We are coming closer to the shortest day and longest night. Every second of our lives is the end of something and the beginning of something else. A thought, an action, an attitude, a feeling… always an opportunity to be, to do better, to stop a habit to start another, to find meaning to stop spinning… it is a continuum and it never repeats… well… at least not till the next bing bang 😊
I came home from Florida to sub-zero temperatures in MN last night. This morning looking out the back door of the house towards the resting poultry production paddock I noticed this flock of black birds.
The video does not do justice to the whole view because I missed the squirrels that were hanging sideways on a corn stem. Or the turkey flock that has nested on the grass along the rows of hazelnuts, or the Luna Moth, the various kinds of dragonflies that got established by the pond this year.
If you want it, you can have the list of birds documented earlier this year by Jonathan Lundgren and his team from Ecdasis foundation. For now, I hope this story helps you imagine the rest.
Let these birds be your eyes and ears, your interpreters to what is going on here. Let the twigs you see with the hanging male flowers tell you “I am a 😀 hazelnut coming of age, next year I will get myself pregnant and produce my first seeds”. The hazelnut grows male flowers in the fall, they mature in the spring when tiny burgundy flowers emerge at the tip of the new buds, as soon as spring comes they are ready to make more life.
Ecosystems regeneration is a fundamental indicator that we are inching our way towards regenerative systems. Biodiversity is a critical path verifier. Data collection and documentation of these verifiers is central to the process of developing baseline standards. Ecosystems regeneration (not prescribed practices) is what makes a product or output ecologically regenerative.
How people engage, how decisions on creating value and wealth and equal/fair distribution through governance and participatory guarantee systems are made, makes the system economically and socially regenerative.
Next time you hear about agricultural practices in the context of regeneration, be prepared to ask the right questions and expect answers with integrity. Let the Ecosystems speak and teach us, let the honorable translators and interpreters of the magnificent wisdom of the systems around us be our first teachers. Let all these creatures speak first so we may speak not for them but for ourselves, about our roles and responsibilities in this never ending continuum of relationships, endings and beginnings.
The reason we left patches of unharvested open pollinated ancestral corn, was so that our other relatives would find winter food and shelter. And come tell us their story.
Having the data to make decisions has been useful and effective. But the biggest reward of this work with #poultry centered #regenerative #agroforestry is the satisfaction and reward of witnessing life return to these spaces that for decades only saw corn and soybean ecological deserts imposed on them.
I am grateful and blessed to greet these relatives and to listen and learn their stories to the extent that my own indigenous intellect keeps waking up.
May their spirits fly to you and bless you and help your own clarity of thought so our words may further and better articulate the world we need to build, so that our energies may connect, so that we may build the generation that turns the tide towards regeneration so that we may be ancestors worthy of respect by the next seven generations.
