Thanks to superforester Mina for the tip, and Boing Boing for the story. This inventive little boy is on his way to being the next Michel Gondry. Ten minutes you won’t regret watching!
Caine’s Arcade from Nirvan Mullick on Vimeo.
Archive for the 'build' Category
Permaculture at its finest. A living swimming pool stacks the functions of rainwater catchment, water filtration, food production, wetlands reclamation, wild animal habitat formation, energy capture in the form of heat from the sun, and the most important function of all: fun.
“David Pagan Butler introduces natural swimming pools: beautiful swimming ponds that require no chemicals, just plants and a simple solar powered filter pump to clean the water.”
(via)
Aloha SuperForest!
Since finding out that we are pregnant, my research and experience has lead me to appreciate the incredible service that midwives offer in supporting women and encouraging our true power and intuition on this transformative journey in growing, birthing, and parenting a new human being.
Jackson’s beautiful sister, Nile Nash, has launched an IndieGoGo fund raising campaign for her latest and greatest endeavor: A Midwifery Clinic in San Francisco. Complete with annual exams, full midwifery care, and, while she’s down there, a waxing! With 14 days left in her campaign, this Mama Lion will surely appreciate all support given. Be sure to check out the rewards she’s offering, like fancy hand knitted hats and even a well woman exam.
Help this amazing woman help other amazing women!
Love you Nile, and all the midwives of the world.
Love + Aloha,
Melissa
Full seven acre proposal to be built over the next few years.
My awesome friend Evan sent me this lovely link!
A seven-acre plot of land in the city’s Beacon Hill neighborhood will be planted with hundreds of different kinds of edibles: walnut and chestnut trees; blueberry and raspberry bushes; fruit trees, including apples and pears; exotics like pineapple, yuzu citrus, guava, persimmons, honeyberries, and lingonberries; herbs; and more. All will be available for public plucking to anyone who wanders into the city’s first food forest.
What a great use of permaculture! The article goes on to say:
What started as a group project for a permaculture design course ended up as a textbook example of community outreach gone right.
For more information you can also read this article and of course, visit the Beacon Food Forest Website!
Also, I found this movie through their website! Yay plants! Plant power!
You are falling from the sky.
The bad news is
you have no parachute.
The good news is
there is no ground.
- Chögyam Trungpa
Oh, Dear Beloved SuperForest,
It has been too long.
Transition is like a window to your heart. Everyone sees you blown apart. And, friends, I am being blown apart once again, as in a week’s time I will be setting down by traveler’s pack for what might be a long while, to pursue a writing career in the great city of New York.
I have shared with you, my fair and precious readers, snapshots of my life on the road, and perhaps I should have shared more; it was difficult to gauge how much I needed to withdraw from the world in order to find myself or whatever it was I went looking for. I’ll be regaling you with some of the best stories from my travels soon, but in the meantime, I think we’re due for a heart to heart.
As of one month ago—that is, the end of January—I was planning to be returning to South Korea to have another tour of teaching English, and, to me, more importantly, to immerse myself in the Zen Buddhist culture there, before wending my way up South America to New York in a year and a half to get into journalism. Ant though this narrative sounded good to me, an I would have time to write and take part in other project publications, it did not release a sense of yearning and dread, a dressing more tart than balsamic vinaigrette that the salad of my soul needed to be rid of. And so I felt haunted, in a way, walking lonesome on snowy Turkish mountains and longing through the second deck of a London bus – and a close friend asked, Why not go to New York now? why not go?
I gurgled back I’m just not ready! and I don’t have the money! and, to myself, AHHHH! But the challenge of that fabled metropolis, and the adventure of forging my career, filled me with a mixture of excitement and fear. With a lingering question in my head, and a fork in the road approaching, I boarded a flight to JFK, to visit friends I hand’t seen in years, and to dip a toe into electric waters.
