Just a quick note to say I won’t be writing for awhile. God Bless.

Just a quick note to say I won't be writing for awhile.
God Bless.

Advent ideas III (mixing bowls and taste tests)

Hopefully you've skipped ahead,  finished something savory, and are already drawing life from it..

..but if you find yourself stumped you can help me make a mess with:

• Daily routines
• Advent calendars
• Scriptural meditation time
• Journey to Bethlehem
• Maps
• and ultimately Spiritual self-Gift(s)

Advent is an immensely rich time of year.  Previous articles in this series were geared towards helping you reconceive elements of this richness as ingredients of a genuine "soul-food", and prepare to "cook" something with it all. 
..  But Sometimes all the possibilities are more daunting than anything else.  This article may help you get some test batches put together where you can sample and home in on the best.

Advent ideas II (kitchen countertop)

Hopefully the preceeding article got you going with some ideas.  Ideally you've skipped ahead and are working on something of your own.  If not feel free to "cook" with me for a bit over the next few days and weeks.  It may turn out to be a disapointing flop (atleast as a first version), but maybe it'll get the ball rolling, your creative juices going, and your sacramental mouth watering..

Advent ideas I (Sacramental grocery store)

Stock up on a few ideas and cook up something eternally new.


(Pt I of a series of unabashedly over-metaphorical posts)

It's one week till advent begins. Ready?

Here's a question - at three days till Christmas in the past few years have you ever found a small ache in your heart, and a longing to have advent to do over again?

I have.

Well, now's our chance..

Grab a cup of spiced tea, pencils and notepad, cause this year it's going to be different.

(Deo volente.)

What's in a name?.. What if it's a Who?

I am.

It is implied that God has given/revealed himself in an absolutely unique way to each soul he ever created:  The "white stone" in Revelations and the "many mansions" in the gospel.

Has God given a bit of himself to every single created thing?  Can we un-bury these treasures?

 

New blogs for Soil and Life & Etherchapel

Just finished my triumvirate of blogs with this.. Soil and Life .. and this .. Etherchapeljournal

..in case you were wondering "why more blogs" (because I certainly did) : posts about chicken poopie just don't seem to fit alongside my remonstrations to renew Christendom via or atleast including the digital spheres.

I've caught myself holding back or compromising what I'd write to try to make everything seem like it fit.

Lifeline

Not every family member is cut out to stay and work on a family farm.

If and when the world chews them up, what?

Visual sanctuary..

Our eyes are gates that open directly into our souls..

You don't have time for this..

wordiness in/and of web 2.0


(See also the related article Dante's Dilemma if you do, in fact, have the time.)

Sing a new song to the Lord

What's wrong with the old songs?
{Innovation, tradition, God, zeal, religious life, (and yet another attempt at justifying/explaining projects like E')}

Chickens: Farm CPR

There's a learning curve with everything, garden-steading and chickens included.
One of the things that makes chickens the easiest, most bang-for-buck project to start your microfarm with (and there are many) are a result of the steep part of that learning curve..
You see, nearly everyone starts their chickens with a vision of them scratching a living in their backyard - happy, maintenance free, carefree, and healthy.  But no one has a backyard that can do this. At first..

Niches pt II: Devotion, the little openness which makes room for infinitely more

Something Divine can only be found in little places..

In making room for anything, you usually must sacrifice something else.  What you're left with is greater still..

An etherchapel sparked musing

"Complete Organic Fertilizer" Cof recipe

(by volume)
The core

Seedmeal 4 pts

 Lime .75 pts 

(NPK C,Ca)

 ...

...better  

Agricultural lime .25 pts

Dolomite lime .25

Gypsum  .25

(mix lime up from these three kinds) 

(adds Mg,S, and better ratio to Ca)

...

... even better

Kelp meal ~1 pt

Rock phosphate 1 pt

(adds Trace minerals and other catalysts, and better P ratio)  

*From Steve's book Gardening when it counts, starting pg21

There are some notes/alternates:

• Something called coprameal [from coconut oil] for  a low potency mix [less NPK, presumably]
• Blood and bone [tankage] for 1pt of the seedmeal [high NPK]
• Dolomite is usually the better lime if you can only afford one
• Ag' lime if you can afford two
• Gypsum least necessary
• rock dust {azomite?} for kelpmeal
• bone meal or bat guano for rock phosphate
• Finely ground as possible

........................

