Entropy, livelihood and disaster

The last couple of days has been very windy. This place has strong winds in late winter and spring. They are part of the 'farm'. I find them unsettling. Things blow away, get damaged, dry out.  Every time the wind blows I hold on, hope, and wait for the calm to clean up the mess.

The winds convey a simple lesson. We are relatively insignificant and not in control.

They also provide a demonstration of a more subtle and important message about the wisdom of acting and then letting go.

The order on the farm is artificial. In ecology it is a maxim that, without the addition of energy, a system will tend to disorder and dissipation - an ecological reinterpretation of the second law of thermodynamics.

Modern western agriculture maintains its order by inputs of energy, most of it exogenous and 'artificial'. Substances like petrochemical fuel and industrial fertilisers contain remarkable amounts of energy. In as much as they are imported, these forms are 'unnatural'.

Permaculture, by contrast, is a way of harnessing and managing natural forms of energy in the landscape using inherent characteristics of the land and its natural and managed ecology.

These sources of 'natural' energy include the sun itself and the wind it drives.

Both natural and unnatural forms of energy generally dwarf the human work that influences the farm's condition.

Permaculture is a conceptual approach to farming. It aims, among other things. to guide and modulate the capture and management of natural energy with the aim of maximising the sustainable production of things useful to humans. A finite and relatively small input applied with intelligence is intended to provide a large relative output.

Permaculture can be interpreted in a way that aligns with the cultivation of the eightfold path. A vegetarian permaculture can work towards wise livelihood - work that attempts of reduce the potential for suffering in this world.

Developing the vegetarian permaculture requires action. The ability of action to influence is observable, but limited by the relative power and complexity of the natural world.

When the sun shines, wind blows, fire burns or water flows, the intelligence in that action is revealed in the quantum and quality of the farm's outcome - but only up to a point, the point where nature overwhelms human effort.

Beyond those limits the influence of any action is uncertain. Action may provide an expected result or it may not, or something else altogether may happen. Thus the wisdom in acting but letting go.

Mindfulness and Weather - Equanimity and Engagement

Recently Mark Nunberg posted a series of talks about understanding sensuality on Dharma Seed. It got me reflecting on mindfulness and the senses.

Buddism suggests that experience can be contained within the 5 aggregates - form, feeling, perception, mental formations and consciousness. In essence it suggests that we are not solid, but a constantly changing emanation of material elements that, through a capacity for sensing, creates a perception of both self and the world that this self perceives.

One facet of farming is an intimate sensory experience of the land, its environment and its ecology. Whether they notice or not, a farmer cannot usually avoid being pressed face-to-face against the nature of the world in which they live... the weather, landscape, rocks, soil, animals and plants. Seeing, hearing, smelling, touching and tasting are all available to the mind.

I suspect that mindful farming has two elements.

The first element is about being alive in each moment to the full range of sensory experience that results from this interaction. Not easy given the constantly changing riot of sensory input.

This version of mindfulness may appear counter to that of the meditative experience. In meditation mindfulness is usually concentrated by removing all external sensory distractions and focusing on the senses associated with a simple experience, commonly breathing. Then come the internal distractions and diversions. Assuming these can be put aside then the aggregates can be slowly revealed/unpicked/dismantled/dissolved.



My assumption has always been that this type of mindfulness is aimed at what Robert Pirsig called the pre-intellectual experience of phenomena. It is not about sensory experience per se, but about experiencing our senses without desire or fear and in a way that does not lead into a tangle of unconscious or intellectualised diversion and distraction. Mindful equanimity?

The second element of mindful farming has to do with connecting actions with the intentions of the eightfold path. It is mindful in the sense that it attempts to make an explicit link between the way we farm or our engagement with the world and our contribution to its suffering or joy. Mindful engagement?

On face value they may appear to be somewhat disconnected. The first element is very much about questioning internalised reactivity - how the mind perceives existence. The second element is about responding mindfully to each circumstance of existence - be it the weather, the cattle market or the rodents that have emanated.

Closer reflection reveals their absolute interdependence. Mindful engagement with the farm may appear relatively straightforward in the light of an explicitly articulated eight-fold path. Unfortunately mindful equanimity, its far slipperier complement, is the only solid foundation I can think of for mindful engagement.

Boredom

It has been over four months since the frenetic activity of my previous commitments subsided. All that activity took me away from the farm and farming. It gave me an excuse to ignore the sameness of each day, the apparent futility of life. I was simply too busy making the day work to worry about its quality.

Now my face presses firmly against the day-to-day. A search for the quality is unimpeded.

There is still plenty to "do" - the farm has a few lifetimes' work to get it to the condition to which we aspire.

The magnitude of that 'task' and the lack of real imperative for our aspirations highlights the unnecessariness of acting at all.

While some things are responsibilities (like milking, feeding and watering animals), most of what is planned is optional, even on a seasonal basis. The world will not notice much if a crop is not planted, if it withers in the ground, or it senesces without harvest. On a daily basis actions can seem inconsequential.

This may seem like a dark place to be...

This boredom is partly about the same unending list of repetitive daily tasks - sow, tend, harvest. It is also about the same unending repetitive discourse that spins in my mind - expectations, aspirations, recurrent desires, ceaseless fears.

... but it is not a dark place. There is a sort of light. The repetitive cycles are the reality of experience - the context for paying attention. In the boredom, the space for mindfulness appears.

Now the challenge is to avoid the diversions that rush to fill the space that boredom created.

Generosity and Community Service

A couple of weeks ago I reached the abrupt end of my four-year term as a Local Government Councillor.

For the last four years I have also been committed to a wide range of other community activities. The end of my Council duties coincides with a deliberate withdrawal from many of these activities.

Both Council and community activities started as part of my generosity practice. A habit of saying "yes" unless there was a clear reason to say "no".

As a form of generosity practice, making commitments that generate expectations of future behaviour well beyond the foreseeable future is somewhat fraught. Making commitments that place me in a systematic position of 'authority' is also fraught.

In the hustle and bustle of a normal western lifestyle, what is conventionally perceived as 'doing good' and actually doing a wise and compassionate thing are not always the same.

Generosity that was overstretched, impersonal and systematised did not feel genuine. Practicing in the conventional structures of a competitive and adversarial society was often uncomfortable. Feeling that I was part of the arbitration of 'winners' and 'losers' was suffering incarnate.

Community service has been fertile ground for practice, even if the pressure of commitments has impacted both the time and energy available for practice. These pressures have also led me at times to be less than generous to those closest to me.

From this experience, I now aspire to generosity at a more personal and immediate scale.