When the smallest particles of matter are broken down into sub atomic particles, what is left is vast amounts of space filled with possibilities and probabilities … particles/matter, it seems are just ‘’concepts”.
A recent BodyTalk lecturer gave us this following description to help us to visualise what is going on. Imagine a footy field with a grain of sand in the centre. Imagine another footy field next to it with another grain of sand in the centre. This is the ‘no thing’ materially – there is a lot of space.
But wait, it gets stranger – Quantum Physicists discovered that the person who is observing the tiny particles that make up atoms actually affects the behaviour of energy and matter. They have demonstrated that electrons seem to be able to exist simultaneously in an infinite array of possibilities or probabilities in their invisible field of energy.
But only when an observer focuses attention on any location of any one electron does that electron appear. In other words, a particle cannot manifest in reality – that is, ordinary space-time as we know it – until we observe it….So at the subatomic level, energy responds to mindful attention and becomes matter….in this sense, we create our own reality….
(These three slides are courtesy of Dr Joe Dispenza from a book called BREAKING THE HABIT OF BEING YOURSELF)
This ‘explains’ (air thingies) spontaneous healing, the throw-away-your-crutches-stuff that happens way outside the norms of medical understanding. But possibly doesn’t help us in th day-to-day, step-by-step way that normal humans require….Holism and Quantum Physics are concepts that open up our minds to realities it can’t grasp, but doesn’t necessarily allow us to manipulate matter to achieve real world outcomes…things are what they are, until they aren’t (which is the kind of annoying statement people who swim in the world of consciousness and awareness like to make).
From a physicist: ‘the material universe is a dynamic web of interrelated events”. …obviously we are part and parcel of this dynamic web. The self is actually a collection of actions, networked with every other action, stretching all the way to the beginning of causality.
.This is where science meets metaphysics – in fact, this is where science hops into bed with metaphysics and creates new life! But anyone who as ventured into the world of consciousness work understands that thinking about the nature of reality just doesn’t work for the everyday mind. I just wanted to come at the paradigm shift that feeds into Energy-based health systems and Regenerative Agriculture with some top science as well as spiritual teaching as backup.
Let’s leave Quantum Physics for some examples of whole of landscape thinking – holistic thinking - from the agricultural world:
Rod O’Bree is a fan of biodiversity. I met him in 2014 when he kindly let me use a few paddocks to grow a crop of spelt – I bought a tractor and spent a season as an unpaid farmhand putting in a modest crop and working with sheep.
If you are interested, the story of the Spelt Project is in a little booklet and is available to read online. I’ll provide the link on the website https://view.joomag.com/the-spelt-project-1-july-2014/0880724001404873632?page=21
This property, Yanget, which is just east of Geraldton has now been applying land restoration and rehydration techniques for 10 years. Yanget is 800has of what used to be some of the most desirable grazing/cropping land near Geraldton. It obviously made the first settler’s, the Grants, big money as it has a grand old house on it – 15-foot ceilings, a sloped roof built for snow, massive rooms including a ballroom with sweeping staircase and a tennis court.
By the time Rod got there in 2009, the servants were long gone, the grandeur was somewhat faded, its rolling hills were bare and crops were the result of intense applications of chemical weedkillers, pesticides and fertilisers.
Before Rod and his family bought Yanget, they had a few acres in Woorree (a semi-rural suburb closer to Geraldton) where they kept racehorses. He and his family hand-fed these athletes the finest quality nuts and grains money could buy and lavished the sort of attention that horses need to perform at their best.
The family then bought another 40 acres nearby so they could rest the 50 or so horses that they weren’t actively training. This scrubby bit of bush out of Geraldton had not been grazed or cultivated for years. The family made regular trips to make sure the horses were happy. Eventually they noticed that the horses were not just looking happy, they were positively glowing, and sported the dappled coats that signal a truly contented and healthy nag.
Why were the hand-fed nags lagging behind the pasture-fed mob? When Rod walked this land and looked at what was on offer for the grazing horses, he realized that the paddocks were alive with over forty different types of herbs, grasses and weeds. The horses were able to eat what they needed when they needed it. It occurred to him that no amount of careful feeding could emulate the effect of grazing done on paddocks where the soil is truly alive and the plants correspondingly nutrient rich and varied. This was Rod’s eureka moment: he became a big fan of biodiversity.
Rod carried this transformational experience with him to Yanget. I am currently working with Rod and the loose crew associated with Yanget to position this land as a template for rehydration and restoration of the whole of the Chapman River catchment area. As Rod already runs a food distribution business out of Geraldton, he is keen to tell the story of food coming out of the Chapman Valley area and link it to a bigger story of local farmers and their co-ordinated efforts to rehydrate and regenerate the land while increasing production and farm profits.
