We kicked off the ceremonial year with 60 odd (by every metric) kinfolk for our annual ceremony to honour the divine dark of the sacred feminine, for winter solstice.
To celebrate this moment, and our community’s deepening of ceremonial approaches, we publish for the first time, The sun wise ceremony calendar, specific to our mob.
We gathered with candles, seed breads, pickles, chestnut and kidney bean stew, rabbit cassoulet, quince tart, medlar pie, feijoa cheese cake, elders and kids.
We paused and listened at this time of the deep dark.
We paused and listened to Mother Country and Father Fire.
Paused and listened to old sonnets,
and newly hatched raps.
Paused and listened to soulful old songs,
and vitalising ones, sung for such a hearth.
Paused and listened to stories meticulously crafted or spoken off the cuff,
and the FireChoir brothers sang Mother of Mountain. We offer it here as a little insight into the ceremonial feast that was this year’s winter solstice gathering.
Slowly one after another we departed from the fire-lit clearing, and walked back through the dark forest to begin our patient sun wise journey towards the summer solstice.
Thank you Brett Ellenport and Leonie Van Eyk for such wonderful images.
Wherever you are we wish you a merry solstice, and a goodly pause.
_______
NB. If you are still wanting to attend all or any of the four online sessions we’re hosting in July, there are still some spaces available but you may want to book now.
A story by Blue Wren (15 mins; read and/or listen).
Not being able to find a suitable myth to share for winter solstice, given the emplacing context of our lives in Djaara Country, as the longest night approached Blue Wren listened and opened, and in came this story. This offering was just one of many stories, poems and songs shared on the night of our community solstice celebration. We hope you enjoy this insight into our ceremonial night in our deep winter forest commons, held by Mother Country & Father Fire.
Once within a fairly timeless land, Mother Country and Father Fire ruled the earth-well worlds of the world. Wedded in exquisite union they lived harmoniously for all of days. Father Fire only a subtle disruptor, a gentle gleam in the dark, wet primordial forests of the Mother, and brought to earth by Grandfather Sun to warm, to illuminate and cook, to potash, and help make ceremony in the luscious belly of Mother Country.
One day Mother Country and Father Fire brought to life a new child, who they named Brother Eucalyptus. He grew out of the light, dusty potash of his father and the rich dark humus of his mother. He began life on the margins of great wet, shade-lit forests. Born a needy, troubled soul he soon began fighting with his siblings, especially Sister Southern Beech who ranged across her Mother with great presence. He felt unseen by his accomplished sister, and would often be found moping about on the rare scab lands of his mother.
His siblings, on the whole, found him crass and quite acidic, and they increasingly turned their backs on him, and from this grave wound of rejection he developed poison in his roots that he began to use on his Brothers and Sisters, releasing it whenever they came close. At first this didn’t matter too much, his territories were small compared with Sister Southern Beech. So, initially, no one really noticed, but gradually Brother Eucalyptus took more and more of his mother’s nutrients and life force and land for himself, and everywhere he grew the ground dried and hardened. He discovered that his inflaming disposition was conducive to making wildfire, and so he conspired to steal fire-craft from his father so that he could both poison and burn his overbearing sister and populate himself in her ruins.
One Brother, however, he could not poison or burn very well. Brother Blackwood – an inspired peacemaker – learned how to play companion to his greedy brother. Because Brother Blackwood could see his Mother suffering and depleted, he taught himself to swallow surplus quantities of nitrogen out of the air, plant himself next to Brother Eucalyptus wherever he was, and release the precious goods into his brother’s roots. Brother Blackwood taught Sisters Silver and Black Wattles to do the same, and soon they took away some of the burden off their mother. While this gift helped their mother to keep the cycles of living and dying rolling, Brother Eucalyptus continued to expand his range, causing ever greater drying and unruly fires.
