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Synchronicity's Story, by MistyDawn Forester - Garden Intern 2017

9/26/2017

For some time, I had been struggling to trust - truly trust - in my agency to manifest the future of my lived reality. I believed firmly that if I called out to the universe and verbalized my intentions, magnetized, I would meet my desire, my need. Still, below the surface was a heavy need to affirm this belief.
No more than 8 months prior to today, I had announced that I was leaving my job of six years, my safe place - an art studio that raised me - to pursue an opportunity unknown. With absolutely no plans for myself, I was in the process of finding a new hire to train as my replacement. I was away on a short vacation when in walked a woman who, on a whim, decided to see if the studio was hiring. After a short interview, my old boss - a woman with beautiful intuition - hired Leila on the spot.

Now it was clear from the beginning that our dynamic would deviate greatly from the typical manger and new hire relationship. Skip small talk, we delved deeply into our contemplations and outlooks. Over a bucket of ceramic glaze and dozens of pieces to be processed, we created an art-centered, therapeutic space for self expansion. A space in which to verbalize our visions and continue the work of realizing our future selves. In this space, I allowed myself to be wholly vulnerable in articulating my desire for a restructured and shared life centered around a connection with the earth.

In May, nonchalant and cool as always, Leila opened her mouth and said something like, “I once did a permaculture internship in WA. I think it’d fit with your vision. You should apply.”

Just like that, here I sit, finishing up my first blog post as tonight’s volunteer chefs chop and prepare produce grown right here at Songaia. We spent my first couple of weeks harvesting buckets of plums, grapes, apples, and pears. Plucking squash. Blending pounds of freshly pulled pesto.

Decimating beautiful but invasive bind weed. Steaming out grape grape juice and reducing elderberry syrup, and plum jam. Transplanting strawberry plants. Shaking cover crop into fall beds. Turning compost and watering the garden quadrant by quadrant. Building a rabbit fence. Unclogging a kitchen drain. Dancing - ecstatically! Stretching, embracing, and singing in unison. Rejoicing at birthdays and the rain. Endlessly pondering as true farm folk philosophers.

And now, harmony reverberating within me, I sit, awestruck by the dedicated community, impassioned by permaculture and cohousing as means of revitalizing the deep bond between humans and habitat. Overjoyed at the intergenerational abundance of family, food, and wise council. And grateful. Grateful for the living reality that is Songaia, for a soul-friend like Leila, and for a universe that answers when I call.

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On Divine Duality & Sacred Opposites by Joey Crotty, Garden Intern 2017

9/26/2017

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I’ve just come back from a journey, one could say. If you are interested, I can tell you the story.

Thursday marks the International Day of Peace. Though today is Wednesday, dear Hayra had sent out an invitation to join her in a Peace Ceremony in honor of this energy. When 3:00pm struck and the ceremony was set to begin, I had been writing my first blog - determined as I was to finally finish a post to get a heckler (Patricia) off my back.

My shallow-rooted self almost convinced me not to go.

“Stay and finish what you're doing,” he said. "You know you’re too busy for ceremony.”

“Too busy for ceremony?!” I thought, mortified. I got up without another thought to find the group for ceremony.

Moments later I approached a circle of women standing by a pear tree. I immediately noticed there were no other men present beside myself. Of course it would be women, I thought, who took the time to honor peace. I felt sadness by the thought. How had I had almost discounted this? I felt a renewed determination within myself to be of service to these remarkable women.

A few words were said, and off we went to the labyrinth, the place we would have our ceremony. I instinctively trailed behind the group, lost in my reflections. When we arrived, Barb told of the history of the labyrinth to deepen our intentions there. Hayra then instructed that she would ring little bell-chimes, and when we felt called, we could enter the labyrinth one at a time.

I felt an unexpected well of grief bubble to my inner surface. Despite the long-trauma that has afflicted our world - along with the unthinkable hardship our beloved mothers, sisters, aunts and daughters have endured - it is still they who show up to pray for peace. I was surrounded by stunning brilliance: the Sacred Feminine that possess both grace and power, shamelessly held by each woman before me.

I have once heard, that in some Indigenous traditions, The People are represented by a great hoop. Within this hoop, children, women, and men each have a place in which they belong, a sacred role for them to fulfill for The People. Children, I was taught, are in the inside of the hoop - playing, learning, growing in their gifts. Surrounding them are the Women, facing toward them in a layer of nourishing, life-giving power.

However, in a hoop that is broken, men indeed surround the women and the children, except they face inward, toward the center. It was revealed to me that it is not the role of men to face within the circle in this way. Such is an orientation of control, power, abuse, negligence. No... instead, the sacred role of Men is to surround the women and children, but to face outward, into the world, as shields of their people. True masculinity, in its life-enhancing form, protects the life within and around women and children. That is our sacrifice and source of honor for The People. Women are life-givers. Children are life and living legacy. Men are life-protectors. A completed hoop.

At the labyrinth, we were asked to hold an intention as we ventured into its winding center, which represents a journey to our inner life, the place of spirit.

