Redefining Wealth, With Dandelion Eyes
What is wealth? Commonly understood and money and even more insidiously, as the capability to exert power over. Real wealth I’ve come to find in three interlaced pieces.
The first is Community. That is friends and lovers whom you trust and greet with joy, that you can support and that support you. That inspires you, people who you see often and admire. The materialization of this kind of wealth is having friends a couple minute walk away, living in such a way that you will encounter these friends as you go about your day to day activities, you’ll work with them and you’ll play with them, you’ll sing with them and you’ll create with them. You’ll argue with them and you’ll grow them!
The second is Time spaciousness and intentional direction, the ability to follow through on a muse you’ve caught in the wind, the ability and desire to lend a hand when you see someone who needs help. If all we have to do is live a life worth living? What is worth doing for you?
The third is Beauty. Beautiful spaces, healthy foods, good sounds, participation in beautiful cycles, like compost or relationship tending, giving, beautiful scents. I believe we all have an innate sense of beauty, many times in my life have I heard people speaking kindly or giving freely and my mind glows signaling that is beautiful to me.
Now those are lofty goals for a life and I think they can be misunderstood as a goal. A state of being to achieve. I think they are better thought of as both the descriptions of the processes we involve ourselves in the descriptions of the wake of our actions, that is what we leave behind as we pass through. Might we be like water or flowers, leaving greenery and fruit, like a healer leaving people glowing.
Dandelions as they move compacted soil towards a luscious prairie, cycle nutrients including calcium and cover the fields in yellow flowers. As one of the early stages of ecological succession in compacted soil, a common byproduct of the common way of modern human living, dandelions are beautiful in the process and beautiful in the enriched soil they leave behind!
Let’s be dandelions together.
Regenerative agriculture gives a materialization of the sorts of efforts we can involve are self in that are beautiful in process and in passing. That are joyous and fulfilling. This dream is about living that and demonstrating that.
By going around to earth healing projects that are happening all over the planet this crew will bring labor, energy, love, support, knowledge and song. Watering the love these people are exchanging with the land, with Gaia’s dreams.
The regenerative wake of the practices included in regenerative agriculture are truly incredible and are best experienced somatically, when you are in that landscape. As you smell the air full of diverse molecules that the life all around you is producing as they talk and grow together. As you feel the soft water absorbing soil under your feet, as you look at pictures of the desolate landscape that now teams with life. Words can hardly do this kind of magic justice, and I will attempt to. Once dry springs flow, diverse bird songs fill the air that was silent, fireflies and their kin decorate the night in prayer to the stars in numbers not seen for a hundred years, food that is deeply nutritious and flavorful because of the diverse abundant soil that that the ecosystem has been nurturing. You might wake up under the stars greeted by a great blue heron stalking the pond down the hill.
This is the sort of world we can dedicate ourselves to creating!! And we can have so much fun doing it.
What does that process look like? I certainly don’t know it all yet, and I envision talking, laughing and singing as we dig swales and ponds. I see admiring the beautiful life all around us with my friends, exclaiming it’s beauty and noticing how certain plants like to grow together, or specifics about the way the water flows during a rain storm. I see eating tasty colorful fruits and veggies the day that we harvest them, ripe and nutritious. I see sleeping together under the stars, I see writings songs around the camp fire. I see planting seeds in garden beds and building with cob. I see making sculptures, painting buildings and carving signs that articulate through color and words the beauty around us.
And that’s the practice on the farm. I also see us bringing the knowledge and culture and hope of this group to the larger community of people who envision a more beautiful world. Through providing material examples of how people have created wealth for themselves and the land through work that is in cooperation w Gaia. In Regenerative workshops at festivals, we may open we a sun salutation and discuss in excitement practically theater the sort of earth healing we have been a part of then invite and participate in discussion with the community of what they see and would like to learn or teach or have heard about. And who may want to join us at our next site of giving. I see working together to develop writings and videos that concisely demonstrate why we are so excited about creating this more beautiful world.
As one dismantles the construction of money in their own minds I believe we become free to do what we really believe in. And helping to bring about this more beautiful way of living with my friends is what I really believe in. I hope this writing inspires your own reflection on what wealth you want to bring into your life, allowing you to see what is really your desires and what desires you may have picked up from our cultural obsession with money that do not actually aligned with the life you care to bring about.