For the first time in their long union, Mother Country and Father Fire began to argue. “I am the dark, Father Fire,” said Mother Country, “all the shade-filled forests, rich humus, subterranean springs, night countries and underworlds of my body enable more life to be lived. That boy is destroying me, stealing all my earth-givings. You have given him fire and he is burning all my beautiful daughters and sons. Enough is enough!” But Father Fire hadn’t given his errant son the magic and responsibility of fire. It had been stolen, like it had been stolen from Hephaestus, the industry god, by Prometheus in another world. In frustration Father Fire retorted: “Do not accuse me woman, I would not do such a thing! That boy is disrespecting me too; he is out of control!” And so went the argument for an age, backwards and forwards went their unhappiness. All the plants and fungi, the lichens, mosses, and lillies, the kestrels, wedgetails, fantails, magpies, wrens, ravens and robins, the brown snakes and black, echidnas, ringtails and owls, and all of life suffered as the parents warred, and Brother Eucalyptus continued on with his wound-rage.
Mother Country became weaker and weaker, Sister Southern Beech almost entirely disappeared, and neither of the parents could bring Brother Eucalyptus into alignment with life.
It was around this point in the story, the First People arrived. Gradually they learned to live within some of the world’s most depleted soils, and they thrived along the coasts due to the abundance of Grandmother Gaia’s many saltwater countries. After some time of listening, languaging and making ceremony, the First People began to better understand the familial feud between the great mother and father and their narcissist son. So everywhere they lived the First People dreamed with Mother Country and Father Fire and co-created rituals for deep listening and subsistence lifeways to live well with the communities of life so as to heal the rift between dark and light, heat and damp, the sacred feminine and sacred masculine, and in doing, bringing the parents of the land back into relationship.
And through this three-way alliance they developed the wisdom of fire-country land stewardship, which had the result of arresting the main harms of Brother Eucalyptus. The way the First People harnessed, respected and applied Father Fire to Mother Country, understanding each region of her in relation to fuel loads, air currents and zephyrs, ground moisture, and the propensity for potash to grow more woody life, deepened over time, and depending on where it was applied, the First People modified their practice, which brought abundance back into the belly of Mother Country. There was to be no significant return of Sister Southern Beech, and old Uncle Holly and Aunty Ivy had long since gone, but despite the morbid depletion of Mother Country, the communities of life that make life worth living began to live again, and people and plants, birds, snakes and pollinators, reptiles and marsupials developed new ways to live a good life among the scant humus and acidic soils.
Sure, there were usual human skirmishes between First Peoples, between different tribes and clans, men and women, but the unhappy colonial story of Brother Eucalyptus now guided all comers. He operated as a precautionary tale across the land. No one wanted to go back to the suffering when such total recklessness and selfishness reigned. So, for many millennia a tapestry of cultures and customs, languages and ceremonies were traded with life, with one another, and First People developed sophisticated lores pertaining to the laws of the mother and father, and a deep and abiding peace spread out across this first great era of energy descent. Even Brother Eucalyptus found some peace. It did not stop his over-taking, burning and poisoning ways, but he felt more himself in the bosom of life, rather than the sole destroyer of it.
Then, half a million new moons later upon the now spongey and rain-absorbing perennial-bread grasslands of the Mother, like a wicked spell unleashed to once again test life, wretched and trammelled First Peoples from northern lands began to arrive. The First People here came to refer to these malnourished and decultured folk as Second Peoples, because they could see they’d lost connection with their great mother and father, and therefore with the dark and the light in dynamic union. Tragically, the Second People didn’t realise how fallen from this grace they had become. They believed they carried the light better than anyone and they swore against the dark, were frightened by it, wanted to kill it off in any way they could. Their transported ideologies feared dark consciousness, feared the secreted mysteries of the divine feminine. These light-obsessed poor souls brought with them technics and poisons that were godlike and dangerous for such misshapen peoples to be playing with, and they brought an attitude of superiority, despite their wretchedness.
