Dancing to Live, Treeage, and the Rush to Plant Ahead of a Winter Rain TPS-0042

Working on a permaculture landscape and rescuing and sorting out the different states of death and vitality in trees that have been planted, that need lots of TLC to make it through and to into production.

It is a beautiful raining day. Last night I had the luxuriant experience of dancing, warm and dry, of course, to keep my immune system strong.

I had some nice new rain gear and was seizing the night before it was pouring.

Utilizing an array of different varieties of seeds, mostly annual herbs and veggies, to basically be an understory guild around these fruit and nut tree plantings out here.

It's been a couple of months of rehab on this project. There are exquisite design implementations here. When you dance and have a romance with nature, then things, things can get ahead of you pretty fast so it takes people power pretty consistently to, once in a system is established, to basically just do the maintenance, to keep things alive, to favor what you want, to grow happily and healthy and strong, and get more or less light, shade, heat, cold, moisture, nutrient...

There are aspects that can be set it and forget it, and then there's stuff that you just need to maintain.

Even if stuff gets ahead of you, where I'm coming in, is sort of the reinforcements to come in and do a bit of rehab on this beautiful property and this beautiful textbook permaculture design system.

And so my triage, literally, no pun intended, triage like T-R-E-E triage. When I set foot on this property and said okay I bowed to the ground and my first evening dancing ceremony celebrating the union the marriage of myself and this beautiful landscape and I put my face plant to the earth and made my vows to the spirits of the land and ancestors saying I will do my best to take exquisite care of you if you take care of me and hopefully allow me to just never set foot off this property again.

I'm so thrilled to be here. I'm so untrilled to be having to enter the mix of The Matrix for almost any reason.

When I barely was becoming aware of that thing In China, they're probably gonna lock it down pretty hard. At that time, maybe one questionable outside of China kind of quarantine. It was obviously on my radar as a prepper, and had been since the early stages, but it's exponentially increasing.

I'm piping in a lot of the up to the minute facts and whatnot. But I gotta say, it's a prepper fantasy come to life during the first days that I was here.

It was quiet, too quiet, kind of a thing.

I'm out here thinking well, this is picking up where I left off with the prepper fantasy of what was in the colony social experiment, reality TV show series back in something like 2011.

That was where they pretty much run around a drill as a reality TV show of what is exactly happening right now.

But I think both seasons of that show, depict how people might navigate the social politics of extreme austerity in a pandemic.

They nailed it a lot of the social dynamics, even if they may have been hyped up.

So the Colony series, check it out. But going back to setting foot on this land, walking around thinking, wow, this feels like that situation where you're gonna have to take inventory of what is available to Macgyver and A-Team together your shelter, your food, your medicine, your water. And with a sense of urgency that is appropriate, and that's accelerating.

It's a miracle that all the stars are aligning to put me where I'm at now, which doesn't guarantee that I'm not infected right now, that I haven't infected others and am responsible for killing other people without knowing it.

That goes for everybody at this stage, until the test kits are all available, and the drive through testing.

But the tragic irony and paradox is that you could be doing everything right, and part of best practices of doing everything right it can still lead to you being infected.

I feel blessed to at least have for myself, the optimism of feeling like I have a survival retreat.

If I have to go out and do any missions into The Matrix, I have a place to go back to and I've done self quarantine already, and I have the means to extend that for quite a long period of time financially...with the preps that I have stored and that I continue to cycle through...

Getting onto this land and saying to myself, okay, you better maximize the security, the ecological security, resilience and productivity of this land now, so that you're not scrambling later in an even more austere time.

So filling up every possible container with potable water, strategizing on rainwater catchment and looking at this overgrown system and having to train the eye and the mind and the deeper subtle aspects of the intuition to feel into where on this design are the places that need the most love and attention and that are gonna get the most yield.

It could be immediate yield, long term yield, but that's the triage, and that's what the training is from first aid and CERT community emergency response team training.

Anyone who understands triage in a mass casualty event, this site is a mass casualty event for trees that have been, chewed bare at the base by adorable critters that I will not, by any means ever poison or go to war with.

But I will have to, in collaboration with other designers, the senior designers of this site, develop strategies to understand what's gonna make it on its own, what needs to be buffered with things like gopher cages and whatnot.

But if you can just imagine yourself, I don't wanna overdo the war metaphors, but you're looking at this site and you're saying, if you're gonna survive here, you have got to determine systematically what gets primary care immediately, so you're kind of tagging.

Literally going through and saying, okay, this tree's dead. We need to pull it and chop and drop mulch in place, so that it doesn't confuse us as we're going to find the trees that will make it, then sorting the efforts into what needs the most care now.

