments of conversations and gestures traced all over and through me.  i want to hold onto them all, document them all, savour and remember.... and i know i can't.  they fall away like cobwebs over time.  i guess i choose a couple, and hold them close.  then allow movement. life flows in such an intricate, yet simple, and beautiful way.

i like that as i grow older i know more deeply in my bones that it is all ok.  no matter what.  no matter what,
i was reflecting last night, as i rode my bicycle down hill in the darkness at incredibly fast speeds.... over wet pavement and leaves... that i felt fear of falling out of love.. fear of loss. and i realized, i've been through that before.  and it hurts.  and still there is joy.  there is movement through and beyond.  it leaves a scar, a tenderness and a heightened sense of compassion..  it brings depth to experience and being. and so, plummetting down the hill as i was, i spent a couple of minutes imagining separating from gavin. wishing peace and letting go.  and then, with that feeling and awareness laced somewhere inside me, i let myself go back into loving being with him.  walking on the earth with the intent to be grounded - as solid and honest as possible... and also to be water - to open and to let myself fall, to let myself be completely immersed in this experience, these feelings.

falling in love with someone is an incredible human experience - and i want to allow myself to feel it. consciously and wildly all at once.

and now my sweet - an ee cummings poems for you:


i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)

i fear no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want
no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which
grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

the moon glows closer thru smog

2005-10-16T23:02:00.000-04:00

As we pulled out of the driveway last night, and looked left over the hill, there she was, the moon, enormous and full. Plump in her sweet irony, she lingered gianormous even as she rose high.

Kili and I are in full honeymoon, in full manifest. We are transitioning from hippie to yippie, yuppie, stylish, and set-up. We are closer in our union and co-habitation. I am finally living in the material world I have been trying to manifest for so long. I have the resources to set myself in the world I physically want to be in, which gives space for the spirit and unharnessed creativity.
We glow. We are rocking it. We play, sass, and continually dance with each other. Love ineffable. I shine to be here. I can barely believe it: I continually give thanks for us having met each other.
We went to Guelph for breakfast this morning. What a fun town on a mound. It is so regal and playful. I am inspired.
Time to bust out the sewing machine.

Zoe, I will post bathroom and kitchen pictures real soon: I need daylight to do this best I think, and I am painting the bathroom right now. I am doing it various shades of white and cream, and will decorate it in antiques in various shades of white.
I will do a blog soon on the antique mall.

everything gardens

2005-10-14T19:04:00.000-04:00

I have a renewed perspective on the phrase.
I have just moved.

We have moved into a large stone house at the base of a hill, at the edge of town. Ontario. The downstairs neighbors are fighting. The neighbor below me is Cathy and her boyfriend Terry. Nasty people they are; crabs in the bucket making sure no body thinks they can get out. I tend to become self conscious and hard on myself around that energy.

My other downstairs neighbor is Wanda, a lost punk poet, mother of two, and on today, our second meeting, she shed tears, and already I loved her. She is supportive, and needs support, she needs the flowers. Everyone does really. This whole scene needs a fat injection of good energy.

The world here feels tight, like a clenched fist. I sense a violent rebellion, a volatility, perhaps more likely to lash out in a race-related shooting than an uprising. I can feel its pressure on me. I am having to, I will have to chose not to buckle, on a daily level, and remain upright, buoyant, living as I want to live with the fun in it.
Gardening.

To garden.
As I walk along, for the first or second time, I write mental lists of things to do:

pick up garbage here

pull out these bricks and put in stone stairs

find the trails in those woods

put a planter box there

do a photo shoot there

As a child, I was baffled by how people could not art the spaces around them. How could people not make spaces more beautiful?
I know much of has to do with laziness. It is not that they cant, we couldn't, but that we don't. We do other things.
"Which is the most universal human characteristic: fear or laziness?"

As I enter this new space, this new neighborhood, I am filled with ideas; fresh eyes can see so many possibilities and improvements. But also I can sense my reluctance and self-consciousness, worrying what the neighbors will think. It will be an interesting challenge to remain light and playful, while the grey people call me crazy. Or at least I think they will.
It is always a balance of time to play and time to bust ass for cash, as to how much gets done. What will I do? What deals can I swing? What health will I manage for myself? How bring can I shine, how hard will I rock it, in this balance with this new environment?
Everything gardens.
Everything and everyone affect the space around them. Everything encourages lives and deaths because of their actions.

