Week 2

Week 2: Off-Grid Living

I was invited by a friend this week to visit her friend who lives off-grid in Chehalis, WA.  I was fortunate to spend the whole day with him on his land and hear his life story and the ways he is able to live minimally with almost zero waste, and almost zero dollars. He was born in Ghana and when was young migrated to Washington. He spent years living an average american life and working for various companies such as Apple, and one day, with intense frustration at modern society decided to by some land with all the money he had, and to live off-grid, by himself, with little to no communication for almost two years. Over time he slowly and surely built himself a cabin out of completely re-purposed wood and found objects on the land.

The high tech technology living here was solar panels for the cabin, his personal ipad, and cameras part of a security system, mainly to be alerted of hunters overstepping their boundaries. He was immensely inspiring, and was a living example of hope that we as humans are more then able to re-connect and live in harmony with the earth. He is a master of intuitively communicating with nature, and I learned so much about permaculture, botany, and basic living in the bush skills in just a day visit.

Our heavy dependence on technology is an  illusion created my consumerist and capitalist culture, and to see someone who has re-connected with intelligence of life and nature boosted my understanding of my project. I am considering visiting him again soon and incorporating his work with mine.

I have continued reading The Secret Teachings of Plants, and will am excited to add The Metamorphosis of Plants, Goethe, and The Grammar of the Lotus, Henry.

I have started writing my idea for a grant, and establishing The Evergreen Yoga Service Collective.

 

Yarden’s Thinking Tool 1

 

 

 

“The emphasis on life marks a shift away from the deconstruction of layers of textuality, and toward an understanding of the inextricable entanglement of material, bicultural, and symbolic forces in the making and unmaking of the subject.” (Smelik, Lykke, xii-xiv)

During this weeks reading I felt my mind as amagnifying glass, zooming in on details of life that were previously washed over. In The Secret Teachings of Plants, Stephen Harrod Buhner talks about dendritic patterns in nature, and this image of the repetitious, branching and growing patterns became a thinking tool. This pattern shows how growth in life is non-linear, but fractal, bended, curved and non-mechanical. In the quote above from Bits of Life, she seems to agree with this way of thinking as not just a linear process, but a process that combines many forces as an“entanglement.”I find this way of thinking much freer and relevant to life, rather then the concrete mechanical way we have been taught to think in our culture.

When I brainstorm “thinking tools” I cannot help but mention meditation as the ultimate and ancient thinking technology. Studies have proved that meditation increases grey matter in the brain over time, and increases thought flow. It is fascinating to me how a process of stopping the internal dialogue, will over time optimize the internal dialogue. It seems as though in our culture we leave little time for rest, and are in a constant business. This increases material productivity, but we lose the conscious awareness behind our productions. New ideas and perceptions of the world opened in front of me, especially with the dendritic diagram in mind, as if peering through the same world through magnifying glass.

One article on meditation increasing grey matter density:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3004979/?

_escaped_fragment_=po=1.72414

Dendritic Diagram: River Drainage pattern

 dendritic pattern: river drain pattern