Seeds of Sedition: Come to your Senses
I teach self-reliance, the world’s most subversive practice.
I teach people how to grow their own food, which is shockingly subversive.
So, yes, it’s seditious. But it’s peaceful sedition.
— Bill Mollison, founder of modern permaculture
I’ll never forget the first time I made my own compost. The gardening bug had bit me hard and I was obsessed with my first garden, a tiny patch of dirt bordering the back patio of my raffish English basement apartment. I tore out the weeds and planted a hodgepodge of pretty and good-smelling things: basket-of-gold, yarrow, marigolds, parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme. I had no system, no clue, but I was so happy digging in that junky little spit of soil. And poor soil it was — mostly clay with rubble and broken bricks mixed in, typical construction backfill. I know, I thought, I’ll make compost!
I dumped a bunch of shoes out of a plastic storage bin and punched holes in it with a screwdriver. My knowledge was rudimentary and without experience, but at least I knew compost needed air. I made a big veggie stir-fry so I would have plenty of broccoli stems and carrot peels to start the pile. The next morning I added a banana peel and dumped my coffee grinds on the mix. This is gonna be awesome!
A week passed, then two. I added every food scrap I could. I shook the bin. It didn’t smell very good. In truth, it smelled awful. And it wasn’t beginning to look anything like the compost I bought from the nursery. It looked like a bunch of rotting slimy carrot peels, broccoli stems, banana peels and coffee grinds.
I showed my food scrap slime to my friend Deana. She was a landscape architect and naturalist, she would know. She looked at my slime, wrinkling her nose. "You can’t just compost food," she told me. "You need some dry materials. Put a bunch of leaves in there. And worms. You need something to eat all that stuff."
I was flabbergasted. "Eat it?" I asked. "But I want to use it in my garden!" She raised an eyebrow. "Well, that won’t help your garden," she said flatly. "Ok," I conceded. "So how do I know I’m doing it right?"
"You’ll know. It will look like it’s breaking down. It will smell good and earthy. And it feels hot."
Look. Smell. Feel. You’ll know, she said. When I applied my senses and let them guide me, I realized she was right. It wasn’t about learning how to make compost; what I really needed was a lesson in learning.
In the opening quotation, Mollison connects the skill to grow food to self-reliance, self-reliance to subversiveness, subversiveness to sedition. It’s a compelling thought.
But I think the seeds of sedition need to germinate before they can grow into new skills. Just as living seeds need fertile well-watered soil to germinate, seditious seeds need a fertile mind well-watered by learning. The ability to learn is the most seditious practice of all. If we want to subvert and ultimately change a system that has conditioned us to do nothing but wait until we can go to a bar and get wasted at a six-foot distance from the twenty-four other people allowed inside, well then, we have some learning to do.
But first, we need to learn how to learn all over again.
We know that not all people learn the same way. Visual learners learn by watching, auditory learners by listening, and tactile learners by doing. This seemingly broad notion is, in my opinion, still very narrow. What about smell, and taste, and the ability to perceive time by the play of light? What about the flashes of intuition when all the senses are attuned in one moment?
Learning is a cumulative sensory experience. When more senses are involved, the experience leaves a more profound and lasting impression. After all, how we go about our lives each day isn’t so much informed by what we learn than by what we remember.
I’m not claiming to understand how our minds decide which lessons become memories. But I would bet my last dollar that your clearest memories are not confined to a sight, or a sound, or any single sense. They are replays in the mind’s eye. We call it "total recall" because it is.
My grandfather was very beloved to me. He passed away a long time ago. Sitting here, closing my eyes, I cannot remember what he looked like. But if I soften my eyes and breathe with my nose I can smell his brown cardigan. And then his face appears and he speaks.
In our hyper-modern culture, learning is becoming an increasingly single-sense experience. We see words and images on a screen, we tap our way through more words and images. Sometimes there is a bit of sound, but mostly we look and look and look. Of all the senses, sight is the most easily confused and sight-based memories are the most easily distorted. Far too many people have been wrongly convicted of crimes because of what someone thought they saw.
My enthusiasm for conspiracy theory hovers between zero and 0.1. I don’t believe in a mastermind engineering a confederacy of dunces. But I do wonder, how long will it be until children, upon encountering a stone or a seashell will pick up the object, try in vain to scroll its surface, and toss the "broken" thing away? If they cannot see a stone or a seashell, smell the earth or salt, feel the gradations and crevices, how will they learn the world? What will they remember?
In the wake of Covid-19, more of our learning opportunities have become one dimensional, relegated to the already flooded domain of sight. The flat screen of the pocket sized supercomputer now delivers our friend visits, happy hours, yoga classes, music festivals, and online rewilding retreats. Oh the irony. Sociologists have already coined the term "Zoom fatigue."
Some of this screen time is necessary. People need to see people, some people more than others. I’m not talking about the time you spend actually communicating or working. I’m talking about the rest of it.
Looking at a screen all day as a way of learning the world is like circling your wrists all day for exercise. You've barely moved, but your wrists are aching.
Ask yourself how much of your day is consumed by looking at a screen as your disembodied finger swipes and your spinal muscles go numb. What did you learn? What do you remember?
