One Summer’s day, on a trail in an Appalachian cove forest in Black Mountain, a friend and Permaculture teacher was telling a story about one of the moments that changed her life. The trees listened in. Their roots held her words like the reflecting pool of a spring.

Courtney shared with me the story of how she left a prestigious ecology program and promising career for the uncertain and unfunded wilds of teaching Permaculture. The integrity of her heart, with a little help from the trees, had brought her to give away what our society would call security to follow something ineffable and alive.

Courtney was asked in her graduate ecology program to study Appalachian ecology and the health of newts in the forest. The way she was asked to do this was to go into an Appalachian forest, catch some newts and extract them from their home, and then bring them back to the brightly lit laboratory.

Once in the lab, she would be instructed to kill them. Then, she was to put their dead bodies into a centrifuge, which would tear apart their forms into a slurry of measurable constituents. Those constituents could be analyzed. Statistics could be applied to them. The forest’s language spoken in newt could be translated to industry’s language, to grant funding’s language, spoken in dollar signs and parts per million.

The newt’s body would be made into ratios. This has always been the method of rationality – to understand by converting life into numbers, as if living beings were only rounding errors in God’s spreadsheet.

Remembering Home

Ecology means the study of home. The rational, academic study of home too often involves going into the forest, forcibly removing someone from it, and putting them into a centrifuge to turn them into quantities.

Do we know more about the eastern deciduous forests than the indigenous people who inhabited them before us? Or the Appalachian country people who danced the soft and sharp dance of their seasons with pragmatism and tenderness? Both peoples, whose ways of knowing were direct, participatory, and intertwined with the life of the beings they studied?

Could we learn anything true about our own ecos, our homes by removing a room, or a pet, or a family member and studying them in dismembered isolation?

There are facts learned from dissection and reduction, it’s true. And yet facts are like step stones placed to form a path. The setting of a path changes the future. Each stone placed is setting a course that’s far more likely to be tread by all, to the neglect of the other tracks that may have been. The wilderness of possibility becomes forgotten in our dull sheering to the trod.

The track already set is the convenient (and funded) one. The facts learned from pulverizing of the body of a newt helps to pave a path for an understanding based on pulverizing – and so, we arrive at our world: fragmentary, gasping for meaning, brightly lit and ceaselessly measured; the kind of world we get when we confuse measuring for understanding.

Epiphanies of Pine and Gravity

There was more to Courtney’s story. My memory has rearranged it, I am sure, and so this is my own telling.

In my recall, she told me that she was walking a forest, hesitantly preparing to do this fieldwork, when a falling pinecone struck her in the head.

She stopped. Something opened. And a great release moved through her as she let the madness of what she was tasked to do leave her body and return to the earth.

She left the ecology program and the success it promised. She gave her attention to the feral pedagogy of Permaculture.

She never took a newt from the pools it was born to return to. She never taught about rivers without inviting her students to take off their clothes and wade in them. She drank from some of the same forest spring pools I drank from, where newts were an unfractionated strain of the intact music of the taste of wild water.

Health is an Instinct

Courtney’s school assignment was to study the health of the newts and the forest; but we don’t really need laboratories to tell the health of a forest, or a plant, or a town, or a person.

When not lost in our thought or deadened to our experience, we are able to sense the health of ecosystems and organisms with our own bodies.

The electromagnetic field of our heart extends strongly outwards from our own body. Our hearts are capable of reading information from the electromagnetic field of other beings, including plants and animals.

Our breath is capable of sampling the constant molecular communication of plants and animals, bacteria and fungi that are cast into the wind as messages by all living things.

If your senses are open, a single sip of spring water contains volumes of story, too rich for any but a poet to give to words.

In my experience, one of my most helpful skills as a Permaculture designer is to feel into the health of the land. What I feel can surprise me. It’s sometimes very different than what we might be commonly taught.

The presence of “invasive” plants, for example, is often not a problem, but a sign of the active recovery of depleted land.

The stress of a treeless and exposed field, though often the pastoral postcard ideal and the result of someone trying to optimize the photosynthesis of their pasture, is palpable in the grasses and the small broadleaf plants (and any hapless grazing animals present, and in the absence of songbirds), wishing the August afternoon were a little bit shorter or more shaded.