Usage

Low demand crops/ whole garden

Broadcast yearly over beds before crop

4-6 qts over 100 ft. sq. of bed or 50 ft of row

Medium demand crops

side dress in bands roughly at or just beyond leaf canopy every 3-4 weeks

an additional 4-6 qts per 100 sq. ft.

Fall, garden cleanup- crabgrass and other weeds, and cover crop possibilities

It's fall and the off-duty gardens are infested with crabgrass and other weeds gone to seed.  Here's the goals..

• Prevent the annual weeds from continuing to dominate (don't just mow and till in)
• Keep the nutrients somewhat in play (don't burn off)

meanwhile

• The chickens need food and bedding/litter
• I need to get to planting fall cleanup mix for garden rotations
• I don't have time for anything elaborate

soo..

• Pretend I'm a farmer stockpiling hay for the winter..
• Capture the nutrients that the weeds have made
• Sickle bar down the plots and let cure
• Rake to some kind of storage/composting area*
• Mark rows
• Scalp swaths with weedwacker
• Make furrows/ loosened soil drills
• Drizzle seed in mixes or in pure rows
• Do only a 5-10x30' area at a time and in different ways for variety spacing trials

How to incorporate this site's (E') devotions into the day (or night)

Etherchapel has several devotions.  Some of them may be difficult to connect with, or just plain difficult to use in this format. To help get you started, here's how I use this site. 

     

(an Etherchapel text approaching first draft stage) 

"Be Still And Know.."

(first and frequent)

By far the easiest and most frequent devotional use I make of E' is done simply by visiting throughout the day..

 Living in the unrelenting noise of the world and web takes a toll.  Even good folk and sites (including this one, if you approach it the wrong way) take part in the fevered competition for just a little slice of your attention, and end up deadening a piece of your soul.  All created things, indeed, seem to say that this world is passing.  Only that which is already set aside can see, and image what lies ahead to where some things have already passed, and where some have always been..

Atleast half of this site is devoted to the gift of Silence (and the Beauty that often inhabits it).  It is that silence which allows the seeds of Divine Revelation to germinate and grow.  The entrance and all of the rest of the visual sanctuary on one level are just a collection of pretty pictures.  If you're looking for flaws and shortcomings, believe me, you'll find them.  If you look in a different way you may just catch a brief glimpse of where they point. Heavenly signpost.. heavenly outpost.. the lines get a litlle fuzzy and the mere one's and zeroes I use for my home-page may just be piece of my true home. 

Anyways.. 

• I return to this site frequently throughout the day whenever I feel like I've had-enough.  Often I find myself letting out breath I didn't realize I was holding.  
• The more frequently I return, pray, and rest here the more it feels like home.

"Oh Lord open my lips.."

 6:00 - Lauds, the liturgical day, invitiatory, start divine office

The Liturgy of the Hours almost always starts my day, after that it anoints every hour it touches.

The divine office is an ongoing prayer made of psalms, scriptures, prayers, and saint's writings, all arranged into something like a symphony.. An enormous symphony with a thousand little movements and melodies orchestrated for every hour of every day. 

Essentially to pray the "hours" is to take up a key part alongside the rest of the Church in the incessant creative act of God.  It is to pray the fire of Eternal Life into a cold world of dwindling time.. 

Anyways.. 

The first thing I do each day here is to:

• Open up the devotions drawer> 
• Go to the Liturgy of the Hours> 
• Look to see whose day it is or if there's an upcoming feast day I should be preparing for> 
• Pray the invitiatory prayer>.  
• (up to this point is about 1 and a half minutes.  If I'm really pressed for time then I make do with  just the " Oh Lord open my lips.." prayer...  Like a true seed, it has everything distilled into it>.  

I can almost always say that prayer and internalize further it by saying it again and again through the day, especially before writing or setting my hands to a task. It makes a perfect little prayer to the Holy-Spirit

• The remainder of the Invitiatory consists of one psalm. It's often a jubilant short one or is somehow tailored to the liturgical day (and thus can cast the an otherworldly light on your day).  In keeping with the exhortation to open lips and praise I say this one aloud.
• Subsequent "Hours" are said depending on the busy-ness of the day and my proximity to a computer, but the idea of being conjoined to a world-side, centuries-long prayer is thrillling.  Future developments of this devotion will try to cultivate the seeds of a mini-breviary for those in the world (but not of it) and for families with children to grow into the full size. 
• In the meantime..

