Alohaaa SuperForest!
When I was introduced to Zero One back in July, it was through an invitation from Jackson to collaborate on the documentation of the project. A project that was presented to me as a Permaculture farm in Kilauea, HI. I didn’t know what form that was taking, what my involvement would be, or even if I wanted involvement. But I was most certainly curious!
I arrived on Kauai in January for a temporary nannying position, which ended in April, and after only a month felt that the island was home. As the job came to an end, I expressed interest in staying on island to my employers, who so generously offered me two things: 1. A place on island to stay through the summer. 2. A bit of their wisdom encouraging me think carefully about my choice to be on the island. According to them, “you don’t become successful on Kauai, you bring your success to it.” With this in mind, I headed back to the mainland for five weeks to feel things out in Los Angeles and see if the city in which I’d resided for the previous six years felt even remotely as much like home as the island did after one month.
Los Angeles is tricky. The drive for success, the drive in the car, and the drive for more began to sneak back in as I immediately started shooting concerts and having quite a bit of fun with it. ”I could be here,” I thought. Make my way as a photographer and be successful. So I decided to go back to island through the summer where I had a beautiful little secluded sanctuary to live and play and have “one last hurrah!” before heading back to LA to “buckle down and get to work!” This mindset became almost laughable the moment I stepped foot back on Kauai.
I opened myself to exploring what my definition of Success would be. Did this mean becoming a working, in-demand photographer? Or getting another sweet nannying position? Or working at the local coffee shop? I realized my conditioning had pigeon-holed my definition of Success to apply only to my ability to make money. My redefining of this word started to take shape when I began looking for a job and discovered that I was apparently not employable because I knew I was leaving the island in August and didn’t have a definitive plan to come back. Employers want a commitment, and I was unable to give them one.
So I cruised. I made do with what I had, shared in the aloha with the amazing friends I’d made, worked odd jobs here and there, adventured regularly and began the next level of observing myself. During this time, at the exact right moments, Jackson and I began to run into each other. We’d known each other very peripherally in LA, and I found it intriguing that we’d met again on a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific. With his invitation to come play at Zero One, my definition of success shifted once again.
My overall happiness in each moment started to be a heavily weighing factor in my belief that I was Successful. And I found that my overall happiness increased the more time I spent at Zero One. So I kept going back. As my numbered days on the island dwindled, my time at Zero One became more precious. I came to understand that Zero One: A Permaculture Farm, was also a pigeon-holed definition for what Zero One really is. We all began to understand this and eventually stopped describing ZO as such. Yes, it’s a Permaculture Farm, but so much more. This gave birth to Zero One: A Garden for Children of All Ages.
You see, Zero One is a place for gardening. But don’t limit yourself to the simple vision of us digging in the dirt and planting some kale. Dictionary.com says Gardening means: “to lay out, cultivate, or tend a garden.” This has come to apply not only to the land gardens, but to the chicken gardens, to the house gardens, and most importantly, to our own internal gardens. To view myself as a garden that needs nurturing through patience, love, and compassion has allowed me, yet again, to push forward my definition of Success. Am I cultivating love for myself and for everyone and everything around me? When that answer is a resounding YES!, then I feel I am Successful. When I feel unsuccessful in my cultivation of love for all things, then I must take a moment to observe and see what, specifically, is breeding this dis-love.
Before leaving the island back in August, I’d made the decision to return to Zero One as soon as possible. I went back to LA, prepared and packed a Burning Man camp, moved out of an apartment, put my car on a watership and myself on an airship, and high-tailed it out of the chaos. I was eager to continue The Melissa Garden: A Cultivation of Self-Love.
The past couple weeks have been quite a wild ride. After clearing out the external noise of Los Angeles – the advertising, the traffic, the people, the instant communication, the drive, coupled with the lack of end date here on the island and, specifically, having a quiet, safe, loving place in which to live, I’ve been allowed to investigate the internal noise in my own head. And to my discovery, it’s loud in there! I’d fallen away from my vigilance of myself and into old patterns of dis-love. Dis-love for Melissa, which extended to a mild dis-love for everything else. I found I had, once again, begun questioning my own value. My talents, my contribution to Zero One, my overall Success. Nothing “bad” had happened. In fact, great things had been happening! Jackson and I have been collaborating on creating a safe, open place for our nine lovely little lady chick-a-doo’s to live and play. I’d been creating and producing and seeing great results in the form of Chicken Village, an adorable space where we can sit and drink our morning coffee and watch an episode of Farm TV where the chickens peck and play and chase each other round and round to gain access to the much coveted and rare delicacy that is The Slug. But the result that has been emerging due to the slowdown and not having any sort of job, in the traditional sense of the word, has been quite interesting. A process of true decompression has begun, an emergence into my true self.
I’ve been given the opportunity to examine myself. My patterns, my conditionings, my fears, my desires, my ambitions, my love and so so much more. Every day is different. Sometimes I wake up and immediately jump out of bed feeling so great and just go go go and create create create. Other days I wake up and just lay lay lay and feel terrible terrible terrible. And no matter what, every night, I lay my head down on the pillow and acknowledge what a truly amazing day it’s been. Even on the days that I’ve spent what feels like hours staring into myself and crying in Chicken Village simply in acknowledgment of my own fears or conditioning, I’m so truly grateful to have this opportunity to discover and shed these layers of negative thinking.
I am the happiest I’ve ever been, at the fullest capacity I’ve ever been, and in the most control that I’ve ever been. This is not to say that I have nothing to “worry” about. But my worry about things like money and a job and some structured idea of success has mostly dissipated. It no longer keeps me up at night. I know that I will be taken care of and that right now, THIS is the place I need to be – stripping away all of the things that do cause me to lose sleep or wake up with a feeling of dread. Though I rarely choose the feeling of dread anymore, and when I do, I find that it’s not always an immediately conscious choice. The feeling arises, and sometimes I’m caught off guard by it, sit in it for a while, and when my awareness of my choice refocuses, I make the choice towards gratitude, or happiness, or more dread. Each and every choice to feel or think or behave in each specific circumstance guides me deeper into a more refined understanding of what exactly The Melissa Garden needs in order to be fully Successful in MY understanding of the word. My priorities have turned away from this idea that money and a career equals success and toward one of happiness and self love equals success. Everything else has taken a back seat. It’s rare that I leave the property these days. And this is simply for now.
More Chicken Village
That said, there is definitely a pecking order. The biggest chick is our Buff Orpington, Miss Beff, a grand yellow hen. As she is physically the largest, she simply uses her bulk to position herself wherever there is food. None of the other chickens are large enough to dislodge her. She doesn’t really peck anyone, she seems rather secure in her superiority, size-wise. Second in size is Spotty, a wild chicken we caught as a tiny chick and have raised with love ever since. Spotty is the enforcer, pecking hard the back of any impudent chicken who would dare try to eat before she and Beff have eaten their fill. Next in size are the two wild ones, Ginger and Eagle, who in turn peck the five white chicks. As the five white ideals (which is their breed) are practically identical, we have yet to name them. We call them simply “the Five.”
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