Silver Branch Permaculture

“Silver Branch” is a an archaic symbol recorded in Irish myth but most likely originates far in the Paleolithic. It points to the memory of an entirely other way of seeing.

In myth, the Silver Branch reopens the door of perception and allows for reunion with life.

When humans had become lost and forgotten their roots in the sacredness of land, the Silver Branch was the key to their recall. The sacred object initiated a journey into the Otherworld – a sacred place that ancient cultures on every continent recognize some version of. Upon emerging from the Otherworld, so the old stories say, we see things entirely anew. Silver Branch perception is beholding the world as it truly is – alive, sentient, complete. To hold the Silver Branch is to learn again to see the wholeness that becomes obscured by too much reliance on the rational mind.

In the Silver Branch way of seeing, we are not separate from animals, plants, waters, stars, or sky. We understand that damage done to the land is damage done to ourselves. We feel that the running waters are our blood, the Winter wind is our breath, the fire is our spirit. To hold the Silver Branch is to re-enter kinship with all life.

Silver Branch seeing happens in a flash. It is the sudden epiphany that all that we see is alive and nourished by the spirit of life. Beholding it, we are beheld by it. Beheld by life, we no longer feel alone.

In Silver Branch perception, we do not have dominion over the animals and plants. We do not see the land as something to take from. Trees are not timber, plants are not crops, stones are not something to mine for profit. The trees and the plants and the stones are our mothers and fathers, our teachers in how to live.

In my own Permaculture practice, this way of seeing is the star I ask to guide me. As a system that has a lot of clever techniques and sayings, Permaculture can sometimes fool us into thinking we’re in charge. But we are only here by the vast grace of life. The indigenous peoples that many of Permaculture’s elders learned from knew this to be true. Our tools and our maps can serve a purpose for regeneration, but they are no substitute for bending low to hear the voice of a violet beneath the empress tree.

Silver Branch reminds me to ask again and again: am I viewing the land as an object, as something separate? Or am I taking our seat at the great table of life where a conversation has been happening long before we were born and that will continue long after we die? Do I rule over the land, thinking I know what to do? Or do I remember to ask the beings that are far wiser than me to show me the way?

When the garden feeds my family, does my pride tell me that I did all of this? Or do I remember that it is only life that can grow a chestnut or an ear of maize – and that life gives this to us because life loves us? Do I let myself feel the love that life feels for me?

I use the name “Silver Branch Permaculture” to draw these lessons near. The consequences of living as if the earth were just dead matter to take from have brought us beyond the threshold of crisis. Even more than changing the details of how we live, we must change our perception. We must restore the sight that is unbroken by reductionist thinking. The earth can teach us how and Permaculture is a good light that points the way.

The practices and principles of Permaculture can guide us back to kinship with life. There, on the ground of the real, knees on the earth, hands in the soil, the voice that yet sings within the land calls to us. Silver Branch in hand, we open to hear what the forest has to teach us. Are you listening?

With gratitude to my Irish ancestors and the people who have kept alive the indigenous Irish wisdom so that many may learn from it.

And here is a poetic and magnificently filmed documentary that evokes Silver Branch perception. It takes place in an undeveloped landscape in Ireland where people yet put their ear to the earth. Highly recommended: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/silverbranchfilms2?autoplay=1

Sign up for updates our workshops and occasional Permaculture inspiration. No spam.

Releasing An Old Name

Golden Egg Permaculture is a name this humble Permaculture practice began with in Carrboro, NC before I was involved with it. When I became Golden Egg’s other main designer, I was grateful for the shelter of the established name to gentle the wind as I got my bearings.

The Golden Egg name was from a cautionary myth about greed and the goose that laid golden eggs. It called in the Permaculture teaching to accept the slow gifts of life rather than the shortsighted profits of quick extraction. It is a good teaching story, and yet I felt a need to let it go.

My own association with the golden goose story was that, while it was a warning, it was also a bit of a judgement already passed. If the goose who laid the golden egg was already killed, what hope do we have? Something was left out of this story that I wanted to call closer.

One of my core beliefs about life is that we can’t actually lose the earth. Earth’s gifts are not a finite supply or a fluke phenomenon. They are the ground condition of being and the model of what unconditional love looks like.

Unlike the stories of judgement wedged into many religions, earth raises no hand in punishment. As Mary Oliver sings in Wild Geese, “you don’t have to be good.” After the multiple cataclysms and waves of extinctions earth has already experienced, what happened next? Life kept creating life.

After the small apocalypse of a forest clear-cut, what happens next? An abundance of disturbance plants appear as if from nothing, bringing food, medicine, habitat, and a rapid remediation of the wounded.

Some of the rivers that ran yellow or orange with poisons thirty years ago are drinkable now and full of fish. Iridescent toxic “superfund” lakes are redeemed by extremophile bacteria able to survive in industrial poison, deposited there by the droppings of of migrating geese to begin the work of turning minerals back into biology. We can do everything wrong and we will never change life’s will to create more life.

This is part of what calls me to let go of the Golden Goose story: if the goose that killed the golden egg were slain, that would not be the end of the story. its body would almost immediately become an eruption of other forms of life – microbial, fungal, insect, and other detritivores.

Some of the bacteria in its guts might be the ones to begin turning wasteland back into meadow and then forest. The slow fire of decomposition would make the goose’s body like the phoenix, a center of rebirth. Death is end and beginning. We would not be doomed for our sins; we would only have to tune back into where life force was now flowing. This understanding is central to the trust that Permaculture has taught me.

Categories: Announcements

0 Comments

Leave a Reply

Avatar placeholder

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *