By Pierre Echaubard | April 2020
How many of us have had to be forced to stay home to really slow down? How many years have we spent not taking the time to really look up and around, to observe with detachment and discernment at what we were doing everyday. How many essential moments with essential people have we missed? Are we living the life we want? Or perhaps more correctly are we allowing ourselves to change our ways as we evolve through life to insure that what we do matches what we are becoming; with all its underlying inner changes in consciousness?
What slowing down could help us do?
Rebalance, Reconnect, Realise and Heal!
Perhaps the most powerful and relevant action, for those who can, is tuning into Earth rhythms and patterns. It feels that, as a society, what we have allowed ourselves to do is to violate Earth inherent natural, well-evolved, regulations (e.g. we now harvest natural resource to accumulate them, not merely to satisfy our needs). We’ve allowed ourselves, in the name of modernity, to cut our ties with our nurturing matrix, that which set what can be reasonably done and what shouldn’t. We’ve gone wild, sort of speak. As a smart spoiled kid, the western world as managed to set its own technocratic rules and it constitutions, so we can legitimately fly free and manifest our humanness, far away from the basic, raw unsophisticated wilderness. But this is double-edged, only wisdom, humility and self-contentment can replace the once observed earthly regulations we abandoned. We thus expose ourselves to unhealthy developments with the only limits we fancy setting up, the ones based on our earth-less laws and economic dictatorships. Who will raise its hand and say “well, let’s give up on this billion dollar investment to let the monarch butterfly migrate in peace across North America?” Some people do but are rapidly reminded that modernity and economic growth (for (w)health and happiness) need to prevail. We’ve allowed ourselves to be facing these dilemnas countless times and we all know what the outcomes are and will continue being. By turning our back to Earth and her inherent rules and regulations we’ve started a process of destruction, created imbalances and negative feedback loops. We’ve create needs for an ever growing infrastructure inherently damaging and for which we constantly, and often not so ethically, run for money…a so-called rat race? We’ve allowed ourselves to leave in FEAR, constantly of loosing everything we’ve created and that we posses, these things we believe are essential but in fact that lead to our ineluctable suffering.
Tuning into Earth Rhythms and Patterns
Slowing down is an opportunity to reconnect to ourselves, embrace our true nature and by so doing reconnect to the essential, simple knowledges and know-hows that will act as synergies towards further reconnecting, setting ourselves back into a more reasonable path. Should we take the time to bake our own bread? Make our own soap, fix our appliances instead of buying new ones? Plant our garden? As we are forced to take the time why don’t we research and relearn a bit how we do these basic essential things, or perhaps should we ask around, our elders must know after all? Why don’t we learn…and emancipate, why don’t we collaborate? Why don’t we allow ourselves to realize that we can do it. We can slow down and learn, experiment, share, collaborate and create…while respecting Earth’s rhythm and patterns, because we need time for the bread to rise, we need time to collect the ingredient and choose what essential oils to add to our soap recipe, it takes a good amount of observation and contemplation to know your plants, understand their need and visualize the unfathomable complexity of biotic and abiotic interactions backing up the sprouting of your winged peas. By digging your fingers into the soil and plant a seed into Earth you ground yourself into the matrix of a story that can still be written together, beautifully…
Some say Permaculture is an answer. We embrace Permaculture principles and regenerative approaches to community building as we see in these a practical solution fostering circularity and resilience…and beauty
In the new era, we commit to learn further, experiment and research as well as teach and share permaculture and its principles because we believe this is a set of life skill that everyone should acquire if we are to reunite with Earth and build a resilient society.
Here’s a glimpse of our past Earth aware activities and programs:
