The Spiritual Destitution of Statism, Perpetual manufactured cultural adolescence and their ecological impacts
exploring the ecological impacts of plant blindness, the spiritual poverty of that is perpetuated by the religion of statism / modern industrial civilization and the public education system
I stumbled across the post linked below yesterday
This made me feel moved to reply with a couple longer comments. I shared those comments as notes so that others could have the opportunity to contribute to the discussion and a thoughtful subscriber requested I make the note(s) into a full post so he can bookmark it.
The following is a slightly enriched version of those notes.
Spiritual poverty is the cause of these trends of deforestation, dietary choices are secondary to that.
In modern society, spiritual poverty begins when we train children to be able to recognize more than a thousand corporate logos yet less than ten plant species. It becomes spiritual destitution when we train humans to organize themselves into silly sociocultural geopolitical identity groups involving the religion of Statism and this results in a species with immense potential squandering our gifts inventing ways to insult, dominate and kill one another (and the living Earth) for profit and ego, rather than live in service of Creation and make this world a more beautiful place generation after generation.
One of the many degenerative inevitable results of this widespread ecological illiteracy, “plant blindness” and statist dogma leads to a sort of impoverishment of the soul. Statism leads to materialism, anthropocentrism, domination, violence and “plant blindness”. Plant blindness leads to spiritual blindness. It does not matter how many times someone is brought to a building or institution designated as a place to know/connect with the divine, if one embraces statism and lives with plant blindness and in a place so ecologically degenerated that they can no longer walk in the Cathedrals that the Creator designed called Old Growth Forests then their ability to perceive and know the will, genius and beauty of Creator’s design is impaired and their perception of beauty skewed.
Being raised in a place devoid of the ancient majestic rooted beings that once dominated the landscape distorts peoples baseline assumptions for what a forest is, influencing increasingly anthropocentric, materialistic and degenerative lifepaths in humans raised there. Multi-generational amnesia results and ecological illiteracy leads to poverty of the heart and imagination.
Or in other words, as expressed by the character in this clip from a film called “Dinner With Andre”, in an extreme urbanized (“smart city” type) situation, it can lead to such a devastating form of ecological illiteracy and plant blindness that “we become a bunch of robots, and as history and memory are erased, there could come a time when almost no-one remembers what life was like on the planet”.
Seeing those problems as an invitation to apply solutions that are potentiated by having a blank slate (a space that is currently in an early ecological successional state due to human disturbance) we can begin the sacred work of planting forests composed of many food and medicine bearing species so that we regenerate forest habitat while also taking action to feed human communities, offer a space for creating new place based traditions, honouring ancestral food practices and create opportunities for interactive educational programs to increase ecological literacy in the youth and offer the antidote for generational amnesia.
Also, “re-wilding” carries a meaning for some that it does not for me.
Here is how I go about “Re-Wilding”
I advocate propagating and awakening dormant ancient seeds within hearts, minds and landscapes simultaneously. I plant seeds with my hands and with words to create places that would appear as “wilderness” to the untrained eye. These are spaces that cultivate and awaken what Martin Prechtel describes as “the tree of memory of our Indigenous Souls”
As I stated in my conversation with James Corbett recently regarding the depopulation propaganda, unlike many "sustainable development" agenda enthusiasts, I do not see humans as incompatible or as an inevitable imposition on nature/biodiversity.
Human presence can enhance so called “wild places” when humans are ecologically literate.
Capable and respectful humans have been living in forests and other biodiverse habitats along side large animals for millennia. We do not need walled off “nature preserves” we need to decolonize our civilized minds and re-wild humanity.
Civilization (the human organizational structure that involves state organized theft and pillaging using violence to create metropolitan centers of biodiversity stripped human habitation, necessitating soldiers and leading to shorter and more dull lifespans) is a very adolescent expression of our immense human gifts.