Much like in the early years of Brother Eucalyptus, they set out to dominate Mother Country, rob from her, and deplatform the ceremonial illuminations of Father Fire and the rich mother-bonded cultures of the First Peoples. Instead of opening with curiosity to the wisdoms of the earthly parents, they brought only one skygod with them who seemed to diminish the great Mother and her daughters. The Second Peoples had received their unilateral story delivered by the messenger, War-Brother Wheat, who had first come into presence when there were many gods and goddesses in the north who tended life. His affect eventually led to the stripping of animist cosmologies and to the development of horse-mobile armies of scale. Some Second People came to here in chains, some desperate to overcome poverty, some were what some call ‘free’, and some were mercantiles civil-ready to coordinate a mass exploitation of what some still call ‘resources’ – that is the gifts of the Mother.
Second Peoples caused untold suffering far worse than in the heady days of Brother Eucalyptus’s fury. For two hundred years most Second People found it hard to listen to Mother Country and Father Fire, they didn’t even consider it. Though some found them a novelty, they also didn’t listen to First People, and either didn’t look or joined in when First People were persecuted, debased and massacred. However, slowly and quietly Mother Country seeped her wisdom into the Second Peoples who lived in her – the farmers and hunters, the gardeners and gleaners, the swimmers of her dark snakey waterholes and the underworlders of her caves, remnant forests and bones.
Eventually the Second People felt the call to make rituals and ceremonies that honoured Mother Country and Father Fire, which derived from the gratitude they felt by living, and the sorrow they felt for the disrespect and war-mind their people had transported. They began quite naively by worshipping Brother Eucalyptus as pure and original and distinguished, despite the many new deserts he was making in other worlds at this point. And they, these well-intentioned folk, hated on the newcomer trees they’d brought with them such as fire-calming Brother Oak, who’d made immediate friends with Brother Blackwood and who brought alkalising, deciduous leaves to Mother Country to help her make humus and balance the acidic and depleting effects of Brother Eucalyptus. Likewise, another newcomer, Sister Hawthorn, brought the possibility of habitat for possums and rich medicine fruits for gang gangs and humans alike. Sister Willow was another brought to Mother Country, and who in their civil-centric guilt began to bulldoze and poison with impunity, as though they could cleanse the creeks and rivers of their forebears’ sins. This was before Second People realised the importance of Sister Willow as a nurse tree trying to restore gold- and livestock-ravaged waterways, and before remembering her gift as a basket tree when they began to walk back plastic bags.
As Second People started to turn away from Roundup-Ready War-Brother Wheat, and the other monocultures of the mind they’d transported, they began to walk with renewal and humility in their steps, alongside their First People friends and kin. One such ceremony they came together to perform was the winter solstice – the divine honouring of the feminine dark at Mother Country’s longest hour. At this ceremony they reflected upon the majesty of Mother Country – her givings, her wisdoms, her riches and her grace.
On the occasion of the winter solstice they, the people of the land, alongside Brothers Eucalyptus, Oak, Pine and Blackwood, and Sisters Cherry Ballart, Sweet Bursaria, New Holly and Hawthorn came together to sing, share story, behold the longest night and feast on the fruits and meats of Mother Country, while warmed and illuminated by the old glorious sunlight of Father Fire.
For this is a time for reculturing harmony and love between feminine and masculine, dark and light, both within ourselves and across the bodies and psyches of our kinship other. It is a time to make humus, make rituals of gratitude and return, and to honour Mother Country for all her gifts, and for teaching us how to heal from the wounds of war, and live and love alongside her within the many underworlding possibilities of her dark.
~
Thanks to Jordan Osmond for the cover photograph and Catie Payne for the use of her microphone.
Last week we hosted a share house of five goodly youngtimers from the burbs of the city south of here. Max Roux was one of them. Max slung his camera over his shoulder as we forested, farmed, gardened, creeked, salvaged, ate, played, loved and listened to one another. This post is from the fruits of that connection and Max’s sleeves-rolled-up documentation.
