Winter Allies
January 6, 2012
This winter I have been making new friends and deepening my relationship with some older acquaintances. Allow me introduce you to a few of them.
The first began reaching out to me some time ago. Exactly when I can’t say. Sometimes I am not the most attentive and the earliest advances were lost on me. Although, not entirely because something vaguely intrigued me. The subtlety of the initial approach changed to a louder, more direct appeal when I thought about removing the plant to let more light in to a particular spot. I started asking around to find out exactly who this was but no one knew. Granted, my survey wasn’t exactly exhaustive, few people with the necessary knowledge are to be found in the mountains these days, but Tsuchiya-san, our most reliable source of local plant information was unable to help. Usually this would indicate the plant wasn’t “useful” but I was developing a strong feeling that this plant was offering something to us.
Without any idea who this was calling me I cautiously tasted its fruit. Beautiful tiny red fruits. A really vibrant, almost translucent, red. Slightly elongated with a pointy end of a darker red or black. Sour, though not unpleasant. Not much flesh – most of the fruits size was given it by the seed inside. I concluded that any usefulness (to me) whatever it may be was not likely to be in eating quantities of the raw fruit. But, rather than disappointment that this was not some new and delicious edible fruit gracing Shikigami (anyway, had it have been Tsuchiya-san would surely have known it), my feeling that this was a plant I wanted to know only grew stronger.
Gamazumi (Viburnum dilatatum)
Some months after this all began I finally got a name. While on a teaching trip to Tokyo I came across what is by far the best guide to edible wild plants in Japan that I have seen so far. In Ikuzo Hashimoto’s Wild Food Lexicon, Japan (for more on this book see Readings) I learnt that it was Gamazumi ガマズミ (Viburnum dilatatum) that had been trying to get my attention. The uses to which it has been put by others include making fruit liquor and jam. It is diuretic and “good for tiredness.” A dye is made from the fruit. Other uses are preserved in one of its English common names; Arrow wood. The long straight shoots of Gamazumi have traditionally been used to make arrows and the older thicker branches to make tool handles. Further, the bark is said to make a good twine.
In the absence of elders we turn to books to gain plant knowledge but, it is not the same. For in personal relationships with plants something that cannot be spoken of flows between plant and person, flows in both directions. When elders teach us from experience this flow of spirit can be felt. The energy, the flow of meaning passing between plant and person radiates out and touches us, inviting us in. From the field guides we learn but one dimension. Elders bring alive the multidimensionality of relationship. And there never really is an absence of elders for the plants themselves, the mountains and rivers, are our elders. No doubt, without a guide speaking a familiar language it is difficult to begin but, in relearning the language of nature teachers are everywhere, if we are only able to listen.
We humans live in a realm a thousand times faster than plants and rarely do we slow down enough to hear them speak.
- Jonathan Sparrow Miller
So, to let a little more light in to the spot, rather than removing Gawazuni I will likely coppice it (explaining to Gawazumi what I am doing and why I am doing it), harvesting the bark for twine and good straight branches for tool handles. The regrowth producing more straight shoots to ensure a future supply of arrows, tool handles, twine, dye, a reviving liquor and some jam. And, not least the pleasure of simply looking at its long slender branches, its deep green summer foliage and intense red autumnal berries. Now that Gawazumi has finally managed to get my attention I will be listening too. Friendships develop and deepen with time and careful listening.
Sanekazura (Kadsura japonica)
My Tokyo book find also enlightened me as regards another plant I had been curious about ever since its strange fruit appeared. (And, even though a book may not be the same as a living elder, nonetheless, I do love and value books. For plants speak through the written words of their human allies too. Interest sparked from reading about a herb easily develops into deeper relationship when the herb is encountered.) A vine with knobbly red berries. Little flashes of red way up in the now leafless tress offering support to the vine. Having cautiously sampled these too, I had come to the conclusion that any relationship I might develop with this plant was also unlikely to be centred on regular eating of its fruit. Maybe not winter food but winter medicine?
