Tuning In

 One of the concepts of permaculture that I particularly value is the deep observation of a site. Before you plant or even plan, you get to know a particular landscape intimately. This comes before placing a garden, a building, an orchard, a playscape, or any other developed area. You use your many senses to take in the particulars of a place. How does the sun hit it? How does the wind come? Does rain gather in pools, run off, or sink in? Is there shade? What is already growing there? What is the slope of the land? The way to discover all these things is to be there, quietly taking it all in. Rather than sitting in your office at your computer, intellectually making a plan, you need to experience the site first hand, get comfortable, and turn off your thoughts. Be quiet. Begin to notice. Let your body pick up signals: wind on your skin, your ears catching sound, your nose noticing fragrances, your eyes looking for insects, undergrowth, birds, sky. Be part of the landscape for a bit and then take that information back to the drawing board.

I use this same practice to bring me back in touch with the natural world around me. It's easy to let my life get crowded with human-focused perspective: meetings, indoor projects, email, busy schedule. I start to feel something missing, a lack of rootedness. But I'm too busy to think about it. And then one day I get propelled out of my busy-ness, thank goodness, and I'm off to the woods, or the lake, or the prairie. That's what I'm going to do right now. When I get back, I'll tell you what I discovered......

Now I'm back home. It was raining all day today, and it occurred to me that I might wait until a clear day to do this. But rain is such an important thing. It is life. All of nature is out there experiencing rain today, so I put myself out there too. I drove to Kent Park, hundreds of acres of prairie and forest, and chose to turn into the Bob White shelter. It's well back from the main road, relatively isolated. I'd never been there before, but knew that to be comfortable I'd need a roof over my head.

The wooden shelter is in a small clearing surrounded by trees. I found a place to sit inside and was quiet for awhile, just breathing-in the place. The rain was audible as it dropped on the roof, and the faint roar of a far-away highway sounded in the background. I heard the occasional bird call but no insect voices. They were probably all either still in hibernation or snuggled safe from the wet. The shelter was six-sided, and that roundedness somehow helped it feel part of the landscape. No hard right angles. On three sides, the land sloped down and away like the end of a peninsula. And all around were tall, tall trees dwarfing the structure. Most of them were deciduous and had not yet started to send out buds. Where the trees were close together, they tended to reach up instead of out. But on one slope which ended in a clear view of a lake, the trees had more room and stretched out as well as up. I noticed several large squirrel nests in the top branches of trees, and though I saw no birds on branches, I heard geese flying over and birdcalls that sounded like crows in the distance. There were also three clumps of conifers, large and well established. Their green was a welcome addition to the brown of the rest of the landscape. Three very tall evergreens stood like nobility granting entrance to the clearing. Others stretched out to their sides with strong branches. One sturdy pine tree had caught a dead companion tree on one of its thick branches, holding it there perhaps for months or years, looking like a mother holding her kin.

When I arrived, the sky was a solid gray and the wind gentle. Shortly after, the wind picked up and there became discrete clouds moving across the sky. The rain eased then. But later the rain picked up and the sky became solid with clouds again. The temperature was in the low 40's and I appreciated the warmth of my fleece jacket. Although it was apparent that in the growing season, the grass was mowed outside the shelter, under the trees there was a healthy accumulation of leaves, dead branches, and stalks from annual plants. There was very little evidence of green growth on this mid-March day, though just at the base of some trees I could see the beginning of "creeping charlie" taking hold. (There must be value in this resilient plant, but we try to suppress its tendency to take over at Prairie Hill.) There were no puddles between my car and the shelter, which would indicate that rain was absorbed into the ground. And there was a feeling of tranquility there in the gentle downpour.

When I headed back to my car, I turned and took one more look at the shelter.  At that point, having spent peaceful time on its bench, it looked lovely to me, framed by the trees around it, almost as if it had grown there. There was a feeling of permanence and stability, nature poised to begin pushing out and up once rising temperatures gave the signal, but content to be just where it was in the annual cycle of ebb and flow. No hurry. What a good lesson. 

Did I learn anything from this hour spent in the woods? Not anything obvious, I guess. But it was a time for me to slow down, to calm my mind's chatter and be a part of something bigger than my small container of activity. As I was pulling out the drive, I realized that it would make sense to visit this same place again, maybe in a month. After all, everything is constantly on the move, growing and changing. Now that I have met this particular landscape, I'll notice the changes that happen. And gradually it will become a new friend.