What is doing okay and can wait a bit longer, and also what is barely hanging, and maybe is a goner, a lost cause beyond the point of no return.

We'll do a little bit to keep it alive, but we can't over extend resources that should probably go to even the more vigorous ones that if they may look fine today, they may need to be maintained at a higher level to keep that level of vigor.

So that has been the name of the game out here is been stacking sats, meaning hoddling, crypto, meaning dollar cost averaging, holding, smart trading, smart investing, frugality, austerity, and picking and choosing the missions, risking exposure and trying to do the social distancing and do the sanitation and most importantly, above all those, it comes down to the strength of the immune system.

I don't wanna hex myself and say, hanta virus, but there are a lot of different rodents, and there's a lot of trash heaps and places that need a lot of TLC.

Being cautious about dust, I'm stirring up a lot of dried rodent feces and urine and stuff like that.

I'm wearing dust masks appropriately for that and praying and really meditating on the throat and the lungs and, and I'm not gonna go into my herbal remedy approach, so that's the zone that I have been in, meditating on my health, being careful, because if you don't want to end up in the hospital, you better not trip and step on a nail, or do anything stupid or careless, or move too fast, or move mindlessly so that you end up in a frivolous trip to the hospital. Then you're stuck there, fed dead, poisonous, toxic food, which lowers your immune system.

You're in an entrapment of air flow, and you will be exposed to corona viruses and every other pathogen on Earth that is cohabitating there.

And you don't want to take up that space for someone else who needs it.

This is my public service announcement, slow the ef down.

I'm saying this to myself, mindfully, slow down. Don't get snagged on rusty chicken wire.

Don't get stomping on rusty nails. Don't be in a rush.

Move very slowly, very deliberately. I've already had a few nicks here and there. I have some strategies for maintaining the surface of my skin.

I've phased through immune responses to various stimuli, various symptoms, and I feel like a million dollars right now, and I'm gonna tell you now why that is.

It's not medical advice, not a prescription for anything, but just timely, spiritual practice, revelations, and maybe things happening for a reason, maybe things being synchronistic, not to be too cryptic, but I'm about to get to the exciting news.

It has been a dream come true to get back here from a little mini mission to Babylon, and get back here before the rains to do this strategy of dense polyculture, seed mix, planting into these large doughnuts of semi composted wood chip mulch around about 20 or 30 beautiful trees that are producing fruits that need to be cared for.

They need to be protected. There needs to be a design consideration for anchoring the human activity to regular maintenance of these young, developing trees, so that they don't get neglected and forgotten about, overgrown, dried out, and then they die.

So when we did the triage we pulled out a lot of dead figs, we snapped them apart.

There's a method of doing that the way that they do the profusion test.

There's the ways checking for consciousness, for profusion of blood in the fingernails.

There's a methodology of steps that you do to determine some vital signs without equipment.

These are simple techniques of, let's say you're in a battlefield or a disaster situation and there's mass casualties and you're doing the triage and you need to have a system of tagging and sorting the people who are ambulant who can get up and move and can be put into an area of ambulant folks.

The people who are alive but cannot move, the people who are, having critical blood loss, or other potential invisible things that you can't tell from just bleeding, or if they can't speak but they're conscious.

There's a whole process. Having that training, and then looking on a landscape and doing that with trees, you're going around and you're saying, okay, which ones are dead? Which ones are alive? How do you determine if they're alive or dead?

You can snap off the tops of branches, you can basically start slowly applying pressure to some of the tips that look super dry, and without carelessly ripping off more branch material than is absolutely necessary, the smallest amount, you just kind of take a little dry tip and be like, does it flex? does it bend? does it snap right off?

How far down when you just kind of feel into okay, there's more resistance there. Then you can do a tiny little scratch test and be very careful and mindful. Just with a finger nail scratch a tiny bit to see if there's moist green life going on, or if it's totally dry.

So there's this interesting practice of if there is any life left in this it may be all the way down in the roots, and we may barely know after snapping off a whole bunch of totally dead branches, and then find out there's life in the roots.

Don't yank it out. Don't kick it over or stomp on it, just break all the limbs off, because it'll have a chance.

Is there growth below the graft? Is this gonna be actually producing what you want or not?

We go through that process, determine which ones are salvageable, which ones are thriving.

There was probably about 20 cubic yards worth of wood chip mulch that was just kind of remnants of a bigger load from an earlier time. It had composted somewhat nicely, so it was a good mix.

Full disclosure, I went to a psytrance party, valentine's Day celebration party.

I didn't know at that time it would be risking life, and it would be basically risking death.

I felt like a million bucks going into that party that night knowing that I was gonna be exposed to everybody else's winter funk, with all the love going on. I wasn't drinking sweetened cocktails, but everybody else was, and tons of smokers.

