Class 4 notes by Anthony M.

This week was quite a mindblower. Max Meyers came in and rocked ourworlds.

We started the day with Jay leading us in a song about water.  We broke up into four or five groups, each singing a different part of the song on top of each other. I usually shrink away from this kind of activity, but with this community and Jay’s leadership, I had plenty of fun.  I held the bass notes with a few other men, singing “the wheel in the water goes round and round, the wheel in the water goes round,” while other groups harmonized their voices and snapped and popped with their mouths. Then we walked around, milled about, and continued the song.  I have never seen it done that way.  What a great experience! It felt like monoculture at first, then it became a guild garden of voices.

We heard from Jay about the water crisis we’re facing, and we got to imagine what that might mean for our futures if we continue on with this trend.  I imagined global corporations and banks and countries staking claim to Antarctica and taking huge machinery down there to excavate water from the ice caps.  Greed and grasping is so ingrained in the way the world does things, that it’s easy to imagine the future looking very grim. The FED is inherently against localizing resource. The whole international monetary system is about globalizing rather than localizing resource use.

Then Max Meyers from MECL Mendocino Ecological Learning Center came and gave us a bunch of solutions the pending water crisis.  Walkable swales, especially on smaller scale landscapes like in urban farms. Path, Swale, Berm is Max’s technique.  PSB allows you to walk in between the swales and berms for easy harvesting.  Another technique is to fill swales with wood chips to store the water and slowly release it into the landscape.  He showed us how to utilize every bit of water before it leaves the landscape.  He even taught how to harvest millions of gallons of water from the roads.  You can filter the water that comes through your curb cuts through fungus rich ditches, then through some ornamentals, then to food bearing plants that aren’t roots or ground level fruiters.  Then after some years, you can harvest your toxin-heavy fungus and send it off-site where they can take the heavy metals out and dispose of the toxins properly.

We learned more about swales than could write about here in one sitting. Then we went and got our hands dirty.  I got to create a swale for the first time!  I dug a fish scale swale in front of a fruit tree and added a berm on the downhill side of the tree.  I caught some water off the downhill walking path by cutting in a 45 degree angle slope into the swale.  I took down one side of the berm to act as an overflow channel to another nearby tree.

Sage taught us about keyline, and contour, and watersheds.  These were terms I vaguely knew about, but it was nice to actually see them in 3D and hear the definitions. I especially liked that we all got to make A-frame levels and calibrate them ourselves. Everything was smooth and easy to learn and implement.  We dug a bunch of small and large swales in about an hour. It was amazing to see the land permacultur-fied so quickly before my eyes.  I am inspired to throw garden parties in the future.

Then came dinner time, and well earned.  A few of us got together and went to a restaurant near the school.  It was my first meal with other students.  It was a great group.  I felt great for the rest of the night after that.

Then we learned about non-violent communication.  I have extensive understanding of the subject and it was nice to see the active interest of my classmates.  It’s definitely something people are yearning for.  I got to help explain some of the more challenging parts of the tool with my groupmates.  I’d love to see more communication practices in this class.  I see them as necessary for the reconstruction of our intra- and interpersonal feedback loops that will help us play our vital role in the living systems we are a part of.

The day started off with a meditation.  That was great for me.  Slav lead it in a way that made it very accessible to all.  I don’t think he called it a meditation.  He just got us in our bodies, and feeling present.  After some introductions, we started the awakening the dreamer symposium.  Slav acknowledged a few times that this information may not be new for some of us.  This really helped me stay connected to the information and the whole process.  I felt like my intelligence was being respected.  The folks in the video from Pachamama seemed very wise and responsible.  The lesson from the video was something like “we think we’re separate, and that is the illusion plaguing us all.”  I am not sure they presented a solution to that problem.  My solution is to meditate on the Dharma.

We did some follow-up exercises around imagining what it’s like to talk to our great-grandchildren about what we did and how we struggled to save the planet during its time of need. It felt very useful to think about our victory as if it had already happened.  It’s a perspective that will help us make the dream become a reality.  Without that imagined future perspective, our hope lies in a world of doubt and possibility. This way it is a vision, like Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream.

Jonathon came in and led the group in some living systems exercises.  Everyone was engaged and excited to see systems theory laid out in front of them.  We all made observations about the way systems play out.  With the help of Jonathon, we thought about the world of gardening, interpersonal relations, and the universe with the new goggles of living systems theory.  This juicy material could be referred back to for the rest of the PDC course.  I hope we visit those activities again.

The holonic description of systems had me intrigued.  No system is closed.  Even when it seems closed, you can see that it is dependent on or at least influenced by systems outside.  There are systems inside of systems inside of systems.

We, as living systems, are dependent on self-correcting feedback loops.  As humans, we can choose to say no to feelings.  We can turn away.  This is the root of our problem with the planet.  If we allowed ourselves to feel, then we’d take actions toward healing ourselves.  This is the way our feedback loop is meant to work.  Compassion is unavoidable when we don’t turn away.  But since we have many ways to shut down around feeling, we are beating ourselves nearly unto death.  We don’t want to experience “negative” emotions, but those are the very evidence that we care, and the pathway toward healing.  We can invite those feelings of grief about the destruction of the planet.  We are lucky to have this feedback loop between us and the living system we live in.  Just as we are lucky to have the feedback loop with the cells that live within us.  When the cells stop communicating with us, like with cancer, the systems within systems die.

Jonathon raised many questions for us to ponder.  How much do you focus on fighting against and fighting within the beaurocratic system, and how much do you create a new system?

We got to do yoga twice a day! Amazing.  The teacher really knew her stuff.  That’s the kind of physiological knowledge I’m looking for in a yoga teacher.

The bowl of tears exercise was pretty powerful for me.  People ritualistically thinking about others, and being vulnerable in front of the group is a requisite for sustainable community.

I love the emphasis on applying permaculture and systems theory to every aspect of life, from running a business, to solving a problem, to community building.  I am hopeful and excited about the diversity of tactics we can use to infiltrate the world with permaculture.

- Anthony M.