In fact, one might say that the prolonged (and artificially manufactured/perpetuated) state of adolescence is a central driving factor in perpetuating this self-destructive, short sighted, and hubristic application of human ingenuity (“civilization”).
For more on what I mean about artificially manufactured and perpetuated adolescence, here is a quote from a book called “Sand Talk” about the origins and purpose of the modern government (tax payer funded) “education” (aka human domestication) system.
“There is a reason ideological battles and culture wars filled with rhetoric about patriotism and nation-building are fought around schools and schooling. Schools are sites of political struggle in this civilisation because they are the main vehicles for establishing the grand narratives needed to make progress possible. The entire history of globalisation hinges on the story of modern public education, how it began and why. I often wonder what would change if people were able to see this story retold from the perspective of an Aboriginal person reading back through old federation documents and the earliest syllabuses from Prussia.
The story of modern public education, then, is a story of transition between an age of imperialism and an age of modern globalisation. It begins, like all stories about civilisations, with the theft of land from indigenous people. The people were the Prūsai, natives of an area between modern day Germany and Russia, who lived there from at least 9000 BCE.
They traded amber and hemp across Europe and into Asia, but mostly lived by hunting and fishing. They maintained this society right up until the thirteenth century.
In the south, trouble had been brewing for centuries. Germanic and other Nordic refugees (from previous Roman invasions and rising sea levels, and from starvation as a result of degraded soil caused by recent incursions of agriculture) went viking across Europe. Viking was a verb meaning raiding in those days, and these boat people really were a problem. They had overrun Britain and changed that island forever, although Roman and Celtic invaders had already been there before them, so the poor old British copped a triple dose of colonial abuse. The Prūsai, however, were lucky enough to escape the worst of this colonisation process for many centuries, and continued their traditional lifestyle, along with many other indigenous nations to the north. For a while, at least.
There weren’t single big nations like today, but pluri-national groups of regions—lots of regions all with different laws, languages and customs: very much like Australia was before colonial occupation. Big countries with one law, one language and one people are a very recent invention designed to facilitate more effective control of populations and resources for economic purposes. This is why, after Rome had left the Germanic regions, the rich landowners struggling for dominance there worked hard to restore the Roman system of social control. They fought to reinstate this power system for a thousand years, with many small states battling each other for supremacy, the Roman eagle standard emblazoned on their coats of arms. This obsession with Rome would cause some problems down the track, particularly for the indigenous Prūsai to the north.
In the thirteenth century, an organisation called the Order of Teutonic Knights broke away from the other German regional groups and decided to create their own new state. The site they chose was Prūsailand, so they invaded and exterminated or assimilated the Prūsai people, making the entire population Teutonic. In classical and fantasy art, however, you won’t find any images of knights wiping out indigenous people. What you will find instead are armoured heroes bravely slaughtering beasts, dragons and mythical monsters. These creatures came to represent the tribal cultures of the world: the romantic European image of the knight slaying the dragon is actually a hidden reference to the systematic genocide of what were called pagan peoples. This European tradition of propaganda in which victims of genocide are portrayed as dangerous animals was later used to great effect against (the Gael, the indigenous people of Turtle Island) Jews (and then later by the Jews against Palestinians), and Aboriginees in Australia, who up until half a century ago were often considered animals rather than human citizens.
By 1281, the Order of Teutonic Knights had all but wiped out the native Prūsai and created the new state of Prussia. The interesting thing is that these ‘white knights’ had been heavily involved with the Crusades, in which the Roman Church had been fighting a Christian war for centuries to take over Jerusalem and other holy places. They failed so badly that instead of bringing Europe to the Middle East, they brought the Middle East back to Europe, in the form of a system of government that they had seen there and liked. This system was in its final stages of decline during the Crusades, with most of the Middle Eastern forests and farming land stripped bare and turned into desert by the ravages of the world’s first civilisations. The survivors had begun returning to more sustainable ways of life—tribalism, subsistence agriculture and pastoralism in the following centuries (a way of life that would later be turned upside down again by twentieth-century Anglo oil interests).
