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They sat at a round table - by Anita Higgins, Garden Steward

10/30/2017

They sat at a round table, in blue chairs that held countless butts before theirs. Each of their butts was connected to a body, connected to a mind, connected to a soul. They spoke, in turn, popcorning, to share a little piece of that soul. Sometimes they spoke in flowing metaphor, painting pictures with their words. Sometimes they spoke with graceless, stumbling honesty. Sometimes they spoke with shy glances or with eye contact held for longer than they were used to. Sometimes they spoke with unforgiving laughter. And with an authentic curiosity, they listened, hungry to know the soul across from them.

And as they listened, threads fine as silk arched from those souls, through the air, weaving their way ‘round the table.

Each morning they did this. A ritual, it seemed. It fed them. Around that table,

each soul was connected to the soul that was connected to the mind, connected to the body, connected to the butt in the next blue chair over. And something else was born. Those threads continued to weave a new being. A living, changing, vibrant thing that greeted them every morning and held them as they walked through their day. A community.

And then they stopped. Circumstances left them scattered, their butts, bodies, minds, and souls far away from those blue chairs each morning. They sat in different chairs, miles or states or countries apart. And the ritual was broken.

What do we do when the threads grow taut with distance? How do we hold ourselves when proximity no longer allows us to hold each other? How do we feed ourselves when an important ritual no longer greets us each morning? How do we go back to sitting our butts in different chairs every morning, when something about sitting in those blue chairs felt so right?

No, really. I’m asking. How?

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Goodbye and Hello, by Anita Higgins - Garden Intern 2017 & New Garden Steward

10/18/2017

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Since accepting the position as incoming Garden Manager, I have been asked many times what my vision for the garden is. Just yesterday Barb asked me if I wouldn’t mind sending her my application or parts of my application so she could get a better sense of it. To be honest, my application doesn’t include much of my vision. It’s more of a long-winded story of how I got to where I am now (or where I was two months ago. That can be accessed here.) I expressed to Barb that I am not entering this position with radical changes planned out. But that’s not to say I lack resolve in my intentions.

Let’s all take a moment to think about Christy. I admire her deeply. That loving, goofy, tenacious, powerhouse of a woman. She expressed to us before she left that she was scared. She wanted to carry what she had learned at Songaia wherever she went. She wanted to continue to live with an attitude of abundance, but felt as if she needed a pillar to stand on after she left this place. How would she continue to do that surrounded by people who live in a culture driven by scarcity? I have no doubt in my mind that Christy will cultivate abundance wherever she goes. But I absolutely understand that fear. How do any of us continue to do this? There is so much fear, and justifiably so. The world is shifting quickly around us. How will we creatively use and respond to these changes? How do we cultivate and radiate abundance?

Christy, carrying tools like a boss at 21 Acres. Photo cred goes to MistyDawn.

I am firm in my resolve to pursue the answers to these questions. I intend to take this position as an opportunity to facilitate growth, and not just in that well-loved garden that holds me as I walk through it. What I have come to know in my heart as truth this summer is that to even begin to know how to walk in this crazy shifting world, we need to remember our role on this planet. My dear one, soul-bud, feather-friend, John Joseph Crotty V would call it re-indigenizing ourselves to the planet and to each other. He should probably write a book about it or something. My intention is to facilitate growth in the garden, the community, the incoming interns, myself, and in the greater community, as we all attempt to answer these questions together.

Joey, likely contemplating a perennial coup of some sort. Or thinking about how delicious ground cherries are. Likely both.

I’ll leave you with one shift that I am making. I believe that the language we use is extremely powerful. Brian demonstrates to me time and again that the story you tell about a situation shapes the outcome. I have personally experienced that changing the language inside your own mind can pull you out of dark times. Considering the power of words, I’ve changed the name of the position from Garden Manager to Garden Steward. That garden isn’t mine to manage. To control. We are stewards of it, as we are of this property, from the wetland in the westernmost reaches of Songaia and the forest to the east. Studying ecology has taught me the basis of interbeing. There is no such thing as a closed ecosystem--all have inputs and outputs and affect one another. We are of service to the land, as it is to us, as we are to each other. We are witnessing that all over the world the loss of this understanding is causing incredible suffering. How can we remember our role on this planet? I don’t have a set plan. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have absolute resolve in my intentions.

Patricia, you wouldn’t want me to shower you in praise. Tough beans. I am forever changed because of what you’ve facilitated here. I hope to honor you as I take the reigns, not filling your shoes, but standing on the shoulders of one of the strongest women I know.

Spreading this little ditty on the permaculture principles, created by someone in Rick Valley's PDC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYIBYQY-h1Q

P.S. What’s up with all the photos of people’s backsides?