Wanda welled up with tears today, and she said that they hurt her because she had not cried in such a time. We were looking at the picture of her little girl. We were talking about people with special spirits, grieving, challenges when they are multiplied on each other, magnified. I was just standing with her there, listening. Woman to woman. There was a moment where I had a flashback to Yenson's 'Heart of the Shaman' workshop, the slide show of the human experience. The direct contact with That, that Holy Moment, ( a sensation much like vertigo for me), is the essence of life, and Listening to the Land affirmed that in the most multi-faceted way for me.
Wanda and I hung out a bit, I did some theatrical story telling, and then got to gardening. I ripped stuff out, did some pruning, and began to reshape the space. Here, I have jumped into their lives, I jumped into her life and how will we garden each other?

How will I deal with this new culture, these changes and challenges? How will I survive these days, financially? What will I pull together to balance my time and cash flow? The possibilities are infinite.
I felt caged-in in this city today. Compressed. I tried to run and everywhere I turned it was a main road with traffic. It smells like Japan, that sweet, bright aroma of heavy traffic. The cars felt like whips to me, a lash with every one that passed. An assault. A gauntlet. And so I ran, back home, to where my garden will be.
I am going to create a bunch of ecosystems and environments, walls that shelter people, buffer energies. I am going to change the energetic flow form of this place.
And how will it change me?

Listening to the Land

2005-05-21T15:28:00.000-04:00

Listening to the Land
Conversations about Nature, Culture and Eros
Derrick Jensen
published by Sierra Club Books 2002.

In order to see the dim twinkling stars, deep in the night sky, you cannot look directly at them, or they will dissappear, a function of the rods and cones in our retinas. Instead, if we look just to the side or just beyond, and observe them in the slight periphery, we can then keep the star in focus. In coming to understand the big questions of these times, of life, we must come at it in the same, round-a-bout way, always keeping observation in the periphery. This metaphor comes to me from Paul Shepard, who I was lead to through the Derrick Jensen in this book of interviews, which does so gracefully this.
Why do we act as we do? What is the relationship between technological innovation and human misery? Is there a direct relationship between environmental destruction and other forms of oppression, such as misogyny and genocide? Is there hope? What are the paths to reconnection? How do we remember to listen?
And so in speaking with many eloquent thinkers, through a colorful palette of topics, travelling in concentric circles, this book has opened my heart - and help align my heart with my head and my actions. So here I lay my notes, with links, to see what you and I may find, and connect.

Dave Foreman
fantastically enough, it looks like the whole interview is online, complete with photos.
He and Christopher Manes are co-founders of EarthFirst! (check out that site: there is some funny stuff there.) They are some hard-core activists, and some eloquent thinkers. These conversations made me think of how in Prodigal Summer, Barbara Kingsolver paints magic around the importance of predators to the food chain: us humans need to see other big creatures around us. ( The thought of this brings me to near tears somehow. I am so deeply grateful that daily I see the gentle eyes of blacktailed deer, and often feel the feline eyes of cougar watching me as i walk home alone late at night. I feel the truth and humility in this, and ache for the millions of numbed city creatures devoid of this consciousness.)

Christopher Manes
A summary of his book: Other Creations: Rediscovering the spirituality of animals.

David Orr
excels at asking questions. Designer, professor and chair of Environmental Studies at Oberlin College. He emphasises how we must reconnect to our communities and localities, and one way is through stories.

Thomas Berry
continues " Narrative is the basic modality in which the which the human mind functions." Modern people are in difficulty because the biblical story we live by has become disfunctional. With the story carrying no meaning, our lives becoming meaningless. His work on co-creating a new story is published by the Harvard Divinity School.

And there is bonding- every least particle is bonded with every other least particle. Everything is integral and interacts with everything else. This means tha nothing is itself without everyonthing else. There is a commanality, an integrity, and intimacy of the universe with itself.
And that intimicay, I think, is the fulfillment of the universe, withthe conditioned on the uniquness of things. Saint Thomas has a wonderful phrase, where he speaks of difference as the prfection of the universe.
Uniqueness is communion with. Thats what the universe is all about.
DJ: does the universe then have a purpose?
TB: The purpose is simly existance. And the glory of existance. Thats the ultimate purpose of everything - existance and self-delight in existance.

