Margaret Fuller: The Prose of Life

I fear I have not one good word to say this fair morning, though the sun shines so encouragingly on the distant hills and gentle river and the trees are in their festive hues. I am not festive, though contented. When obliged to give myself to the prose of life, as I am on this occasion of being established in a new home I like to do the thing, wholly and quite, - to weave my web for the day solely from the grey yarn. ~Margaret Fuller~

Meditations of John Muir

“This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never dried all at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.”  ~John Muir~

John Burroughs: The Healing Power of Nature

I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.
~John Burroughs~

[Image: sunset from the front of the bungalow]

Osho on Nature

Look at the trees, look at the birds, look at the clouds, look at the stars... and if you have eyes you will be able to see that the whole existence is joyful. Everything is simply happy. Trees are happy for no reason; they are not going to become prime ministers or presidents and they are not going to become rich and they will never have any bank balance. Look at the flowers — for no reason. It is simply unbelievable how happy flowers are.  ~Osho~

Two Interviews with David Holmgren

 

These two interviews with David Holmgren, co originator of the Permaculture concept (along with Bill Mollison), were amongst the first videos I watched on Permaculture, and I still find them inspirational and motivating.

Aldo Leopold: A Sand County Almanac

“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.”

“Civilization has so cluttered this elemental man-earth relationship with gadgets and middlemen that awareness of it is growing dim. We fancy that industry supports us, forgetting what supports industry.”

“The problem, then, is how to bring about a striving for harmony with land among a people many of whom have forgotten there is any such thing as land, among whom education and culture have become almost synonymous with landlessness. This is the problem of conservation education.” 

Wes Jackson: Becoming Native to this Place

“Our task is to build cultural fortresses to protect our emerging nativeness. They must be strong enough to hold at bay the powers of consumerism, the powers of greed and envy and pride. One of the most effective ways for this to come about would be for our universities to assume the awesome responsibility to both validate and educate those who want to be homecomers -- not necessarily to go home but to go someplace and dig in and begin the long search and experiment to become native.”

“We have become a more juvenile culture. We have become a childish "me, me, me" culture with fifteen-second attention spans. The global village that television was supposed to bring is less a village than a playground... Little attempt is made to pass on our cultural inheritance, and our moral and religious traditions are neglected except in the shallow "family values" arguments.”

Gerrard Winstanley, True Leveller

Gerrard Winstanley (1609 – 1676) was a Quaker reformer and political activist during The Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell. Winstanley was one of the founders of the English group known as the True Levellers or Diggers for their beliefs, and for their actions. The group occupied public lands that had been privatized by enclosures and dug them over, pulling down hedges and filling in ditches, to plant crops. True Levellers was the name they used to describe themselves, whereas the term Diggers was coined by contemporaries.

For libertarian socialist scholar Murray Bookchin there is a coincidence of political projects between German Protestant revolutionary Thomas Müntzer and Winstanley. For Bookchin "In the modern world, anarchism first appeared as a movement of the peasantry and yeomanry against declining feudal institutions. In Germany its foremost spokesman during the Peasant Wars was Thomas Muenzer; in England, Gerrard Winstanley, a leading participant in the Digger movement. The concepts held by Muenzer and Winstanley were superbly attuned to the needs of their time — a historical period when the majority of the population lived in the countryside and when the most militant revolutionary forces came from an agrarian world. It would be painfully academic to argue whether Muenzer and Winstanley could have achieved their ideals. What is of real importance is that they spoke to their time; their anarchist concepts followed naturally from the rural society that furnished the bands of the peasant armies in Germany and the New Model in England."

from "Ecology and Revolutionary Thought" Lewis Herber. (Murray Bookchin).

Cover Design from the remastered 1976 film Winstanley

"So long as the earth is intagled and appropriated into particular hands and kept there by the power of the sword......so long the creation lies under bondage."

~ Gerrard Winstanley Fire in the Bush 1650

"England is a Prison; the variety of subtilties in the Laws preserved by the Sword, are bolts, bars, and doors of the prison; the Lawyers are Jaylors, and poor men are the prisoners; for let a man fall into the hands of any from the Bailiffe to the Judge, and he is either undone, or wearie of his life."

"Buying and Selling is an Art, whereby people endeavour to cheat one another of the Land.......and true Religion is, To let every one enjoy it."

~ Gerrard Winstanley A New-years Gift for the Parliament and Armie 1650

Last Child in the Woods

Richard Louv, author of Last Child In The Woods, provides a well researched account of how children and young people are becoming estranged from nature, and how this is affecting their physical, psychological and social health. He coins the term nature deficit disorder to describe the maelstrom of problems we are building up by cooping up children for long hours in the classroom or their bedrooms with computers. In addition to epidemic obesity, immune, sensory and poor musculoskeletal development in the manner of battery hens, Louv shows how giving over green space to corporations for malls and retail parks is causing psychological and social impacts far beyond those anticipated, including alienation, mental illness, crime, drug addiction, and inability to communicate effectively.

