Saturday, September 15, 2007
Walking the Land with Beginner’s Eyes
My friend Andrea Read who founded The Newforest Institute in Brooks, along with her husband Russell Read, believes that “a continual and deeper relationship with nature allows us to become more and more human.” Walking the land, feeding the birds, harvesting the vegetables makes me care more, makes me more human. Conversely, says Andrea, “if we don’t have a deep connection to nature, we are likely to have a diminished sense of our humanness.” New Forest’s mission is to restore and revitalize the human connection to the land, to develop what they call “land literacy.”
I spent Thursday morning at Brooks, walking the land with students from the Institute and Julia and Charles Yelton, who practice and teach permaculture design (check out: PermacultureDesign.org) They had just returned from an extended working experience in Cyprus where they designed a permaculture garden at a drug rehab facility. At New Forest, they were teaching a three-week course in the basics of permaculture. Thursday morning, the students, my son – an intern at the Institute—and I walked the thirty acres of land that had been clear-cut seven years ago. The challenge to the students was to design a campus with residences, a meeting hall and a garden to fit the history, ecology, altitude and needs of the land. We measured soil acidity, altitude, noticed where small ponds had been built, where deer had tred. We walked through the land, listening to what the land might want to tell us.
We walked with beginner’s eyes, and tradesmen’s tools. We stopped at a grove of spruce trees, all in a circle and bounded by a large trunk, which resembled a statue of the Indian God Ganesha. Julia had us pause, and said, “Listen. What is the Earth saying?” We looked around and one of us said, “This is a sacred spot.” I said, “There’s Ganesha.” Julia pointed out that the spruce tress were healthy and that spruce were dying out elsewhere due to a disease. It would be important to preserve this sacred spot, and to cut back anything that might impair the growth of the trees.
I had begun the journey that day preoccupied by daily, monkey-mind stuff. It dropped away as I walked and listened and opened my beginner’s eyes. I left calm, enriched, perhaps a bit more human.
Here’s a quote I rediscovered last night in the frontispiece of a book called The Desert of the Heart by Karen Chamberlain (Ghost Road Press) I recommend it highly.
“Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth, I believe. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience, to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it. He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it. He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of noon and all the colors of the dawn an dusk.”
N. Scott Momaday, Man Made of Words
Is this the reason so many people from away are moving to mid-coast Maine? (Bangor Daily News Article)
posted by kathrinseitz at 8:09 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home