Plants and Healers

Frank Cook
Chrysalis 2 Essay
December 20, 2007

This paper is in two sections linked by my love for Gaia. I hope you enjoy it. As Brian, voice of the ferns, often reminds us, “We are here to serve each other and to serve Gaia.”

“If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either.”

-Thich Nhat Hanh in Satish Kumar’s You Are Therefore I Am

Section 1 - A Phenomenological Inquiry into Ferns and Seaweeds

In the first module Henri Bortoft and Craig Holdrege established the efficacy of using Goethe’s approach of phenomenological study. But it was in the second module that Brian Goodwin and Stephan Harding placed it in context for us. Brian describes phenomenology as a form of “exploratory orientation in which we are fully embedded in the experience”. Stephan took us on several phenomenological explorations, two of which were in the redwood forest. He described the Goethean approach as “seeing the whole in the parts.” We brushed aside the detritus and looked at life on the forest floor. Stephan referred to the other creatures we saw as our “brothers and sisters” as we kneeled there amazed at the abundance of life forms beneath our feet...

I am really lucky to have Jessika Towle (jessikaht@msn.com) assisting this spring teaching time. If you have questions about the schedule below please don’t hesitate to contact her or me. New opportunities and changes will be posted on my website—check in occasionally: www.plantsandhealers.com. Generally speaking, I seek right-livelihood through donation so please give what you can and receive what you need. Hope to see you helping make one or more of these circles meaningful. Look forward to reconnecting with family and friends this spring!

Frank

Sustainable Design Short Course
Essay for MSc
March 5, 2008

Permaculture as Sustainable Design

Language plays many roles in this walk through life. You are now here in it, in this sentence, as you read through these symbols lifting meaning from the presence of the whole. (Bortoft) For language to flow we need to be at some level of agreement as to the meanings of the words. In the six months since beginning this MSc the call for a lexicon has been raised a number of times as we try to bring words into realms not often articulated in modern times.
As humanity enters the post-modern era, we are working hard to test out new meanings to old words and occasionally whole new words. What resonates will last and change and grow along with the budding culture of Gaian awareness. “We can choose whether to remain in the narrow, objectivist mode of consciousness that has contributed to the crisis, or to act from a deeper, wider mode of consciousness in which we experience our unity with the whole of Gaia…” (Harding, pg 225)
Let us simply look at the language for the title of this essay. During the three weeks of the Sustainable Design course these words have certainly been batted around, both propped up and taken down. Though our course was largely devoid of permaculture(PC) teachings (with the exception of Ana Cardona and my presentation on the topic one afternoon), a review of design literature does indicate that its philosophy is becoming known. In The Sustainable Revolution and Design for Sustainability time is taken to describe it history and some of its major tenants. Edwards further describes permaculture as an example of a “…biocentric approach to sustainability. Nature is at the center and humans depend on it…” (pg 122)
In the three weeks we had seven teachers each giving their views on sustainable design as well as the 25 of us, students, putting forth thoughts and experiences around this topic. I grew a lot in my understanding of the culture of designers and the complexities of changing how we go about creating…

The Dilemma of Global Starvation
As Intellectual Abstraction

The title of this essay may lead you to believe that I am discounting the knowledge of how many people starve to death each year. (nearly 3 million this year and counting. Check into some of our collective human vital statistics: www.lovearth.net/worldcounters.htm). I have been aware of this atrocity for many years. Stop for a moment and feel this. Someone starves to death every three seconds. There are so many paradoxes we live in this modern world including more than a quarter of the food reproduced in the US is wasted (96 billion pounds land-filled of the 356 billion pounds reproduced). Over a third of the UK’s food is thrown out! It is realizations like these that gradually shifted me from being the star of my own movie to “tuning in, turning on, and dropping out” as Timothy Leary advised. This I did fully in 1992 and for the next eight years searched to understand the appropriate path through life to walk. The feelings of human suffering still guide me as I live this life in service to Gaia.
This essay is about the failings of trying to approach this condition of suffering through institutions and experts along with suggestions of other ways we might live more in harmony in the planet.