Your Lot

Land, plot, allotment.... your lot.

Much of today's troubles stem from a dislocation from the land, a displacement from one's greater self. A landless people are a troubled people, and even though we may live in supposed democracies, the land is not allotted equally.

Reading through the natural farmer Masanobu Fukuoka's One-Straw Revolution I am pleased to see that I am not the only one who believes the land should be divvied up equally amongst the people and animals, and not, as in Scotland's case amongst 81 or so human individuals.

On the subject of working the land, not intensively or industrially but sensitively and intelligently, Fukuoka has this to say:

In general, commercial agriculture is an unstable proposition. The farmer would do much better by growing the food he needs without thinking about making money. If you plant one grain of rice, it becomes more than one thousand grains. One row of turnips makes enough pickles for the entire winter. If you follow this line of thought, you will have enough to eat, more than enough, without struggling. But if you try to make money instead, you get on board the profit wagon, and it runs away with you.

 The message is clear: grow your own food, on your lot.

When I lived in Warsaw, I was amazed to see how much of the city had been given over to allotments, and not just any allotments, but plots of land that accommodated little huts and sheds that would have made the likes of Thoreau and other shed-dwellers jealous. I was amazed at not just the blaze of vegetables, flowers and fruit, flowing forth from each of these little plots, but from the very aesthetic of these plots themselves with their little wooden daschas, their colourfully painted fences, water features and a general countenance that demonstrated a deep love for these small urban gardens. Within a few kilometres of my humble flat in Mokotow, there were several large spaces that had been given over to this practice of growing your own.

The allotments (Ogrodki dzialkowe) of Warsaw have a long and colourful history, and are one of the city’s more redeeming features. Almost 5% (1,700 hectares) of Warsaw's city surface is given over to allotments. The first ‘dzialki’ were set up before the war when the Polish Socialist Party put forward an initiative to form ‘special workers’ oases of peace’. Where the likes of London gradually lost hers to property developers (inner city London was covered with allotments following WWII) Warsaw has retained hers, governed by an allotment cooperative to protect and conserve them. During the Communist era, and as part of a remit to have people ‘grow their own’, most of the dzialki were allocated to professional groups such as teachers, railway workers or miners. An allotment ‘parcel’ was a symbol of a certain status. More importantly, it was a gurantee of a regular food supply since buying certain foods at stores was not always possible. In effect, it was a form of collective and responsible living which is still vigorously continued to this day.

In Glasgow, the situation regarding allotments, however, is rather lamentable, and in spite of their existence here and there, they inhabit nowhere near the same space as they do in Warsaw. Then of course you have the trouble of getting to your allotment if they are so sporadically placed. In Warsaw, you walked to it, because they were everywhere. 

Here's Fukuoka again:

In olden times there were warriors, farmers, craftsmen, and merchants. Agriculture was said to be closer to the source of things than trade or manufacturing, and the farmer was said to be the 'cupbearer of the gods'. He was always able to get by somehow or other and have enough to eat.

And The Upanishads:

First, know food.
Towards food all things move.
By food all things live.
Into food all things return.

In other words, treat food frivolously at your peril.

Which is difficult, because we live in a frivolous society that does not take these things seriously until we have invariably passed the point of no return. We live in a world of luxury restaurants and nouvelle cuisine, where the Heston Blumenthals and Gordon Ramsays of the world dictate what is good for you.

Then there are the elitist outlets like Roots & Fruits and Waitrose where organic produce (in spite of it costing less to produce, think of all those pesticides and chemicals you don't have to buy as an organic farmer), costs more than the treated stuff.

If a high price is charged for natural food, it means that the merchant is taking excessive profits. Furthermore, if natural foods are expensive, they become luxury foods and only rich people are able to afford them.

Being removed from food, whether physically from the land and from the growing process or from the fancy nonsense foods that distract us from real food, is at the root of our troubles today. If people ate (and drank) correctly - a plant-based diet with wholegrains  and little alcohol - then the world would soon come to its senses. As Fukuoka states:

If the Ministry's (of Agriculture) staff were to go to the mountains and meadows, gather the seven herbs of spring, and the seven herbs of autumn, and taste them, they would learn what the source of human nourishment is...

He then continues:

... if 100% of the people were farming it would be ideal. There is just a quarter acre of arable land for each person in Japan. If each single person were given one quarter acre, that is one and a quarter acres for a family of five, that would be more than enough land to support the family for the whole year. If natural farming were practiced, a farmer would also have plenty of time for leisure and social activities within the village community. I think this is the most direct path toward making this country a happy, pleasant land.

Pleasant, and peasant!

Yet, the word peasant, from the Old French paisent meaning inhabitant of the land (one who works the land), has garnered a distinctly pejorative tone within our luxury-minded modern age. It is interesting to note that the word luxury itself derives from the Latin luxuria meaning excess, extravagance, and ultimately from luxus meaning dislocated.