It was just a whole beautiful, diverse sampling of colorful people from all over the world there to celebrate love and life.

Though like clockwork, viruses spread. So as far as I can imagine, every funk in existence at that time, there was no indication of a corona virus case, even known in LA, as far as I know.

Certainly no one was in a state of panic or or even alarm.

I gotta see my people. If I'm gonna go bug out and be mostly on this land project, I thought to myself you know what, I could pass on this party but no I think I need it. I will be very sad if I don't go. So I went I danced all night.

So much to celebrate for me, despite an unexpected global pandemic looming. We were innocently bliss, blissfully ignorant, for the most part at that point.

But, of course, light clockwork, a little scratch in the back of the throat in the morning.

Also, when I slept, I felt like there was a bit of a draft that I normally would totally account for so that was kind of like oh sh*t, alright well...

Good thing I'm going to bug out to this land and basically be totally isolated and have practically zero contact with anybody for a solid two weeks. That was the self quarantine drill.

I went through a bizarre fever and very mild, upper respiratory, pseudo tiny coughs that didn't really take hold.

I was fast, so as soon as I got that tiny little tickle in the back of the throat, I said, okay, battle mode. Self quarantine. No more eating solid food.

I'm not gonna mention the herbs that I use, I did what you would consider a plant tea, I wanted TO connect with some of the herbs of this land.

I'm gonna go out, in a beautiful natural place, and I'm going to go have romance with this new to me herb that's highly potent and medicinal.

I'm not trying to start an M-L-M talking about this, I'm not even gonna say what it is but it's also the placebo effect I'm sitting there going I nurture and support and boost my immune system and this is a test.

Just soldier on. There was about a 36 hour period where I was pretty incapacitated with fever, feeling like I was being boiled from the inside out. But very interestingly, my lymph nodes never swelled up in the back of my throat.

It was never really miserable the way that it would normally be.

I almost had no mucus. There was just maybe one night where I had put some very, gentle soft very natural soapy solution onto a little bit of a paper towel and inserted that to stop the one night of a bit of a faucet coming out of one nostril and then that was fine.

What was so weird to me was that, I never get sick. I had a fever maybe one time in the last several years since going so called Keto, so called Paleo, but basically eliminating all added sugar, all refined sugar, and pretty much eating no processed foods, and only having veggie burritos as my cheat food, here and there. But I have a lot of confidence in my immune system, just knowing that I'm not constantly inflamed because I've eliminated grains, legumes, dairy and, and added sugar.

So we're talking fruits, nuts, seeds, berries, mostly fish, some poultry, and lots of herbs and now I'm not gonna get into the, the specific choices of things just now, but I will say that I hunkered down, I did the self quarantine it was a bona fide drill.

There Was an actual real threat which is that I swabbed that entire party with my open smiling mouth.

I was so stoked I was basically smiling the whole time.

I had a water filter that I used. I would obviously wash my hands using the restroom. But there's so much hugging and sweating and just close contact and talking people, everybody's just spraying these tiny particles.

The fever was, um, was in its own psychedelic experience. But honestly, I was surprised by how mild most of the symptoms were and how, how limited in duration.

There's no reason for me to believe that I had been exposed to this virus.

For me, it felt like, well, this is a drill.

The novel aspect was that there was no precedent in my immune system.

It's like nothing that you've ever fought off before, you don't get any freebies from your immune system with this one.

It's just your raw immune system fighting a new virus.

I feel this morning today like a billion fucking dollars.

I'm not selling any herbal secret or anything. But what I would like to share is that I had a very profound experience last night, out there, seizing the night, humbled by the cold and the rain, dry within my multiple layers of appropriate sort of tactical, casual gardening clothes and rain gear.

Also knowing you don't want to be out here too long, but you gotta stay warm. So you gotta effing dance to live. You gotta effing dance to stay warm. If you're gonna seize this moment to get these seeds in the ground before you miss the rains. I guess I'm living on the edge, but hey, some people are raiding Walmart.

I'm out there dancing to stay warm and keep dry and get seeds in the ground.

That is the panic mode that I want to be in.

To me, it's a healthy panic mode. It's a win/win, and it's a force multiplier to say to these trees, hey, you know, you've been spiritually sending the smoke signals and here I am.

You take care of me. I take care of you. I love you.

This is a beautiful romance. And I will nurture you and nourish you and cherish you, and be shaded by you and fed by you.

Nature is poly-womb-ic, I'm just helping to create habitat for wildlife.

The frogs and the toads everywhere last night, just bringing me to my knees almost to tears. These these critters everywhere are so heart melting.

I'm just bumping into him, and I've got my light on, oh sh*t.