The failed model borrowed by the Teutonic Knights wasn’t invented in the Middle East. It had its origins in an unsuccessful Asian experiment of large states with total government authority and rampant expansion and production. This was completely alien in Europe, which was used to a system of petty warlords and oligarchs struggling chaotically over dwindling natural resources, while local peasants in villages persisted much as they had since the beginning of the iron age, periodically disrupted by the activities of the powerful. The exotic new system introduced by the Teutonic Knights was all about absolute power concentrated into one highly organised central government that would control the daily lives of all.
Remember too that these new Prussians had just spent a thousand years trying to replicate the system of control that they had experienced under the Romans who had originally conquered Germania. (Britain and the US later mastered Rome’s imperial method—a system of establishing indigenous elites to keep conquered peoples in check, promoting lateral violence and competition to make subjugated peoples self-policing vassals.) Prussia even adopted the Roman symbol of the eagle as a logo, which was later picked up by the Nazis and the United States. Rome introduced mesmerising dreams of power and control that have not been easy to shake even in modern history.
By the eighteenth century Prussia, under Frederick the Great, had become one of the greatest powers in Europe, despite its small size and lack of natural resources. This was due to the fact that it had a larger permanent military force than anyone else. No other country could force so many of its citizens into the army on a full-time basis. The Prussian system was one of total control, which successfully managed to coerce the population into complete submission to the will of the government.
Creating a massive standing army was not a problem for them. (Over a century later, the US military would adopt their formula for maintaining permanent standing armies on the advice of a Prussian military consultant named von Steuben.)
Prussia didn’t stop there. The more rights it stripped from Prussian citizens, the more powerful it became. Frederick the Great’s nephew continued this process, depriving every adult of all rights and privileges.
Then in 1806 the Prussians suffered a shattering military defeat at the hands of Napoleon. After their beaten soldiers fled from certain death, they decided to turn their attention to the children, realising they had to start young if they wanted to instil the kind of obedience that would override the fear of death itself.
The government decided that if it could force people to remain children for a few extra years, then it could retard social, emotional and intellectual development and control them more easily. This was the point in history that ‘adolescence’ was invented—a method of slowing the transition from childhood to adulthood, so that it would take years rather than, for example, the months it takes in Indigenous rites of passage.
This delayed transition, intended to create a permanent state of child-like compliance in adults, was developed from farming techniques used to break horses and to domesticate animals. Bear in mind that the original domestication of animals involved the mutation of wild species into an infantilised form with a smaller brain and an inability to adapt or solve problems. To domesticate an animal in this way you must:
1. Separate the young from their parents in the daylight hours.
2. Confine them in an enclosed space with limited stimulation or access to natural habitat.
3. Use rewards and punishments to force them to comply with purposeless tasks.
Effectively, the Prussians created a system using the same techniques to manufacture adolescence and thus domesticate their people.
The system they invented in the early nineteenth century to administer this change was public education: the radical innovation of universal primary schooling, followed by streaming into trade, professional and leadership education. It was all arbitrated by a rigorous examination system (on top of the usual considerations of money and class). The vast majority of Prussian students (over ninety per cent) attended the Volksschule, where they learned a simple version of history, religion, manners and obedience and were drilled endlessly in basic literacy and numeracy. Discipline was paramount; boredom was weaponised and deployed to lobotomise the population.
This system worked so well that Prussia became one of the most powerful countries in the world, at a time when the idea of ‘nations’ (rather than regions, kingdoms, tribes or city-states) was first being promoted as the dominant form of social organisation on the planet. The Prussians began to make plans to spread the institution of schooling as a tool for social control throughout the world, as it facilitated the kind of uniformity and compliance that was needed to make the model of nationhood work. The US could testify to the effectiveness of Prussian education as a tool for domination and power, as American educators had been making pilgrimages to Germany for more than half a century. Excitingly, test schools across America proved that the artificially induced phenomenon of adolescence was achievable outside of Prussia, too.
