1. Landscape analysis. How does the drainage work? What elements that are already there do you want to keep (a tree)? Where does the sun shine...and where is it shady? Do a sketch map of problems and opportunities based on what is already there.
2. Landscape program. What do you want to do in your landscape? Garden? Storage of cars and other toys? Do you have animals? Do you play games? Do you have kids who need to play? Do you want to entertain, like parties or barbeques? Where do you want shade and where do you want it to be sunny all the time (food garden for example)? Are some areas multi-use and others single-use?
...What do you NOT want to do in your landscape? How much upkeep do you figure on doing? Are you into lawns with all the expense and time needed to keep them up? Using a different color of ink or pencil from step 1, draw in things you want to do and where you think they would work best, given the problems and opportunities in step 1.
3. Outdoor "rooms." Once you have an idea of where your activity areas will be, based on step 2, think of the yard as an extension of living space OUTside your house. Think about how the different areas as a series of related outdoor "rooms" that are defined by hardscape (bricks, decks, walls, driveways, walks) and softscape (trees, hedges, plant beds and borders). This is also the time to think about how you will water and light your yard, if you haven't already done so.
4. THEN and only then, do you decide what plants and trees to buy, as well as lawn installation location, building of walls and decks, etc. If you put things in before you do analysis or have a plan, it can be expensive. You may plant a cute little tree in a tight space where it "looks right" but where in 10-15 years it will crowd your house or cast shadows over a food garden area, or grow into power lines.
You don't have to install things all at once, depending on time and budget. You can phase things in. But a good plan that you stick to will keep you on track, will measure your success, and will end up as a unified and beautiful design.
In both the woodland and the prairie, I could see the trails of many animals and hear the cheerful songs of many kinds of birds. When I walked abroad, I could see many forms of life, beautiful living creatures which Wakanda had placed here; and these were, after their manner, walking, flying, leaping, running, playing all about.
But now the face of all the land is changed and sad. The living creatures are gone. I see the land desolate and I suffer an unspeakable sadness. Sometimes I wake in the night, and I feel as though I should suffocate from the pressure of this awful feeling of loneliness."
=Omaha elder, quoted in Melvin R. Gilmore, Prairie Smoke (1929).
Interesting fact for the day. You know how people are always making the expression we call "duck lips" in photos on the internet? It's French, and the pursing of the lips is called a "moue" (pout). It expresses distaste, disdain or annoyance, and is combined with a look of disinterest in one's eyes. It is also brief. If you are a beautiful woman, it can even imply "Yes, I know I am sexy, and I know you want me, but can you not see I am so much more beautiful than you?... so away with you, ugly little fellow. You do not stand a snowball's chance in hell. Ugh." To illustrate, I found an image of a moue by French actress Brigitte Bardot, and a duckface by a silly American girl. Notice the differences? The American girl is a pretty girl, but she shows no subtlety, no mystery, no insouciance. This sad attempt is, instead, tres gauche. Now compare duckface to the moue of Brigitte Bardot. Compare?? No, there can be no comparison.
That's how I was raised and that's how I experience the world, and how I interact with it. This is not always easy, considering the bustling world we all live in today, which certainly does not see the land and sky and water as alive, and mainly sees animals and plants as resources to be used as we wish to, and in fact, often sees even people as expendable things to be used and discarded.
I was raised both as a Catholic and in my Native American traditions, and although science is an integral part of my understanding of the material world, it is also innate within me to see things in a mystic way of everything being alive and having the rights to exist as they are. As I am an artist, that is also part of what I am, seeing beyond the appearances of things.
It has been a lifelong quest of mine to synthesize these often contradictory points of view I have been raised with and exposed to, in a way that makes sense for me, and which honors the truths found in each. It has been quite a "wrasslin' match" at times though, that's for sure! There are people in my life who don't like what science has to say, about human evolution for example ("I didn't come from no monkey!") and who see spirits in their own lives, and there are other people in my life who think belief in a living animistic world with spirits is nuts. Yet we all in the end have to find our own road, what makes sense to us.
So don't give up the search for balance in your life, between existing in the world of jobs and school and all that, and the more ancient worlds of spirit, nature, and family/ancestors.
Shoot, I am a total mongrel. The last one of my ancestors that came over was in the 1840s, the first European ones were here in the 1600s and the Native American ones, well, depending on your point of view, have either been here from the beginning of creation to 15,000 years ago or so.
I am plain old American I guess. I don't claim to be a Celt, or a German, or a fullblood Indian either, or any of the other half-dozen things my ancestors were. I'm a 'Merican, that's all. I have no relatives I ever met from the other side of the pond. Never been to Europe, except a 6 hour layover in Amsterdam on the way to Africa in 96. (It was early Sunday morning, so all the "interesting" places were quiet and nothing was going on.)
