Some years ago I had a weekend workshop experience with an Andean
shaman from Ecuador. After lunch
on Saturday, the shaman instructed us, speaking through a translator, to sit
absolutely motionless—he emphasized several times the importance of not moving
a muscle—and then started singing to us in his native language. He’d sing for a while and then stop and
let out a drawn-out sibilant sound like a combination of a hiss and a silencing
Shhhh… Then he would begin chanting again.
This process repeated multiple times. After a couple cycles, I noticed that
as he sang I could feel myself being compressed somehow, as if being hugged
from all sides. Then, when he made the sound like whooshing wind that followed,
I felt release. And with each
release, I felt myself expand beyond my previous boundaries.
I do not recall how many of these cycles we went through,
but when the shaman felt complete with that process, he gave us our next
instructions: Walk outdoors and find a piece of vegetation that you find
attractive and bring it back in with you. I smiled as I stood up. I smiled as I watched the other participants walking a little unsteadily
toward the doors. I smiled as the
floor beneath me felt a little spongy under my feet. I smiled as I emerged into
the October sunshine and looked around, wondering where to go.
I found a piece of Asian bittersweet to bring back in. True,
it’s a noxious invasive plant. But when I looked at it, I liked it.
About fifteen minutes later, after everyone was seated back
inside the nature center headquarters, the shaman asked a very interesting
question: “Look at the piece of the plant you brought in,” he said. “What gives
it the form that you see? “
I looked down at the twig in my hands, bare but for tiny
orange fruits dotting its terminations, and the answer to the shaman’s question
was obvious. I didn’t have to think about it. It was literally staring me in
the face: The plant took this form
because it enjoys being in this form.
The form of the plant is an outward expression of its JOY!
As I’ve reflected back on this experience over the years,
mostly what I’ve focused on is the amazing shamanic prowess that allowed our
teacher to bring a group of distractible, half-crazy gringos into direct
contact with the numinous layer of existence through the focused power of his
voice and will alone. Lately, though, I’ve been focusing on the vision itself:
what does it mean if joy is the maker of a living form? How can it affect my
vision and my actions to see that the living world is a visible expression of
joy?
I ask because this seems to be nearly universally unseen, from
sassafras trees celebrating their sassafrasiness to curly docks curling
luxuriantly in their own vital exuberance. Attempting permaculture as a survivor of a
culture that sees form as something disconnected from joy (or any other aspect
of subjectivity) will probably devolve into folly unless this error is corrected.
Let’s take a look at how this affects our thinking, and assume that what’s true
of plants is just as true of animals and possibly much else.
In this culture, when we see a plant growing or a chickadee
flitting from twig to twig, we see it “doing” something:
Q: “What’s that bird doing?” A: “It’s flitting from twig to twig.”
But I doubt such a statement would make any sense from the
interior of the chickadee’s experience. The chickadee is a part of the world,
but it remains intimately connected with it. Each twig in each moment draws forth
that bird for unfathomable reasons—perhaps partly the relative positioning of
bird to branch, partly the need to spring up and take flight that is built into
the chickadee’s physiology, partly the timing, but mostly the onrush of interweaving
stimuli in which, as Jon Young says in his course, Advanced Bird Language, the bird is inextricably linked as both a signal
responder and signal generator. So the short answer is that, like the plant,
the bird is moved by the joy of chickadeeing around as a chickadee, in its
chickadee way in its chickadee world. To put that bird in a cage without even a
branch to hop on, for example, would deprive it of its joy.
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| Photo courtesy Rick Scholz |
“Nonsense!” says the ogre consciousness that seems to rule
these days. “That bird can learn to trudge around on the floor of the cage the
way sensible birds like chickens and turkeys do—if I allow them to do so, that
is, before I eat them.”
The result of this kind of thinking, if we can call it thinking,
is that the songbird thus treated would most likely sicken and die. But even if
it should live on somehow, this much is for sure: It would be less of a
chickadee. Deprive a living being of the opportunity to inhabit its form with joy,
in other words, and its form would begin to weaken and possibly dissolve altogether.
We have a habit in this culture of denying subjectivity and
creating a picture of the world through a grammar that by its very structure misrepresents
it. To its credit, permaculture takes the dualities of noun and verb, actors
and actions, people and landscapes, and tries to pull these into a better unity, its focus on relationships and dynamics replacing reductionistic cause and
effect. But as a design science, permaculture going to fall short if it focuses merely on
form and not on what fills it, even if it brings in the moral dimension as part
of the design process. What really
distinguishes successful permaculturists is their joy in being part of this process,
which is to say—in being. That joy is as much a part of their designs as is the
joy within my sprig of bittersweet.
And, if there is truth in my perception that the quality of
joy infuses and gives form to the living world—from sassafras trees to
chickadees—it follows that it would also apply to people. One logical
consequence of this would be that those who most fully inhabit their joy are also
most fully present on the planet, and the best in-formed. Conversely, those who
are not in their joy are not fully present. Note that joy does not preclude
suffering. In fact, what I’ve seen is that only those who connect most deeply
with their joy have the strength to suffer, to overcome obstacles, and to feel
most deeply into the troubles of this world in their search for new ways.
For all of these reasons, the connection between being in joy
and being truly present would seem to be enormously consequential. It throws
into the open and validates the deep desire of many of us for a way of being in
the world that really works, one that feels good on the inside and which does not
amount to a continuous assault on our sensibilities. As a culture, we tend to ignore
this desire, or worse, we get it backwards, and the forms we create are
actively hostile to life. But we
won’t be able to design healthy systems unless we really show up, and we cannot
really show up unless we find our joy, more fully inhabit our forms and thus
better connect with the living world around us.