We have been asked a number of times in India what our religion is. We reply, we are animists. Then we are asked, but who is your god, your gods? We answer, Mother Country. Our response feels inadequate because our animism is not rooted in the past with developed belief systems or dependency on a story. Rather, it is an in-and-out-again presence with the living of the world.
At traditional Hindu weddings in India the groom leads the bride around a sacred fire. The couple take seven steps, each one representing a blessing – food, strength, wealth, happiness, progeny, cattle and devotion. Throughout our two weeks living in Dal Lake, near Dharamshala in Himachal Pradesh in the north of India, these seven blessings travel with us. They travel with us, in us, through us, connecting us to everything here.
We arrived in Naddi above Dharamshala on dusk, and went exploring.
and out of the clouds came this friendly Gaddi goatherd.
We spent a night in a mouldy room with a stellar view, and only one double bed despite the advertisement stating three singles.
We have inflatable mattresses with us, it was cheap and cheerful, and the next day we left our packs in the room and went walking for the morning.
The temperature was cool and the tributaries flowing. This region has three main seasons: summer, monsoon, and winter. It is monsoon season now, and it rains every day from July to September.
On our walk we recognised old friends, uncensored and unrestrained, growing autonomously in the mountains,
and came to shrines where daily offerings are made.
We crossed Naddi River,
and took masala chai and omelette at a stone built café on the other side.
We began making connections here,
but we had a mouldy room to leave and the promise of a cricket park to get to.
Just down from Naddi is Dal Lake, which boasts a well loved public cricket pitch. Teams are chosen, Woody a little nervous at first, clouds cover the lake, cattle watch on.
Just up from the pitch, Bittu runs a chai stand he’s had for seven years. He’s thirty now, and ready to walk the seven steps with a goodly woman, arranged or otherwise. He played Patrick’s guitar and the two men had a yarn,
while Meg and Woody set out on foot to look for a room close to Dal Lake’s cricket pitch. They door knocked at guest houses, some of which were closed as this is the off season in Kangra district. They eventually found Pong Dam View, under renovations.
We hired two musty but not mouldy rooms, which meant Woody’s parents, who like to wake early could get up, do morning stretches, make tea, make love, make blog, without waking the growing boy, who is a 12-hour-a-night sleeper. There is also a little kitchenette. We opened all the windows and doors and let the fresh mountain air flow through.
The kind owner of the home stay, Kali Dass, a retired soldier, gave us a 2/3 discount for staying long-term, so room 1 at Pong View Dam Home Stay became our little sanctuary for a fortnight. No other guests stayed during this time. A quiet sanctuary from which we stepped out from each day to go exploring, and where, across the road, another guest house and café was situated, sporting this truism at the front door.
Back in Australia we heard the news that the Labor Party have set up their own disinformation reporting site urging their believers to dob in what they deem as ‘disinformation’. Yes, we should absolutely trust a government and their supporters to hold the measure of truth on behalf of everyone else – it’s always worked well in the past.
The past is very present in India. Gandhi, like Mao in China, is the only fella on the notes here,
and his glasses appear everywhere as a potent symbol for the man who led the country to independence.
While in Dharamshala, over two nights, we watched with Woody the 3-hour film, Gandhi (1982) for a historical insight into how India moved from British colonial control over many different tribal peoples, to the modern nation-state republic (annexed off from Pakistan in 1947), it is today. We’ve also been reading the court statement and associated literature of Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse,
and listening to Tibetans in exile here in Dharamshala speak about the intransigence of the Chinese government towards Tibetan people, culture, language and sovereignty.