When Rod first arrived at Yanget in Feb 2009 they got a good rain event of over 20mms… and watched it run off the property carrying sediment and chemicals down to the sea in Champion Bay 25 kilometres to the west. Twenty four hours later there was not a puddle or sign of water to be seen.
Ten years later the water stays in the creek for 100 days and there is the expectation that there will now be enough water held underground as well as is the pools to maintain permanent water supplies whatever the season brings.
The small amount of water that now leaves Yanget land is clean, a gift to our fishing industry.
Rod worked with hydrologist Peter Andrews applying his principles of rehydration using techniques to slow the movement of water across the land. They did this by blocking at strategic points in the gouged-out creeks and creating banks along the contours of the land to keep the water high in the landscape.
Understanding where to place these interventions is key – but, with trial and error, Rod got a handle on the interplay of water and earth and started seeing great results from inexpensive methods.
Peter Andrews is a controversial figure, but by any measurement an original thinker and genius hydrologist whose knowledge of how the Australian landscape functions is second to none. He and Rod met and connected through a love of horses and Rod credits Peter with giving him the tools to read the land and the water flow to create a whole of landscape approach to regeneration.
Yanget is named for a type of wetland bulrush – the roots of this water loving plant were a major food source for the Aboriginal people, harvested in autumn just after the first rains. It was admired as a tasty carbohydrate in diaries of the first white explorers. There are now healthy stands of this food ready for the coals if need be. NOTE Yanget (suspected to be Typhus dominengus or typhus orientalis)
The old paradigm when trying to restore the land would be to replant - to bring in the tubestock and a load of spades and busloads of school kids to do the work. Great idea as a value-add, but the main event should be to start fixing the water system and allowing nature to do what it does best: clothe herself in green.
Once the water starts staying in the land, sediment, instead of storming off the property with rain events, starts to build where it is dropped as the water slows and starts to pool. As high ground develops, seeds, especially the natives, start sprouting in numbers.
This is exactly what happened on Yanget when the water system started functioning… the native seeds started growing in exponential numbers. The first to appear were the pioneers, the woody shrubs which at Yanget meant prickly acacias (Acacia tetragonaphila) or the Hakea pressei (you know the one with big hard seeds and needle like spines that would take your eye out.) and the weeds of course. The unloved Star thistles used to be a monoculture on some paddocks at Yanget, and kicked in early-on in the plant sequencing as the soil started to build.
Annie Rasor-Rowland – expert weed eater – names plants like thistles as the rock stars of any landscape, in that they have evolved under tricky conditions to live hard, have heaps of sex, seed up and die in quick time. These plants evolved in conditions that made them disturbance specialists, so they have a particular fondness for humans –the biggest and most effective of all the disturbance specialists..
As the star thistles bloomed the powers-that-be represented by the Ag department and surrounding farmers were calling for Rod’s head. ‘Good’ farmers would be bringing in the herbicides to knock these weeds out – allowing the whole cycle of bare soil, erosion and loss to repeat with the next rain event.
Rod held his nerve. Peter Andrews had convinced Rod that there is a natural succession of plants that needs to cycle through as the land heals– weeds aren’t weeds in this scenario, they are simply plants with a job to do. From the pioneers, we go to the broad-leafed plants and by the time they are taking hold the soil is becoming fertile enough to allow the sweet winter annual grasses to thrive. They steal the sugars out from under the noses of the hardliners and usher in the native perennials.
Once the glory of this land, native perennials were the first to be eaten out under the land management efforts of colonisers - there is a bit of a push in Agriculture to reinstate perennials, mostly South African varieties. But nature, if given the green light, can coax long forgotten seeds out of the beleaguered corners where they sit in secret, biding their time, waiting for the colonisers to finally get out from under their European filter and join the dots on what could be. Perennials used to carpet the Rangelands and much of the wheatbelt in WA - the rich purple, gold and brown colours provided food for biological communities and held the soil fertility and moisture together through the dry summer months. (If you want to read more on this the original Wildfood from the Rangelands podcasts had a few stories based around the perennials and the role they played in the Rangelands, accessible at:https://hmopodnetwork.com.au/show/wildfood-from-the-rangelands/)
There are weeds on Rod’s land now, but they are part of a much bigger mix of plants - the soil conditions are now ripe to support anything he wants to grow and Mother nature, the god in this context, continues to do what she does best – clothe herself with green, instituting biodiversity and fertility.
MAGIC happens when you start working with whole systems