Remove a people from its land and you can convince them of anything !

Like normalizing and industrializing the eating of meat.

Which is possibly, when you look at this holistically and not blindly as we are apt to do in the profit-led West, the silliest thing you could ever do on a plant-based planet and to a plant-based lifeform, on an energy-finite planet.

But don't take my word for it:

If 22 bushels (1,300 pounds) of rice and 22 bushels of winter grain are harvested from a quarter acre field such as one of these, then the field will support five to ten people each investing an average of less than one hour of labor per day. But if the field were turned over to pasturage, or if the grain were fed to cattle, only one person could be supported per quarter acre. Meat becomes a luxury food when its production requires land which could provide food directly for human consumption. This has been shown clearly and definitely. Each person should ponder how much hardship he is causing by indulging in food so expensively produced.

Meat and other imported foods are luxuries because they require more energy and resources than the traditional vegetables and grains produced locally. It follows that people who limit themselves to a simple local diet need do less work and use less land than those with an appetite for luxury.

...Brown rice and vegetables may seem to some like coarse fare, but this is the very finest diet nutritionally, and enables human beings to live simply and directly.

If we do have a food crisis it will not be caused by the insufficiency of nature's productive power, but by the extravagance of human desire.

What can you say, other than perhaps:

Get an allotment!

Grow your own food!

Think and move critically!

Modernity is a state of War... Dig for Victory!

Out of the Egg of Chaos

Everything lives. Thunder lives, and rain lives, and sunshine lives. But not in the personal sense, writes D.H. Lawrence in Mornings in Mexico (in the chapter entitled The Hopi Snake Dance).

And yet, some indigenous tribes, the Maori of Aotearoa (New Zealand) for instance, have accorded mountains and rivers personal status. This is not some kind of perverted anthropo-morphosising on the part of deluded humans but an understanding of these entities as being alive, as accommodating the same vital impulses as any living creature. Because we may not understand them, and their place in the wider context of Earth, we are often reluctant to see them like ourselves. This is further compounded by a general lack of understanding of our own selves at an essential and fundamental level.

Lawrence continues:

How is man to get himself into relation with the vast living convulsions of rain and thunder and sun, which are conscious and alive and potent, but like vastest of beasts, inscrutable and incomprehensible. How is man to get himself into relation with these, the vastest of cosmic beasts?

Man no longer knows how to respond to Nature (his own included) because he has been sidelined and blindsided by a system of being that boxes him up, and which does not accord aliveness, but which accords 'death' in the simple accumulation of the non-essential. Death, one could argue, did not exist before man's manipulating hands began to upset and pervert the natural order. Death is a construct devised by men to explain their loss of aliveness, to explain their separation from their own imperishable selves. There is no death, really, something of which I'm sure mountains and rivers are aware, only a revolutional circumsession in which all goes round and round.

Man's 'personality' has been fashioned not by Nature, but by a perverted state of affairs that seeks to take advantage of Nature. Man no longer sleeps beneath the stars but in the dark. He breathes badly, and moves even less fluently. He is, by all estimations, his own worst enemy, and yet to tell him that, this little self-made god, would be to incur the wrath of a devil.

The cosmos is a great furnace, a dragon's den, where the heroes and demi-gods, men, forge themselves into being. It is a vast and violent matrix, where souls form like diamonds in earth, under extreme pressure.

All our acts, if not for the forging of the human, are pointless. As many wise creatures have already made out, the end result of culture is the recognition of a circum-cess (as opposed to a pro-cess) that is deeply alive and deeply interconnected. That is frugal and fruitful, that flourishes and blossoms. After all....

Man is as a flower, rain can kill him or succour him, heat can flick him with a bright tail, and destroy him: or, on the other hand, it can softly call him into existence, out of the egg of chaos.

We are all flowers, emerging from the plant and the clan (these two words are actually the same word with the Celts changing the 'p' to a 'c' and doing away with the end 't'), and blossoming because of Earth. Nowadays, one's flow- and flower-hood has been severely compromised if not entirely negated by a broken system of earth-management. The flower has wilted in most cases, in the most severe taking the plant with it. And unless we recognize, once again, life and feeling in all things, unless we can relate to streams and rivers and woods in this deeply fundamental and personal (per sona, sounding through, 'speaking with us') sense (and not just in a superficial one), we will forever be condemned to the man-fashioned constructs of 'death' and 'loneliness', and a one-way ticket to hell.

The answer is simple. Move by yourself. Embody space. Think critically.

And be (with) nature.

God grows weary of great kingdoms, but never tires of little flowers. Rabindranath Tagore

The Stillness Card

As an anti-dote to busyness and business, and the over-coagulated life... the stillness card.