In Japanese the plant is known as Sanekazura (サネカズラ), in Latin as Kadsura japonica. It is a plant used in kampo, the Japanese adaptation of traditional Chinese medicine. Sanekazura is used as a tonic to boost the immune system. The beautifully weird berries are first dried then simmered until gooey, strained and taken as a tea. This decoction is said also to relieve coughs and reduce excessive mucus production. A winter medicine to be sure. Further, the Sanekazura vine is used for basketry and a hair styling gel can be extracted from it!
It does not surprise me that a medicine good for winter strength should be growing nearby, producing the berries that boost the immune system just as the weather begins to get cold. Or that it is growing in a particularly cold frosty spot, where these changes are most abrupt. For this is all rather typical behaviour in a plant: plants grow where they are needed, where their gifts contribute to community resilience and well being. The environment in which they grow tells us much about what they do. In scientific language this is referred to as “ecosystem function.”
We know that plants are constantly adapting to changes in environmental conditions and forming symbiotic relationships, or mutual aid societies, with other plants, fungi, animals, microbes etc. We know too that plants will alter their chemical composition in response to these changes or the needs of their communities, that the same plant growing in different locations can have a remarkably different chemical constitution. Further, plant people, holders of indigenous (from Latin indigena, “sprung from the land”) knowledge, have always told us that this ability in plants is what we are appealing to when we ask for their medicine. And hence the necessity of “choosing” (or being chosen by) the right plant, of offering a prayer to the plant, of making our request and explaining our needs. (This notion has many profound implications, not least of which for the current tendency towards standardization and commercialization of herbal medicines, reducing whole plants to an “active constituent”).
Now, the scientist studying ecosystem functions of plants will likely baulk at my suggestion that plants can and do make internal adjustments in order to assist our needs, even though they readily accept this idea in relation to other elements in the ecosystem. The magical thinking here, the superstition, is that all we know about ecosystems somehow doesn’t apply to the human species, that we are the sole species on the planet that exists outside of the web of communication linking all life. That the strands that intricately weave this web do not also run through us.
Having withdrawn from our bodies into our heads, locating our consciousness there, and perceiving the world through a particularly anthropocentric filter, some of our most precious knowledge has gone, our most useful abilities atrophied through lack of use. We no longer easily feel the vibrations coursing through the strands that weave the web. We have disconnected ourselves from the medium of communication. But all is not lost. The plants offer medicine for that affliction too. Imbibing the “wild redeemer” we begin the long process of deschooling ourselves and reinhabiting life.
Amazake (fermented rice porridge) with fuyuichigo (Rubus buergeri) and yuzu (Citrus ichangensis × C. reticulata) rind
Fuyuichigo (フユイチゴ), “winter berry,” (Rubus buergeri) is one I have been aware of for some time. It is a dominant ground cover here and can be found throughout the forest and in clearings. But this is my first autumn and early winter here so it is the first time I have had the pleasure of eating the winter berry.
The fruits are generally smaller than cultivated raspberries (which are of the same genus) although there are many of comparable size. Also, generally, the fruit is pleasantly tart but can be rather sweet, particularly when growing in sunny locations. It fruits copiously and is thornless so regardless of the small size it is relatively easy to collect good quantities of berries.
Fuyuichigo, like other berries in the Rubus genus, amongst other things, is very high in vitamin C, making it another excellent food for fortifying the body for the cold of winter.
Seri (Oenanthe javanica)
From the reds to the greens.
Heading outside to gather greens for a meal I walk towards the “garden” but before reaching it spot some beautiful looking dandelion leaves, tender and intensely green, vibrating in the late afternoon light. Next I see a patch of chickweed, lush again having been harvested from only a couple of days ago. White clover catches my eye next. A handful of tender young clover leaves and a few young leaves of sorrel. I turn to the deliciously nutty plantain leaves then head off in the direction of a wasabi patch to gather some young leaves there passing as I go watercress and water celery (seri セリ) which I add to my basket to complete the wild salad.