The Guggenheim

With the news that teachers are increasingly being surveilled in the classroom, it is worth noting how the structure of many new build academies is based on an eighteenth century prison designer Jeremy Bentham.

Bentham first proposed the idea of the Panopticon in 1791. The concept of the design is to allow a single watchman to observe all the inmates of an institution without them being able to tell whether they are being watched or not. The fact that the inmates cannot know when they are being watched or not means that all inmates must act as though they are watched at all times, effectively controlling their own behaviour constantly. The name is also a reference to Panoptes from Greek mythology; he was a giant with a hundred eyes and thus was known to be a very effective watchman. This is the principle behind CCTV and IT surveillance, sometimes called the Information Panopticon.

Bentham always conceived the Panopticon principle as being beneficial to the design of a variety of institutions where surveillance was important, including hospitals, schools, workhouses, and lunatic asylums, as well as prisons. In particular, he developed it in his ideas for a "chrestomathic" school (one devoted to useful learning), in which teaching was to be undertaken by senior pupils on the monitorial principle, under the overall supervision of the Master and for a pauper “industry-house” (workhouse). Thus the human touch of "teachers" or "prison wardens" becomes a much reduced necessity. The lasting psychological effects on academy children (who incidentally are not even allowed outside to play in one Panopticon school) remains to be seen.

Here is a montage of academy and prison designs all mixed up. At first glance they are indistinguishable. And the last word is left to Foucault.

The Therapeutic Garden

Research is increasingly showing the necessity of a daily connection with nature for public health. In his impassioned book The Therapeutic Garden, Donald Norfolk relates the history of therapeutic green spaces, mentioning that the term paradise comes from the Persian for ‘walled garden’. Norfolk also details the social value of Thomas More’s Utopia, and how town planners were influenced by Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities of Tomorrow in providing town parks and designs to make verdant livable towns such as Welwyn. Even the utilitarian Victorians were moved to make beautiful city parks for the urbanized masses, which not only served the purpose of ameliorating air pollution, but reduced crime and promoted wellbeing and social cohesion.

Carl Jung: The Soul of Nature

"Through scientific understanding, our world has become dehumanised. Man feels himself isolated in the cosmos. He is no longer involved in nature and has lost his emotional participation in natural events, which hitherto had a symbolic meaning for him. Thunder is no longer the voice of a god, nor is lightning his avenging missile. No river contains a spirit, no tree makes a mans's life, no snake is the embodiment of wisdom and no mountain still harbours a great demon. Neither do things speak to him nor can he speak to things, like stones, springs, plants and animals."

~ Carl Jung ~

Chief Seattle Speech

Though captivatingly beautiful, the Chief Settle speech is not actually authentic. Rather than issuing from the very real Chief Seattle in 1854, those moving words were written by a screenwriter in 1971.

"Chief Seattle is probably our greatest manufactured prophet," said David Buerge, a Northwest historian. The real Chief Seattle did give a speech in 1854, but he never said "The earth is our mother." Nor did he say "I have seen a thousand rotting buffaloes on the prairie, left by the white man who shot them from a passing train." There were no bison within 600 miles of the chief's home on Puget Sound in the Pacific Northwest, and trains to the West were years away.

How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them? Every part of the Earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clear and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people. The sap which courses through the trees carries the memory and experience of my people. The sap which courses through the trees carries the memories of the red man.

The white man's dead forget the country of their birth when they go to walk among the stars. Our dead never forget this beautiful Earth, for it is the mother of the red man. We are part of the Earth and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters, the deer, the horse, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadows, the body heat of the pony, and the man, all belong to the same family.

So, when the Great Chief in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land, he asks much of us. The Great White Chief sends word he will reserve us a place so that we can live comfortably to ourselves. He will be our father and we will be his children. So we will consider your offer to buy land. But it will not be easy. For this land is sacred to us.

This shining water that moves in streams and rivers is not just water but the blood of our ancestors. If we sell you land, you must remember that it is sacred blood of our ancestors. If we sell you land, you must remember that it is sacred, and you must teach your children that it is sacred and that each ghostly reflection in the clear water of the lakes tells of events in the life of my people. The waters murmur is the voice of my father's father.

The rivers of our brothers they quench our thirst. The rivers carry our canoes and feed our children. If we sell you our land, you must remember to teach your children that the rivers are our brothers, and yours, and you must henceforth give the rivers the kindness that you would give my brother. We know that the white man does not understand our ways. One portion of land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. The Earth is not his brother, but his enemy and when he has conquered it, he moves on. He leaves his father's graves behind, and he does not care. He kidnaps the Earth from his children, and he does not care.