I honor those people and lands I come from. I get curious about which part of me might respond to something familiar over there. I read about the history and ways there. But I am an American, a new thing built out of old things, on a land that is new to part of me and a very old home to another part of me. It's all I know.
I see it all like a river, moving like a snake on the land, with braided channels, and moving islands, and oxbows that get cut off and go dead. And then another spring flood changes the whole thing. Some trees are washed away and some grow new and hold firm, and new saplings emerge and willows grow among the sandbars.
I see it all like a tapestry, with some parts too faded and worn away, threadbare, and not much can be seen but a line or a discolored thread here and there, but then other parts are interwoven and repaired with new threads, bright with color, and somehow the whole, though motley and disjointed, also has a beauty in its complexity, like an old city that is still alive, with its medieval buildings and outlines, joined by new avenues and trains and neon signs.
We all go back to the very beginning, whatever you decide the beginning was ...or in our native language, the beginning IS, because Creation is still unfolding around us, just as the End too is unfolding around us.
As Basho said so well, "“Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise; seek what they sought.”
Lance
conquer, divide, categorize, map, and privatize the Earth. The more radical
implications of guerrilla gardening is that it calls into question the land use
of today's modern world. With the rise of modern industrial society, and the
accumulation of mass amounts of riches by the ruling class, land that
historically had been held and treated as a commons, has effectively been
divorced from the people who benefited and cared for the land the most. When
common, everyday people lose access to land, they become enslaved and dependent
upon the industrial machine that is destroying human culture and the land base
that supports all of us. Not that long ago (at least in the historical long
view) when the planet had a smaller population and people had a greater hand in
the production of their food – the commons – whether that be forest, pasture,
prairie, or wetlands, contributed greatly to the food in their diets and
personal autonomy in their lives."
http://autonomyacres.wordpress.com/2
For example, if you are having a sweat, say, a nonnative person wants to participate. So you might say ok, if you are friends or at least know them. So they go, try to follow what is told to them, what to do. It's a good thing. A blessing. But then the next thing you know, this person is running a sweat themselves, without having been given the training, the right and responsibility, because it comes with both. It's like a pipe, not everyone in an Indian community is a pipecarrier, but every white guy or woman who is interested, thinks by definition, they have the capacity and the RIGHT to do it. Indians don't think that. Not every native person is a shaman, so why does every white person think they can be one? A shaman mainly serves the community.
..ok, so let's go back to that first guy who went to a sweat. Now that guest suddenly decides he has the knowledge to run a sweat. To make things worse, he starts charging people MONEY to go to it. (Isn't that what this culture is all about anyways? Money and the SELF?) That's the next stage. That lack of being humble. That greed. Now this guy calls himself some Indian/native sounding name, and he (or SHE) is running workshops to TRAIN OTHERS. A guy who had no training, now he purports to train others and charge hundreds of dollars, maybe linked workshops that add up to thousands of dollars. Sounding like cultural misappropriation yet? But wait, that's not the final stage.
The final stage is when this guy, maybe he calls himself Red Buffalo Thunder or something, he starts collecting his followers like some kind of guru, has workshops, has written a couple of books, has a 501(c)(3), etc. And THEN he starts criticizing the very same Indians who out of kindness, invited him in the first place. He starts saying how they really don't understand the truth, or that they misunderstand things, they don't do it the right way, that they have no right to say anything about him because he has his rights, dontcha know? That the INDIANS are the ignorant, bad ones because they tell him he should be doing that, that he is doing cultural misappropriation.
Now, do you understand? No, I figure some might and some still won't. They will still justify their rights, to do what they want, make the money they want, and write the books they want. And then people wonder why Indians don't want to talk to them anymore... Except of course for those Indians who have become shysters themselves, raking in the bucks themselves from ignorant nonIndians so eager to get some real Indian spirituality. Sad.
The intent in the guy's heart from Colorado (I was corrected, the event was in Sedona...figures!) was about money obviously. Having said that, the other part is that when you do those things, you assume a spiritual role of responsibility in that person's life...not being a big shot or a boss or a guru, but someone who is responsible for them. And whatever blowback occurs. It amazes me when people get mad about a priest or minister "having authority" and the same people go running to someone else who bosses them around spiritually.
But the main thing is, hey, if you are doing any of that stuff in private, for yourself, only, and you are experimenting with your own spiritual path, that's on you. Fine. That's between you and the spirits, you and the Creator. The problem comes when you (anyone, not talking about "you") assume any role of responsibility for others, or representing yourself as a spiritual leader.
I am not a spiritual leader. But I am also not a spiritual follower. As my uncle Herman Bearcomesout once told me, it's all out there, in the land, where it came from, look there. As the Hawaiians say, "Nana I Ke Kumu" (Look to the Source).
"Dark Ecology: Searching for truth in a post-green world." By Paul Kingsnorth.