Most of these plants will be found within close proximity to your own houses for most of these plants have long followed human camps. Nourishing and delicious herbs that keep us healthful and show a preference for growing close by us. Part of our supportive community, we have, in the past 50 odd years, attempted to banish dandelion, plantain, sorrel, chickweed and clover from our camps with incredible quantities of herbicides. The work of a disembodied head, to be sure, for all of these plants are far more nutritious than the salad plants we work so hard to cultivate.
Water celery, seri セリ, (Oenanthe javanica) also referred to as Japanese parsley or Chinese celery, is a member of the water dropwort family. Seri has a long stem with leaves descending in size from the base of stem to the tip. It has bipinnate, rounded leaflets, with serrated edges. Several species of water dropworts are extremely toxic so it is essential to make a good positive identification of seri before consuming it. Making this easier, here, we only eat seri in the winter and spring when it happens to be the only water dropwort around. In the heat of summer, when the other water dropworts appear, the seri becomes tough and stringy. It will be found in wet places. The photo above was taken near a spring just below our house. As its English common names suggest seri has a taste reminiscent of celery, or, more like something between celery, parsley and carrots. Every part of the plant is edible, leaves, stems, roots and seeds. Edible, delicious and very nutritious. The leaves in particular are rich in minerals and vitamins.
“Let food be your medicine and medicine your food.” Local, seasonal, wild.
Tokyo Event
December 9, 2011
Returning to the Way of Nature
A workshop facilitated by Dion Workman and Takuya Sasa.
Nerima-ku, Tokyo
17th Dec. Sat. 10:00~17:00
Donations appreciated. Please bring food for a shared lunch.
RSVP required: tabi0419[at]gmail.com
Returning to the Way of Nature
A presentation and discussion about the state of modern society, the destruction of the environment and how we could live in a very different way. A way that is good for ourselves, our children, our human communities and the community of all life on Earth.
Many of us feel a sense of unease about the world today. We feel anxiety for the future, a future where we don’t see opportunities to live healthy fulfilled lives for ourselves and where we see each generation leaving to their children a world in poorer condition. We feel a great sadness for the injustice of our societies and for the way in which our way of life is destroying Earth. And we feel helpless to do anything about it.
In this event lead by Dion Workman and Takuya Sasa, we look at the root causes of these issues and discuss practical solutions. We will look at ecology, technology, economics, community, education, food, health and energy. We will examine many aspects of the world today and ask how can we create the world that our hearts long for. What can we do as individuals and as communities.
Our hearts tell us that another world is possible. It is time to start living in that new world.
Dion Workman was born in Aotearoa/New Zealand and now lives in Izu-hanto. He is a natural farmer, wild food forager, permaculturalist, deep ecologist and writer.
Takuya Sasa was born in Tokyo. He has traveled extensively in 60 countries including one year traveling by horse through central America. Much of this time he has spent learning about the indigenous cultures of the countries he travels in. Takuya also spent one year in Aoteroa/New Zealand learning Permaculture.
Returning to the Way of Nature
現代社会のあり方や環境問題についてプレゼンテーションをおこない、話し合います。
The Gift Economy (part II)
November 25, 2011
In this post, the second part of a series on gift economies, [part one can be read here], I contrast the dynamics of a money economy to those of a gift economy, and discuss the casting of spells and how to break spells. In a future post I shall look at the practicalities of gift economies and address the issues of transitioning from our current money economy to something more desirable. Or, in other words, from scarcity to abundance.
Monetized Life
The loyalty of school children, indigenous knowledge, drinking water, the human genome—it’s all for sale.
- Lewis Hyde, The Gift
It is commonly believed that the origins of money lie in barter. Money, we are told, developed as a technology to facilitate the otherwise cumbersome direct exchange of goods. As anthropologist David Graeber, in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, points out (as have many others) there is virtually no anthropological evidence to support this view and plenty of evidence suggesting that it is erroneous. [Graeber] Barter, the direct exchange of goods based on an agreed upon value of the goods by the trading parties, is found where people have previously come into contact with money.