As we write, the Dalai Lama is returning to his home-in-exile here in Dharamshala, after surgery in New York. The Chinese government continue to call him a separatist, which is an odd label and demonstrates how they either don’t understand or care for the beliefs and wishes of HH or Tibetans. (It also gives us context for why it was made so difficult for us to travel to Tibet from China. Foreigners are granted a two-week visa to China, but then need a permit to get to Tibet, which ordinarily takes 20 days, and you have to be chaperoned for the entire time by an accredited travel agent).
Sympathy for Tibet in this region is pronounced,
which contributes to the ongoing beef between India and China. One afternoon, while we were playing cricket, we witnessed two Tibetan dancers perform on the banks of Dal Lake.
It was joyful to behold such culture making.
The continuous attack on indigenous peoples globally is global capitalism’s conversion process of lively, connected souls into moribund consumers. Some colonial-capitalist institutions are brutal and unashamed in how they treat first people, like the Chinese government in Tibet, the Israeli government in Palestine and US-NATO alliance all over the world. And some are more subtle in how they foster the conversion process, like the lesser nations of the Five-Eyes countries, who increasingly participate in what we call institutional fascism. That is a trust-us-we’re-experts-go-back-to-your-shopping kind of fascism. Because there is no boot stomping, few see this fascism by bureaucratic stealth, rolled out by sophisticated propaganda.
Tibet’s sovereignty was once an important issue for leftists in the rich countries, but seemingly not now for The New Normal Left, who seem to be engaging in purity politics, dividing people into correct and incorrect categories. Purity politics is dangerous ideology as it strips away nuance and diversity of approaches; it is projection warfare predicated on fear and desire. Rather than a turning towards an open relationship with life, with shadows, with underworlding and knowing oneself, the dark is feared,
and ideology takes over.
The two performers at Dal Lake dance their culture into presence and away from fear. Dancing, not war, represents for us the spiritual anarchism required for this era of growing censorship and government overreach. Incorporating both the light and dark occurs in mature cosmologies. The Christian influence in the west has in large part attempted to cancel the dark, and the cult of scientism has carried on this peculiarity into the present. By not being in relationship with darkness, the tendency to mythologise that one is only a force for good comes into play. (See Charles Eisenstein’s brilliant The Sith: A political allegory). This conceit – that the dark cannot inform, give to, or challenge our civilisational hubris – is dangerous. There is no reflection, no shadow world, no trickster to learn from. For us, Mother Country is both light and dark, and this is why we are mother country animists, and why we find kinship with animisms in India.
The assassination of a political opponent did not bring about the reunification of India, as Nathuram Godse had hoped. We have played cricket with Indian soldiers on holiday here in Dal Lake, who express to us that they’re spending their youth keeping “terrorists” out of Kashmir. The continual bloody legacy of the 1947 partitioning into two separate nation states, India and Pakistan, which Gandhi created (albeit with great reluctance), has never gone away. Similarly, the assassination of Trump will not free America from systemic corruption and stop Congress from effectively being a chamber of bought stooges acting for the military and pharma industries, and others. Likewise, violence against China will not bring about Tibetan liberty. The persistence of culture and eldership, however, will.
Tsundue, a mutual friend of friends back home, filled us in further on the Tibetan story here. Tsundue was born in Dharamshala, after his family fled Tibet in 1959, and he and his wife have raised a family here. He too spent some of his youth at Ladakh with a Tibetan unit of the Indian army, resisting Chinese government forces there. Today he is a father, artist and beautiful soul.
If Kamala Harris wins office there will probably be global nuclear war. The Democrats are a New Normal party; they are a war party, and since 2014, when Obama allowed Democrats to receive money from Pharma, they have become a Pandemic Industrial Complex party. American politics is not some fairytale of good guys and bad guys. Rather, it is a culture war between working class discontents on the right and the bourgeois institutional fascists on the left who have abandoned them. There are no good guys, though redneck anarchists like Oliver Anthony, come close.