In 1870, Prussia got its revenge on France by annihilating the French military in the Franco-Prussian War, and immediately established Germany as a unified nation state—the dream of the Teutonic Knights finally realised. After that, the Prussian education system (and the new institution of extended childhood) became all the rage around the western world. It was modified to some extent, probably because the Prussian model seemed a bit weird, even to the power-hungry ultra-rich of Europe—it was so all-encompassing that women were required to register each month with the police when their menstruation started. Prussia was described jokingly as an ‘army with a country’ or a ‘gigantic penal institution’. Towns and cities were built like prison blocks, grey grids of rigid cubes and plain surfaces. The government worked hard to ‘cleanse’ the society of homeless people, gypsies, Jews and homosexuals as they expanded and enforced their embryonic doctrine of eugenics. (Their motto for education was Arbeit macht frei, work sets you free, a slogan that the Nazis adopted and later placed above the gates of concentration camps, including Auschwitz, used for Jewish slave labour and extermination. There are many schools in Australia today with a similar motto in Latin: Labor Omnia Vincit, work conquers all. Now, as ever, the creation of a workforce to serve the national economy is the openly stated main goal of public education. And, as ever, the inmates of this system are told that their enthusiastic compliance with forced labour will be in their best interests at some future point.)
Germany’s compulsory education system expressed six outcomes in its original syllabus documents:
1. Obedient soldiers to the army.
2. Obedient workers for mines, factories and farms.
3. Well-subordinated civil servants.
4. Well-subordinated clerks for industry.
5. Citizens who thought alike on most issues.
6. National uniformity in thought, word and deed.
And it spread like wildfire: to Hungary in 1868, Austria in 1869, Switzerland in 1874, Italy in 1877, Holland in 1878, Belgium in 1879, Britain in 1880, and France in 1882. From there it quickly expanded further to European colonies, including Australia (and Canada).
As we’ve seen, the US had been involved much earlier, with even Benjamin Franklin advocating the Prussian system. In 1913 Woodrow Wilson established the Federal Reserve, copying Germany in its centralised banking system too: this way, the state would control both learning and money, just like Germany did.
As the twentieth century wore on, more interesting links emerged between Germany and the US, both drawing on the symbols and dreamings of ancient Rome—because Germany’s old obsession with ancient Rome hadn’t gone away. They called their leader Kaiser, German for Caesar; they adopted the symbol of Roman fasces, bundles of rods with an axe that once represented Roman state power. The US followed suit. American education documents emerged with those same symbols printed on the covers, and today the fasces are still a prominent symbol of American power, proudly on display in many official ceremonies.
The Roman fasces came to represent a whole modern belief system around social control and national domination—that’s where fascism got its name—and a version of the Roman salute was famously adopted by the Nazis.
In that period, when Hitler was Time’s man of the year in America, the pseudo-science of eugenics that the Nazis so enthusiatically adopted was popular throughout the western world. It purported to legitimate a decades-old tradition of white supremacy that had earlier informed the nationalist values established during Australian federation and exemplified by the White Australia Policy.
Not just in Australia, but all around the world, new systems of education, nationalism, finance, corporatism and social control were informed by fascist ideas and theories from Germany and the United States, encouraging the extermination of indigenous people and minorities, just like the white knights of yore. Cataclysms followed as new nations that had missed out on the empire-building activities of the age of discovery tried to catch up with their land-rich neighbours. When the smoke cleared, lands and power and blame were redistributed unevenly among the survivors and a new world emerged with new stories providing a sanitised history of good triumphing over evil.
But the structural racism installed through Prussian-style schooling and the eugenics movement would not be discarded, merely rebranded. Later, following long civil-rights struggles and campaigns for social justice, racial inferiority was renamed ‘cultural difference’. Racial integration was called ‘reconciliation’. In the colonies, assimilation was relaunched as ‘Closing the Gap’. The language became more politically correct, but the globalising goals of cultural uniformity, economic compliance and homogenised identities remained the same.
