From Extraction Beyond Sustainability To Regeneration
Originally published May 31, 2020
On this last day of May 2020, the seventh day since we passed 100,000 coronavirus deaths in the US, and the sixth day of increasing protests and rioting in response to the callous murder of George Floyd by a white police officer, I am sitting at home with my eyes almost swollen shut from an allergic reaction to a bee sting. There are no coincidences. Trying to make friends with my new quarantine buddies, one of them didn’t appreciate my intrusion into their new home two nights ago and did a direct bee line straight for the spot on my eye where I have been nursing a nasty stye infection for about two months that was just finally on its way out. The universe can’t get any more direct in whacking me over the head with a message here, I guess. I am pretty thick-headed apparently… Something about seeing, or not seeing, and pain, physical, emotional, spiritual, and individual, social, cosmic, and about breathing and suffocation. Lung metal and, right now, Heart fire, all resting on Kidney water. Maybe I will figure it out eventually.
But I can’t just sit here and witness this country, which I chose to make my home three decades ago, fall apart around me, going up in flames of rage, without doing something. As a writer (and too sick to go anywhere in a car, let alone a protest with potential tear gas right now), I sit down with the computer since that is what I can do. So many of us, I think, are asking ourselves what it is that we can do right now, individually and on a local and national level. What is the best way to respond to the epidemic and all the suffering associated with that, and now to George Floyd’s murder as the culmination of the racism and hatred that has been building month after month and year after year, turbocharged by the orange clown and his minions? What can we do to reverse the direction of the pendulum and circle back to the “more beautiful world our hearts know is possible” in Charles Eisenstein’s words?
So often in the past three years I have felt that we have reached a breaking point, only to have things go back to “normal” after a few hours or days of outrage, while those of us with broken hearts again and again have just picked up the shards and tried to stitch our hearts back together so we can go on doing the healing, nurturing work we came to this lifetime to do. So much resilience and beauty and kindness I have seen these past few difficult years, and especially since the start of the current epidemic. But somehow the current moment feels different, more painful and scary, and yet also therefore more potent. Are we, finally, reaching a point of no return?
While my actual eyes have been hurting and barely functioning at times, trying to process an inflammation, literally, from all the flames of hatred and ignorance they witness in the eye-dominated reality, in another reality I am seeing the beginnings of an emergent new order, perspective, way of being, in our individual, social, national and global bodies. This reminds me of the Chinese phrase “mínglǐ” 明理, which is the quality that is associated with the heart and fire among the five organs and elements in Wang Fengyi’s teachings. It is also the term that is used to bring in the quality of heart-fire in the five-element chant he taught.
Let us unpack this phrase that is ultimately impossible to translate: Míng means “brightness,” as literally the light shining forth from the sun and the moon. It can mean “to illuminate,” “to shed light on something,” “to make bright” or “to shine forth” or “to be illuminated by,” also in the metaphorical sense of “to comprehend.” Lǐ means principle, inherent structure, the pattern of coherence in the realm of the Ten Thousand Things, which determines how things take shape in the ten thousand things. Originally, the character refers to the natural structure of jade that is revealed, made visible by a master carver in the perfectly crafted piece of jade. This unifying formless principle underlying the limitless diversity in the realm of form is associated with the heart as the organ that can perceive it, both through intellectual study and through intuitive self-reflection. To me, this is the gift of the present moment, the phoenix rising from the ashes.
It strikes me that the real and metaphorical flames of the current moment and the urgent need for this quality of mínglǐ, are supported by the calendrical forces of metal and water, which are prevalent in this year: Resonating in the human body with the lungs, and hence with breathing, one aspect of absorbing Qì from the outside world into the human body, metal is linked to the virtue yì 義 , righteousness, the sense of right and wrong, the “shining sword of justice,” or, in Wang Fengyi’s chants, the “radiance of sound and light” 響亮 xiǎngliàng. Water, which resonates in the human body with the kidneys and with reproduction and essence, is linked to the virtue zhì 智, wisdom, understanding, or in Wang Fengyi’s thinking the ability of water to always find the lowest place by adapting flexibly, with the gentle harmonious softness of róuhé 柔和 in the Five-Element chants.
