Day: October 22, 2011

Sitting in our Sukkah at Eden Village, a hexagon of black locust from our forest, I can gaze in each direction and learn something about the place I am dwelling. I can look out to the east and see our production fields, mostly in covercrop of oats, with an occasional row of cosmos or cabbage, and behind the fields a cob oven, and behind that, our kitchen. To the south, a wetland and forest, from which we harvested the black locust and the invasive phragmites which we used as schach to cover our Sukkah. To the north, the office, theatre,and share circle, center of the creative cyclone during the summer camp season. But to the west is my favorite view: our Hebrew calendar garden, and surrounding it, islands of fruit trees & vines, surrounded by perennial vegetables, medicinal herbs, soil building plants, nectary flowers that feed pollinators, and structural plants that are like little sukkot for spiders, wasps, birds, mice, snakes, dragonflies, worms, beetles. This is our edible forest garden. Part wild, and part domestic, the forest garden feels very similar to the Sukkah. It too is a dwelling place, a place to gather in and make holy, a place to draw inspiration and joy and sustenance. A forest garden is a perennial polyculture that is composed of diverse plants that are beneficial to humans and to the ecosystem, and that draws inspiration from the social interaction of plant communities in nature. In monoculture, most iconically pictured in a dense stand of identical, chemically fertilized corn stalks, modern techniques of mechanization and chemical pest control are employed to make single commodity production as ‘efficient’ as possible. In reality that efficiency is only possible through the use of fossil fuels, to power the combines that have replaced human hands, and to be converted into chemical fertilizer that has replaced living soil. Every aspect of the plant’s life-cycle is isolated and controlled. Forest gardening does not isolate, it invites. On Sukkot, we invite ushpizin, exalted guests, into our dwelling place. According to the Lurianic Kabbalists, each of the teacher/ancestors we ask to sit with us in our Sukkah represents one of the seven ‘lower’ sefirot, emanations of divine energy. In the same way, when planting our forest garden, we create plant guilds, inviting a connected but diverse cast of characters that each bring their own strategies for survival and reproduction, their own ecological specialties, their own medicine, their own invertebrate friends, their own tastes and smells, their own unique divine presence into our community. In addition, when starting a new plant guild, we often add mychorhizal inoculant, a concentrated pro-biotic syrup to help transform the rocky clay that makes up the majority of our land into rich dense, living, soil. These microbes (fungi, yeasts, and bacteria) allow organic matter in the soil to break down, allow tree roots to absorb nutrients and moisture more efficiently, and enable certain plants to pull nitrogen out of the air and ‘fix’ it in the soil, making it available for other plants. Trusting in their invisible power and utter precision, we can feel with great depth the immaculate orchestration of the life support systems that make our earthly existence possible. On Sukkot, we remember the precarious balance of our existence, that all our structures are in fact temporary, even King Solomon’s Temple. At the same time, we revel in the immense abundance of the earth itself, which nurtures and supports us with utter grace and forgiveness. By planting fruit trees, by turning baseball fields and suburban lawns into little gardens of Eden, we are creating a home in the deepest sense. We are not just receiving shefa, divine abundance, but making it our practice, our way of existence. In this sense, we are students of the apple tree and the shiitake mycelium and the winter squash, and even the sun, whose very innermost nature it is to give. Understanding this, we may choose to shift our thinking from a rhetoric of scarcity, so pervasive in the wider culture today (recession, terrorism, resource scramble), to an ethic of abundance. In fact, studies have been done that show that calorie for calorie, small scale diverse vegetable production is in fact more productive on the same land than fossil fuel based conventional agriculture. And that is just in terms of food production, without factoring in “externalities” such as climate change and poisoned water from pesticides. The ‘fact’ is that the earth wants to feed us, a lot, a lot of lots of different things! In permaculture, we call this overyielding, that by mimicking natural plant communities and working with nature, we are actually more productive than when we attempt to isolate, control, and work against her. This practice is a combination of faith, gratitude, observation, sweat, and participation in the processes of life. On a deeper level, on Sukkot we combine the four species (myrtle, willow, palm, citron) through the waving the Lulav, in an act of theurgy, a drawing down of the divine, that celebrates this life force by mapping it onto the six directions. As in other earth based wisdom traditions, we honor the sacred directions, the Arba Ruachot, the four winds. The word ruach is commonly used in the context of the life force, or flowing spirit, within our bodies and this is precisely the energy that we invoke in the the waving of the lulav, combining the fragrant and fertile abundance of the etrog with the active, extensive quality of the lulav, traditionally the center protrusion of a date palm. We shake the lulav in mystical extension of the divine flow to the four corners of the earth, as well as outward and inward, tuning the channels of manifestation, and allowing the garden to grow, in ourselves, and all around us. At Eden Village, our Hebrew Calendar Garden, a technology for exploring living time, is also calibrated to the directions. Large spiraling beds for the months are inhabited by symbolic and seasonal plants. Tevet