On the other side of the Atlantic, I was greeted by a third-grade classmate who’s already gone to LA and now to NY and is well on her way to her dreams, and, standing in the Strand Bookshop near Union Square, sisterly asked, Are you going to come here? and I thought Y..yes? and I said mrmrmrmrmaybe? In Manhattan that night, and on the subway to Brooklyn, I took in the young and hardworking swirling about, and thought, these are my people.
A week went by in the city: Warm weather. A Super Bowl victory. Friendship renewal. A phone, a charger. The fluttering bird inside my chest: perching, roosting, possible nesting. A decision made. One very disappointed school in Korea, and some very happy parents in America.
So, next week, on the day of the leap (that’s the 29th), I will land in New York, one-way. Two bags. Friend’s couches to as-yet-unknown-sublet to one-day-a-lease. Freelancing to as-yet-unknown-internship to one-day-a-full-time-job. And a lot of what I need to do to get to what I want to do, somewhere in the thought-and-word industry. Known and unknown.
A great leap in the great leap year of the water dragon.
And if you’re in New York, you are always welcome with me.
Love,
Drake
(p.s.: This replugging means that this SuperForest is about get real energetic. This is going to be fun.
A comment from Jackson on my last post, regarding creating sacred spaces in everyday life:
This is fantastic, Drake! The question I ask myself is: How big can I make my sacred space?
Can it be bigger than a room? Could it be the whole house? Could it be the whole street? Could it be the planet itself? Could I stretch out really far and contain the entirety of the Universe within my sacred space?If I did that, I would reside within my sacred space forever.
A reply, in three parts:
I. IMAGINATION EXPERIMENTS
You are in your backyard, an open winter’s plain, with a camera in hand, and a spindly birch stands alone before you. A sparrow flies to a far branch and begins to tweet, and you turn your head to the stimuli. The angle of vision shifts. Light and shadow form a new composition. “Snap” goes the shutter.
It’s the high summer. You are lying in bed, looking out the window to the same tree. Feeling hot, you switch on the fan above you. You look again at the cedar, now full and green. Coolness on your face brings your attention back to the fan. You look up, and follow one blade’s spin, slowing its orbit with your concentration.
That fall, standing in line at the grocery store, you are a bit bored. You need to get home, and the fluorescent lights give you a headache. Your jaw tightens. The cashier is taking too long, and the little kids up anew spots ahead are getting annoying.
Or, rather, you catch yourself growing annoyed, blink well, and exhale. You breathe down into your soles, let your arches rest, and feel the ground beneath your toes. Frustration melts into relaxation, and the environment shifts: the lights illuminate, the cashier is thorough, and the children’s whimsy delightful.
Light and shadow recompose. The blade slows.
A smile alights on the corners of your mouth.
II. PHENOMENOLOGICAL CONFESSIONAL
When I was a boy, I played lots of video games. I remember, in my early illiteracy, begging my sister to read to me the text of RPGs. As with many of my ilk, the screen, I think, shaped the way that I relate to myself.
I remember standing in front of the bathroom mirror, one of those places of childhood epiphany, and touching my face, thinking, “this is my body, this is the one I get.” I had, through the analogy of SEGA, thought of my body as something I was “playing,” the character given for this life.
Using myself as an example, I tend to identify with the witnessing screen of my consciousness, rather than this body, as me. And, contrarily, I tend to see others as their bodies; it takes consideration to realize that in this other collection of parts lives a consciousness, with a history of breakups and best friends and ice cream preferences. Unexamined, I harbor a frayed mind/body dualism: I am only my mind, they are only their bodies.
Descartes would suggest that this consciousness and this body are running parallel to one another, and do not intersect. This seems silly, as this mind and this body are constantly interacting. When I hit my head on something, consciousness knows it too.
Going back to childhood, the screen conditioned me into a mediated identity. There was the subject, consciousness, and the object, the body, which have a mysterious degree of separation. We often talk of “having” a body, but rarely of “being” a body. Perhaps this is a reason that so many, including myself, tend to neglect, or even harm, our bodies, which are somehow so far away. But it is in the body that the consciousness is in the world. Rather than being mutually exclusive, mind and body are mutually inclusive.