Remembering, not Dismembering

Land is mystery, land is home. There are many times where I don’t know the answer to an ecological question. Yet never have I thought the missing piece in my understanding was to be found in taking apart a living thing. I would say that Permaculture works exactly the other way.

In Permaculture design, we start from wholeness. We design with wholeness. We end up with wholeness.

We understand what Bill Mollison taught in resonance with many indigenous teachings: that animals are the messengers of trees and trees, the gardens of animals.

We learn how life, like our own bodies from embryos, emerges not through severance and dissection, nor through the assembly of parts like a factory, but through something that begins whole and from which wholeness emerges, complete and whole at every stage, coming to know itself more richly through each moment of relational interbeing.

I think of Courtney often and the brightness of her spirit as a Permaculture teacher and someone deeply at home in the forest. We grow most true when we listen to the questions of our heart, or the voice of gravity and pinecone shaking us out of the laboratory’s trance. What we gain by trading security for integrity shines through our being like the ripened glow of a Newt.

In our time there are millions of facts easily accessed through any screen that purport to help us understand nature. I’d compost them all for the lessons learned in a season spent by a mountain spring pool in the tutelage of a newt. I learn a lot from ecology as a science and I read analyses of what constituents are in what plants, but I’m unconvinced the isolated facts recorded from stealing a life from its context can bring us to real depth of understanding.

Without instrument or grant funding, every forest trail is already a generous library of lessons. Every spring pool is a fountain of understanding. Every newt is an amphibious professor, bridging the water and the air, reminding us how to walk the surface and when to hear the calling to return to our depths.

Another Newt

Years after my forest walk with Courtney and the new life it planted in me, I was preparing to hire someone to help me clear a half-acre of pines in our forested mountain land.

I was distressed about the money and the weight of the heavy machinery on the land. Still, from my reason, it seemed like the best option.

The pines were numerous and large. My felling skills would put me at high risk. I wanted to plant trees right away and lacked an open place to do it. We’d use all the bodies of the cut pines in the best ways possible, and then, we’d be able to plant a small nursery and a succession of healthy hardwood trees to regenerate the place the pines had been cut from.

While I was marking out the place for the contractor, I encountered, on a moist and fragrant stump of pine, the orange iridescence of a young newt. We paused to watch each other. The neon sunset glow impressed itself into the deeper corridors of my memory. I walked back up the hill, prepared to proceed with my decision to pay someone to machine clear the land.

It was a week later, in a deep meditation, that the newt surfaced in my memory. Newt’s vivid coloration, enhanced by the refracted light of a rainy day, was for me the most visible face of an infinite web of ecological relationships. The imaginal Newt sat with me on a stump as I sat and breathed in the dark. We looked together at the tension my body held around the decision – one I’ve never before made for land I tend – to bring in machinery to rapidly clear the trees of an area.

The newt’s gaze wasn’t an accusation. Instead, she sat with the apprehension I barely knew I’d been feeling in those days circling this decision and the thousands of dollars we’d have to spend to effect it. She sat with my tension in the wet stillness of the forest floor. Then, she let me feel into what it would be like to drop that tension; to call off the machinery, to save any other decisions for another day, to let the newt place be a newt place just as it was, until a new clarity could emerge.

When I let myself see what the newt showed me, I felt the sloughing off of years of tension. While the facts had aligned enough with my choice to clear the pines, my heart had been silently struggling with the destruction I’d have to walk into knowing it was something I paid to make happen.

I walked out of that meditation a lighter being. With an apology, I told the contractor I was going to leave the area be for now.

I’ve been cutting those same pines since slowly myself, carefully, one at a time. It will take many seasons more than it would have; and that is giving the newt, and me, time to adjust. Time to make ourselves at home in the slow changes that are always part of life. Time to listen, and to spare a plant or a tree that a sunbeam happens to catch and make sing before me in the momentary cloudbreak of a rainy day, and to feel the kinship as I work of all the forest creatures who I resemble, as I carry out slow tasks as a member of the wholeness that gives me life.