“Something needs to be said about Rosa Parks other than her feet were tired… Lots of people on that bus and many before and since had tired feet… lots of people still do… they just don’t know where to plant them”
— Nikki Giovanni’s “Harvest” (quoted from Rosa Parks with Princess Weekes on You’re Wrong About)
At the risk of being completely reactionary and petty, speaking ill of my ancestors, and altogether regretting this, here is a curmudgeonly blog post in response to a WhatsApp message that irritated me. Because a blog post in response to a WhatsApp message is what “discourse” (or therapy, rather???) looks like these days.
Just like mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of healthy fungal networks, paintings are the fruiting bodies of my solitude. Disturbing solitude has the same effect that tilling soil has on fungal networks: bad.
My biggest takeaway from Machiavelli is that every virtue is a balance between two equal and opposite vices: vice of deficiency, and a vice of excess.
It’s a virtue to be timely.
It’s a vice of deficiency to be a procrastinator.
It’s a vice of excess to be a precrastinator. <-- That's me, I am a precrastinator.
Let’s say we’ve established that the world sucks and we are thus motivated to do something about it. Let’s accept that resisting sucky forces is a way of “doing something”. One of my preoccupations is to reshape my own notions of resistance and subversion from something that is loud, in-your-face, and angry to something that is more quiet, mundane, but still angry, aka. something I have the capacity to participate in.
“The light you see at the end of the tunnel is the front of an oncoming train” – David Lee Roth
I am a ball of contradictions floating around in existential limbo. I mean, more so than usual… All this is to say, if I made mud pies out of wilderness, would you pity me enough to buy them on Etsy?
This semester I have the opportunity to formalize some of my past year’s gardening experience by taking the Organic Master Gardener online course through Gaia College. This weekend I had the privilege of attending Guelph Organic Conference. Both activities were mutually informative and are giving me a lot to think about (so much so that I have to write about it!) and I am so grateful that my employers would sponsor my personal and professional development in these ways.
I’ve been thinking about how much I rely on examples for both functions of communication: comprehension and expression. I appreciate having examples to understand, but I fear using example to express. As I become more conscious of how I engage examples in communication, my relationship with them becomes more akin to “reverence”. Examples are powerful communication tools.
Our first expansion project in Gjøvik was to help expand the Food Forest.
The idea of the Food Forest (or Forest Garden) is to look to a naturally occurring forest as inspiration for how vegetation should be organized in a garden. Notice all the diversity and connections that exist in a forest: multiple levels of shrubbery, thick hummus that keeps water in the soil, animal life, perennials that grow deep roots in a forest.
Our permaculture peeps see the connections and positive feedback loops between all the aforementioned components and are inspired to replicate this system using edible plants. By intentionally planting layers of mutually beneficial, edible and non-invasive perennials, they hope to improve soil quality and create a resilient food system that requires less manual inputs over time. “Harvesting” would be more akin to “foraging” in a forest of food like this!
I have a hunch that most of our “production problems” we have can be reframed as problems of distribution.
Here, I put this hunch of mine to the test against some iconic “problems of the world” in the crudest and most irreverent thought experiment ever, supported by no evidence whatsoever outside of what I can recall off the top of my head.