With the help of these three elements, fire, metal, and water, here is what appears in my mind right now: This is a pivotal time, a giant hinge moment that calls on us all to replace the currently still dominant model of EXTRACTION not just with the goal of SUSTAINABILITY, as has been advocated up to now by many progressive people, but with the ideal of RESTORATION, or even REGENERATION. And by “restoration” I don’t mean a return to the “normal” that may have worked for some people in the age before the coronavirus, but a return to the source, to ancient ways of being and knowing, in harmony with our plant and animal relations. We can see the need for this change in perspective in the three main areas of Chinese thought that I like to fall back on: Politics/economics, agriculture, and medicine.
Full disclosure: This post was inspired by my daughter who is a flaming passionate activist for social justice and prison abolition and has been talking to me about restorative justice, as a way to respond to the breaking of laws not by seeking punishment and revenge but by focusing on repairing the harm done and collaboratively transforming people and relationships in the process. In the age of climate change, depleted soils, factory farms, “junk food,” antibiotic resistance, ever increasing economic inequality, and now the coronavirus and exploding social tensions, we all know that the old model of extractive economics and politics, extractive agriculture, and extractive medicine (in the sense of a medicine that facilitates the extraction of the maximum of productivity from our exhausted bodies) are no longer working. So let us not ask for a return to the pre-Corona normal, because we know that it wasn’t working! Like most of you probably, I used to think that I embraced “sustainability” as a model of being in the world and in particular of food production. But truly, the soils are too depleted, the earth too abused, our bodies too toxic and overtaxed, our friends and communities, at least in the US, too impoverished, to embrace sustainability as our goal. What we had wasn’t working. Sustaining a body, or farm, or country that is as poisoned and exhausted as the contemporary US just is not cutting it right now. It is time to reach beyond the bandaids of technological fixes, from solar energy and organic fertilizers to supplements to that puny $1200 stimulus check that many of the most desperate among us didn’t even get!
In my experience as a farmer, it came so natural to me to call my farm “beyond organic,” I didn’t think twice about it, but I was too busy farming to really contemplate what my intentions and vision were. Now with the gift of hindsight and the perspective of having lived around other farmers in Oregon and Washington, the farms who I see thrive do so much more than to farm sustainably. They are actively building, restoring, creating ever-growing thriving habitats for a huge diversity of plants and animals to cohabit in harmony, with wild spaces, forests, fields, wetlands, etc, and with the goal of nourishing and nurturing their community not just materially but on a much deeper level. When I acquired my orchard near Taos, New Mexico, the land was exhausted and abused, the trees were old and diseased after decades of neglect, the house was a shell full of syringes and trash, and the neighbors saw my land as a place to dump discarded fridges and wrecked cars. With years of hard, hard work, I created an oasis of peace and beauty and abundance there, a place literally where milk and honey flowed.
How can we translate that sort of work, which I see as the vision of being in the world spelled out in the ancient Chinese classics, to medical practice? What does it mean to think of our work as practitioners of Chinese medicine as “regenerative”? How might that change our response to the diagnosis and treatment of a patient with coronavirus at a stage that requires medical intervention? In other words, what does “regenerative medicine” look like?
Can you hear the hope, the promise, the potential in that? I will leave you with two stories, shared with me by two experienced Chinese practitioners and dear friends in the last couple of weeks. Both of them have been unable to practice for the last couple of months, and one has actually been forced to close their clinic as a result of the loss of income. Both have found a new sense of quiet and much-needed recuperation for themselves in that externally imposed hiatus, which they sorely needed, if I may say so from the outside. Both recently saw a single patient in a safe outdoor setting and came away with such a sense of pleasure and joy and ease, and deep personal connection with that single patient. Both mentioned to me that that encounter has changed how they think about their medical practice in a profound way that they, or I, are still unable to put into words. Neither of them want or will go back to the old normal, regardless of how this pandemic evolves. Regenerative politics, regenerative farming, regenerative healing. That vision is what I see with my third eye tonight.
