yes yes yes, there is a home for this! Earth and Activism and Spirit orbit with Starhawk and the Earth Activist Training Permaculture-Palooza

there is a home for this!
yay yay yay!

those words kept landing with a thud in my stomach throughout the 2 weeks of Earth Activist Training. They landed like comfort, like warm tea on a cold day. Mmmmm, relax, spread out, there's a home for this and you're inside it.

I've had a funny hunch that permaculture is an important lens for me. I've worktraded on permaculture sites, tried (unsuccessfully... so far) to get permaculture classes started, written articles about queer permaculture (more on that some other time). But honestly it was all a hunch - my own experience was my greatest proof that permaculture and real liberatory social justice are one in the same. we can talk about composting our poop into fertile soil one moment and then discuss effective methods of direct action the next? we can talk about dealing with police brutality in the same breath as rainwater harvesting? oh wow oh wow yes!

Starhawk's E.A.T. course, which she taught with Charles Williams, is freaking amazing. As she went over the syllabus each item lodged itself in another nook of my brain, found a fold yearning for exactly that flavor to chew on. There was already space for this knowledge, all i needed was the content to fill in the corners and expand the edges of this now-huge space.

this approach to permaculture constantly examines the human relationships that go down alongside the earth sustainability work. we spent 2 nights talking about non-hierarchical organizing and methods to make a meeting functional fun and effective. we talked about magical activism. baby we even devised some magical activism.

On the activism front, this shit is potent. After so much analysis, heartache and headbreak over Occupy, I came to quite a few conclusions about what makes organizing work. It all aligns with permaculture principles. Observe first.  Value the marginal, the edges, those with less power. Form coalitions that can thrive autonomously, not with constant leadership from outside. I could go on. Permaculture extends these ideas into physical realities. It explains through a lens of natural systems that makes these abstract concepts so much more tenable. Diversity isn't just a cute thing people think theyre supposed to want. it is the core essential necessity of a healthy reality. Blam. If you look at something as if it's a problem, it will stay a problem. if you look at something as if it's information, than it's a solution. Blam.

Also, the intergenerationality of the group was as important as the course content. I have been hungering for relationship with my elders. Here i found many generations interwoven and conscious of how important this fabric is for any future progress. We talked about the struggle to expand the narrowing confines of gender binaries, how to talk about a goddess who is not only a goddess, what earlier feminist movements have to teach youth today and what healing needs to take place. Many new questions, and damn it felt good to sit with people who aren't within 15 years of my age.

Permaculture is as ancient as humanity. This word encapsulates a whole history of people living together with the earth. These past 2 weeks I felt for the first time that I was honoring the ancestors and indigenous peoples of this land in a way that was authentic and active, not guilt-ridden and defeated.

this is the beginning of something.  Spirit and magic can be manifested and harnessed to increase human capacity for love and creativity. this is no joke, no subtle thing. This is the power ritual holds for the transformation of life. I'm telling ya. I've held such a distance between myself and spirituality for so long, the vestiges of scientific conditioning clinging to me and hissing "that doesn't make sense!". But here i found that the things that inspire me about science can be the wellspring from which my spirituality gushes - i can marvel at cells and water and star dust and pound the earth in ecstatic frothing. Woopee!

O.U.R.Ecovillage: Kids Camp!

I got a call Saturday night, 9pm, 2 weeks ago.

Brandy said "the person who was supposed to be running kids camp on monday cant anymore. If you still want to do work-trade for the E.A.T. course, can you come out? tomorrow?"

GUH.

I ran home, hyperventilating and sweating. I had applied months earlier to do work trade at OUR Ecovillage for the  EAT Course. EAT = Earth Activist Training, and it is the Permaculture Design Certificate course that Starhawk started and teachers. Why was i so rabid for this course? instead of re-capturing how i had been feeling, heres the blurb i sent my new permaculture friend Nicole in the UK describing my desires (sent months ago) :

"I am hungry for all permaculture skills (I have a lot of experience with
natural building, composting toilets, and rainwater catchment systems,
less experience with gardening), but what I'm looking for specifically is
a permaculture practice that places social justice at the center of the
work. I am very interested in permaculture as a lens on liberation. I am a
queer, feminist, anti-racist and anti-capitalist individual, and all of
these things are very tied in to permaculture for me. I believe that
permaculture has the ability to transform how people organize, how we
create self-sufficient alternatives to dominant structures, how we achieve
liberation of oppressed people, and how we shift activism from an
"anti-domination" stance to a "pro-liberation" stance. To me the
domination of women, of queers, of people of color, and of the earth are
all part of the same nasty mindset. I am most interested in projects that
have strong racial, gender, and economic diversity. I'm super excited
about learning from women and transfolk."

