An Ode to Trees!

November 19, 2021

Remember this?

One day, back in the early ’70s, Mom asked me why I no longer go to church. “Nature is my church,” I responded, instantly. “Oh, I’ve heard that one before,” she wisecracked.

My family was Catholic. Nature was not part of our culture, beyond the rare family picnic in a park.

This morning on our walk, puppy Shadow and I were astounded to be greeted with the hushed presence of the two large, mature gingko trees on the Indiana University campus raining down golden leaves. The lawn was already a carpet of gold, and the trees kept raining more down. I felt both stunned and honored to be present at such a great ceremony, one which, obviously, from what was happening, occurs only once a year, and all at once.

I was so wishing I had brought my phone with me to at least take a photo!

The gingko is native to China; here’s one, raining . . .

 

This 1400 Year Old Ginko Tree Rains Down an Ocean of Yellow Leaves in Autumn

Digging further, I was stunned to discover that gingko is the world’s oldest tree, dating back 200 million years, to the Age of the Dinosaurs. Furthermore, it is a single species, with no living relatives.

Peter Crane: History of Gingko, Earth’s Oldest Tree

I was unusually grateful to have been serendipitously present for this beautiful natural ceremony, and noted that it occurred just after I had decided to actually venture out of here, tomorrow night, for really, the first time since the plandemic, to sit in the IU Fine Arts Theater for the movie, The Hidden Life of Trees.

And, to add to that synchronicity, here’s another one: for the last few weeks, on my daily walks, I have found myself singing “The falling leaves, drift past the window . . .”  the lyrics of which, I had actually remembered, in their entirety.

Like anyone who spends time alone in forests, I have long felt the intensely serene atmosphere generated by trees. And like many people, there are times when I reverently hug a tree, or stand with my spine against it, or sit at its feet, to help ground and calm myself when in need. And always, always, I’m so very grateful to trees for their powerful, steady persistence, simultaneously rooting into the ground and reaching for the sun, day by day, year by year, decade by decade, and for some, like the ancient gingko, century after century and even way beyond — vibrating their strong, subtle harmonic into the air which we humans then breathe in, and, if we are very very fortunate, then make our own, if but for a single moment!

In my daily practices — yoga, chikung, taichi — I aim to internalize the tree’s extraordinary capacity to link Above to Below, via their strong, straight trunks. Like a vertical tree, I draw energy up from the sacred earth and down from the holy heavens, circulating this strong intense loving energy through my all-too-human heart to radiate out, in all directions horizontally, a blessing.

It’s my way of giving back.

So you can just imagine how deeply grateful I felt to be admitted into their more shining world during our communion this morning under the ceremony of the golden rain.

I’ll end with this photo, taken a few days ago unbeknownst to me by a friend, of Shadow and me walking through a wonderful treed arch towards the light.

 

Has the Covid Incantation Invaded both Permaculture and Transition Town movements?

November 18, 2021

It’s weird. I’ve long noticed that I simply can’t predict who is going to fall for the massive, malevolent, brilliantly produced and directed Covid Con. Spellbound people “show their true colors” — or rather, reveal the mental mask that has been surreptitiously placed on them — just about anywhere. You can imagine my shock when my original herbalist teacher told me that she got vaxxed . . .

Whether or not someone’s going to fall for the con seems random. But is it? I’ve noticed that, with exceptions (like myself),  the higher the level of education, the more likely will the person fall for the con. For example, Bloomington Indiana, where I live, is a highly vaxxed and masked town set within a rural environs where hardly anyone wears a mask much less gets vaxxed.

BTW: the higher one’s level of education, the more thoroughly the mind has split from the body, and the less grounded, safe, secure, one feels upon this good earth. This is relevant, because:

It may be that one way to recognize those likely susceptible to Covid indoctrination is to somehow assess their level of underlying free-floating anxiety. At least that’s what Mattias Desmet thinks; and after nearly two years of putting up with this massive, multi-layered, Big Media Big Med Big Tech Big Gov driven absurdity, I’m ready to agree with him. The drat Covid Spell can show up where I least expect it. Not just in many of my friends and relatives, but for example, in both the Permaculture and Transition Town movements!

I remember, about six months ago, receiving an email from one of the foremost permaculture teachers in the U.S., in which he began, seemingly breezily, by saying that now that both he and his partner are vaxxed — geez! Was he saying that with the usual excited undertone of “finally we were able to protect ourselves,” or in the more practical tone of “good; we got that out of the way, now we can go on”?

Whatever the tone implied by the words, immediately, upon reading this remark I was internally shaking my head in utter disbelief.

WHAT? YOU ARE? AND YOU THINK THIS IS A GOOD IDEA? I wanted to either cry or scream. But . . . But . . . But . . . That’s like spraying Monsanto on plants, to kill bugs. Don’t you realize that? Don’t you see your own body/mind/spirit as  its own brilliant, integrated permaculture biome? HUH? I just don’t get it.

I don’t get it, when the two of you are the ones who originally taught me that in order to keep plants healthy, rather than kill the offending intruder, simply nourish the plant with more of what it needs. That bad bugs prey on weak plants.

I want to shake my permaculture mentors out of of the thick cement helmets they have apparently rammed onto their overstuffed heads —  with only one (mainstream media) channel in, resulting in not just fear of a so-called bad bug, but likely worse, if Desmet is correct, and their underlying anxiety has resulted from an apparently scared world-view of impoverished scarcity. Come on, man! What happened to permaculture’s sacred world-view of unceasing abundance? Huh? Huh?

I thought you were the ones who would show us the way out of the wreckage our decaying our military/industrial culture has insidiously wreaked upon both humans and the earth beneath our feet. You showed me the way, with permaculture! I remember, the first words out of your mouths, in that Permaculture Design Course I took, back in 2005. I was hooked! This is the way! We can transform the whole world! Yes! We can do this!

Likewise the equally righteous and visionary Transition Town Movement, which one can also view as yet another permaculture dimension — of social and urban design. Here’s a post about what’s happened to Totnes, which, if I recall correctly, is the original Transition Town, model for all the others across this globe.

Project Fear and the invasion of Narnia