Our bodies are constantly communicating with us. “Listen to your body, listen to your body.” But what is it saying, and how do I listen? Most obvious is “HUNGRY” and “SLEEPY!” but what are the less obvious elements, the tension in the shoulders, the pull in the hamstrings, saying to us?
A teacher once told me that all body tension is emotional. And with meditation and yoga my incredulity had eroded. It seems that it is a sensitivity to these feelings that is needed to udnrstand them. It is a though my body is a class of students, and each part wants to be called on to say what happened over the weekend. That tension, or that peace, radiates in consciousness, and out into our surroundings. The mind is manifest in the body, the body manifest in the mind.
–
Relationship is everywhere, and everywhere we are shown ourselves. The other reveals us … The whole always throws the parts into relationship, polishing the mirrors. What we see happening in the external drama we can be sure is part of ourselves. It is said that a cow walked across the entire city of Baghdad and saw only some hay that had fallen off a wagon. Likewise, some people travel all around the world and report back that everyone tried to cheat them.
Coleman Barks’s commentary, The Essential Rumi.
–
III. CONSCIOUSNESS AND ENVIRONMENT
When first laying eyes on the Himalayas, or Monet’s <em> Water Lillies </em>>, one may emit a soft “ah,” a soft vocalization of placid awe. This awe extinguishes anxiety, and the conscious mind rests on the beauty it beholds. Correspondingly, the body relaxes and releases. For a moment, the “I” and its projected barriers are gone, and consciousness is unseparated from its environment. The lover dissolves into the beloved, and this is, to me, the essence of sacred experience.
What is important to keep in mind is that consciousness does not exist somewhere else; the phenomena we experience through our senses are not behind a screen, the mind is not mediated. The state of consciousness is reflected in the body’s posture and movement, the tension of muscles and joints, in the tone of voice, in the feeling communicated by physical touch. As well, the state of consciousness frames, or perhaps even defines, what one takes away from a particular location.
Christianity and Buddhism agree that the body is a temple. The body exudes its consciousness, and if one makes safe refuge within one’s body, the way that the druid feels in Stonehenge, or the francophile in Montmartre, the sacred space of the mind expands, and the peace of that consciousness acts as a temple blessing to all those that interact with it.
Last summer in Dharamsala I received a teaching from the Dalai Lama, and walking from his throne to his car, he turned to his right and, for the briefest of moments, His Holiness connected eyes with me, and I froze in elation; all my ideas my ideas fell down, and he turned back to his path, and I cooed and clapped in a fit of Lama-induced love-hysterics.
What is the well-spring of said swoon? How is it that His Holiness radiates radical peace, through the medium of air into me? I do not know, but I sense that in that lustrous mind of his is a calm ocean, and that serenity of consciousness is manifest in the body.
In loving, we train ourselves to love more. In perceiving the beauty of the world, we make ourselves more vulnerable to seeing the beauty that is inside us. By stepping into the quiet beauty within consciousness, and gain an appreciation for this foundation of living, we in turn open our aesthetic aperture. In the calm abiding of sensing beauty in the “screen” of consciousness, one begins to appreciate the beauty of the body. This threefold sensitivity to beauty, at the seat of consciousness, as part of the body, and within space, creates a sustainable, positive, psychological ecology, transcendent of “everywhere.”
A SuperForest.
Love,
Drake
We superforesters are huge advocates for the fight against modern day slavery. We’ve written numerous posts, spoken with authors and abolitionists, attended the Freedom Awards, sponsored by our friends at Free The Slaves (if you haven’t please check out he amazing work they are doing). One of the greatest advocates in bringing awareness and progress to this movement is CNN’s freedom project, which since it’s launch in March of 2011 has inspired thousands of individuals and organizations to get proactive right now.