Money and barter are systems where the emphasis, the value, is placed on the object of exchange, that is, on the material goods or services. The purpose of the exchange is acquisition. In traditional gift economies, such as potlatch, for example, we see something very different. Objects that help meet material needs are indeed transferred but the value does not reside solely in the object but, rather, in the giving and receiving. The purpose is not acquisition of material goods but the strengthening of support networks or gift circles.
What does it mean to strive for “financial independence”? That we don’t want to be dependent on others, to need others. We want to be free of obligation and responsibility. If you do something for me and I pay you for the service I have met my obligations and therefore owe you nothing. Job done, money paid, we’re finished. “Nice and clean.”
This hard won “independence” is illusory, of course, for we have actually exchanged interdependence, with family, friends and community for near total dependence on money and the goods and services it can afford us. We are no longer intimate with the people who sustain our lives. The monetized life is a depersonalized life.
The Gift Circle
The dynamic of the gift is very different. The gift builds relationship. The feelings of gratitude we experience in receiving gifts foster our desire to give back, to share our gratitude. And, on the flip side of gratitude we have obligation. We feel a sense of responsibility to those who are generous toward us. We look out for them and care for them. The gift attends to our self-interests by fostering the interests of the community at large. More for you means more for me.
It is told that when a needy family came to the house of the Prophet Muhammad his wife, Aisha, took the meat that they had in the house and gave all but a shank to the family. When later she explained that nothing was left of the lamb but the shank the Prophet replied that all was saved but the shank.
The gift economy, in fostering relationships of gratitude and responsibility, relies on social witnessing: a community awareness of who is generous and who stingy which consequently determines the level of generosity shown to individual community members. How, and by whom, your needs are met directly relates to how you have treated others.
In the modern world we often bemoan the loss of community. It seems the more “affluent” the society at large the more keenly the loss of community is felt. But this should not surprise us for the dynamic of money undermines community bonds by removing our interdependence, our needing each other. This need for one another is the foundation of community.
The gift circulates through the community – and we should note that the movement of the gift is indeed one of circulation and not exchange, for where, as Charles Eisenstein points out, our gifts are exchanged we are moving into the realm of barter and are no longer in the realm of the gift [Eisenstein]. As the gift flows through the community it infuses the feelings of generosity and gratitude that strengthen our communal ties as our needs are met. Spirit is breathed into the community.
The Community of Life
What is the origin of this monstrous machine that chews up beauty and spits out money?
- Charles Eisenstein, Sacred Economics
The fictitious story of money’s origins in barter conveniently supports the notion that markets will spontaneously emerge, sooner or later, wherever there are human societies. Again, David Graeber shows us that such an assumption is highly problematic as the emergence of markets had far more to do with rulers meeting the needs of their armies than it ever did with meeting the needs of the people. [Graeber] If markets are inevitable then it is only to certain kinds of societies. Getting “the people” to participate usually required forceful coercion such as undermining social networks and stealing land (enclosing the commons, or privatizing, as we call it today. As Proudhon said, “Property is theft”). Of course the simplest method is to start issuing currency and then demand taxes paid in that currency. What was formerly given away is now sold and co-operation disintegrates into competition. The market emerges.
The functioning of markets requires an element of scarcity. There must be a need for something not easily obtained. Either new needs must be manufactured or the meeting of existing needs made difficult. When intrepid explorers, missionaries, anthropologists and the like encountered “primitive” societies they did not find barter or market mentalities because what they generally found were people who lived in a world of abundance, not scarcity. Needs were met by the gifts of the gods. The world, the entire community of life, was a gift circle where, as long as behaviour appropriate to a gift circle was maintained, all ones needs would be met.
Of course, the simple minded savages couldn’t possibly be allowed to continue living in such a state of ignorance. One of any number of ingenious methods of inducing scarcity was introduced, necessitating the establishment of markets, the use of money, the collection of taxes, debt, poverty, theft, prisons, and so on, and so on… From living by the gifts of the gods to survival of the fittest. More for you means less for me.