"Hail Mary: (full-of-Grace).."

 9:00 - Terce,  (the day's consecration, the day's rosary, praying decades and the star of the morning)

Anyways,

The beginings of the day's spiritual work usually takes place away from the computer.  It consists of a series of mental prayers, recollections and setting of intentions.  Occasionally it helps to then incarnate these in an easy way, by writing them down, say,  but usually I do good just to remember and start here.. 

• recollection of which set of Mysteries the day uses (for instance Friday and it's sorrowful mysterys) for meditation throughout the day,
• the re-collection of prayer requests and folk we've seen suffering to continuously bring before the altar, 
• and a con-sacration of the day and it's hardships with the aid of Our Lady.

"And taking up his cross.."

12:00 - Sext, little devotions, the "yoke that is easy", and daily toil

"The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.." 

3:00 - None, The Stations of the cross, the Sign of the cross, and the hour of Mercy

"Behold, the Lamb.."

5:00 - Vespers, intercession and Exposition 

"Now, Master, you let your servant go in peace.."

8:00 - Compline, and Night prayers

...

"In the silent hours of night, bless the Lord.."

Vigils, the office of readings, and intercessory prayer

Niches (what makes this site different)

Silence, Reverence, Obedience, Poverty, Simplicity, Hospitality, Humility..

Making room for something infinitely bigger entails sacrifice, and enshrines Beauty..

An etherchapel musing

...

...(I know that intro' sounds awfully pretentious, especially that last bit about humility.  

In my defense, I  started out writing about what this site (E') was not. That didn't go anywhere.  So I switched tacks and decided to write about what it did (or atleast attempted) that makes it different. Out spilled the list of monastic qualities, I know they look ridiculous applied to my site. Or rather, my site looks ridiculous alongside them.  But it's true.  Those qualities do best summarize lots of the things I've been trying to do there.. Trying..

 And anyways not enough webwriters put H3 tags on these concepts nowadays, nor the equivalent real-world priority.. )

Silence -

I've written (rather, I've tried to write elsewhere) about some mysterious quality I want E' to have: stillness, quiet, the quality without a name, visual oasis, no ads, no flashiness, no graspy proselytizing, no apologetics and arguing, no overly-lengthy train of words going nowhere and doing nothing and eventually derailing and ..

Each time I've failed, or felt like I've failed.  No matter what I pithily called it by, and no matter how many words I hurled (and here continue to hurl) It remained itself, and not to be described, or even praised by the likes of me.  But the concept that kept returning to the forefront was one of quiet, of a hush that is like a balm for our overwrought minds.  In this flashing, shrieking, crisis-filled, commercial-powered world there seems no place to turn to even , sometimes, within the church militant.

There's a verse about folk crying out "Peace! Peace!" when there is none, and I don't want to do that.  However, there's no end to the new's agencies, homilies, blogs, and good folk pointing out the various manifestations of hellfire in this crowded theatre.  Enough already.  Don't despair nor promote it neither. The enemy is not only a liar but the first and worst loser. Phantasm, bedlam, and despair are his.  Victory, or rather the victor Himself, is ours.  Be still.

Reverence -

The root of Devotion: being alive enough to even care 

Boredom with life is epidemic. Distractions and anesthetics of all kinds multiply, but eventually only worsen the fever. This web is one of those distractions, or rather, it's the perfect medium for them. But it too, whithers, rots and has begun to spread despair, immense catalyst that it is. 

This whole project, on the surface, looks like its just about particular individual devotions plopped into that dynamic but dying area. But it's not. 

Etherchapel is much more fundamentally about a very general kind of religious devotion way upstream, and a mysterious stillness there who is full of Life. Yes, it's about teachings, and Traditions aided and more fully incarnated by technology... but it's more about being devoted enough in the first place to even try to incarnate them, by knowing that they incarnate Him.

The internetworked computer may turn out to be several orders of magnitude more powerful than the printing press. It will either rot and degrade us with a thralldom for the glossy and novel, or be polished by the Church into something humble and eternal. 

Obedience -

Poverty -

Simplicity -

Hospitality -

Humility -

Room for improvement -

Enshrinement -

What is technology good for?

