“If the path be beautiful, let us not ask where it leads.” -Anatole France
We have written in our previous posts about how important it is to enjoy the process of creating a more beautiful, regenerative life for yourself and your loved ones. It is a lifelong pursuit and it will have seasons of strife and difficulty along the way. Life is short and precious and finding beauty, reverence, and gratitude can build the mental and emotional fortitude to steady your ship during the storms that will inevitably visit us all. The highest leverage point you have to cultivate these practices is in your personal “zone 0” – in your head and in your heart. This article will share some tips and guideposts that might help you create a more beautiful life from the inside out.
The Tao of Gardening
When I took my Permaculture Design Course, one of our guest speakers was a writer named Larry Korn. He was the translator for Manasoba Fukuoka’s One Straw Revolution, which is a foundational (and free) book I would recommend to anyone interested in permaculture and finding spiritual development in growing food. Mr. Korn lived in a primitive hut working on Fukuoka’s farm for several years before writing the translation. He has lived in the experience of a self-sufficient, organic, “no work” farm. His advice? Don’t do a design. That’s right, he had the audacity to tell a group of us who were paying to learn how to do permaculture design, not to design! You could see some of the brains explode in the room at this suggestion.
While he may have said it partly for dramatic effect, I think the main gist of what he was getting at is that we need to have our head and our heart clear, and we need to be fully immersed in observing and interacting with our little piece of this big garden before we are able make any type of design that would be useful. It is also a traditional tool of Zen and Taoism to use paradoxes or illogical aphorisms like this as a tool to open the mind and allow creative thought and moments of enlightenment to occur. While Fukuoka didn’t ascribe to any particular religion, he was undoubtedly influenced by both of those philosophical traditions. After all, his most well-known quotation is “The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.”
This context can help us begin to understand what he means when he says “Do nothing” gardening or “no work” farming can match or beat the yields of chemical industrial farming. In Taoism, a central concept is that of Wu Wei, or effortless action. Try not to try. Obviously, this is an impossible paradox, yet we know when we see it. We can just tell if someone is forcing it or if they are in a flow state.
When a dancer or an athlete or an artist is moving like the waves on the ocean and it looks effortless, that is Wu Wei. This state is reached by habits of discipline that allow a comfort zone, a confidence, a rhythm that allows for the least possible effort to be used when taking action. It’s not that there is no effort or no work, it’s that it is the least possible effort for the most optimized, in the flow outcome. In the realm of permaculture, that means habits and practices that immerse us in nature, enable pattern understanding, ground us in humility and connection, and ultimately enables a design science that, as Wendell Berry puts it, “begins and ends with reverence.”
Polyculture Planting
The more materially minded among you might now be meandering away, wondering how all of this woo woo might practically affect your real life. While I do believe that beginning your inner work can be the most beneficial way to begin, let’s take this out to the garden. One strategy you can use there is to base your designs in diverse polycultures. Polyculture just means our gardens and orchards are diverse. It is a core principle of permaculture design that lends itself well to creating a beautiful landscape.
Follow the patterns we find in nature, with dynamic mixes of plants intermingling, cooperating, competing, and evolving over time. Polyculture plantings also include many practical benefits:
- way less work to maintain over time
- build more fertility and soil
- sequester more water and C02
- allow more pest and disease resistance
- create more nutritious food
- hedge our bets against crop failures,
- can be beautiful places to live and work
- creates habitat for pollinators and wildlife
Diverse forest gardens can nourish both our body and our soul. Loads of recent research continues to verify our dependence on a diverse, healthy habitat and wildlife. For example, this cross-sectional study out of Germany concluded that the proximity of green space and the diversity of plant and bird species people were exposed to was associated with improved mental health.
Yet another study from Europe concluded that: “A high biodiversity in our vicinity is as important for life satisfaction as our income, scientists found. All across Europe, the individual enjoyment of life correlates with the number of surrounding bird species. An additional 10% of bird species therefore increases the Europeans’ life satisfaction as much as a comparable increase in income. Nature conservation thus constitutes an investment in human well-being.”
That’s right, thousands of people across Europe were just as happy to hear diverse birdsong as they were to get more cold, hard cash! This aligns with previous research on happiness and fulfillment that suggests that once people reach a certain minimum threshold of having enough money, there are diminishing returns and other areas of life become more meaningful. Obviously, it’s more difficult to enjoy the birdsong if you’re wondering where your next meal will come from or where you can find shelter. However, once our basic needs are secure with a little extra in reserve, humans tend to want more ethereal pleasures.
Grow Beautiful Polycultures
So, we know that polyculture gardens are better gardens and ecosystems than standard monocultures, and we know they are better for our mental, physical, and microbial health. But how can we make them look nice too? We don’t want our neighbors calling the HOA or the township in on us for neglecting the yard. We don’t want to feel overwhelmed by a garden that looks like a chaotic, weedy mess. A few simple tricks can make a world of difference with this:
- Permanent beds with designated paths and edges
- Fortress plants to make solid and useful boundaries
- Use mostly perennials so your planting work grows easier with time
- Mimic forest layers – groundcover, herb layer, bushes, vines, trees
- Include several types of flowering plants in each bed
- Add mulch and/or make it self-mulching using sacrificial plants
- Plant “edimentals“, aka edible ornamentals
- Adapt your expectations of what is beautiful – it really is in the eye of the beholder
Each of these strategies has entire books written about them and they are lifelong learning experiences. Taken together they can create a synergistic effect that allows you to more easily grow food, beauty, and habitat all in the same landscape. Be patient and flexible in order to go with the flows of nature and understand that the gardens will change and fill in over time. If you have a few bare patches at first, it’s just another opportunity to plant something else next season.
Returning to Reverence
We began in reverence, let us end in reverence. The pattern in this radish is the same pattern we see unfolding in galaxies, from stars, in cells, and all the way down to the limits of our perception. Applying this pattern of Natural Law to our zone 0 might represent the idea that we are connected to everything else, we are never alone, we have dynamic forces radiating outward from the center of our being, and yet we can have colorful and beautiful boundaries that can at times give us shelter and definition.
Putting this into practice by creating forest gardens can allow you to live out your values and purpose of caring for the earth and all of life. It can help keep you from giving in to doom and gloom nihilism about all the damage humans have done. It gives you the opportunity to meditate and exercise in nature and to connect with others. It allows you to make a beautiful environment, to savor delicious food, and it gives you something to look forward to as it grows. Finally, it can be a gateway for a spiritual practice that can help give your life meaning and purpose. These things are some the most important and most beautiful things we have in this life. We hope some of these ideas can help you start to create a more beautiful life today and to feed both your body and your soul.
I’ll leave you with a short video by the inimitable Alan Watts on the purpose of life. Spoiler – “It’s a musical thing and you were supposed to sing and dance all along”. Some of his other works have great descriptions of Zen and Taoism if you’re interested in learning more about those topics. The art in the video is done by “After Skool”, and they also have lots of other interesting videos that are worth exploring.
