Water, Unconscious

Michael Greenstein is making a newsletter for Intentional Communities that I want to support and luckily, he’s asked me to write an article from the Yarrow Ecovillage point-of-view.

Michael tells me the theme for this month is ‘water’.

Water! We, here in our ecovillage, are in the midst of the confustication of moving houses, of finishing up construction, planning landscaping, restructuring governance, buying a new tractor, and hiring a ecovillage planner. Water! ... Water is last thing I’m thinking of! I’m still hanging onto summer. Water means rain at this point, and I’m in denial.

And besides, I’m not confident in writing on command about a single topic... I still feel new at this writing business and haven’t tried an exercise like this before.

I have a small friend visiting, who wants to walk my black dog as a diversionary tactic to stall her bedtime. Venturing out with her, allows me to procrastinate with the writing, too. The sunset is drawing in closer and earlier, this end-of-summer evening, as we head down our lane, hand in hand, and hand on leash, towards our far pasture, to pick some late blackberries. She’s an observant child and she spots some sheep on the distant hillside.

“Listen!” I say to her, “Can you hear them bleating?” We stop, and hold our attention. Nope! ... too far ...and wind in the wrong direction. We hear dripping instead. The rows of blueberries on the farm next door, run close and parallel with our lane. They are bushes confined by wires stretched between posts and there’s a black plastic pipe running along the top that has regular holes and a regular drip, drip, drip.

The rows are constrained, straight, uniform and tidy. Our neighbour keeps weeds in control, the birds out, and uses a mechanical picker to harvest what, presumably, is a profitable crop. I’m not tempted at all to taste a sample of his berries, even as they are close to hand and a beautiful blue. When the weeds are standing dead, the berries don’t look alive, either.

There are noises, too, on our side of the lane that aren’t sheep baaaing. Soban, our own ecovillage farmer, is irrigating his cucumbers with the nozzle on his hose gushing into a long trough between the rows, making a long, blue stripe of reflected sky and a lively sound. His cucumber plants are carefully tied to strings that hang from long wire rows. When they sway in the wind, they remind me of passengers on a bus hanging onto the upper hand rail, jostling cheerfully along ... not going anywhere at all.

I’m enjoying myself, but still, I have more thinking to do before I write about water. I’m glad there’s some staining to do on the boards for the new cordwood-masonry house.

Staining is a good activity for the kind of musing meditation that precedes my writing. I’d like to use the big brush with the soft bristles, but it’s lost. I didn’t lose it ... Can’t have been me ... I haven’t been staining for awhile. Someone else lost it. There are so other people to choose from to blame ... many of us are taking a turn at this job, as it’s rather a pleasant one ... satisfying, not too difficult, and helpful.

We’re standing in a circle, wondering ... Is each one of us looking to the others as a person who could have lost a brush, even though we’d rather not go that blaming way? Nevertheless, it’s an easy direction for humans.

Shawn plunges his hand into the cleaning bucket that’s been standing at our feet ... and brings out the brush. It’s been submerged and hidden all along, right there in front of us... in the water.

Ah! I think. Water. There all along. Dripping, gushing, standing still. Now I know what I’ll write for Michael’s theme ... About water, unconscious.

I hold in my long ago memory and imagination, a particular way of water, that still inspires me, as I live in this intentional community.

Have you heard of chesil? ... and/or Chesil Beach in the south of England?

Chesil is a kind of gravel and Chesil Beach, the place, is remarkable in that it has a stream that flows completely through the gravel ... through, not on top. You can sense as you stand there, rather than see or feel, the water moving beneath your feet. Water that seeks the cracks and spaces. Flows around.

Patient.

Soft.

Persistent.

And at its end, reunited with the sea.

Chesil would be in the Permaculture principles, wouldn’t it? ( Permaculture being about finding better ways for humans to live in nature.)

I can see it in ... Creatively use and respond to change. Use small and slow solutions.

Where can you see it?

Holmgren's 12 design principles from Wikipedia.

These restatements of the principles of permaculture appear in David Holmgren's Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability ^[5]; also see permacultureprinciples.com ^[6];

1. Observe and interact - By taking the time to engage with nature we can design solutions that suit our particular situation.
2. Catch and store energy - By developing systems that collect resources when they are abundant, we can use them in times of need.
3. Obtain a yield - Ensure that you are getting truly useful rewards as part of the work that you are doing.
4. Apply self-regulation and accept feedback - We need to discourage inappropriate activity to ensure that systems can continue to function well.
5. Use and value renewable resources and services - Make the best use of nature's abundance to reduce our consumptive behaviour and dependence on non-renewable resources.
6. Produce no waste - By valuing and making use of all the resources that are available to us, nothing goes to waste.
7. Design from patterns to details - By stepping back, we can observe patterns in nature and society. These can form the backbone of our designs, with the details filled in as we go.
8. Integrate rather than segregate - By putting the right things in the right place, relationships develop between those things and they work together to support each other.
9. Use small and slow solutions - Small and slow systems are easier to maintain than big ones, making better use of local resources and producing more sustainable outcomes.
10. Use and value diversity - Diversity reduces vulnerability to a variety of threats and takes advantage of the unique nature of the environment in which it resides.
11. Use edges and value the marginal - The interface between things is where the most interesting events take place. These are often the most valuable, diverse and productive elements in the system.
12. Creatively use and respond to change - We can have a positive impact on inevitable change by carefully observing, and then intervening at the right time.