The Inner Path of Permaculture

There’s something magical that happens for me around mid-July as we decidedly move out of the summer solstice time and I feel reenergized by a barely perceptible yet daily increasing tilt toward fall. I don’t think I’m alone in this, and as we get closer to the month of August and start accelerating toward the equinox, I often feel another, stronger uptick in nervous energy as the days grow shorter. Perhaps in this people are similar to squirrels busily fattening up on summer bounty. Maybe I’m on the same page as my garden leeks, which usually seem to suddenly realize after a few months in the ground that it’s time to get busy and start outwardly growing.

But I love mid-July because, even though I can feel the pace starting to pick up with each passing day, we’re also still plenty deep in the fat part of summer, a time known for bringing on midsummer dreams. I find myself caught up in little whirlpools of fascination everywhere, whirlpools that tend to get bigger the longer I participate in them. I think the languor brought on by summer's heat helps me relax into those places, too. As a gardener or walker in woods and meadows, I am certain I’ve learned as much by ambling about in this way as by disciplined study. Sitting down in the squash patch or resting on a fallen log for a while can be an educational experience, and at this time of year especially, it feels like there’s still time for some of this productive laziness.

Noticing way the tilt of the earth affects the inclinations of my mind and body brought me to a number of thoughts about permaculture as a personal journey. I am reminded of a few years ago when I read Sam Keen’s book, A Passionate Life. The basic idea I gleaned from Keen’s book is that humanity is in the midst of an erotic crisis, and the conflation of the erotic and the sexual is but one of the many symptoms of a broader cultural crisis at the root of many of our social ills. Keen takes his readers back to the original meaning of eros, which to the Greeks was understood as “the prime mover of stars and acorns and the affairs of men.” (p. 26) 

Setting aside for a moment the obvious error evident in the quote above — did the Greeks leave women out of a discussion about eros? — the immediate point is that eros moves everything, which perhaps also explained for them why people, squirrels and leeks all tend to step it up a notch at certain times of year. However, by relegating our conception of the erotic only to what happens in our bedrooms, there is a tendency in our culture not to see how this same forward-leaning impulse of life also moves in our thoughts and feelings, and how it forms the driving energy behind our households, communities, and workplaces. It is easy to forget how this thing that moves us, call it what you will, also connects us to everything else that moves. This connection spans everything from the slowly moving mountains to things most ephemeral: the flash of insight, the bursting of an angel’s trumpet into flower.

This is highly significant, because from what I’ve seen, the strongest practitioners of permaculture are not first and foremost the most learned people. Yes, they do tend to amass considerable, even amazing stores of knowledge, but the most essential quality of real permaculture practitioners is their aliveness to their world, since only by being alive to the world can we align our livingness with it.

However, we run into strong cultural headwinds here. The culture tends to separate things, and our inner schisms ultimately manifest as an overdeveloped capacity to compartmentalize. This in turn is reflected in the structures and systems we design. These external structures tend in turn to militate against awareness of our profound connection with all of life. Modern agricultural practices show one of the more grisly outcomes: the reproductive power of plants and animals is here commandeered and dominated in a way that would make most devoted sadists woozy. We lay waste to the fertility principle. I suggest we do so because we have not adequately cared for our own, and more broadly for that thing now beyond the pale of science that Keen hints at —perhaps we should just call it life.

Keen writes, “First love and sex, like value and fact and mind and matter, were separated. Love became a private, subjective emotion, a way of feeling about another person. Its cognitive status was denied; it was not considered a way of knowing. Modern philosophies of science rejected as sentimental nonsense Augustine’s conclusion that we can only know what we love.” (p. 15) Yes, that does sound like science: Get rid of that fluffy-headed “love” stuff! 

But we see where that takes us, right?  It brings us exactly to where we are, and I honestly think we can do better than this. Love may not be reasonable, but that doesn't mean there is no reason for it. Still, there are those who would say that it is naïve to include feelings in our ways of knowing, or even deny the possibility of connecting with the pulse of life that moves us. Some look at the state of the sciences and say and that what is needed to rectify the absence of these inner connections is a stronger code of ethics. From my perspective there is no evidence to support the idea that external measures will support life-enhancing action in any field when the inner connections to life are lacking or disregarded.

Later in his book, Keen elaborates on the observation that we treat the earth precisely as we treat our bodies. This should come as no surprise, because the two are one and the same. Thus, the junkie and the industrialist, both under their own kinds of anesthesia, become addicted to spilling toxic substances into living streams, be they blood vessels or rivers, and the CAFO operator is, in every sense of the word, a pervert.

In a way, it’s a bit of an irony (and perhaps a great moral victory!) to even study permaculture as I first did, in a university biology department, given the extent to which science has become the handmaiden of industry and a tool for the abstract, symbol-driven world of monetary gain. Take a look at the people who really care about the practice of permaculture and we see that it’s about making connections, and the deeper motives of these people must align with those of the natural systems in which they are embedded. Thus, and this is really the main insight I’m offering here, there is another axis of permaculture practice that intersects with the art and science of arranging elements on a given piece of land. This other axis, the one I’m calling the inner path of permaculture, goes straight through the living heart of the designer.

The importance of this axis is obliquely hinted at when we look at the crucial role of observation in the design process. What moves the designers’ eyes?  What sublime impulse walks us forth?  What moves our thoughts, our feelings, and what brings forth remembrances that lead to sudden conceptions, ideas, and the creative upwelling of inspiration?  In a very real sense, our ideas spring from the soil of our minds as the flora and fauna of that inner terrain. “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower,” as Dylan Thomas wrote . . . yes, that too drives us.

This is why it’s so important to follow those little whirlpools of fascination, the ones that that get bigger the longer one looks, even if it takes a bit of time. Through them, the world looks into us as lovers, touches and dialogs with us, and moves us to its side. When we feel the ancient depth and urgency in the rise and fall of each breath that we take as part of earth, we will know ourselves as well as the planetary system that meets and inspires us, breath by breath, with its own gifts and passion. A friend of mine once quoted, “I am the Earth walking,” and so likewise we must also be the Earth’s thought, speech, and feeling. Taken together, this is the consciousness of unity, and as a connecting science, the practice of permaculture ultimately requires nothing less.