His father's grave, and his children's birthright are forgotten. He treats his mother, the Earth, and his brother, the same, as things to be bought, plundered, sold like sheep or bright beads. His appetite will devour the Earth and leave behind only a desert. I do not know. Our ways are different from yours ways. The sight of your cities pains the eyes of the red man. But perhaps it is because the red man is a savage and does not understand.

There is no quiet place in the white man's cities. No place to hear the unfurling of leaves in spring, or the rustle of an insect's wings. But perhaps it is because I am a savage and do not understand. The clatter only seems to insult the ears. And what is there to life if a man cannot hear the lonely cry of a whippoorwill or the arguments of the frogs around a pond at night. I am a red man and do not understand. The Indian prefers the soft sound of the wind darting over the face of the pond, and the smell of the wind itself, cleansed by a midday rain, or scented with the pinon pine.

The air is precious to the red man, for all things share the same breath - the beast, the tree, the man, they all share the same breath. The white man does not seem to notice the air he breathes. Like a man dying for many days, he is numb to the stench. But if we sell you our land, you must remember that the air is precious to us, that the air shares its spirit with all the life it supports. The wind that gave our grandfather his first breath also receives his last sigh. And if we sell you our land, you must keep it apart and sacred, as a place where even the white man can go to taste the wind that is sweetened by the meadow's flowers.

So we will consider your offer to buy our land. If we decide to accept, I will make one condition - the white man must treat the beasts of this land as his brothers. I am a savage and do not understand any other way. I have seen a thousand rotting buffaloes on the prairie, left by the white man who shot them from a passing train. I am a savage and do not understand how the smoking iron horse can be made more important than the buffalo that we kill only to stay alive.

What is man without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone, man would die from a great loneliness of the spirit. For whatever happens to the beasts, soon happens to man. All things are connected. You must teach your children that the ground beneath their feet is the ashes of our grandfathers. So that they will respect the land, tell your children that the Earth is rich with the lives of our kin. Teach your children what we have taught our children, that the Earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the Earth befalls the sons of the Earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves.

This we know - the Earth does not belong to man - man belongs to the Earth. This we know. All things are connected like the blood which unites one family. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the Earth - befalls the sons of the Earth. Man did not weave the web of life - he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. Even the white man, whose God walks and talks with him as friend to friend, cannot be exempt from the common destiny. We may be brothers after all. We shall see. One thing we know, which the white man may one day discover - Our God is the same God. You may think now that you own Him as you wish to own our land, but you cannot. He is the God of man, and His compassion is equal for red man and the white. The Earth is precious to Him, and to harm the Earth is to heap contempt on its creator. The whites too shall pass, perhaps sooner than all other tribes.

But in your perishing you will shine brightly, fired by the strength of the God who brought you to this land and for some special purpose gave you dominion over this land and over the red man. That destiny is a mystery to us, for we do not understand when the buffalo are slaughtered, the wild horses tamed, the secret corners of the forest heavy with scent of many men, and the view of the ripe hills blotted by talking wires. Where is the thicket? Gone. Where is the Eagle? Gone. The end of living and the beginning of survival.

Murray Bookchin: Ecology & Revolutionary Thought

The point is that man is undoing the work of organic evolution. By creating vast urban agglomerations of concrete, metal, and glass, by overriding and undermining the complex, subtly organized ecosystems that constitute local differences in the natural world — in short, by replacing a highly complex organic environment with a simplified, inorganic one — man is disassembling the biotic pyramid that supported humanity for countless millennia. In the course of replacing the complex ecological relationships on which all advanced living things depend with more elementary relationships, man is steadily restoring the biosphere to a stage that will be able to support only simpler forms of life. If this great reversal of the evolutionary process continues, it is by no means fanciful to suppose that the preconditions for higher forms of life will be irreparably destroyed and the earth will become incapable of supporting man himself.

Lewis Herber (Murray Bookchin)
from Ecology and Revolutionary Thought

Rachel Carson: The Sense of Wonder

“Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?” 

~ Silent Spring

“A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full or wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantment of later year…the alienation from the sources of our strength.” 

~ The Sense of Wonder

“To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of years, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.” 

~ The Sea Around Us

Wendell Berry on Food

“The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared food, confronts inert, anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived. The products of nature and agriculture have been made, to all appearances, the products of industry. Both eater and eaten are thus in exile from biological reality.”

“Eating with the fullest pleasure – pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance – is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living in a mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.”

“A person who undertakes to grow a garden at home, by practices that will preserve rather than exploit the economy of the soil, has his mind precisely against what is wrong with us… What I am saying is that if we apply our minds directly and competently to the needs of the earth, then we will have begun to make fundamental and necessary changes in our minds. We will begin to understand and to mistrust and to change our wasteful economy, which markets not just the produce of earth, but also the earth’s ability to produce.”