Hayra chimed the first bell. What would my intention be? In honor of a completed Hoop of the People, I decided my intention would be to wait for my fellow women to go before me into this sacred place. I would wait at the entrance, and enter last to ensure they each made it safely inside. (Symbolically, of course, nothing was threatening us.)

The bell chimed, and one at a time a woman entered the labyrinth. Patricia entered, then Christy, Barb, Mary, Anita, Carol. In honor of my intention, I offered to let Hayra - holder of the ceremony - go before me, knowing she'd likely decline. She did. I respected her wish and stood before the labyrinth. She chimed the bell for me, and I, too, entered.

I began to wind slowly through the labyrinth, passing by the others, surprised at the distance I felt between them as if those labyrinth stones were really forty feet tall. Yet I also felt immense closeness to the others, a delightfully paradoxical juxtaposition. My thoughts drifted to our ancestors, the Celts, and the ancientness of this labyrinth’s design as well as the intentions they may have held there, thousands of years in the past, in times felt but no longer remembered.

To the outer edges I went, then to the inner circle; all when I least expected it. Each step I held my intention of honoring and protecting these women moving around me, on inner journeys of their own, trying to find a rhythm of beauty in my gait to reflect how I might walk in the world in honor of them.

With surprising slowness - so much path being coiled into such a tight space - the others made it to the center one at a time, which, coincidentally, was the only place where green grass was growing. Witnessing them standing there within this sacred space gave me goosebumps. As I entered I noticed they had left a spot for me, right at the entrance with enough room to hold us all in this special patch of green.

I felt power here. I wanted to stay in this beautiful space forever. Yet, just as I was getting settled in, not even a full breath had I took, Hayra chimed the bell again. I had anticipated leaving last in here as well, fully honoring the trajectory of my original intentions. Then I realized, in that split second, that I should in fact venture to the outer world first. Going within represented to me a kind of safety, dangers that are less physical and more spiritual in nature. The outer world represented, to me in that moment, a type of inverse. And so felt it was I who should be first to face that world, symbolically shielding any burden that might exist there.

The bell chimed, breaking the silence. I broke away before I had time to exhale, making my way outward. Just as we entered, one by one we exited the labyrinth, forming a circle together. We then held hands, and were instructed to breath in from the left our bodies and exhale to the right, to push a spiral of counter-clockwise energy between and through us. Hayra offered her beautiful words, of seeing the wounded, perpetrators of hurt within herself, the parts of her that were once wounded, the wounds that echo there still.

My mind wandered to the Old Way, a way in which it was often the hunter who would eat last after a kill. First the elders would eat, then the children, then the women, then the men, then, only when everyone else had eaten would the hunter eat. In honor of this tradition, I chose to stay silent in this space, opening space to others who wished to express their thoughts.

No one else spoke; the tender silence perhaps spoke more than any one of us could. We hugged, straggled a bit, and the ceremony for peace had come to an end.

I write about this because, in the dominant life-destroying Monoculture, there is seldom a clear expression of what a healthy masculinity in the world can truly look like. The counter-cultural 60s represented a resurgence of the Sacred Feminine in both women and men. As storyteller Robert Bly describes it, this was a wonderful, powerful, and necessary shift. The world desperately yearns for the Sacred Feminine once again. Except that... the world equally yearns for the Sacred Masculine. Authentic masculinity - mistaken as it was for the horrific wellspring of the world's pain, exploitation, war - was cast into a place of dishonor. Masculinity was feared, thought to be wantonly brutish, and so it was suppressed. Many men grew into the feminine-sided nature of themselves - guided as they were by powerful women - with tenderness and emotional openness unfathomable to men a generation before them. What they did not grow into, however, were the qualities of the Sacred Masculine in balance with their Sacred Feminine, a balance that gives men their true power as men.

Life-preserving, but not life-giving, Bly describes this condition. Heart without a skeleton. Compassion without fierceness. Vision without action, which may be just as harmful as action without vision.

Divine Duality... Sacred Opposites that, only together, lead to the living mystery of our existence. I recognize I have a long, long way to go in healing the sham separation so imprinted within me of these luscious counterparts, spacious yet whole. Nonetheless, I offer this story as a humble step toward trusting the regenerative capacity of Life that moves within us all.

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Bull and Authenticity, by Anita Higgins

9/19/2017

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Something I have been realizing about myself is that I am a horrible bull-shitter. That’s not saying I cannot tell a convincing lie. I can, I have, and I probably will. But the amount of stress that keeping up a lie causes me is wearing in a way that really affects me. I have found myself increasingly sensitive to, and aware of, how that affects me as I learn the value in showing up authentically.

Earlier in the summer, I became aware that my partner David’s mother was reaching out for help to throw a surprise party for him. She was so sweet, so excited, and so determined that I bit my tongue when I felt compelled to remind her that David hates surprise parties. So the plan went on. For months. Up until the week of the party I wasn’t too concerned about keeping it a secret from David, because that basically entailed just not talking about it.