I hope this marginal perspective is far enough ‘out of the box’ to provoke some questions regarding the sustainability of the global systems that shape our minds and lives. Where is our current turbulent period of transition taking us? Do we want to go there? What form will knowledge transmission (aka education) need to take during this transition? Us-two may also tentatively wonder whether our minds are now too domesticated and shrivelled even to contemplate these questions effectively.”
(above excerpt from “Sand Talk” by Tyson Yunkaporta, you can get a copy here: https://birchbarkbooks.com/products/sand-talk )
For more on the Prussian state “education” (human domestication) system and how it is used in your local schools to condition you to be an obedient statist, compliant consumer and passive authority figure capitulator, read this :
and/or watch this:
Some people tell me I am promoting the “noble savage” myth and that indigenous people are “primitive”, “savage” and “low-tech” and they would rather enjoy all the wonders of modern western civilization.
I tell them that while it is true and it is worth pointing out that some people romanticize indigenous people’s from specific areas (because placing any culture, group of people or individual on some pedestal as pure is unhealthy). I do not romanticize their past nor do I romanticize the potential of their worldviews to provide solutions to the present challenges we face.
Some people use red herring tactics and talk about human sacrifice being a central theme in indigenous cultures, that is sad propaganda narrative that compelled a Corbett Report commenter (that goes by the screenname “mkey”) whom I respect a great deal to state:
“Westernized, civilized cultures sacrifice the unborn, the old, the young and everything in between every day and in droves.
Bloodshed and sacrifice. All day, every day, industrial scale.” (source)
I tell the indigenous demonization propaganda pushers that we should keep in mind that demonization and dehumanization of the perceived “enemy” or targeted “sub-human class” of an empire is a time tested psychological warfare technique that has been employed in both real time conflicts and retrospectively as “victors write the history books”.
Therefore, I propose that people do far more irrational and fallacious romanticizing of Christian institutions, European imported statism and the myth of the “more civilized settler” than any one engages in with regards to Native American cultures.
Some talk about indigenous cultures as "primitive" / "low tech" and modern civilization as "advanced" and "high tech".
Most would think of Feller Bunchers, GMO seeds and genetic mRNA injections, smart missiles and 5G satellites as “high tech”… I do not. Those are adolescent abuses of human gifts, low level morality and low level social maturity technologies.
For some info on some of the many wonderful accomplishments of industrial western statist civilization, read:
If “high” tech is intended to articulate advanced tech that is ethically aligned, socially enriching and exemplifies a mature and thoughtful application of human gifts, than I propose that the social technologies (which involves physical technologies like fire and seed storage inoculation/propagation) which facilitate a culture being able to create a food forest that survives and produces for 7000 thousand years to be much more “high tech”.
(For additional references, check out the links in this comment)
Tech (both social and physical) that enables a community to feed their human members while also enriching the non-human community of beings, enhancing water quality and access, attracting more animal based food sources and enriching the beauty of a place is much more advanced than laser beam guided missiles, skyscraper canyons, machine guns or elon musk satellites… there is no chance those things will last 7000 years. And if they did, this Earth would be turned into a giant open pit mine and toxic waste dump by then… thus, modern civilization’s technologies are actually very “low” tech (low morally, low in foresight, low in ecological literacy, low in holistic vision and low in compassion).
Whether or not those adolescent forms of technology can end a great deal of life in a short amount of time does not impress me at all. I do however find a 7000 year old food forest (or even a 200 year old one for that matter) very impressive.
Thus, I am working to use my hands to create more of them and pass them along to the next generation.
For more info on how you can get involved, read:
Overconsumption is a symptom of a spiritual sickness that plagues those who are cultural orphans lost in the delusions of statism and no longer are aware of their own indigenous roots (we all have them).
