We are exploring the basic nature and culture of land-based people. Clearly, we are all dependent on the planet for providing much, if not all of the requirements for our life in the physical material plane. Our bodies are composed of the material we ingest as food, breath, liquid and sensory stimuli. Our homes and sacred places are located on this planet and are constructed of material that is provided by Earth. The stability of fuel, money and psychological states are directly impacted by how this physical world is manipulated.
With all this instability, many people engage in intense over-consumption or wasteful attitudes toward resources. Other people are hyper-focused on finding another planet or dimension to live on despite being as equally dependent on Earth for their life, family, body and pleasure as anyone else.
Land-based people acknowledge the location of all material experiences as the living Planet Mother. Land-based people celebrate and serve in ways that support Planet Mother in all her transformations. Land-based people exist globally.
Colonization is a fearful pattern to attempt to align the lifestyle of land-based people with poverty. This pattern has come to assault many of the land based people all over the globe. To accomplish this, currency is a necessary invention to assign wealth to an arbitrary symbol.
As land-based people honor and innovate a living culture, specific patterns shape the creative expression of our practices. We have always grown food, cared for trees and fed nearby animals. We have always focused on using our breathing, stretching, music, dance, and walking as methods of stepping outside of time and ego. We have for eons had sex to reproduce and educated our children within the family.
In the corporate mental structure that dominates the minds of many people, it is a requirement to believe the need for permission. We seek permission to marry, travel, conduct exchange and reproduce. Who do we ask for permission and why?
To lose our connection to the rich fertility of land puts us in a deep, silent subconscious state of fear. That fear of loss, lack and abandonment help to justify the illusion of currency.
Currency is a way of calculating and traveling with your self-worth or personal value. It’s much easier to fold some treasury notes and put them in your pocket than to drag hectares of land everywhere you go. Much of the personal value of land-based people is determined by the health productivity and beauty of the land they steward.
How can this be shown to others in a colonized culture that is designed to direct our attention away from nature and the labor of love that people have practiced for generations? Once this sensual loving relationship is severed physically and psychologically then value is attributed to different lifestyle practices and objects, such as the number of college degrees earned, jewelry, vehicles, popularity, political status, and bank statements.
When the way one interacts with the Earth is unrelated to how they are valued in society than the value can be attached to constantly changing symbols that hold no inherent value. These artificial concepts of self-worth can create a culture of competition over false ideas of limited resources and access.
Local food growers transform these cultural ideas when we work to produce food for our families while rejuvenating the soil with nutrients and attention. As Planet Mother accepts our service, she cleanses us of the ego and continues to feed us in a multitude of diverse ways.
This quantum nutrition serves to enrich our experience in her dimension. The practice of caring for the plants that provide the food we eat is an ancient, humbling way of coexistence. The repetition of cultivation can serve as a meditation for decolonizing our life.
Colonization is rooted in our language, dreams, occupations and media. As we document the local food movement from the perspective of committed growers who are operating outside the typical non-profit industrial complex we demonstrate our power.
Land-base people have always been sovereign, enterprising people who create our lives from the love in our being that pours out through our service to the planet that supports our physical life. Planet Mother is the only home we have ever known as humans. Our daily actions deeply affect the environment of this planet. How do you feel about the way you eat?
Attached is a powerful talk by Zarna Joshi of Women of Color Speak Out: Colonialization and Animals.
Eugene Cookepresents the “Grow Where You Are” workshop series and book in partnership with the organization m.a.m.a. earth. After years of working as an independent contractor supporting urban agriculture organizations, Eugene establishedGrow Where You Are, LLC, to create a structure for the collaborative efforts of local food heroes to yield tangible results. The main hub for Grow Where You Are is the Good Shepherd Agroecology Center in Southwest Atlanta, Ga., where clean food is grown in a system that preserves the ecology and supports the people. Read all of Eugene’s MOTHER EARTH NEWS postshere.
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