Day 33 - Sinking In

Boyd Varty — Mon, 04 May 2020 09:00:00 +0200

A lonely day missing people. In a week I will be complete and its starting to stir up the mind. It feels close and creates a bout of anxious immaturity. I want to talk to them now but also I don’t want to leave this tree. I have come to ride the ups and downs of how the mind uses time.

I sit in my chair and listen to the sounds of nature. A kingfisher hitting the water, elephants flapping and nyala browsing. Time to have time, who has that?

Johnny Clegg:
The world is full of strange behavior
And every man has to be his own savior
I know I can make it on my own if I try
But I’m searching for the great heart to stand me by
Underneath the African sky
A great hear to stand me by
I’m searching for the spirit of the great heart.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g48_fqX7KJc
https://www.johnnyclegg.com/

Searching for the spirit of the great heart I certainly am. And here when I end up singing to myself I may have found it for a moment.

The river has cleared and I splash for a moment. I don’t hang out too long on account of the many leathery sleeping bags I have seen. On my run I glance to the right and see a herd of giraffes running next to me. Elephants cross the river almost continuously.
How do I go back now? How has what I learnt here shape my life moving forward?

I’m learning to sink in. The tree is teaching me how to put down a root into myself and into this place. This is what I have learnt. I do want to connect people with this. I do want to live with this mind.

In the afternoon I take my bag of rubbish to be collected. Its an absurd looking pile of packaging, coming from the necessity to store and sell food. It was the Egyptians who put food against lock and key. I once read a study about Chimps who got given food which was shared and distributed. They then removed the food and introduced tokens which could be traded and all hell broke loose.

At the most primary psychological level, when you take away food you change everything.

Ghandi was a huge believer in the village because he understood that in shared production of food you could produce enough to be free from colonial rules of survival. I don’t think small food gardens can be underestimated. And surely as markets continue to globalize in a world of radically accelerating uncertainty, you couldn’t do better than a back to basics insurance plan than small decentralized food gardens. Put the gardens at the center of your pocket of light.

The respect I have for natures efficiency has grown exponentially.

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Day 28 - Call me Crazy

Boyd Varty — Wed, 29 Apr 2020 09:00:00 +0200

You would be amazed at how far crocodiles move at night. I found myself following the distinctive track for about 2 kilometers. I’ve spent a lot of time in the bush veld, but in this experience by nature of the experience I have been taken deeper. I have the will and the mindset to find out where crocodiles go. To be immersed in patterns that otherwise seem random.

This is an understanding of a certain individuality to each creature. Of course even deeper is the fact that naming anything takes you a little bit further away from it.

Zen Koan. A glass of water on the table. The teacher asks what is that? The students give linear answers. The master picks up the glass and drinks, making the point of pure experience.

From a spiritual point of view, the other truth is that mind changes out here. The thought load of future and past is replaced by an immediacy of attention. Mind recruits the body, it is in a creative response to the body. I say that because I honestly tend to run pretty anxious. This is how we used to be for many thousands of years.

While we can’t obviously live in trees in the wild, its worth noting that if we could most of us would be closer to enlightenment. There are really opportunities to questioning how we get off the progress train with nuance. We have to face the truth that not all progress is progress. Modern life ain’t it all cracked up to be. It’s certainly worth some of your capacity to innovate before you have kids and they become teenagers. Life architecture as an activism is a very engaging way to spend the blink of an eye we all get.

Right now I’m reading two of the most beautiful books. Braiding Sweetgrass and Overstory.
https://www.amazon.com/Braiding-Sweetgrass-Indigenous-Scientific-Knowledge/dp/1571313567
https://www.amazon.com/Overstory-Novel-Richard-Powers/dp/039363552X
Both talk about the intelligence of plants. In Overstory, the trees start to call a total discordant group of people together. It shows how a forest is not a collection of trees but a living thing.

Connect with Boyd Varty:
Website | https://boydvarty.com/
Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/boyd_varty/
Twitter | https://twitter.com/BoydVarty

Track Your Life with Boyd Varty - Episodes Tagged with “Permaculture”

Day 33 - Sinking In

Day 28 - Call me Crazy