I squared off with one and felt the power of this being in front of me, it was amazing. At first I thought it may be a rattlesnake. It was squared off facing me, and I just wanted to get out of its way.

It wasn't charging me. It was just sitting there, so we played chicken for a second, and it jumped out of the way.

But I that was an intense, beautiful moment, this is a beautiful realm.

I'm thrilled to be here. I hope I survive everything and stay strong, and that I can really do this ecological magic, to work this land and make it abundant and build on this strategy.

We're gonna guild plant around these trees. I'm going to establish for myself this probably daily-ish route around all these trees, which are dispersed around an acre and have compost or composted mulch donuts around these trees.

That's gonna be the water storage tank, basically. That will keep fertigated and keep moist and I will have a reason to be visiting them every day to get my daily herbs and greens.

There's the orchard over there that just does its thing, and we don't even pay attention to it because it's irrigated. Maybe we check it on it once in a while.

Now integrating the human pathway, daily commute, of walking through it to be like, oh, if you're hungry, you wanna eat, or you want some herbs, you gotta go out to where the trees are and you're gonna check on your kitchen garden. It's kind of like, in a permaculture sense, you're mixing the zones.

You're overlaying zones one through three. You're kind of like commingling them, otherwise it can be so dispersed that it's a big chore.

Well, you should be walking, you should be hiking, so creating many zone one plantings that will be stitched together through earthworks and through ponding and fertigation...it's a beautiful sort of candy land game board.

There's so many critters, anything you plant will be ground down to a nub, pulled from underground, chewed from above ground and slithered on and just munched on till you just have nothing but little, barely hanging stems.

Whenever you plant anything, if you think you're gonna just go to the nursery or grow some seedlings, and just plug them in as transplants...that doesn't work in this level of wilderness, you're going to have to plant a huge, diverse array of sacrificial plantings knowing that a ton of it is gonna get eaten.

I'm going to cooperate with and attract a lot of my competitors and be happy that they are coming around doing their bits.

I was thrilled to get to that point, to have survived that period of self quarantine, satisfactorily, to bond with the herbs of the land.

At the moment of the rains beginning, the hard and soft scaping had been done, and with the rehab triage, I knew where in the dark with the little head lamp to go.

And those mulch donuts, they were my tags on the triage, they were my visual cues to be able to go very systematically.

I need to actually draw them out on a map, make a little pirate treasure map of where all the trees are.

But for now, that map is in my subconscious, and I'm ingraining it so that I don't neglect, I don't wanna forget the ones that are a little bit off the beaten path.

I want to have a route that trains me to get to all of them.

And the way to incentivize that habit is to, as I said, bend the rules of permaculture zonation to have a reason to go out and be like, oh, this tree needs some form of treatment, or it needs some pruning, or it needs some care, or I wanna change the contours so that the basin outside of this sort of conical mound at the base is going to hold water better than having it run off when I either water or when it rains.

You gotta have a reason to care, and you gotta have reason to go out there to care.

That strategy of planting things around it, then I'm gonna go and harvest quickly, as opposed to, in the years it takes for these nuts and fruits to develop.

That's the name of the game, and that was put into action last night.

I have many reasons, in spite of what is happening in the world, to be ecstatic and to celebrate.

In the bitter sweet glory of having the privilege, having earned the privilege and earned the luxury to have at least 75 to 85 % buffering from an ability to actually follow the best practices and, and not really have to compromise too much and know that if the worst things get you, I can scale into and scale out of the official protocols and restrictions and, and just try to keep myself on a tight leash to this property.

The most tragic irony would be to have done all this work, my life's work, to earn access, to be secure, ecologically, and have this opportunity, and then be swept up in a net of quarantine unnecessarily, or, like I said, to do something stupid and end up in a hospital unnecessarily for unrelated reasons.

Then be exposed and all that I've done to build my immune system to this point, it's all nullified by being hospitalized.

I don't wanna tell anybody when or how, or if they should ever check in or at what point. That's not my call to make, and not my advice to give.

This is what's real. This is as real as it gets.

Part of my strategy to adapt to this moment is to really do the triage on making sure the people who I love in the world really know it, making the amends.

We don't know what could happen. You don't know who could be next.

And instead of fear and panic and worry, do the practical things.

Focus on the security. Focus on that base level of the Maslow hierarchy. Get that squared away, and then really careful.

Feel into who needs to be reminded of your deep and true love for them.

A lot of them are coming to me in my dreams, and a lot of them are kind of like bubbling up to the surface of my inbox, just on their own.

This is advice for me and everyone else , make every day like Valentine's Day, that's a positive attitude, that can do no harm and can do no wrong no matter what your relationship is to a financial crisis, to an epidemic pandemic. Treat everyday like Valentine's Day.