Much less than everything but much more than merely more 
This text is not really about new technologies.  It's about the human priority and creativity involved in making them.  
And the infinite Divine Creativity in generating all

Lightning rod

Lightining rod (on church cross, as analogy to and how-to for imaging Christ in the world (think about letting the zaps bypass you mostly, by being grounded into the church triumphant))

Etherchapel

 This is a website/project I've been building on since 06.  It attempts to start doing with the web (and other materials) something akin to what the monks, masons, illuminators, and other builders did with what they had.

At it's simplest level - I'm just trying to make a quiet and beautiful space for God's grace to work.. But.. alongside and via a complex one.  One in which the web is developed as an icon to God (a lens and a lifeline),  rather than left to rot as an idol (hell's own mirror and scourge). 

Etherchapel as a visual sanctuary

Housing all, is something like a little romanesque abbey that I've been modeling. With it and its surroundings - courtyard gardens - sanctuary - ambulatory and side chapels I'm trying to image something..  So hopefully,  like all religious art, alongside (and via) the semi-beautiful imagery there's something deeper mysteriously communicated.
 Above this is a hidden layer of website that I call the devotions drawer.
At first I imagined and formed the visual walls merely to hold out the noise of the rest of the web, the drawer to hold traditional devotions digitized. It is at these two things that it works best, but E' is more..
Etherchapel tries to

• find some of the web's intrinsic (sacramental?)  potential that we've neglected (and the enemy uses to corrosive purposes)
•   use the artistic/theological traditions of the church as inspiration and jumping off points (icons, illuminated breviaries, devotionals, shrines, chapels, cathedrals, and cultures)
• provide for some of the needs in the church that I see
•  and, regardless of temporal success (for some of what I've looks really half-baked), start building at the foot of the altar again.

It's gone through three or four itterations, so I hesitate to write about how it will look/function whenever you get around to roaming through, but It's always had two or three sides:

•  Sanctuary - I've always tremendously admired what the artisans of their day did with parchment, beam, lintel, stone, arch, household and culture.   That last one especially. Even in and of this vale of tears medieval workers polished something other-worldly. So I've been trying to make a quiet place for grace to sink roots and grow, untwisting, setting-apart, and offering the humble bits of networked-graphical-information-presentation.  At first it was just a little one-room chapel and thus ether-chapel.  It has sprawled somewhat into something like a Romanesque monastery and its surroundings.  I like to cool down my eyeballs and soul by parking at the entrance for awhile before heading in.  It's hard for me to get anything out of exploring its nooks (most of which are still just on my computer's drawing board) but I had hoped that others would enjoy wandering, picking a favorite spot and opening up the devotional drawer .. 
• Nursery - Just what is the web (and other modern materials + opportunities) good for?  Pre-suppposing that every thing's job is to bring us closer to God in some unique way, it remains our job to figure out what those ways are.  For instance, parchment and pigment's first uses weren't as fliers, mass-mailings and other trash can liners, but capturing and incarnating the most important of ideas..  Thus illuminated bibles and breviaries.  With the web (a more potent but analogous medium) whole new salvific possibilities open up.  Obviously the web is capable of incarating the Word via the Image.. the Image via the Word.. and thus the entirety of Revelation via relation.  This, no doubt is is its strongest area, albeit massively underdeveloped.  But as well, it partakes somewhat of architecture's ability to form us, gather us, make a community,  and even somewhat of a family out of us. traditional, proven, and beloved devotional forms belong in this ubiquetous medium that humans move through and inhabit.  In journal, forum and field tests for a modern Christendom and "field tests" for resultant devotions

 

Weeds never say die, part I

Weeds and other pests grow 24/7.. twice as fast when its over 90.  There's only so much time you can and should spend on them.  Make it count.

(Strategy #1 If you can't beat 'em, make 'em join you) 

 

...

• Weeds as volunteer soil stewards
• Weeds as free soil test kits
• Weeds as home-gym + health spa
• Weeds as saint-makers

• Weeds as volunteer soil stewards

 This really is the bottom line of growing things:  Your job is to capture as much energy for life as possible (primarily from the sun) and put it intelligently into the cycle that supports you.

  At fairly rare but key points this life will come from the aesthtetics and enjoyment of a clean (bare) soil/mulch surface, or an absolute monoculture of crops/ornamentals. But MUCH more often every square inch of your soil needs to be making hay (stored chemical energy) while the sun shines...

If there's a weed growing there, it means there's energy, water, and fertility that would otherwise have been lost: Sunlight that would have just been baking the life out of your soil.  Nitrogen and other nutrients that would have been volatizing into the atmosphere or sinking into the subsoil. Moisture that would have been evaporated away. All kept in play.  All yours to harvest and harness when and if they actually do start competing with your crops.  