Dancing is what is required in this present moment, and just as with the truism painted on the wall of the guesthouse above, the monks filming this joyous display of life to share the story of Tibet’s continual culture making, is creative-political dancing. It is joyous sedition. Counter propaganda. Art has always performed a role of subversion, and there is no time like now for artists, poets, writers, filmmakers, anarchists, permies, neopeasants and musicians to joyously and playfully counter the propaganda of the global machine conglomerate.
There is a buzz here, currently, for the return of the Dalai Lama. He has been based in Mcleodganj in Dharamshala since 1960, when he fled Chinese state aggression after the Tibet uprisings, and set up the independent Tibetan government in exile here.
We booked in to hear him speak,
though his lecture was postponed, no doubt due to his health. It is not certain how many more Dalai Lamas will live in exile. China, via economic warfare, is probably set to become the world’s superpower as the US empire crumbles. Or, perhaps Artificial General Intelligence will devour the entirety of humanity in the next handful of years, who knows. But what is clear to us is that all rigid structures, all tightly controlled places, all inflexible dynamics, all static dogma, all government overreaches always signal fragility, sickness and inevitable collapse.
The antidote to all this is forever dancing at the propaganda, fear campaigns and inflexibility of wrong story authority,
and thieving when it brings liberation and laughter,
and daring to enter underworlds,
and connecting with earth others,
and practicing social and labouring solidarity,
and Himalayan thrifting,
and sharing joy through the shared love of a game,
and beholding the majesty of mothering mountains,
and giving where possible to people in need, while not being suckered by a well crafted racket,
and staying with the contradiction of beauty and barbarity mixed in the same moment,
and helping strangers without need of reward or flattery,
and learning from those more accomplished at being relaxed and oneself in private or public places,
and following, for a while, the flags of others with open curiosity, despite fomenting for ourselves our own processes and prayers unshackled from another’s authority,
and singing and playing more delicious life into abundant life, as guests in another world,
and occasionally grooming oneself, on the event of a shared birthday, and honouring the Dharamshala artisan (thanks Suninder!) who helped perform the operations,
and passing on our knowledges to youngtimers,
regardless of our species.
While there is much to learn from the world’s religions and spiritual movements here in Dal Lake, Naddi, Dharamkot, Dharamshala, McLeodganj, et al, we are finding more kinship with the wisdom and lifeways of monkeys,
and bulls,
and raptors,
and russula eating slugs,
and sow thistles,
and mountain clouds,
and street dogs,
and goats and their goatherds.
Pankaj is the son of Gaddi shepherds, and has, along with his kin, taken the family’s goats and sheep up into the higher country for summer browsing. The family normally has a flerd (a flock-herd) of around 50 animals, but a few seasons ago a snow slide took out half of this number. In the evenings we have walked up the mountain to Naddi, and Pankaj and other family members have cooked us some of the best curries we’ve had in this region.
Pankaj makes the paneer cheese that goes into the Kadai Paneer curry dish from his own cow and buffalo milk, and on one occasion the family offered us a goat curry, not normally on the menu. The Gaddi are people of dear interest to us. They are Indo-Aryan, semi-pastoral peoples living mainly in the Indian states of Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir. They are made up of many different cultural groups, and for generations they have been herding their animals through the high countries of northern India. According to locals, and the god Shiva himself who, it is told, has a special affection for them, the Gaddis are a graced and gentle lot. In the mid-twentieth century, they inspired the Punjabi romantic painter, Sobha Singh, to create his famous, Her Grace the Gaddan, which is hung in many guesthouses in the district.
We asked Pankaj whether our tracking senses were right to call this a tiger print, which we came across on one of our forest walks.
He confirmed our suspicions and spoke of how the tigers come into the villages after the snow melts each year, hungry after the winter, but they are around at any time. The way he spoke about this most revered animal without fear and with respect was beautiful to hear. On a number of nights, we walked home from his restaurant through the dark, awake and alert to the presence of tigers, but not fearful.