For more on that watch "Wendigo Thinking, The Path Of The Sacred Warrior and the Reclamation Of Our Indigeneity" :
Also, I would argue that Statism is the prime mover that perpetuates overconsumption. As Derrick highlights in this clip
"GNP" is really the measure of how fast a statist regime can turn living things into dead uniform commodities. Statist regimes inculcate their citizens with propaganda systems to make them into obedient consumers and extract taxes from them (using the threat of violence) which those statist regimes them give to corporations that pillage the Earth (Big Ag, vegan or non vegan, Clearcutting forestry operations, Big pharma and the military industrial complex).
“Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or fascist dictorship, or a parliament or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peace makers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”
― Hermann Goering from (Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, President of the Reichstag, Prime Minister of Prussia and, as Hitler's designated successor, the second man in the Third Reich.)
Statism also perpetuates spiritual poverty through indoctrinating people into thinking that it is okay to kill other people (as long as an “authority figure” tells orders you to do it. This violates every cardinal religious law given to us by wise ones from centuries and millennia past such as the simple and obviously true commandment of “thou shall not kill”.
For more on how statism perpetuates war (for profit) and normalized/indoctrinates the youth to be a part of that racket, read:
The proponents of techno-optimism, transhumanism and “Bright Green environmentalism” would tell you that we can have our cake and eat it too, but they seem not to care whether or not we end up living in a planet that is a giant open pit mine and factory farm.
I personally do not think an expanding human population necessitates the depletion of resources and means that forests nor other species will die off. (for more info: https://gavinmounsey.substack.com/p/are-there-limits-to-growth )
Human habitation of an area can actually increase biodiversity, water quality and beauty rather than diminish it.
It is more a matter of the ethos and self-image driving cultures that determines whether or not they serve as a blessing or an imposition on an ecosystem.
Cultures that perceive themselves as having a responsibility as stewards and caretakers, while seeing nature as being comprised of myriad beings all possessing a sprit (like humans do) and offering gifts tend to be driven by motivating factors like gratitude, reciprocity and making use of every part of another being they kill/harvest while only taking what they need to live healthily. Some of those cultures can live in an ecosystem while simultaneously enriching it.
Cultures that perceive themselves as the most important organism on the planet, being entitled to exploit as they see fit and having no responsibility/need to reciprocate, seeing nature as a collection of dead/intimate resources and stupid animals (worth less than humans) take and take for greed without restraint and kill for pleasure and profit. Those cultures typically decrease biodiversity, poison the water and desertify once lush ecosystems in their endless quest for more disposable superficial pleasures, comfort, opulence and attempting to fill a void in their heart (where gratitude should be) with more material things.
The first type of culture does not require living in teepees or mud huts, but it does require humility, being willing to constantly learn new things/skills, pattern observation, biomimicry, courage and determination.
The second cultural trajectory only requires that we keep on having faith in and voting for politicians (that are part of intrinsically degenerative statist regimes), buying stuff from Amazon, Walmart, keep on making excuses why we cannot grow our own food, buying big ag/factory farm food and move into the wonderful utopian smart cities being constructed for us.
Thus, I propose it is the trends that arise from the statist religion (see link below for more info: https://gavinmounsey.substack.com/p/why-i-do-not-celebrate-canada-day ) which are the most significant factor in deforestation, desertification, soil erosion, water poisoning and many other degenerative trends. Vegans and Beef eaters can live regeneratively or they can be devout statists and follow blindly as multi-generational racketeering operations continue to pillage the Earth.
Governments (every last involuntary form of government that uses violent coercion) is the single most ecologically destructive force on the planet.
For more on why that is the case, read:
It is time to move past the era of followers and leaders, peasants and princes, worshipers and saviors, haves and have-nots, minions and tyrants, corporations and consumers and usher in the age of self governed, place based, ancestrally guided, symbiotic community connected, creative, resilient and symbiotically connected human beings which collaborate of their own free will to leave this world a little more beautiful than it was before.