Just as Aristotle warned us of the barrenness of the busy life, so too have many advised us of the magical qualities of a quiet life, of la vita contemplativa, where living is largely spontaneous and attuned to its nature, and where there still remains a modicum of otium, that Latin activity that denotes no activity, in which contemplation can occur. Indeed, the very nature of business is the negation of otium (nec otium, from where we get 'negotiate'), and by extension, any contemplation. To be sure, all animals have to negotiate, whether it be their way ahead, or with other plants and creatures, but when those negotiations drown out any possibility for reflection then we know we are in trouble. This, for many, has become the state of affairs in the modern workaday world. The loss of reflection and contemplation, and a general existential absence, replaced with a sort of controlled manic depression, due to our incessant state of being busy.

Stillness, and not doing, is the antidote...

The Crow Manifesto

We're all backward. Our machines are all modern and shit - but our minds - our minds are primitive.

James Mangold, Cop Land

'Primitive peoples are polyglots, poets, songsters and taxonomists', writes Allan Cameron in his book In Praise of the Garrulous. The primitive, as its etymology suggests, marks the first, the prime, and the original. Indeed, one only need look casually at the synonyms for 'prime' (main, chief, key, central, foremost, of the highest quality) to see that maybe we have been duped into believing the primitive somehow inferior to the modern. 

Crows are primitive. Man is not. And yet crows can fly. Man cannot.

In what way then is a crow (or any bird or insect for that matter) inferior to man? In that it chooses not to destroy and pollute the land that feeds and shelters it?

When man taps into the primitive once more, he will slowly regain the power of flight, as he will his intimate relationship to the Earth, its plants and its animals. But to do so requires a thorough re-appraisal of what modernity is doing to him, and has already done to him. This re-appraisal is at the root of these existential memos. 

In particular, man needs to reasses 4 things: Balance, Movement, Growth, and Space. And reassess them carefully, within the greater paradigm of the Earth and not just within the broken economic system of the West.

As Bruce Chatwin implies in Songlines, his study of the Aborigines of Australia, the difference between modern man and primitive man is one of outlook. Modern man is forever changing the world to suit his dubious vision of the future, whereas primitive man puts all his mental energies into keeping it the same. 

The word 'same' is key here as it has intonations of 'togetherness' (from the Proto-Indo-European root sem- 'one', also 'as one', also related to Sanskrit samah, 'even, level, similar, identical'. In other words, where primitive peoples recognize their insinuation within the very integument of the Earth 'as one', modern man does not. 

The issue at hand (or even, at foot) is one of roots.




And to me, the men in Mexico are like trees, forests that the white men felled in their coming. But the roots of the trees are deep and alive and forever sending up new shoots.

D.H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent


 

Sacred Plant Medicine & The Destroying Angel

Only to him who stands where the barley stands and listens well, will it speak and tell, for his sake what man is.

Masanobu Fukuoka, The One Straw Revolution

The other day whilst cycling back over the river home, I passed, as usual, the Science Centre and saw several large phallic-shaped white mushrooms in the little grass lawn to the centre's north. It was only later upon identifying them in my little field guide that I realized their significance: they were 'destroying angels' (Amanita virosa), the deadliest mushrooms on the planet. How appropriate I thought that they should be growing here, right in front of the Science Centre. 

As Stephen Buhner writes in the preface to his wonderful book Sacred Plant Medicine: Explorations in the Practice of Indigenous Herbalism:

You will undoubtedly note I take strong exception with the way scientific opinion is now commonly accepted in the world. This has caused me to question many of its uses, and this perspective comes through in some of my writing. With medical science especially I take exception. The presentation by conventional medical science that herbs are unscientific and a remnant of an earlier more superstitious age is a grave misuse of science when so much data, much of it gathered in other countries, conflicts with this view. In their search for knowledge there is an attitude of superiority that many scientists possess, which, if allowed to be expressed without proper controls, can be dangerous. Further, our culture has come to rely overmuch on scientific experts. Many people no longer reason for themselves when faced with opinions from scientific experts, and it is questionable whether such experts really understand the workings of nature any more than anyone else. The misapplication of technology, based upon the expert opinions of the scientific community, without regard for environmental consequences, has caused a great deal of damage to the Earth. I, and many others, are beginning to question whether or not science can or should play as large a role in determining the safe application of technology... But a more pervasive problem exists in the unquestioned embracing of the scientific model. Though very useful, most scientists feel that methods of information gathering other than the scientific are not valid. Adherents of other forms of learning are generally castigated by the world scientific community. This trend has caused the abandonment of many approaches to understanding the world that, I believe, we as a species need in order to successfully inhabit the Earth.