Recently they reported on an amazing event held in Atlanta, Georgia in which over 42,000 faith-based college students gathered to hold a candlelight vigil in whcih they raised over 2.6 million dollars to end modern slavery. Yes you heard correct, 2.6 million! What an incredibly hopeful and inspiring message of community gathering to raise light to the darkness and engender change.
You can read the CNN report here: http://thecnnfreedomproject.blogs.cnn.com/2012/01/05/college-kids-vow-to-end-slavery/
Bill Moyers: You write in “The Mythic Image” about the center of transformation, the idea of a sacred place where the temporal walls may dissolve to reveal a wonder. What does it mean to have a scared place?
Joseph Campbell: This is an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.
It does seem that kindness is the door to happiness, and we would do well to remember that kindness is a graceful affection to another — as well as to one’s self. To provide a still place and time for simply existing — whether it be with a book, a piece of music, or a craft — is one of the most nourishing services we can do for ourselves. And, indeed, this allows us to relieve stress, and thus be of greater service to others.
I think of my own meditation practice. Sitting on the cushion, I rest my weight on my seat, and I feel the slow pull of tension from my groin to my knees. I balance on the cushion, equal parts peaceful and precarious. As my breathe fills my stomach, and my monkey mind begins to rest, the tension in my hips releases, quiet as a silent ripple’s song. I give the tightness to the ground. With stalactite certainty, my knees drip down to the earth. The mono- of my balancing act becomes tri-, and the base of support becomes solid. Relaxed and alert, I am, without doing, meditating.
In this way, the clumsy can become coordinated. Or, in my case, at least more so.
Was it market urgency that drove away the space of the sacred? In sacred acts, It is not even patience that takes place, for patience regards some event in the future. When the sabbath is created in our lives we allow ourselves to simply exist, to be with gentle care. It is in this way that pouring a cup of tea becomes ritual, and in the heaving half-circle steps after a long run that one is deeply alive. Sanskrit, as always, provides an apt term: shamatha, meaning calm abiding, loosely focused, the way the gardener lovingly trims the plant, or the artists brushes paint across the canvas. This is, I think, what we call grace.
There is a tenderness within us that I take to be the seat of the soul. The cup filled by the muse. Within this inside-quiet lies inspiration and possiblity beyond anything yet known; indeed, it is from the unknown inside that the new is created. We venture into uninterpreted space, and, with courage and faith and trust, are able to share our findings: in art, in conversation, in love. This, then, is the beautiful forge of creativity, shamatha awareness transforming the inner to outer.
The only thing holding us back is us. Every barrier, every border, is our own. If we are to grow, we must take full responsibilty for our prejudices: Every “I can’t” is an atrophied “I don’t.” We must face the fear at the bottom of the learning curve. We must not yield to our doubts, if we are to yield to our dreams.
Projects are daunting. They daunt; they are experts at it. The “can’t” chorus sings siren song, but the “can” camp swells with each daily drop in the bucket. The year is young. Plenty of buckets to choose from. So What is your sacred shamatha vessel, and how will you gracefully fill it?
(via)
Number one: Figure out what you want. Do this by asking yourself A LOT of questions and listening to the answers that are returned to you. Beginning with, “What do I want?” I’ve found that simply being on the land helps me to quiet my mind. Sometimes by just sitting, other times by weeding the garden or walking silently, listening to what’s happening in my head. Then, when I receive an answer, for example, “I want to build a chicken coop,” I think about what I want that coop to look like. What are my reasons for wanting chickens? To feed my family? To feed the community? To sell? How many chickens do I have energy, money and food to raise? How much space do I have to dedicate to chickens? What materials are available to build a coop? Would I rather have a chicken tractor so I can utilize my birds for garden preparation and fertilization? Any question that I can think of, that seems important for my initial coop design, I have to remember to ask it, and listen to what comes in response.
