Permaculture, Abundance & Acceptance

I was at the farm over the last 2 days. Except the dal, everything else on the plate was from the farm or the neighbourhood.

Yesterday, breakfast was bamboo-shoot curry and honey with akki roti (made of rice flour). The honey was wild, from a hive in the mud (different bees from the tree hive ones)!!!

I also spotted a little one slithering across a pathway and went to check it out closer as it went into the bushes — one of the vipers — Russell’s I think.

Got me thinking. (A lot gets me thinking these days).

The bamboo was seasonal, and the mushrooms shows up too like that (nice if you know which to eat). The snake definitely “happened”. As did the honey.

The place, though, has become nicer for this kind of serendipity to happen. And that’s what you can focus on for magic to occur. Eventually this serendipity, the magic becomes abundance. But unpredictable, surprising and often in unplanned directions.

To “chase” the honey down - as production, or some flowers, or some fruit, or coffee, or the spotting of the birds, or the snake, or tigers in reserves — these focus on these as end goals and not on the ecosystems and processes that create this magic. That focus often comes at the cost of the ecosystem itself — there’s always a cost. The magic must “happen”, not “be caused”.

What we can do is to understand and align ourselves with the substrate and the underlying biome without forcing our needs on it. What we can also do in the most beautiful way is learn skills and ways that prepare us to celebrate, be thankful and react when the magic does happen. That includes skills including foraging, preservation, and even familiarity with the wild.

We have lost both a lot — the alignment that produces this abundance, and the skills that recognize and utilize it as a participant, not a master.

I’m not a religious person, but I do suspect that’s what the Gita was referring to with respect to the effort and fruit idea. And I believe that is the true underlying essence o regenerative techniques such as permaculture.