• Groom them with a rake ( I was surprised at how much this quick fix "helped" leading me to believe that half my compulsion to weed is aesthetic). 
• Give em a hair-cut with some lawn shears, and leave the clippings as "mulchpost". 
•  Pulling the easy ones up by the roots (automagically cultivates and loosen the soil for removing the noxious ones and can, again, automagically, mix soil on top of pre-scattered crop seed).
•   Toss them in the compost pile.
•  Give 'em to the chickens and rabbits as a treat.
•  Set them aside for mulch,

Use them as the fertilizer and subsoiling tools they are..  Next year, IF you think you can improve upon a free and already planted cover crop mix tailored to your area over many years, take a hint and plant something you want there.

• Weeds as free soil test kits.  

Dynamic accumulators.  Thats what some weeds are. They specialize in mopping up or mining out specific nutrients.  Some of your crops might need a boost of those nutrients. Next year plant them where those weeds grew best. This year.. well.. if Mohammed can't come to the mountain, rip it up by the roots and bring it to him.

Also.  Some weeds are remediation specialists (fancy name for soil rebuilders) when your soil has specific problems, you'll see these first. Let them do their work long enough and you'll have an improved garden. Atleast learn what their presence means so you can improve the soil.

• Weeds as home-gym

First though, an aside about Gardening in general, and a rant on the "back-breaking" work it supposedly demands..

1. Tending the soil is a labor of love.  In time you re-shape, grow, and adapt to meet it as much as the soil does to meet you and your needs.  If you don't love it, don't submit to it.
2. The only backs that are broken gardening are the ones that spend too much time hunched over trying to milk a living out of a machine or a computer..  The land doesn't work the way a machine does, try to work it harder or faster and you'll fail. Painfully.  Instead, enter into it's rhythms.  Make hay when the sun shines.  Make hot chocolate (and plans) when its cold and rainy.  It's a dance, if you want to lead, you do it with your eyes, your head, and subtle changes.. not with brawn, because nature weighs more than you do. 
3. In general there's two sides to all garden work. Some people might say it depends on whether you're a glass-is-half-full or a glass-is-half-empty sort of person as to which side is prominent, but I find it depends more on if the mosquitoes are out or not, so kill the mosquitoes:
4.  
   • It has actual value and is genuinely satisfying (it's hugely substantial, and not doing it has cumulative consequences)
   • It is quiet and contemplative (it's tedious)
   • It is familiar and even familial (it's repetitive, and never-ending)

Now, about the actual work that weeding (should you decide to do it) involves, and this is for the most intensive and effective way of weeding - completely by hand.

• Hands/fingers

There's no tool that has ever been made that is as good as human digits at getting stubborn weeds out.  There never will be.  Your hands know this.  From time to time you'll notice that they have mysteriously dropped your favorite tool half a row back and are happily, precisely, and successfully eradicating the exact weeds you don't want in and amongst the over babied crops you do want.  They don't gobble up vast acreages in mere minutes like waving a magic wand (a hoe) or draging a one ton plow, and this is always frustrating to those of us who've seen the quick cheap results such tools seem to yield.  But I repeat, there is no tool that is as good as a pair of human hands at getting rid of stubborn weeds.  And addiction to quick cheap results is something that needs weeding worse than an acre of crabgrass.

(If your doing alot of hand weeding, you might try getting some tough medical gloves (the puncture resistant kind that cops and emt folk have to wear) and luxuriate in being able to weed with surgical precision without getting dirty fingernails, and farmer fingers.  I haven't tried it yet, but it seems like it oughta help.)

• Torso, Legs, and Backs.. (broken and otherwise)

• With the exception of pulling up vast ammounts of mature grasses (like finished corn stalks or any other +4ft weed) weeding isn't the sort of exercise to quickly drain or build up individual muscles much.  It's the ten thousand slightly different repetitions of kneel down - lean in - support self - find weed - lean further in (without support) - hold aside crop plant with one hand - gently but irresistably tug out weed - toss into pile - lean further/ duck-walk down row - straighten up - walk elsewhere - repeat.. that gets you.  But

• Indefinables

Here's where the real benefits are.  Forget the specific muscles.  The activity of weeding is good for the whole you. Systemically.  Pumping lymphatic fluid around, Vitamin D production, Sweating out toxins, building up the endurance and willpower that make life possible and the evening's ease into something more re-creation-al than post 9-5 job couch-potatoing.  