Learning how to learn demands that we tear ourselves away from the parade of "stories" on the screen and engage our senses. We need to smell and taste, to use our hands to sift textures, to feel changes in the air with our skin and unevenness in the ground with our feet.
Perhaps I'm making this sound difficult. It's not. Once we begin to immerse ourselves in more sensory experiences, learning to learn is actually very easy. We are made for it. The world is alive and despite everything we have done to ourselves so still are we.
You don't need to abandon your life and live in the forest to start learning how to learn (though it’s not a bad idea). Four years of teaching our interns has shown me repeatedly just how quickly and powerfully our capacity to learn returns when stimulated by sensory experience. No matter how clogged your respiration is by pollution, how dulled your hearing by noise, no matter how disconnected you might feel, it is only temporary. When exposed to new sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures, your senses rally. The parts of the brain associated with processing new sensations jump at the task. I’ve seen it happen time and time again.
In December, a couple from Canada stayed here on our farm. Like many others who come here, they wanted to connect to nature and learn some essential skills. I walked them through the cacao plantation where the trees needed pruning. I showed them the opportunistic plants called epiphytes that grow on other plants. If enough epiphytes use a cacao tree as host, they can break branches. I showed Rob and Tiffany how to spot them, the difference in the shape of the leaf and the way they grew in clumps. To me, after hundreds of hours in the plantation, seeing them was second nature.
My apprentices gave me looks of alarm. "How can you see it? It all looks like one tree to me!"
"Well,” I said, "spend some time here and see what happens. I’m going to cook lunch." And I left them there with their pruners in hand, looking at the tree branches, smiling to myself as I walked away.
A few hours later they returned, tired but jubilant. With their senses awakened, they told me how they learned what to do.
Rob reflected on his experience poignantly:
From forming the five main branches and stripping back the invasive vines at the base, to spotting epiphytes in the canopy, I learned the tricks of the trade. After twenty years of working in welding shops in a concrete half-frozen city my spirit cried out for this type of work. The sound of the birds and insects was soothing, the air was clean and humid, the uneven earth beneath our feet gently tested our balance and strength.
Meanwhile I had asked Hanna, an intern who wanted to paint a mural to harvest clay from the creek to make natural paint. When I plucked the rounded lumps of clay out of the water and showed her how they differed from stones, at first she protested. "I can’t see the difference," she told me, "It all looks the same." "Ok," I replied, "come down here and feel around in the water. The clay is slippery. Pick it up. It’s very light. Now pick up a stone. Feel how heavy it is? Now you can tell."
She returned beaming to the farm a short time later, with two buckets of pigmented clay. "Wow," I said, "good job!" "It wasn’t hard," she said, "once I could feel the difference with my hands, it was easy to see!"
Once I could feel it, I could see it. Truth. Like everything else in nature, our senses work together. Learning with our senses in nature is not only effective, clearly it makes us happy.
In The Good Life Lab, New Yorker-turned desert homesteader Wendy Tremayne writes:
I used to think nature’s wisdom was an abstract concept. But once I took the time to reconnect to nature by slowing down, foraging, and growing I noticed that nature’s wisdom is real and tangible. Because we are alive we are able to intuit its knowledge. This happens through our senses and by connecting to life (…) In contrast, acculturated knowledge about the commodified world, things like banking, communication, and media are not natural. This knowledge can’t keep us alive. It is not essential. People are meant to intuit the world. And I have found being able to causes us to feel calm, safe, and happy.
Think about the first time you made a Google Spreadsheet. Maybe you felt a sense of accomplishment — or perhaps relief — that it was done. Now recall the first time you made marmalade from strawberries you picked yourself, or knitted a scarf, or built a snow fort with your children. How did you feel?
If you’ve read this piece, I thank you. Now please turn off your computer or mobile device, stand up, stretch and go outside to your garden. Or to your kitchen, workshop, music room, art space or sewing chair. Pick something up and work with it until you can do something new, until you feel the deep satisfaction and quiet joy that accompanies learning. There are many ways to sow the seeds of sedition. The ability to learn is the fertile soil they need to grow.
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At Sueño de Vida we work in a meaningful way to heal land ravaged by deforestation. How meaningful? According to a recent UN Foresight Brief on climate change,
--It is of the utmost importance to stop deforestation and to increase reforestation efforts around the world. Agricultural practices should focus on soil building, year-round soil cover with plants and the use of agroforestry methods.
That is exactly what we do here at SdV. You can help by helping us do what we do every day: plant forests that nurture soil, people, and community.
Click HERE to donate directly to our reforestation
Thank you.
Kristen Krash is the director and co-founder of Sueño de Vida, a regenerative agroforestry farm, education center, nature reserve in Ecuador’s Chocó Andino Cloudforest. Prior to moving, Kristen was known for her guerrilla gardens — productive green spaces she created in any available space. Now an urban transplant in the South American rain forest, she has adapted her urban gardening and sustainability skills to large-scale reforestation of degraded land. She takes a practical and accessible approach to helping others achieve more balance and self-sufficiency in their lives.
Kristen’s articles and interviews have been featured on popular sustainability platforms like Abundant Edge and The Mud Home, and in the Rainforest Regeneration Curriculum at the Ecological Restoration Camps.
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