Solution-Oriented Living

On our recent road trip up the 5 from LA to Sacra­mento, I found myself in a state of shock and dis­may for a good por­tion of the trip. Yes, I’ve heard rum­blings over the lack of water in Cal­i­for­nia and how pro­duce prices are set to sky-rocket in the next year or so, but as some­one who actively avoids main­stream media and spent most of the last year in Hawaii grow­ing most of my own veg­gies– out of sight out of mind. So being con­fronted with hun­dreds of miles of what used to be farm­land and is now noth­ing but a dust bowl was a shock.

At first my girls and I thought it was caused by fire, but upon look­ing closer these trees were sim­ply dead due to lack of water.  Sights like this were com­mon for hours at a time as hun­dreds of acres are now rem­nants of farm­land and tons of signs pro­claim­ing whose fault this is.  It was eerie to say the least and my ini­tial thoughts were that of blam­ing Con­gress and how I’m sure this is all part of their grand plan to have Mon­santo con­trol every last bit of our food source because peo­ple will be hun­gry and food will be so expen­sive.  I mean, Cal­i­for­nia sup­plies most of the coun­try with their pro­duce.  This is a BIG deal.  It is by no means a local­ized problem.

So, the girls (ages 8 & 10) started ask­ing ques­tions and at first I was hard pressed to answer any of them.  I was not find­ing any words that were not fueled by anger, vic­tim­hood or fatal­ism– none of which I encour­age them to adopt so I was at a loss.  So, I started with, “Well, it’s kind of com­pli­cated…  There’s lots of rea­sons these trees are dead.  Remem­ber, we always want to look for solu­tions when we see a prob­lem and not stay on the prob­lem too long.”

“So, what’s the solu­tion?”  And with that ques­tion, the fun began.  It imme­di­ately shifted the heav­i­ness of the sit­u­a­tion and we spent quite a long time on all the pos­si­ble solu­tions for this sit­u­a­tion.  We did spend a bit of time on the mul­ti­tudes of how we got to this point.  Well, we can see all the trees were planted in straight lines, so we know for sure that means men planted them.  When­ever we see straight lines in nature it means that Man was try­ing to con­trol or dom­i­nate nature rather than work­ing with her, as straight lines do not appear in nature.  This is one of the rea­sons that in a Wal­dorf school straight lines are rarely found.  Steiner even devel­oped a form of Anthro­po­soph­i­cal archi­tec­ture that incor­po­rates curved lines into its buildings. 

So we can see that a very mas­cu­line model of farm­ing was applied here.  So, if we turn to a per­ma­cul­ture model for farm­ing we wouldn’t see the same depen­dency for water that mono-cropping requires.  The fact that all these crops were put into place in an area that requires deliv­er­ing water in a con­crete canal was prob­a­bly a pretty good sign that it was not sus­tain­able.  So we spoke about sus­tain­able farm­ing meth­ods that require much less water and the work of those like Bill Molle­son and Geoff Law­ton
We spoke of how many shifts are tak­ing place right now that are of a cor­rec­tive man­ner because the whole earth is com­ing to the stark real­iza­tion that an overly mas­cu­line approach to liv­ing is not very con­ducive to a high qual­ity life.  So, now that this fem­i­nine energy shift is tak­ing place we’re com­ing more into a place of bal­ance.  But it can be slightly uncom­fort­able while the mas­cu­line forms die off.  And how in the future a bal­anced yin/yang energy will once again pre­vail.  It’s an inter­est­ing time to be liv­ing in as these changes are occur­ring all around us right now.

I know for myself the moment I move from focus­ing on the prob­lem to focus­ing on the solu­tion is the moment I move back into the vor­tex– or that good feel­ing place.  There was a lit­tle hill­side that was con­tin­u­ously falling onto the road in Kauai and I’d been study­ing dif­fer­ent nat­ural ero­sion con­trol meth­ods and knew that Vetiver grass was a sim­ple, nat­ural, easy, cost-effective solu­tion for this par­tic­u­lar hill — so each time we would drive past it I would roll down my win­dow and shout to the hill­side, “Vetiver Grass!”   After a few times the girls asked, “Why do always shout Vetiver to that moun­tain?”  and I said, “Because it’s the solu­tion to the prob­lem that is there.  And some­day, some­one will go by that hill­side and be look­ing for the solu­tion and they will be a match to the answer that is already there.”  So after that they would join me in shout­ing, “Vetiver!”

Now, this was very easy for me to do with this lovely benign hill­side in Kauai!  And there are other areas in my life– ok, peo­ple in my life where I know I’m still focus­ing far more on what bugs me about them than the solu­tion to my prob­lem with them.  What if every time I thought of _____ I would shout, “Easy-going, lover of life!”  inside my own head?  I’m sure it would shift my per­cep­tion of that per­son and make a dif­fer­ence.   What about you?  What are some areas in your life where you could be focus­ing more on the solu­tion than the prob­lem at hand?

Tags: bill mollison, permaculture, rudolf steiner, vetiver grass

Category: Law of Attraction, Parenting