Then, using free or cheap, found, recycled, donated, used, materials, I build Prototype A Chicken Coop. No need for expert skills, I cobble together a rudimentary first coop, get some chickens, put them in it, and see what happens. Does the cat get in and eat two of my ladies? Is it so good I don’t need to make any adjustments at all? Would I rather it have wheels for easier relocation? I observe and make adjustments. There are no mistakes, just experimenting, creating, having fun, learning and forward movement. I use prototyping for nearly all of my projects. It allows me to obverse and make decisions based on real events rather than trying to predict what will happen in the future. Here is a fantastic article SuperForester Jackson just found on Prototyping.
(via)
Next, Land needs people. Either paid help or work/trade/live-in help. Development can rarely be done alone AND happy and quickly and cheaply. So observe the land while asking for, meeting with and inviting your specifically chosen team to come join you to live on the land. Let the grass (if there is any) grow long and tall. Observe the paths that the people create in the un-mowed grass. Plant where the people Don’t walk. Allow them to create your map for you. Trust them. You’ve chosen these people for specific reasons like, you like them, they are skilled and valuable to you and your project. Treat them as such.
I’ve now co-created land projects twice, once on two acres, currently on nine, and (fingers crossed) moving on to five. With each project, the team of people was the most integral first step after: Do Nothing. Wait. Observe. Document (photo, video, write.) If you feel you can do this alone AND cheap, you’re likely mistaken. If you’re still interested in the monetary/employment, drive to work to buy this car, buy this car to drive to work system and you’ve got a lot of money and are willing to spend it, hire some awesome peeps to help you. I’ve used the live-in, work/trade, low or no rent method for both projects and have found it to be most fulfilling for the land, the people and our collective sanity.
Figure out where you’re going to set up each camp. When you allow each team member/family their own camping spot with room to ripple out towards each other and the common areas, you will be able to observe that wherever you place a human, the land around them will get cleared and cleaned and loved from the inside out, effortlessly. Again, trust your people. Don’t micromanage. With a common goal, that one you figured out you wanted in step one, the vision will come to fruition if you communicate with and trust your people.
Water: Wells can be ideal, but take time and money. So set up some rain catchment. You can use a simple tarp/55 gallon plastic barrel system that you can run through either a natural, plant, sand, charcoal filter or a Berkey or Britta system. Also, Is there a nearby fresh spring or a stream running on the land that you can utilize?
Poop: We call our method The Tree Machine. Dig a hole about 3-4 feet deep and 2-3 feet wide. Build a simple wooden box with a toilet hole and hinged cover, and place it over hole in ground. Squat on box and poop in hole. Place dirt or, preferably dry wood chips over each poo until hole is nearly full. Remove box, fill in remaining part of hole, let sit for two weeks. Plant fruit tree over it. Repeat.
Those are the basics I’ve used for the initial phase of land projects.
Aloha!
One year dies. Another is born. A life consuming a life. Two thousand and eleven, tottering into two thousand and twelve, this year that carries so much connotation. Will the world end? Possibly. Will it continue? Most probably. A day ends, another begins. The earth rotates, the earth orbits; turning, turning, turning. The heart pumps out red, receives blue. A transfer, transform, transport, translate:
The Sufis dance sema, the gentle whirl for which the dervish are known. Arm extended, face to the side, turning, turning, turning, the spin they learn from the nail in the ground. The slow burn of rapture. A touch of the divine. Lover and beloved, turning, turning. Rotation. A year, a day, a life, ends. Another begins.
Pause.
There is still time to rejoice. The content of mental life is shaped by its stimulus, from within and without. A diet of resentment encourages jealousy, envy, the sad cousins of comparison. A habit of appreciation engenders joy, even awe, healthy servings for the “good cholesterol” of the ego. Let us be in awe of this year. Of all that has happened. And rather than punishing ourselves for what we haven’t done, rejoice in the steps taken. This is positivity.