There is no elected official, institution, politician, guru, priest, revolutionary, savior or any other external force or individual who can do this for you. Engaging in life on Earth is a voluntary journey that each of us chose willingly. The Creator of all things respects our choice to be here and our free will. We did not come here to see a dramatic dualistic showdown happen and applaud the ‘good guy' for vanquishing the bad guy (from a distance as a spectator). No, each and every one of us (whether we are currently consciously aware of this fact or not) came here to co-author the story. That means no-one else is going to do the hard work for us (not a savior, rebel leader nor a politician) we came here to do that work of transforming this world ourselves.
If you are reading this than that means that on a soul level you chose to be here on Earth in this particular time (and critical stage in the unfolding of humanity) because you are resilient, courageous, capable of transmuting pain into wisdom, radiating light from within to make the darkness flee and serving as an exemplar to help those who are ready to also become catalysts for a metamorphosis.
You are the sowers of the seeds of change and the remediators of humanity's collective consciousness. You are the gardeners that sow the seeds of hope, healing, remembrance, kindness, respect, solidarity and compassion (even in the midst of the cold winter winds) having faith these seeds will germinate and their roots take hold when the time is right.
In order to see a new culture and way of living take hold and begin to become the norm we must cut our ties to the old ways and begin to live and embody a vision that is both ancient and unprecedented. We must remember what our ancestors were wise enough to understand and forge a close knit relationship with the land we live on. The interdependence, sacred geometry, efficiency, resilience and regenerative capacity of the intact ecosystems where we live can provide us guidance on the path forward. Through emulating these living systems in the garden/farming sector and engaging in biomimicry with our technology we can create resilient systems and ways of perceiving that can provide us food, medicine and wisdom on our path to create a brighter future. And it can begin with something as simple as humility and a handful of seeds.
We can choose to be the living embodiment of truth, agents of the regenerative capacity of Mother Earth and the antidote that helps to expel the tentacles of statism and their corporate/bankster parasitic overlords in each of our communities.
We can plant the seeds for abundance, health and hope. We can plant these seeds with our hands and our hearts. We can do this one regenerative garden, one community food forest and one regenerative community at a time.
Now is the time to reaffirm our alliances with the living Earth, to nurture new symbiotic relationships with the soil, people, plants and fungi in our local communities. Human empires rise and fall, and history teaches us that when they fall, it is those that know how to grow/forage for their own food, medicine and preserve it that survived. I will be focusing on these efforts locally and helping those at a distance to do the same.
We can create oasis’s of health, resilience, and abundance in each of our communities.. we can become the solution, break from dependence on centralized systems and help others to do the same. It begins with the soil and the seeds and it evolves into nurturing symbiotic connections with those we share our communities with.
“For all of us, becoming indigenous to a place means living as if your children’s future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual, depended on it.”
―Robin Wall Kimmerer Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants
Incase you missed this message waaaaay down at the bottom of my fertility enhancing foods post, I just wanted to give you all a heads up that I will be simultaneously beginning two big community food forest installation projects (one of which I hinted at in this post) and I am also working at my day job now (saving up to self-publish/print my next book) so my time for writing on here will be decreasing significantly for a few months. I may be able to swing a couple posts a month if I am lucky.
So thanks in advance to those of you that stick around and continue to support what I do here. It means a lot to me.
I was introduced to you through your appearance on The Corbett Report. Your work is of the utmost importance at this time. I have been a gardener for the bulk of my adult life and have experienced immense gratification from the entire process, but it wasn't until I read 'Braiding Sweetgrass' by Robin Wall Kimmerer that I finally understood that plants are our teachers. Being a big fan of trees since childhood, I am currently fortunate enough to spend a great deal of time receiving their spiritual and physical gifts. I believe that if more of us were able/willing to spend time in the forest daily, the 'reverence for life', which indigenous people the world over understand full well, would be substantially restored and our way forward on a more sound footing. Best wishes for continued success. Keep On Truckin' Gavin!
an empowering article, fantastic!