If money has undermined the bonds of human community then it’s severing of our connection to the larger community of life has been even more complete. As the quote opening this section suggests, our economy is a monstrous machine that consumes the natural world to create money. Although the overt buying and selling of human life is generally looked down upon in our “enlightened” age the rest of life is still up for grabs. “For a price, you can buy anything, even the pelt of an endangered species.” [Eisenstein] Although money is not the root cause of our (self)exile from the community of life, but is, rather, a manifestation of it, it has nevertheless become a ferocious enforcer of the belief that we are discreet beings separate from the rest of life.
Our sense of separation goes back at least to the Neolithic and the first agriculturalists. With agriculture a new binary view of the world is born, a world of competition, of us against them: crops or weeds, beneficial insects or pests, domestic or wild, good or evil, etcetera, etcetera. Some, such as John Zerzan, would place the origins of our separation even earlier with the emergence of symbolic culture; representational language, number and art. [Zerzan] No matter when we place the origins of our separation, with money we have carried it to its conclusion and today find ourselves in a world of abstractions where everything has been reduced to number.
The fate of life is determined by the monetary value that can be extracted from it. If we see more value in a field of soy beans than a prairie then prairie will become field of soy beans. Sacred land or uranium mine? Rain forest or hardwood decking? Endangered species or pelt? Numbers in a ledger.
Living in the Real World
From the mistaken view of ourselves as discrete and separate beings we have developed our stories, our cultures, philosophies, sciences, technologies, economies…that support and reinforce this view. We have written ourselves into a monstrous fiction and remade the earth as a backdrop for our dystopian plot.
But we are not separate, are we? When we look at a forest freshly clear cut we feel the pain of the forest. We feel the sense of loss of the creatures whose home has been razed. Thousands of years of steadily increasing separation has not completely extinguished our sense that we are those creatures, we are those trees. When we allow ourselves, when our rational mind momentarily drops the prison guard role it has been educated to play, we feel the truth of our interdependence.
Returning to live in the real world requires just that we live in that world of interdependence. That is to say, not just believe, or even know, but live.
From the moment of your birth, no, before that even, you have been receiving the gifts necessary to sustain and nourish you. Before you were capable of “earning your keep” you received the gifts of life, of Earth. It is no wonder that we often experience deep feelings of gratitude for simply being alive, for we’ve been receiving precious gifts non-stop the whole time we’ve been here. What has changed? Why do we now feel anxious that what we need will no longer be given to us? Is it because we have not maintained the behaviour appropriate to a gift circle?
Marcel Mauss noted that traditional gift economies contained a trio of obligations: “the obligation to give, the obligation to accept, and the obligation to reciprocate.” [Hyde] We have all been given gifts, ways in which we are able to make unique contributions to life on our beautiful planet and, if we are not to renege on our obligations then we must be giving generously of our gifts. To do not what you love but what you think you must do “for the money” is to renege on your obligations. Behave inappropriately and the gift circle is broken. To overcome your survival anxiety, to put aside the monetized illusion of security, and wholly offer up your gifts for the well-being of all life is to re-enter the gift circle. (I am not suggesting that you will never need money but, rather, that if you do what you love and give of your gifts, whatever money you need will come.)
To refuse a gift is to proclaim that we do not want to be in relationship with the giver. The obligation to accept also requires that we be open to all gifts that come our way, that is, not to have fixed ideas about how our needs are to be met. Let’s face it, we don’t know best. The evidence of that is everywhere. Our “knowing” is so wrapped up in our story of separation that it is woven through with desires to control the world around us. It is time to let go. Remember, the “weeds” are often more nutritious than the crops.
The earth gives us what we need. Long before we got the idea that we could run the show, Earth generously provided for our every need. We must reciprocate if we want to live in the gift. Nothing can demonstrate this more clearly than looking at the current state of this planet. Since attempting to take over the reins we’ve run vital life support systems in to the ground. Not reciprocating the gift ceases to flow. To rejoin the circle we must use the gifts given us and give back to Earth. That is, to fulfil our purpose in life. To fulfil our ecosystem function.