Yet there is also negative space. Absence, as presence. Known and unknown. A thought appears in the conscious mind, and absorbs back into the unconscious. Is it gone, disappeared? Unknown, a possible return. The absence inside gives meaning to the form of the bell. Ring, ring, ring. A new year approaches. A vessel of life. Fill it, but not all the way. Presence, absence.
Turning, turning, turning.
A healthy relationship with absence, with the not done, or not yet done, is needed. As an American, I was brought up to believe that I can and would do everything. And so I threw myself around, in anguish for all that I have not and will not be. Fear, anger, arrogance: a greed for experience. Don’t confuse the universe, trust intuition. A profound mystery lies inside of us. Go toward that. Let all that is not you fall away.
As a hair is pulled from a slab of butter.
The new year approaches, the orbit-lap is nearly made. We carry the momentum of our many causes, soon to become effects. Yesterday’s premises created today. The self is the product of accumulated habits.
From today, tomorrow.
2011, 2012.
Due cause for a party.
Alter a step, change the dance.
Peace and blessings,
Drake
He who binds himself to a Joy,
Does the winged life destroy;
He who kisses the Joy as it flies,
Lives in eternity’s sunrise.William Blake
(image via earthbagbuilding.com)
Good Mooooorning SuperForesters!
Let’s start an eco village here on the island on Kauai. Let’s come together, pool our resources, solidify an intention, and build the bugger.
Let’s find a nice piece of land here on the island, and there is much land to choose from. Let’s buy that piece of land, and camp out on it. If it has buildings we live in them, if not, we camp. We look at the land. We look at where we camped. We see the relationship between where we chose to camp, and the place where we should begin building suitable housing. Then we begin building it.
To begin, we need housing. Here in the tropics, buildings are mostly constructed of wood, which is much like building something out of popsicles in the desert. Wood, once cut down starts to degrade. If it gets wet, it degrades even faster. Bugs and mushrooms and microbes and molds, all love to eat wet wood. Building out of wood is no good. If you want to build to last in the tropics your choices are stone, or plastic.
(image via parsarts.com)
Here enters the work of architect Nader Khalili, a man who won a prize from NASA to design the lightest and most robust dwellings for use on the moon. His idea: ship long, uncut lengths of sandbag material, fill them with moon rocks, coil them up like a coil pot, and move in. Easy and fast to build, nice looking, strong, earthquake (moonquake) proof, even lava proof, for lava flows right around it, Khalili’s Emergency Dome is the perfect choice for regenerative living in tropics. Here we have plenty of earth, we have concrete to stabilize it, and we can use this model to prototype an even bigger, more robust living situation in the future. Cool in the summer, warm in the winter, open, non-toxic, friendly dwellings. Cheap too! And bugs cannot eat eco domes.
Let’s build a community based on unity and oneness as a model. What that means exactly I’m still learning, but love is a big part of it, and personal responsibility another. A SuperForest in 3D, if you will.
I base much of my ideas on two books, the Permaculture Designer’s Manual and A Course in Miracles.
The PDM says that the yield of the system is theoretically limitless, depending entirely on the creativity of the designer. Which is another way of saying that human ingenuity cannot be contained and can stack functions atop each other forever, always improving, always reducing waste and energy.
ACIM says that perception is entirely my choice. That a state of Heaven on Earth is my choice. That nothing real can be threatened and that nothing unreal exists. This book has brought me much peace of mind, much stillness, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.
A Course in Miracles says that the only choice I ever have to make is whether to live in Heaven or live in hell.
If that is so, then let us build a heaven together. Where we can heal and teach healing. That is my heart’s desire and fondest wish.
The next step is to ask yourself if you’d like to live in community, and whether or not you think that community would like to live with you. That’s a very important question. After that we get in touch via this site or facebook. With enough of us interested a discussion can take place. Discussions lead to further discussions which often lead to action. I would like to outcome of the discussions and action to be the purchase of a piece of land here on Kauai, with funds in reserve to start a media lab and document the process of creation as it unfolds.
Let’s do this thang!
Love to All,
Jackson
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