So basically i was searching for permaculture that had social justice at its core. i searched and searched, but was having a surprisingly hard time actually finding groups that were doing this work. lots of people sprinkle it on top, but really focusing on social permaculture? it was often an afterthought.

Starhawk is one of the founders of Eco-Feminism and modern Paganism; she is a huge social justice activist and one of the most important nonviolence advocates, particularly during the anti-nuclear movement of the 90s.nAnd I didn't know this at the time, but she's also super involved with, basically, organizational theory. How groups of people work. What sort of organizing is empowering, inspires action. What meetings make us sing and what meetings make us glaze over. How to achieve non-hierarchy, easier said than done. And ths is basically all of the stuff i think about all the damn time (thus, this blog.) Social Permaculture. give it to me.

ok ok ok ok ok okok okokokokokokokokok,
there needs to be more conversation about this class, which actually started a week ago. Spirituality, building, solutions, direction, acceptance, expansiveness, ritual, forgiveness, coalescence, magic, challenge, etc etc all come to mind. seriously folks, this shit is poppin off and we gotta chat. but for now, let's get back to that phone call.

Basically, it was ridiculous and meant taking a plane, but i couldn't turn away from this. i had been holding this in my heart for months. i found out a had a bunch of miles that would expire unless i used them, and on monday morning i was on a 6am plan bound for Victoria, BC, Canada. Tuesday morning, Kids Camp! began!

and it was great. no one involved knew they would be earlier than the thursday before it started (thats 4 days). there were 16 kids, ages 5-10. 3 counselors. Us counselors joked often about how crazy it all was - all thrown into it, no schedule, everything and i mean just about everything off the cuff. but the kids were so creative and amazing, kind and ready to learn. and this place, this place. this place is an endless well of fun stuff to do, cause guess what, that's what happens when communities come together and decide to do stuff. this ecovillage is full of projects, from farm work and animal care to building with mud and clay and making your own butter and wandering in the woods. we actually pulled it off because the community held space for the kids, because us counselors were badass at checking in about each others needs and boundaries, and because this sort of place is ripe with spaces to learn. oh, and mostly cause the kids were amazing. if anything our realization that it was actually chaotic was the most negative part of kids camp, cause the actual days went very well.

it's a funny thing. Brandy, the director of OUR Ecovillage, kind of irresponsibly dumped a huge load on 3 unknowing people, assuming theyd figure it out. And we grumbled that it was irresponsible, but you know what? She was right. We figured it out. And it was great. Learning can be funny.

WHATS BeeN GOinG On?!?! 1st: Grandma Turned 90

My grandmama turned 90 a couple of weeks ago. Me, my mama, her two sisters and everybody's respective kids and partners gathered in western mass. to celebrate. and wow.

my grandma was always extremely strong, direct. encouraging. with her dementia she has softened; she is kinder than ever, constantly grateful, always smiling, shaking her head and saying things like "i cant believe it" or "youre gorgeous." it's like all of the love juice that has always been a part of her actions is now bubbling to the surface, being articulated in the only words she thinks worthwhile saying. what used to be what she did but never said, now she says. she says love.

i realized that this wasnt new (i used to think that her dementia was bringing on this new uber-loving thing) when i saw all of her children gather for her birthday. her children are all, first and foremost, incredible mothers. the three sisters are strong, deep, giving, unbelievable mothers. they are fierce. they support eachother. the incredible mothering that my grandma provided has extended itself and thus increased exponentially, as the next generation has taken her love in, digested it through each personal lens, and spread it onto their own families.

at the birthday i saw the magical transmutation of love and skillful mothering through the generations. it doesnt stop. it is steady fire. the more you give it, the more it grows. this is a clan, there are secrets to these skills; not discrete things you can write down, but ways, intentions, care.


all hail grandmothers.