A story told on a forest trail is made truer by the trees.
One Summer’s day on a trail in an Appalachian cove forest in Black Mountain, a friend and Permaculture teacher was telling me a thread of the weave of the moment we shared. 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 story holds strong resonances with my own.
The stories of obedience to our hearts when they demand that we change our lives are windows opened in the drywall queue of modernity. As the Irish poet John Moriarty would say, they are seals’ breathing holes in the icy lake of the world. The fresh breath of life flows into them, sustaining everything.
Courtney was asked in her ecology program to study Appalachian ecology and the health of newts. 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 and 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 quantities of chemicals.
The word ecology means the study of home. The modern study of our home 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 their rhythms with pragmatism and tenderness?
There are facts learned from dissection and reduction, it’s true. And yet facts, as any curious scientist knows, are like step stones on a path. Each one placed is setting a course that’s likely as not to be tread by all, to the neglect of the other tracks that may have been. The pulverizing of the body of a newt paves a path for an understanding based on pulverizing – and so, we have our world: fragmentary, gasping for meaning, brightly lit and ceaselessly measured.
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, getting ready 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. She gave her attention to 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 step into them.
Courtney’s assignment was to study the health of the newts and the forest; but we don’t really 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 keyed to health through one of our oldest instincts. Some would say the electromagnetic field of our heart, which – here’s one of those facts, a step stone on a path – can be measured over three feet away from the body, understands things from the electromagnetic field of other beings, including plants and animals. One of those understandings is health.
In my experience, my greatest skill as a Permaculture designer is to feel into the health of the land, and of a plant and an animal. What I feel is often different than what might be taught in a university. The presence of “invasive” plants, for example, is often not a mark of ill health, but of a vital recovery of depleted land. The stress of a treeless and exposed south-facing pasture, though often the pastoral postcard ideal, is palpable in a body that has known the Piedmont without the thermal subterfuge of air conditioning.
Never have I thought the missing piece in my understanding was to be found in taking apart a living thing. Permaculture works the other way.
We perceive the wholeness of all that is present. We understand what Bill Mollison said in resonance with 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. 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.
There are ten-thousand ton tomes of facts easily accessible 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, but I’m unconvinced any fact gained from stealing a life from its context can bring me anywhere truly worth going.
Every forest trail is 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 how to hear the calling to return to the 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 an eastern 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. The 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 towards some humble, sustaining end.