In viewing from the end, let’s declare the margin between yes and no, light and dark lies a fertile seed, landed in dappled-light at the edge of a primordial forest, exquisite mutations and movements, as potent in its beginning as is this passing shadow-life where truth is defined as what the opposites have in common, and what is common in this place involves itself with breathing, eating, loving and drinking deeply. A healthy, vibrant life from its beginning, seed and soil.
Let’s begin there and release ourselves from the burden of hypothetical-preconception. Let’s arrive in wonder with our eyes and hearts open, the critical mind left to graze on the grass lands in full sun, preoccupied, while we simply observe in the coolness of the shade.
This seed has had the benefit of being drenched at the edge of a tree’s canopy, where fall rain droplets have gathered living micro-organisms into its round, from the under-surface of leaves before falling to coat seed and decomposing leaf matter with the enzymatic and living force needed for a seed to birth in full signaling capacity; a balance of immunity, nutrient and community informed by seasons and collaborations before it, ever changing and current. The root of this seed will not go blindly or alone. This seed will send a root tip as open and observant as we are in our infancy, childhood and called to adopt in our adulthood at the precipice of any great unknowable change.
There are undifferentiated cells at the very tip of this root, at its own margin and interface with the manifest creation, loaded with all the ingredients needed to form leaf, stem, root, future flower and seed. Decision of how cell production proceeds is based on what will serve best in genetic expression of those traits handed down from ancestors. Those best suited to continue life, a verb which we shall define as thrive, diversity, a multiplicity of options, fluidity, flow, expression. Love. Balance.
As root descends and Cotyledon rises to present in turn, its true leaves to dance a season with sun and moon, a music is perceptible, nuanced and margined itself between the seen and unseen, the perceptible and intuited. We know this music within our own bodies so much alike we are, plant and human. We share a biome. We share a common means of nutrient uptake and an immune function within our bodies that in turn informs our own progeny. We have mobility. They don’t. We both arise from clay. This is the true origin story. First, I’ll share a bit about LaLa Gardens.
Let’s meet at the 100-gallon trough of JLF (Jadam liquid fertilizer). A steel trough filled to the brim with last season’s Thistle, Ragweed, male Cannabis plants of the CBD dominant hemp variety to name a few. Added, the dead bees from my first years attempt at ‘keeping’ honeybees, (though indigenous bees are thriving, from the size of a pinhead to the several bumble types filling the air with their audible vibrations). There are several bird carcasses including the young owl who died caught up in a barbed wire fence, the shedding deer hide from the canyon we lovingly call kitty cat canyon. We are nervous and excited to come face to face eventually with the mountain lion who feasts there. To all this abundance is added water left lightly covered and still, at least a season. What is the expected outcome? Fertilizer is a word we think we understand.
When the lid is lifted in the fall after the work of gardening multiplied by the many orchestrated tasks a natural farmer has at hand, it’s an hours long marveling at the multiplicity of distinct patterned communities of …what exactly? Not to mention the lacy pattern of spores left on the underside of the board cover, the mushrooms that had used the watery, organic mat of rotting things as a substrate, not anticipating hitting their heads, and by way of that event, depositing their spore in lacy black flower patterns, to drop again onto a new substrate of this year’s harvest of less desired plants into the inky blackness of this mesmerizing constructed bog microclimate.
This Jadam method is down the road practice of Korean Natural Farming (KNF) for LaLa Gardens. These are related practices by methodology and too by genealogy as KNF is a long won perfection in practice since the 60’s by Chow Han-kyu in Korea, and Jadam, perfected in on-going practice by his son, Youngsang Cho with Sunyoung Cho (daughter of Youngsang), also interpreter for the family, as they bring this art into our English speaking consciousness. They are practices which both compliment and amplify one another. They are both simple and specific. They are practicable ‘any place, condition or time’ by anyone who can summon the patience of the true observational kind. A skill which gets better with time and practice and a quiet disposition open to the possibility of happiness.
LaLa Gardens was a one-acre Permaculture demonstration garden (Peter Bane taught), before learning KNF hands on from Chris Trump in Boise Idaho, student in lineage to Master Cho. (Where Master is defined within the territory of wisdom. And, wisdom defined by knowledge practiced and in turn taught. Defined as true Citizen Scientist. Defined by coming into balance with natural law so that ones’ expression in doing and speaking become a mouthpiece for the underlying living structures that feed all of us, including our plant and animal cousins). Adding KNF as a tool in the Permaculture toolbox has been the equivalent of poetry. That condensed sweetness of language when it serves the ineffable qualities of life that make one cry and laugh at the same time before giggling is rediscovered. It’s a practice so aligned with the physical natural world to be a fresh whisper from an original garden, a seed gathering voice to be embodied.
We won’t explore the nuanced specifics of KNF or Jadam practice in order to catch a glimpse, available from an angled view, of the very workings of the universe in how our bodies, in full orchestral expression, arise from clay then sway between successional and entropic decay, to rise again. Succession happens. Succession as defined by words like reciprocity, community, diversity, resonance and cooperation. Succession which has as its end view, nothing short of a complete closed-loop of thriving, ever-changing abundance. In nature, successions end view is a full-growth forest of a fungal dominant nature where the ecosystem inclusive of the deepest, anaerobic clays, sands and silts to the tallest cloud-generating trees is and has been in communication and full cooperation with …each other. A system of which we are a part of, at one with, should we decide to be.
Simple path. Hard decisions…at least at first glance. Our critical mind looks up from grazing, the grass looks better over there. A fly is biting. Perhaps knowing what our options are, being in touch with this knowing, our own meristem of undifferentiated potential, we will be empowered to decide in accordance with our ancestral genetic code, with natures cooperative signaling, with the clay from which we first arose.
What happens when we hit clay? When faced with an impenetrable matrix containing within it everything needed for life yet inaccessible in its raw form. The margin between the living and inert. We are not alone to face this question. The biggest illusion arguably is the ‘assumption of separation’, the very thing that keeps our eyes closed in fear of what we stand alone to face, whatever that is for each of us. It doesn’t change the obvious workings of nature, silent, awaiting recognition alone to reveal we are instead in the midst of a great work, furious and consonant, a finished creation in process of constant change; interweaving, cascading, amplifying, resonant and atonal. We are far from alone in the evolutionary scale. We have within it a signaling capacity that comes alive once we arrive at the garden gate, if we tend to it as stewards, attentive to what nature is showing us, signaling to us in kind.