Published in the January/February 2013 issue of Orion magazine
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/a
Kingsnorth essentially has come to the following ideas, which I excerpt here:
"And so I ask myself: what, at this moment in history, would not be a waste of my time? And I arrive at five tentative answers:
One: Withdrawing. If you do this, a lot of people will call you a “defeatist” or a “doomer,” or claim you are “burnt out.” They will tell you that you have an obligation to work for climate justice or world peace or the end of bad things everywhere, and that “fighting” is always better than “quitting.” Ignore them, and take part in a very ancient practical and spiritual tradition: withdrawing from the fray. Withdraw not with cynicism, but with a questing mind. Withdraw so that you can allow yourself to sit back quietly and feel, intuit, work out what is right for you and what nature might need from you. Withdraw because refusing to help the machine advance—refusing to tighten the ratchet further—is a deeply moral position. Withdraw because action is not always more effective than inaction. Withdraw to examine your worldview: the cosmology, the paradigm, the assumptions, the direction of travel. All real change starts with withdrawal.
Two: Preserving nonhuman life. The revisionists will continue to tell us that wildness is dead, nature is for people, and Progress is God, and they will continue to be wrong. There is still much remaining of the earth’s wild diversity, but it may not remain for much longer. The human empire is the greatest threat to what remains of life on earth, and you are part of it. What can you do—really do, at a practical level—about this? Maybe you can buy up some land and rewild it; maybe you can let your garden run free; maybe you can work for a conservation group or set one up yourself; maybe you can put your body in the way of a bulldozer; maybe you can use your skills to prevent the destruction of yet another wild place. How can you create or protect a space for nonhuman nature to breathe easier; how can you give something that isn’t us a chance to survive our appetites?
Three: Getting your hands dirty. Root yourself in something: some practical work, some place, some way of doing. Pick up your scythe or your equivalent and get out there and do physical work in clean air surrounded by things you cannot control. Get away from your laptop and throw away your smartphone, if you have one. Ground yourself in things and places, learn or practice human-scale convivial skills. Only by doing that, rather than just talking about it, do you learn what is real and what’s not, and what makes sense and what is so much hot air.
Four: Insisting that nature has a value beyond utility. And telling everyone. Remember that you are one life-form among many and understand that everything has intrinsic value. If you want to call this “ecocentrism” or “deep ecology,” do it. If you want to call it something else, do that. If you want to look to tribal societies for your inspiration, do it. If that seems too gooey, just look up into the sky. Sit on the grass, touch a tree trunk, walk into the hills, dig in the garden, look at what you find in the soil, marvel at what the hell this thing called life could possibly be. Value it for what it is, try to understand what it is, and have nothing but pity or contempt for people who tell you that its only value is in what they can extract from it.
Five: Building refuges. The coming decades are likely to challenge much of what we think we know about what progress is, and about who we are in relation to the rest of nature. Advanced technologies will challenge our sense of what it means to be human at the same time as the tide of extinction rolls on. The ongoing collapse of social and economic infrastructures, and of the web of life itself, will kill off much of what we value. In this context, ask yourself: what power do you have to preserve what is of value—creatures, skills, things, places? Can you work, with others or alone, to create places or networks that act as refuges from the unfolding storm? Can you think, or act, like the librarian of a monastery through the Dark Ages, guarding the old books as empires rise and fall outside?
It will be apparent by now that in these last five paragraphs I have been talking to myself. These are the things that make sense to me right now when I think about what is coming and what I can do, still, with some joy and determination. If you don’t feel despair, in times like these, you are not fully alive. But there has to be something beyond despair too; or rather, something that accompanies it, like a companion on the road. This is my approach, right now. It is, I suppose, the development of a personal philosophy for a dark time: a dark ecology. None of it is going to save the world—but then there is no saving the world, and the ones who say there is are the ones you need to save it from."
I liked what he said. It resonates for me.
So what is the companion of despair? For me it is a very old kind of hope. It's not the kind of hope most people think of anymore when you say the word "hope." It is not a hope that thinks people will change, or techno-optimism, etc. It is the kind of hope a starving wolf has, or an ancient human hunter who hasn't eaten in a week. You keep moving, looking for food, because there might be a caribou over the next ridge. Because the only other alternative is to lie down and die where you are. But hunters, the wolf and the man, don't do that, they keep moving until they cannot move, because there might be that caribou just out of sight, over the next ridge..or the next.
When I woke up I had no idea what this was about, but after I dragged the trash to the curb, I came to the computer and was led to this post:
http://tidesturner.blogspot.com/2013/03/m
All I can say is, this woman gets it. Whatever you think about traveling in vision, whether it is "real". She gets it. What shamanism really is and what it is not. Wow. It's the very first time I've seen someone who was not brought up in a native community really get this. It's why indigenous people say what they say. And how so many modern people are just so different with their focus on ego. The past is a foreign country.
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hengruh- Lance Foster
- The Sleeping Giant
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