I speak as a human being who travels in sacred territory, one who travels the Earth-centred path. I speak of the territory I have found, the Earth-centred devotions that have called me, and of the sacred plant relations. It is your birthright as well to enter this sacred territory. I invite youn to hear what I share here, to go beyond the words, and feel the touch of the sacred territory that lies beyond.

Paul Feyerabend in Against Method makes similar claims. Look no further than its final chapter to see what science has really done for us.

Rupert Sheldrake, in his equally enlightening book The Science Delusion, states unequivocally and quite rightly that most scientists are at the beck and call of commercial and military interests.

Be warned, Science is not what it appears to be. It is a destroyer of the human and of the humus. And of con-science.

Hence, the Destroying Angel.... the Earth's voice expressing itself. Fighting back. The planet is a lot more mysterious than science would have it. The emergence of these fruiting bodies is no coincidence, but it takes a keen eye, and an even keener mind, to see it...

'Hmmmph!'   The Earth destroying Science with a single fruiting body. Now that's what I call power.

Trip Report

There are no conditions to fulfill. There is nothing to be done, nothing to be given up. Just look and remember, whatever you perceive is not you, nor yours. It is there in the field of consciousness, but you are not the field and its contents, nor even the knower of the field. It is your idea that you have to do things that entangles you in the results of your efforts - the motive, the desire, the failure to achieve, the sense of frustration - all this holds you back. Simply look at whatever happens and know that you are beyond it.

Nisargadatta Maharaj

The universe is not something out there... the universe is here!

You kinda understand this when you dabble in extra-curricular chemicals like magic mushrooms, that all this hankering after the outside is a form of pathology, of wrong living (or perverted living, living that has been pushed through the grinder of science and separation)... That these 'scientists' wasting huge amounts of money and energy on space exploration realize nothing of the universe that irradiates from within... from here. 

Chasing after stars only reveals the extent to which you have been separated from your own inner star, your own supernova. 

Indeed, the supernova might well be the realization...

After this, there is no uni-verse.... but a con-verse.

 

One of the great ravens of Boglairoch. When I was up at the Slacks trig point I got chatting to a fellow traveller and was telling him of the family of ravens that lives up here. At that moment he pointed out one of them in the distance. And then, something magical happened. It flew over to us, as if to say hello, and hovered right above us, the closest I have ever been to a raven. It is true that in my trips up here this year alone, as often as 3-4 times a week, I have communicated with the ravens not just vocally (I studied 'Crow-talk' for 3 years in Warsaw, the corvid crossroads of Europe, and consider myself pretty fluent!) but also bodily, with the head, the eyes, the arms. Corvids in general have a special aptitude for remembering faces, and I am pretty sure (all ego aside) that these guys recognize me, as I recognize them. It is a subtle form of communication to be sure, more often than not, but once in a while, they will come so close as to render the subtle asunder, and put a smile on your face that is difficult to wipe off.

It is then I realize that man has abandoned his power of flight in favour of being carried, and at the incredible loss that he has sustained as a result. The loss of conscience (reduced to science), the loss of contact (reduced to tact), and the loss of the contours (reduced to tours) that lead us around and up into our higher contemplative Self. The end result being the loss of 'withness', and togetherness; the loss of the ability to receive the communications of crows, the loss of correspondance in general. 

It is interesting to note that the word 'loss' comes from the Proto-Indo-European root leus-, an extended form of the root leu- "to loosen, divide, cut apart, untie, separate", which of course is the very premise of modern science. It follows then, within a world outlook based upon the modern scientific method, that loss is the inevitable consequence. And there is no greater loss than the loss of knowing who (and where) you are.

As if to highlight that point, as I made my way down the Greenside path and onto its little bypass, I spooked a couple of kestrels getting it on in the underbrush. What a flutter that was! I'm sure there's a metaphor, an auspice and an omen, in their somewhere.

Ships Passing

Just the other day whilst sitting at Clydebank reading, this enormous frigate passed me almost without my seeing it. The stealth of these big beasts is remarkable considering their size. It kind of lets you know that it is possible to be big and quiet at the same time... Try telling that to your neighbours!

Just on the right of the picture, you can see the Loch Humphrey path working its way up over the shoulder of the Kilpatrick Braes. That steep bit nearing the top is affectionately known by all those who have walked it (or tried to cycle it!) as The Bastard.

This blue beauty again passed me while I was blabbing away to another cyclist waiting for the ferry. Complete inattentional blindness on my part. It actually passed me completely before I caught it in the corner of my eye, and I was miffed, because I had just missed out on a great photo. This one doesn't do it justice.

This the Freeway / Causeway dredger in June plying the Clyde for the duration of the month. This is from Braehead with the Harbour Head crane in the background.

The dredger turning around at Greenock and heading back up the Clyde towards Glasgow.