• Weeds as Saint-makers

When you're repeatedly in the hot sun, facing tiny little things .. and  losing.. you begin to change.  City-folk mistake it for becoming a simpleton.  But to work with humus is to be humbled, to ponder what it means ".. you are dust, unto dust you shall return".

I admit.. The thoughts that come out there are simple and few.  Also theres a perennial temptation to dismiss them as silly and shallow in the face of all the desperate "real" goings-on out in the "real world".  But the schemes and fevered goings on of the world will soon return to the nothingness from whom they spirated..  Miles wide, millimeters deep, and moving nowhere at the speed of light. 

Besides,

To return to the weedpatch for an example... Lets say, I scrape the crown of this crabgrass plant.  The very next day it will be back,  because I think I'm done I've moved on.  In one week it will be just as hale as it ever was.  In the two or three weeks time it'll probably take for me return to that spot to be greeted by the disdain full laughter of the lower life forms it is I who'll be the weaker, not they.  

Welp, the heat of the day (the time I spend schemeing and writing blog stuff) is over.  Time to return to the weed patch.. I mean.. the garden.

(To be continued)

 

My Design Style (a rambling from an old notebook)

 ... In my "style" of building I want to approach this divine analogy.  Inspired by music, creation, and salvation history I want to proceed- finding elemental seed motiffs.. that generate parts.. that add up to entities.. that mature into insight.. that makes way for Inspiration...  Like revelation shining light upon its own parts and the larger things that flow from them I want to find the largest- who, containing the complexity of all things within himself, has no parts.

(Friday, April 1, 2005 1:59:17 PM)

(This text confuses even me in places, and I wrote it!  It was hastily and un-selfconsciously written (being intended only for my own idea sparking).  The result is something honest and unstudied, but also ponderous and, at times, embarrassingly incomprehensible.  Caveat browseor.)

Paths, patrols, routes, ruts, rewards, and routine

The most powerful and indispensable tools in working with your land are a habitual morning cup of coffee and walk.

...

• On routine and railroads ( the ongoing systemic power increase (or decrease) from un-consumed catalysts that grow)
• On the placement of flowerpots and manure piles (riches and rewards for each leg of the morning route from zone to zone)
• Of gardener's footprints as fertilizer ( seasonal and day to day observations/decisions)

Our place, and our plans

We live on the 6-7 acre heart of what was once a thriving several-hundred-acre family farm (not our family) in Tennessee.  Much of it has been badly used or neglected and the vast rich acres sloughed off to pay debts until all that remains is a small and scrubby sort of sterility.. 

 I've no ambition to re-aquire hundreds of acres and manage them in the mercenary agro-industrial way.  I do want to get our little plot, and along with it, the idea of a small family-sized farm breathing again.

Permaculture

(permanent {agri}culture)

a method of designing homes, gardens, farms, and communities for the long term and from the ground up.

Permaculture is a young design method that originated in Australia.  Though most often developed, embraced, and used by folk of a completely different sort than me, its patterns and ideas are more useful than anything I've seen.  It is the strategy that orchestrates all the tactics and techniques here on our place.

But, I think it's more than something merely useful.  I think it's useful enough to be something eternal.

Anyway, this will be an ongoing (and hopefully improving) post, both as an uncolored introduction to "permaculture" itself, and what I'm doing with it..

• Permaculture starts with a superbly rational kind of reverence for Nature (including human nature).
• "It" especially seeks out and studies the useful keys to, facets of, and connections within stable eco-systems and/or human societal systems.
• The thinking is, if these systems "developed" by themselves.. if they've maintained and repaired  themselves, and all without conscious input (work) from humans then there's something/s in them that can be interwoven into all our laborious toiling to make them more: productive, automatic, and synergistic.

Permaculture, formal origins/ resources

• It's origins/testing grounds are Australian (a place where things that even survive stand out, and things that thrive cry out for marveling, study, and emulation)
• Bill Mollison and David Holmgren; originators, authors
• The currently excellent wikipedia entry

Permaculture has largely been developed by folk as a vehicle for societal change but is prone to being employed by folk

• Bottom to top design (kitchens-to gardens- to fields -to neighborhoods- to societies)
• Simplicity and economy