Monkey business here in Dharamshala is not always welcome. Apart from taking banana offerings from a shrine, we watched monkeys stealing corn cobs from a sleeping street food vendor, and use power lines as jungle vines to swing from tree to tree, sometimes bringing them down.
This particular cheekiness is another learning from India, which we can apply when necessary. If governments use communication lines to control us further and silence dissent, as is already happening around the world, then we will dance those lines down. Maybe our monkey dance in this instance will be reverting to dumb phones, and going off line. Monkeys ridicule the slingshot stones projected at them by house and store owners. Back home, since Covid, we have been slung labels such as conspiracists, selfish, right-wing and stupid, and even likened to colonists who intentionally brought small pox to Aboriginal communities.
A new study, a metadata analysis, published a few days ago claims that 3% of people who took Covid vaccines died suddenly. This adds up to millions worldwide. You may want to read the study before it is censored, cancelled, smeared or taken down. Remarkably, we were in a grass roots community group with the person who wrote the above opinion about the unvaccinated being intentional super spreaders. We were fighting institutional fascism in the form of overreaching local laws with her, before Covid entered the room.
We are reflecting here that we are still in the wound of Covid, and perhaps monkey business is another way to help heal that wound when dialogue or deep listening circles are not possible. Perhaps this is why we are so drawn to monkey trickster energy here in Dal Lake and the little villages nearby,
and not just one kind of monkey business.
Nor can we get enough of cricket with the local fellas.
We played cricket with many local kids when school let them out, and many men and women.
These Punjabi tourists, who played ball with us, got out their boom box and created a spontaneous dance party. Having written about dancing through the morning in this blog, the dance was invited in the afternoon, and Patrick jumped in, while Woody declined but picked up the camera.
The dance went a little like this:
There has been much joy in these hills. Many steps of learning and living. One teenager turned to Patrick behind the stumps and said after facing a delivery, “Bowling is a beautiful art”.
Another cricketer we played with said, “In India cricket is cultural.” On Patrick and Woody’s birthday, we went to Dharamshala Stadium.
Meg took this photo of the birthday lads with their new annual haircuts.
Many Indian tourists also visit this northern temple of the game. As well as being cultural, it is often said cricket is a religion in India. Players like Tendulkar and Kohli are considered gods here, though the game is not parochial and other countries’ cricketers, especially Australian, are also revered and enthusiastically spoken of. Harmission, Jashan’s cousin in Punjab, was named after Steve Harmison, an English cricketer.
Integrating this game and other chance encounters with dance and cheekiness, with permacultural neopeasantry, with mother country animism, with subsistence-resilience, with spiritual anarchism, and with observation, connection and curiosity are our seven steps in Dharamshala.
Before we left Dal Lake we made a little offering to the local cricket shrine.
“The word ‘individuality’ means ‘indivisible’, not fragmented. Individuality means a totality, the whole, and the word ‘whole’ means healthy, holy.” Krishnamurti
While in Nepal we briefly met this man.
Here’s a rough translation of what he sings (via a free translation app and our own poetic license):
Hello to everyone greetings with good luck Greetings everyone greetings to all I am living for you Loving at heart for I sing elegant Nepal Greetings everyone greetings with good wishes
Patrick later wrote this poem inspired by the brief encounter.
Minstrel
Hello
greetings, g’day
I am the listener
who feels your life
bind to mine
in the moment of
your playing
You appear
from some place
at the bus
when it stops
to let out
we stabled travellers
to urinate
Your music
is my old people’s too
(when we were not fragmented)
loose and wild
inside me
raw and free
dancing gaily at fear
I feel renewal
in this land slipping
bus shaken day
in hearing
your pleasure
to sing and
string
This is not a wafty, throwaway praise. This is an embodied knowing, a deeply felt thank you for the living, growing, seeding, podding, storing and shitting of plants. For their many giving parts.
