It’s done. After two more very full days in 100° temps, young and old meeting, greeting, hugging, speaking, announcing, debating, joking around, downloading detailed info, interacting emotionally, mentally and spiritually with hundreds of other very full souls who are doing righteous work for themselves, communities and the planet — it’s no wonder we feel satisfied! No wonder we’re all over each other when we do meet up and realize just how wide-spread our permacultural and other regenerative practices are becoming, and especially, how we’re now making enormous headway in thickening the underground miceellial fabric in which all our various nodes are embedded.
Speaking of which, yesterday, after my Green Acres presentation — more on that in a minute — I sat for awhile on shady grass with a group that was deeply ensconced in talking about fungi, it’s habits, especially sexual, and what I now call “identity diffusing.” Forget male/female polarity! The nucleus of one spore might actually fuse with the nucleas of another, and/or one nucleus will leave and travel elsewhere, depending on the job that needs to be done in delivering nutrients to plants. Furthermore, fungi DNA gets really hoary and confusing, making utter nonsense of our human habit of trying like hell to classify the natural world into tidy pre-set categories.
Keep in mind that I was hearing all this while lying on my side exhausted, as a kind of murmuring, with audience, including myself, astonished, despite my somnolence. So I will definitely need to pursue this “identity diffusion” understanding when I get home, because it may be that fungi is my new Teacher.
My own presentation, after five days of being asked over and over again to join as a speaker in one forum after another — speaking for five minutes, three minutes, one minute, depending — was like a joke that the universe pulled on me. Here I had spent three weeks of my precious time preparing for a slide show that details the Evolution of Green Acres from neighborhood into village, and in fact, went to the organizers several times over the first few days of the convergence with a request for a space dark enough to show the slides. And they did try to give me what I wanted, though difficult, since all the presentations were in the daytime, outside!
Anyway, so that very morning, yesterday, I realized that I should just forget about doing a slide show, since it would be so faintly visible, and just wing it. After all, I’m good at winging it, it’s mostly what I do. The slide show was a way of imposing discipline on this otherwise unruly Sagittarius. So I marched back up to the organizers table and told them that. Okay. Done.
Since many many people had come up to me after I had spoken during these various forums earlier, and asked about my presentation, when and where, I figured I’d have a good audience. Since I had engaged in heart-to-heart talks with young and old on many levels, all of us realizing so profoundly that everybody on earth is lonely, hungry for community, I figured we’d have a good time in that hour assigned specifically to the Green Acres experiment.
And guess what? Only six people showed up — and none of them were people who had asked about it earlier! I was astonished. Kept expecting at least some of them to show up . . . Finally I figured the universe was playing a joke on me; it was at that point that my own need for control, once again, flew out yet another window. First I had finally let go of presenting the slide show here, then I had to descend to a deeper level of my own ego, to let go of my relative importance at this convergence. Big time learnings. But the seven of us present DID have a great hour together. And all in all, there are plenty of folks here in northern California who know now about our village-building experience in Bloomington, Indiana. Some of them might even visit.
And by the way, I signed us up with NuMundo.
Check out this website. An extraordinary effort by young techies to further the movement by actually mapping on-the-ground permaculture and other regenerative projects world-wide. Here I am with David Casey, the founder, having just spent 15 minutes with him putting Green Acres Village onto the map.
Then, prior to lying around with mushroom dreams, I wandered over to the Main Stage, where a forum with Starhawk and others was in progress on the impacts of Climate Change, and the relevance of permaculture and other regenenrative practices. This was during their Q&A. But of course, part of the conversation must have had to do with Climate Change Denial, and how to mitigate that! I say this to give you the presumed context for a remark of the man directly in front of me, who raised his hand, and said, and I quote him exactly:
“What if it IS a hoax, and we build a better world for nothing?”
Of course, this remark elicited both shock and hilarity.
Then, without missing a beat, and with a wry little smile, Starhawk responded:
“We can always wreck it again.”
BTW: I’ve begun to penetrate Starhawk’s gigantic new book, City of Refuge, as I prepare to make my way north, over a five day period, through Ernest Callenbach’s long-ago imagined “ecotopia,” — each afternoon and evening will find me deep in conversation with at least one extraordinary woman — to Seattle.
Here’s a final gifting from the convergence, our Peace Altar, made with bits and pieces of nature found on this land.
And here’s a final reminder from our NAPC land host, the Solar Living Institute: five or six old cars, adjacent Highway 101, with gigantic trees growing through them.
Yep, “we can always wreck it again,” but then Nature always bats last.