Me and David, June 2017

As the weekend of the party crept up, my stress did the same. I knew I was going to have to do some serious lying. David trusted me, so I was going to get away with it. But my stress didn’t come from worrying I was going to blow the secret of the party. Like I said before, I am increasingly sensitive to lying in any form (even if it’s lying for the sake of a damn surprise party). The morning of the party came, and I was sweating bullets. I had stayed with David the night before and had made up the story that I was needed at Songaia for a few hours that afternoon to do some watering. His mom had asked that he come “help her with a party she was throwing” that afternoon, so he and I we were going to meet back up for dinner.

Now, I am not sure how else to explain the irony in this, other than the universe testing me. The morning of the party, as David and I ate our favorite breakfast together (potato hash with peppers), we got on the topic of trust. Specifically, how important and fragile trust can be in relationships. Well, shit. Yes, I agree with the things you are saying and here are my opinions on the value of trusting and being trust-worthy. But also, here are a bunch of lies. “I need to go water at Songaia for a few hours today” “You can’t drive me to Songaia because I need my car for doing errands” “Yes I would love to watch that movie with you tonight that we’re definitely going to be home in time for”. The list goes on. And he asked no questions when I walked out of his door wearing a dress and makeup to go work in the garden. What a sweet man.

The party was a hit. David had no clue, I got to meet so many people who are important to him, and despite the fact that it was a surprise party...I think he really loved it. Even though the party was a hit and David was happy, something had changed. I had lied to him and gotten away with it. This was new. And it wasn’t just one lie, it was a whole set of lies, designed to deceive. And it felt bad, even after the truly innocent purpose of the lies came to light.

Patricia asked us the other day what we are “addicted” to fostering in our lives. What are we passionate about? What do we go out of our way to create? For me, it’s intimacy. Usually people reserve the word “intimacy” for romantic relationships. But I think that there is so much value in applying the word to friendships. I am passionate about developing intimate relationships with people. When I say I am a horrible liar it’s not because I cannot tell a convincing lie. It’s because in building relationships, intimacy can only be really realized if we show up authentically. This cannot be achieved if you are perpetuating lies, no matter how innocuous they seem, because those lies can shatter the same trust that authenticity builds. I believe showing up authentically, as challenging as it can be, is a pillar of social permaculture. Who could have guessed a surprise party would be an opportunity for growth?
P.S. Still not convinced David has totally forgiven me ;)

From left: Andrew, Me, Christy, Joey, and Mark while visiting Farmer Frog. I’ve learned a lot from these people this summer. Including the value of authenticity. Mark and Brumby left this week, off on their next adventure. I am honored to have met both of them and to watch them strive to live with as much authenticity as possible. The intimacy they create in their relationships through living that way is absolutely inspiring. I’m better for having known each one of these people and I cannot wait to see what they do with the rest of their lives.

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Haiku

9/17/2017

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Haiku

by Christy McKinney:

Center on the edge
The sides are all around us
Is that an otter?

Let's be blackberries
Opportunistic and wild
Bearing fruit with seeds

Zone 8 B ate me
But where will it go to next?
Follow the earth’s path

by Anita Higgins

Sun kissed tomato
Patricia scrapes the jar clean
Peanut butter toast

No such thing as waste
Food waste spews from the chipper
I smell like cheese

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Dirt is my Dry Shampoo, by Christy McKinney

9/17/2017

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9/14/17
Dirt is my Dry Shampoo. The name of my next blog. Haha. For the past couple weeks I have been coming inside for lunch with dirt warpaint on my face and a dirt “tan line” on my legs, but this is all just a testament to the work that’s going into putting up the rabbit enclosement. Yes, that’s right, enclosement - not fence. My new plan is to capture all the rabbits and put them inside the garden for a bunny wonderland. Think how cute that would be. It takes meticulous effort and some digging in the dirt, but I can all but guarantee a profit for the future. But really, the rabbit fence has been on my mind and has been a source of great work and a great learning experience for me - from tool use and knowledge to building materials and proper body mechanics.

In other news, as the summer is coming to an end, I am beginning to plan my next steps after Songaia. I plan to road trip to the east coast and stay for a bit before embarking on some travels internationally. One thing we have been discussing among the intern group is how to not “fall back asleep” once we leave this magical place. What pillars do we want to stand on as we lead by example moving into the “new story”? What are things we can return to to give us back that strength and energy we felt at Songaia? How can we operate in an environment that’s so different than our ideal? Lots of things to ponder and mull over, but this leads to great questions and conversations.

The bittersweet feeling of moving forward is beginning to creep in as my departure date is approaching, but I am anxious to absorb what I can from the remainder of my time at Songaia.

Leaning on the (still to be installed) fence.

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Synchronicity's Story, by MistyDawn Forester - Garden Intern 2017

On Divine Duality & Sacred Opposites by Joey Crotty, Garden Intern 2017

Bull and Authenticity, by Anita Higgins

Haiku

Dirt is my Dry Shampoo, by Christy McKinney

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