“But even in the much-publicized rebellion of the young against the materialism of the affluent society, the consumer mentality is too often still intact: the standards of behavior are still those of kind and quantity, the security sought is still the security of numbers, and the chief motive is still the consumer’s anxiety that he is missing out on what is “in.” In this state of total consumerism – which is to say a state of helpless dependence on things and services and ideas and motives that we have forgotten how to provide ourselves – all meaningful contact between ourselves and the earth is broken. We do not understand the earth in terms either of what it offers us or of what it requires of us, and I think it is the rule that people inevitably destroy what they do not understand.

from The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry

Thoreau, from Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

“We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.”

 

~ Henry David Thoreau, from Walden: Or, Life in the Woods~

Gandhi & The Ashram Experiment

A mere enumeration of the vows is enough to indicate that life in the ashram was austere. It was also busy. Everyone had to put in some manual work. There was a spinning and weaving department, a cowshed and a large farm. Every inmate of the ashram cleaned his own plates and washed his own clothes. There were no servants. The atmosphere was, however, not so much of a monastery but that of a large family under a kindly but exacting patriarch. Gandhi was Bapu, the father of the household, Kasturba was Ba, the mother. It was a motley group including little children and octogenarians, graduates of American and European universities and Sanskrit scholars, devout whole-hoggers, and thinly disguised sceptics. It was a human laboratory where Gandhi tested his moral and spiritual hypotheses. It was also to him what the family is to most people, a haven from the dust and din of the world. It was a family linked not by blood or property, but by allegiance to common ideals. Gandhi ruled the ashram but his authority in the ashram, as well as in the rest of the country, was moral. When things went wrong or a member of the ashram was guilty of a serious lapse, Gandhi would take the blame upon himself and atone for it by undertaking a fast.

Donovan: The Song of Wandering Aengus (1971)

Haunting music to the poetry of W. B. Yeats

I wish out to the hazel wood
Because a fire was in my head
And I cut and peeled a hazel wand
And hooked a berry with a thread

And when white moths were on the wing
And moth-like stars were flickering out
I dropped a berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire aflame
But something rustled on the door
And someone called me by my name.

It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossoms in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands
I will find out where she has gone
And kiss her lips and take her hands

And walk among long dappled grass
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

I have only started reading Rob Young’s Electric Eden: A History of Britain’s Visionary Music (for my purposes read: acid folk), but Donovan gets an early mention which alludes to the milieu in which he wrote this otherworldly and inspired music, quoted below.

Donovan’s success after the Dylan- influenced singles such as ‘Catch The Wind’, ‘Colours’, and ‘Universal Soldier’ was in part due to some steerage by his new producer/ svengali Mickie Most, who had urged the young artist to trick out his acoustic folkiness with generous helpings from the new palette of psychedelic colours creeping into pop production in the wake of such records as The Beatles’ Revolver and The Kinks Face To Face. In 1965 he was still immersed in the Woody Guthrie/ Dylan knock- off protest folk of his first LP What’s Bin Did and What’s Bin Did, while on his second, Fairytale, he began to inch towards a more bucolic mode.

… From a landowner named Donald MacDonald, he had just purchased three remote Scottish islands; Islay, Mingay, and Clett, near Skye’s north- west Vaternish peninsula, where he and his friend/ ‘manager’ Gypsy Dave intended to set up a ‘Renaissance community’ of artists, musicians, and poets in a row of tumbledown shepherds’ cottages.

[and of his consequent dreamy musical projects]… These benignly stoned odes fondly and naively imagined a long- lost, bucolic Avalon where like minds of a forever young Flower Generation might gather in peace, singing, dancing, smoking, making love and contemplating the universe in a guilt- free environment.

[after collaboration with the Beatles and Maharishi Yogi in India]… He flew back high as a magic carpet with a pipe- load of Eastern mysticism, and a newly piqued interest in Celtic medievalism and Victoriana, manifested in songs such as ‘Guinevere’, ‘Legend of a Child Girl Linda’, and ‘Season of the Witch’… now with his purchase of a far away island kingdom, Donovan was planning to use his status as a counter- cultural guru to convert the pipedream into a living experiment.

This then was the artist who brought his own stab at Wonderland, the pied piper whose master plan was to sail off to his private fiefdom singing Lewis Carroll’s line ‘Won’t You Join The Dancer?’ and who put up the money for potential acolytes like Vashti Bunyan and Robert Lewis to make the pilgrimage.

The Song of Wandering Aengus appeared on the album H.M.S Donovan, the second album of Donovan's children's music, and was recorded between 1968- 1971.

Grow the Revolution!

Bill Mollison Quotes