Whether plants are in their own autonomy, in relationship with measureless earth others, or requiring peoples’ union to thrive, plants embody the feminine divine. Mother Country is the vessel in which all things are brewed, hotly or coldly, and plants are often the very fibres that enable the alchemy of such fermentations throughout life, into death and back across into life.
They are encasements of nourishment, wisdom holders, inebriation agents and great revealers.
But so much plant living has been violated by industrial food, energy and medicine capitalisms. Plants have been incarcerated, mined and used as gratuitous commodities. When welded to the dominant culture we devour them, we’re never fully satisfied, never fully full. Why? Is it our relationship with plants has radically changed under the spell and ideology of modernity’s project?
We have never had more food available to us in our short time as a species, but is it in this glut that gluttony occurs? That we are unfulfilled?
So many of the capitalisms that exploit plants are greenwashing capitalisms. Biofuels are the obvious example, but almost all uses of plants are a form of enslavement, within the machine of hypertechnocivility.
Domesticating plants, it has long been said, is the story of our own domestication. This is not always the same story as the process of becoming hypertechnocivil – that is, so industrialised to think we are the only species worth feeding – our food automated and chugged into cities, from where anthropocentrism powers over all life.
However, if we open to the ritual possibilities, the medicinal, magical and teaching properties of plants, can we call on our more expansive selves – the broader, mythological, transformative and cosmological potentialities of our selves – to take hold in our daily actions and processes?
This, we’ve found, is more possible when our foods, energies and medicines come from the gentle labours of our creaturely bodies. When we are ecological participants in loved biomes. When we are creatures of place. A loved homeplace.
When we walk for the plant gifts that make our lives possible, we cannot but step into the magical and divine realms of plants. From such a place both abundance and gratitude flow. We, people, can once again co-union with plants. It is deep in our cultural DNA that we live this way. It is lifemaking connected to ancestors. It refuses the severings of modernity.
Highly cultivated plants such as grapes thrive in conditions where people yearly prune their radical vines. In turn people thrive by eating the fruits created by the goddess herself.
Borlotti beans don’t need highly cultivated soil as they fix nitrogen in the earth and bring fertility to any earthly biome. Their colours delight us in the sun, under which we dry them to store for winter fuel.
Basil loves the full brunt of summer’s heat – a powerful herb and food medicine destined for almond pesto.
Ella, one of this week’s volunteers at Tree Elbow, communes with prune plums. We all delight in this prunus variety, also destined to be dried for winter’s cellaring and eating.
Volunteer Beau works alongside Blackwood with spelt from Burrum Biodynamics to alchemise this old grain into pasta to join the almond basil pesto for dinner.
Patrick sets up a tree net to catch acorns for their harvesting, thus stopping the midnight clang of hard little nuts landing on the water tank and waking the underworlders sleeping nearby.
Blackwood demonstrates his method of acorn shelling to his family and volunteers, using a nut cracker. Acorn meal will be used with spelt for winter pancakes and for the brewing of Patrick’s acorn beer (a recipe which can be found at the end of his re:)Fermenting culture book).
It has been a week of communing with plants, glowing in the gratitude of abundance, and savouring this time of harvest with volunteers and visitors, including Jess from Canada, who like Beau and Ella brought a joyful spirit to Tree Elbow.
The week finished with Wild Fennel – our local herbal medicine circle led by local witches, Catie and Zoe. Their beautifully facilitated plant medicine circle elegantly brought us all into deeper presence with the holy Tulsi, while we were warmed by the equinox fire in the garden at Tree Elbow.
A special thank you to Jordan for the pic of the plant circle, Catie and Zoe for the love and for the crafting back of the peoples’ medicine, and to Beau and Ella for your loving attention and joyous labours this week as SWAPs.
We look forward to hearing from you which plant or plants you are present to right now. What herbal teas or medicine plant foods are you most grateful for? What is your latest herbal/harvest discovery?