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A String of Rain-Soaked Pearls, by Joey Crotty - Garden Intern 2017

10/14/2017

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As I write this, a pendulum of paradigms swings, yanks, and jabs wildly within me. Between synchronicity and chance. Abundance and scarcity. Community and isolation. Surrender and control. Delight and dread. I write to you, dear reader, suspended in the space between them all.

This is not exactly an easy time to be alive, is it? Perhaps it hasn't been for some time now, but something tells me there is a unique intensity at which the World of Old is face-planting presently, a 10,000 year fall in the making. This manifested nightmare of alienation goes by many names; some call it colonialism, imperialism, or the patriarchy (though I believe these touch on symptoms rather than a cause). I prefer to call it the Mass Monoculture; not because I believe the term captures this hydra's essence entirely, but as a parody to highlight that such a monolith contains very little culture of value or vitality at all. In fact, the Monoculture is an anthropomorphized force at war with the very conditions of life that it itself requires to exist. A candle that wishes to extinguish its own flame, wick, and wax. A paradox, to be sure, but also the deepest and truest form of insanity.

And yet, here we are, dear relative. Each of us making do (as Paul Goodman described it) in a life-denying civilization, trying our intuitive damnedest to choose life over the insanity of snuffing out our very existence.

Life can make do with very little, though, can't she? Her spirit wishes to live, naturally... and so she does through each of us. We can feel her spirit pulsing, pulsing, pulsing... moving us to show up authentically in the world, encouraged as we are by our surprising moments of belonging, absurd goofiness, new traditions, unforgiving laughter. Through some ancient pull we feel the presence of something greater - that "inter-" or "meta-being" that comprises who we actually are. Remembering, remembering, remembering... that we are not monsters; we are music. The earthen orchestration of life herself embodied, as you and I, and nothing less.

Songaia. Song of our Mother Earth. What depth, and from what dream, did the Spirit of Mystery pull you from? What yearning do you hold for us, Great Container? What strings did you cast into the aether, pulling this motley crew of lovers and dancers and charming instigators toward your spirited hearth, to drink from your life-sweetening waters?

Will you be the mother of many more to come, Songaia? A perennial being with many seeds, casting, germinating, opening yourself in the darkest night of soul's soil? Do your inhabitants know your dream - do they dream it, too? - as they pivot through a world of faux scarcity and sham abundance toward the wealth of a more timeless nature?

I've seen your children, Songaia, and walked among them. I may have even become one of them when I wasn't paying attention, but giving it. Maybe it happened slowly, and maybe it happened all at once... when I wasn't fearing, when I found myself lost in the mirth of their regal tenderness.

There are those of you who have transitioned. Yet, somehow, I get the sense that your work is not yet finished, your presence present yet still. I call to you humbly, First Dreamers, and permit you to move through my thoughts. Dear ancestors... might you show me what you scheme for us, reveal what moves mysteriously from your plain into ours at this mighty hour?

The view comes into focus, slowly, but with passing clarity…

I see a region dotted like rain-soaked pearls along the Salish Coast, harbors of living ember sown far into its interior. Village after village after village is found here... unique in their iridescent vibrance, strung like lace upon the neck of Mother Earth. I see the footprints of many, not to be minimized, but to be celebrated. Little ones and older ones, with skin of obsidian, adobe, sand and snow, footprints that carry the countless gifts of the Human Spirit upon the good green world in their birth-rightful place.

"You are mine," the Earth Mother reminds us. "Children of this Great Dream."

And so where we walk, we learn to surrender, and where we surrender, we take root once more. We witness the land deepen in luster and lessen in dust. In her many waters a Great Homecoming is afin… countless waves of shooting, speckled silver stars emerge with such force that the course of rivers reverse as the Salmon Nation returns.

The people pray as they work to restore themselves in a living world. They pray for the homecoming of more Animal and Plant People. The More-Than-Human Ones hold their councils, and after some deliberation, they reach consensus: they, too, will return. And so they do, as a monochromatic world becomes awash in living colors once again.

Many hundreds of years go by. The happenings of near-present become but a myth, stories of those to come.

"Did they really almost end it all?" a little one asks. She is a young girl, our great, great, great, great, great granddaughter yet to be.

"Yes, almost..." the storyteller tells her. "Very close, in fact." Her eyes widen in disbelief. “However…” The storyteller tries to contain a sly and knowing smile. “The life you hold within yourself, little one, was once the life-light kept aglow within our very ancestors, barely a flicker at their most decisive hour...”

What happens next in their story is up to us.

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They sat at a round table - by Anita Higgins, Garden Steward

Goodbye and Hello, by Anita Higgins - Garden Intern 2017 & New Garden Steward

A String of Rain-Soaked Pearls, by Joey Crotty - Garden Intern 2017

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