Pearson Gardens

Community gardens, like community houses, are places for learning and growth. Like minded people coming together out of love and a shared intention creates a magical space where many things can happen. Friendships made and forged, possibilities expanded from the dream of the single sleeper to the wide-eyed dreams of the gathered crowd. 

Signs are common in community spaces that have evolved with love and care. We want our systems to work, and so we create channels of communication to convey their highest evolved functioning. Art always has a place in their creation, for art is the song of the heart in love. 

Ecology, dreams, and the sun and moon all have their place here.

The garden is a microcosm of the cosmos.

But what is it stake here is not only the creation of a community in a small city on earth, but the skilling of human life at its core essence - the creation of food, and its interplay with the greater-than-human world from which we are born, and on which we all constantly feed. 

What are you giving back to the spirit of Earth?

As for myself, I remember my connections as best I can. I give food to the soil, and piss to the trees. I give my thoughts to the whole planet, and my people – the human beings – and to this region on which I live. I talk to the things of this earth, the same way I talk to God. When I invoke Jesus, where is he? When I invoke his consciousness, is he on some dimension that I can see touch taste?

When I speak with that inner voice, I believe His spirit can live in all things. 

Do not all babies touch our heart the way that Christ can?

Call it what you will, I love this Life, and am true to, and truest in, the Divinity.

The White Pine

A part of my garden is Inward. Nature connects me. 

Sacred Places

There is a woods near my house.

People come to commune-

A sacred place, for exercise, for light, for breathing the natural beings. 

Do you know this place? Respite and reminder. Promise of a journey within, without, and in terms of all beings.

Garden Notes!

Found my garden notes for this year -yes!!!

First gardening

I'm starting a garden. It is the entire earth.

How will our civilization know the future?  As a populated place, with resources dwindled to naught?  

As a loving community of life. As a sacred, molten stone, covered in a microbial skin that breeds and gives birth to its own children. 

I make a sacred offering. Who do you pray to? When there is deep, deep suffering, to what do you most commonly turn? And when there is Joy – to what or whom do you most typically give thanks?  

Connell shows up. Lover of mantids! Why do you like bugs?, I ask him. I take video.  

– How do I embed video from my iPhone!? –

Working on career SOULPATH - Christmas Time with Family, 2013

Working on career. Stable at job now – with much goodness within it. Doesn’t make the money for a longterm relationship with a child – in my opinion – with wanting a homestead, solar house, refurbs, a car that works and a mother that can stay home with the child.

Dad puts the heat on me like in the Lodge when the steam hot rock beings breathed their life-giving death into me...

The first thing I think of is teaching ecology with the public schools. The second thing I think of is a counseling track. Then I remember Michael Young and – wanting to make a career that gets me bing payed by what I already do – by bine what I already am. The world of creative art – songs – all this on the side right now, because it is something I already do but am miles behind in making happen.

The Soul Path in Ecology and Teaching with Young Adults and just-turned-men is a path I also think of – workshops and working with Permaculture Institute and the like to guide soul path and direction with people.

That means getting on board with Kaveen and other Teachers-Counselors and making something happen.

It means putting together some poems for the Asheville Poetry Review as well.

And the first things mean getting into courses with RALC – and the Counselling Certification with the State of North Carolina.

But I remember the MESS of energy that I get into with really superficially extroverted things. And I want to avoid that if I can.

And reading Nature and the Soul by Bill Plotkin.

And of course there's learning some carpentry skills with Jen or anyone I can work with. 

Worked on my SoulPath today. I used the Mankind Project "Mission Exercise: Wheel of Life" pie chart to "assess" where I was, developmentally, in different areas of my life. 

Seeing that I felt like I was at a "zero" in the realm of Community Service and Citizenship left me longing to fill up and develop that path. And so I reflected what I felt like would be various layers of development, from my "zero" (or maybe "1") all the way out as far as I could, to "Doing It! and reflecting back — which is what I am doing here — and ultimately publishing some summaries of my quest/path to journals such as Oracle 20/20 or PanGaia or other publications. 

Having this "important but not urgent" chart here is good for my focusing — I have taken a step in their direction today for each Layer I drew-uncovered on my Chart. 

I am exploring a regional journal of spiritual ecology — and my NEXT STEP seems to be having a discussion with Appalachian Voices about the possibility, since they occupy the market sector and range but not the spirit of what I am talking about. (They are activist and informative, but not so artistic or expressive as I am imagining). 

I wrote Chuck Marsh about my desire to give workshops with ecology and permaculture blending with Advising, SoulPath, Mission, and Purpose questions in life — the "reflection" and mentorship, the "samtalspartner" segment that David Issacs named for me in our own discussion; and the same approach that a lot of learning institutes are offering now (due to a real lack of mentorship, guidance, and true Soul Care in our culture of formal education) — Gaia U, Mycelium (perhaps!?); Joy Harmon's approach; probably some of the alternative schools around this asheville region. 

And somehow, learning and doing interviews would be so useful: something that has come to me so many times. Really learning how to do research through multiple interviews. SKILL: Researching questions and uncovering shared collective knowledge through qualitative research processes:  

• The myriad of collective living situations - micro-communitarian communal homesteading in asheville and surrounds

• Eco-Regional Archetypal Stories

• Collective / Psyche Archetypes "where this regional eco-cultural story wants to go" 

Just emailed David Issacs about the above!

Checking out,

Michael