Charlene Spretnak
continues the dialogue on reconnecting using a new narrative

Fellow citizens, reality has turned out to be a lot more complex than we thought. Our tradition, always conscientious and hard-working, clung so fiercely to the mechanistic, reductionist model of the natural world for 300 years that we got a lot wrong. Throughout this century, however, we’ve been gradually correcting our orientation. Now, with the breakthroughs of the new sciences, we’re making many exciting discoveries about the subtle interconnectedness in and among our bodies, nature, the biosphere, and the whole universe. This brings us a new respect, which we hope you’ll share, for other traditions that perceived that sort of interrelatedness all along, such as religion, art, and native peoples’ worldviews.to continue

John A Livingston
Author of One Cosmic Instant: a Natural History of Human Arrogance, The Falacy of Wildlife Conservation, and Rogue Primate: An Exploration of Human Domestication. He is a professor emeritus at York University where he taught from '70 to '92. President of Canadian Nature Federation and the first producer of The Nature of Things.
"The Ecosphere in which we live is a web that envelops all organisms and ecosystems, that gave rise to life in the first place, and that sustains it now. Every organism and every ecosystem is a full participant."
(This quote is from the Ecospheric Ethics website, a fantastic anthology of useable works). Livingston paints cohesive the dialouge that we are not separate from nature, we need to transform our language and thinking patterns away from the self/ other split.
"I think the self/other split is so pernicious because we spend all our time concentratin on self, and we seem to take the idea of other as given. I dont think the coyote sees the bunny as other. She is what she eats, and before she eats it."

Matthew Fox
His work attempts to rescue Christianity from the destructive tendencies which now surround it. He is the founding director of the Institute of Culture and Creation Spirituality in California.
"How do we teach gratitude? What do you do with your gratitude? Thats part of the mystical impulse. Our whole being, our existance, is a miracle."
His writing of estatic, quote Rilke, speaking of awe, eros, and mystery. We are all part of the mystery, and the acceptance of that is our freedom.

David Ehrenfeld
The Arrogance of Humanism is one of the most important texts of the last 20 years, so say the big thinkers. With degrees in history, medicine and zoology, he is professor of biology at Rutgers Universtiy and columnist, author and editor. He works to dismantle our underlying assumptions of humanism, the mightness of science, and our belief that we humans know so much.
" The idea of 'now we know how to do it better' is wrong. When it comes to timber management, we dont really know what to do. We know in Oregon where we've clearcut, that agter three planting the trees still arent growing back ... Because we dont understand the way the world works, we also dont understand the sources and origins of goodness. Unexpectedly, good things happen. They happen fairly often."

John Keeble
"It occured to me once again that the trick was to enter the chaos, not control it, nor to wipe it out with one form on monomania or anothet, and yet at the same time to hold fast to a sense of right conduct, to keep looking outwards, and not to get trapped inside an illusionary net." Author of Yellowfish, Broken Ground, and Out of the Channel: The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill in Prince William Sound.
"Language is a natural resource, or maybe I should say natural wonder, born of the air we`ve taken into our lungs from the atmosphere, loases with the detrius of the air, and shaped by bone and cartilage and flesh as it comes out in words. It's a way we have of keeping contact with each other and of giving form to our dreams. Language is extraordinarily diverse."

everything gardens

poem 'bout me, by another

return

april

garden ninja: working with the source

gardening season again...

sweet violets

kdub and the bump

destabilizing the binary for enlarged spaces of the sayable:

Beyond Economy: a Critical Participation (my best essay to date)

Sacred Space: design for an interfaith garden

Each operational computer’s ecological footprint

response to reading from Worldviews: Foltz

Ecological Water Cleaning Systems

Biodegradation systems for petroleum hydrocarbons

States of Grace: book review

The Cosmos In Lady Manzanita: process and the Great Paradox

time

autumn and closing

weed to the wise

shifting, friends and zuchini brownies

images: june 4

energy. money. sighs. and amens for the days.

garden ninja school: may 23 and 30

images

weeds

companion plantings

Seed to Seed: syllabus overview

Permaculture Principles

Derrick Jensen in Guelph

*Seed to Seed Gardening Course*

benevolant allies

UWaterloo community garden

Intro to the workshops

spring storm and the aching river

herbology notes from Josee's

at Josees, june 15, 2004

fatkatshis

jayme*s first sweater

Betty Basement and the Flower Designer

teetering owl and a whiskered kangaroo

the kittens

hey zoe, kdub

apple pie : love

the moon glows closer thru smog

everything gardens

Listening to the Land

Seed to Seed Gardening Course