Duncan Essay

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Well, you know this is a world of stuff. We call it the material world. There is good stuff, healthy stuff, attractive stuff, and then there is the other stuff…

Until recently, all stuff was at least natural stuff, and therefore filled with the intelligence of nature (even if that involved decay.) And the stuff that mankind made, from baskets to clothing to temples, was made from the natural, nature-given stuff.

In order to create something useful people had to work with the intelligence of nature. Some of us call this the devic level. The properties of materials needed to be understood at various levels and energy and intelligence applied to create what was needed. When my friend Paul returned from Yosemite a few years ago, he told me of sitting and talking with an old Indian lady who was making baskets from available native materials. She told him that in making baskets there had to be an internal integrity. For her, one of the basic considerations was that all the material in the basket needed to come from the same mini-ecosystem. In other words, if she were using plants that grew along a stream, then all the material for that basket needed to come from the same stream bank. They wanted to stay together in their community. Similarly, when a Japanese temple is/was built, the wooden columns are kept in the same respective positions as the trees were growing in the forest. The one growing in the northeast will go in the northeast, and so on.

Perhaps this seems a bit extreme, but these examples show an awareness of certain laws of nature. Now, our culture and many others are moving away from these basic truths of usefulness and cooperation, and have been moving toward various technologies which of course also must spring from nature. But I find these technologies tend to remove the individual or culture from direct involvement or responsibility because they are out of our control. A client of mine recently showed me a sample of a material she had been about to use for her closet cabinets. It was a product called MDF, a dense sheet material of fine sawdust (?) with a paper veneer imitating wood. My greatest surprise was that she did not seem to have any aversion to this material as fake wood. Such a material certainly does not connect us with nature, its intelligence, or its rhythms. Although not always “toxic” such de-natured products fill our lives. While providing convenience, they seem to take us farther from any oneness with nature.

Perhaps many would say, “so what?” And yes, something is gained through mass production, advanced technologies and well-trained machines. But much is also lost. Knowledge of what local lumbers are best for what purposes, is disappearing. We just buy lumber from the lumber company. (If the mills are clear-cutting somewhere else, we don’t see it.) Or what crops might do well here besides corn and soybeans. (This was once a great apple growing region.) Another example that Robert Laporte used to give is that we have many different major ecosystems in America, and we build houses of the same basic construction in all of them.

Most of what we buy today we could call anonymous. We don’t know where the materials are grown or extracted, who made it, and so on. In this way it has all become like fast and/or packaged food. Result: little or no life-force. Most houses built today are of this same quality, too, despite their price-tags.

Another way of looking at this is to grasp the vibrational importance. If someone you love or are close to knits you a sweater, you probably sense if feels different than one you buy from a catalog, which has been knit by machine ….somewhere. And mothers’ home cooked food has more love and therefore vitality than anonymous fast-food. No surprise, but why?

This is the value of human attention. Attention is a flow of energy, and human attention, especially if loving, literally can change (raise) the vibration of natural materials. Therefore, items or structures made by people feel more full of life to us than those made by machines. This is why old houses and barns often feel good and perhaps restful to us, and antiques can have great worth. Hand woven fabrics and hand-made rugs have a different energy that we can feel. It is not the expense…..it is a vibrational essence that we perceive on some deep level. There is something there that can draw us in. It is not a question of taste, or style, but of vibrational quality fostered by human attention.

Correlatively, in Ayuervedic terms, all machines, in my estimation and experience, are vata-pita aggravating. This means that vibrationally they tend to throw the human system out of balance. The vast majority of goods sold by Wal-Mart, for example, are machine produced. Does it feel good to walk around in Wal-Mart, or to have those items in your home? And it is not to say we should never use machines. But we can lean toward products where human attention has added its value of raising the vibration.

The conclusion I draw from these observations is that stuff made by attentive, caring people is usually richer in feeling than that made by machines or without care. Even if you were living in a concrete apartment in a city, you could change the quality of the space by filling it with things that are alive in this way. If permaculture is an awareness and construct of the interconnectedness and healthful structuring of our environments, in harmony with nature, then I think it must need to come right in the door into the house or office. It is our prerogative to live in harmony with nature to the greatest extent we can, for all our needs and comforts. And, of course this brings its own delights and wonder unavailable through other forms of gratification.