I’m sharing the sentiment that the biggest ocean is in the sky.
There’s a course on the atmosphere I studied, it was profound to me when the professor talked about how in my own words I'll paraphrase but basically the moisture that gets absorbed from the surface of the Earth and that lives in the atmosphere.
There is a dramatic, disproportionate ratio of water on the surface of the planet, including every body of water, every river, lake, ocean, pond, glacier. All of it is a drop in the bucket compared to what is suspended in the atmosphere at all times. That under certain circumstances falls to the Earth in various different forms. But even then, it's something like thousands of years.
Every molecule of water that hits the ground, the average amount of time that it remains on the surface of the planet Earth, in whatever place it may be, whether in the ocean, or in a glacier or pond or a raindrop, whatever it is a bit of steam...
I can't remember what the ratio is at this moment, but it's ridiculous how long that molecule will be in the atmosphere, suspended relative to how long it would be on the surface of the planet.
The amount of moisture that lives in our atmosphere, relative to the amount of moisture water molecules that live on the Earth for the temporary time they're on the surface. it's very daunting to try to consider.
The reason why I'm pontificating on this at the moment is that there's been an, uncharacteristic of this site over the last three years, an amount of rain in the last few weeks.
To me that's very promising. There's a something called the The Fall of Civilizations.
It's a show where they break it down, they break it all the way down, all the stuff Jarod Diamond talks about in terms of the excesses that empires take where they tempt fate against nature, and nature crushes them.
I listened to recently one on Egypt, where they talk about them how these cycles, it's chaotic, but there are patterns and cycles within the chaos of whether rainier periods where the crushing, merciless desert wasteland around the Nile River would be blessed with rains, rainy, wetter, cooler periods every so often hundreds of times, even in the history of human habitation of that environment that we're aware of.
I don't know what the scope of that metric really is, but it would turn into a grassland, what would have otherwise been deadly, uninhabitable, desert wasteland.
Just an emergent property of fertility out of what appears to be the most sterile material on Earth, which is desert sand.
But actually it's filled with seeds waiting to be germinated by a blessed chapter in the earth's life history, where that big ocean in the sky, for whatever reasons, blesses the Earth with moisture in the form of precipitation.
And for some people, it's deadly to be swamped by floods and mass death occurs. And my heart goes out to them. I think that's a human design problem to solve with permaculture because those forces are to be partnered with and aligned with for maximum mutual benefit of all living beings. We have intelligence there's no reason for us to be what doing what Bill Mollison said, falling into holes of our own making.
I'm having this moment of sentimentality about the biggest ocean that is in the sky, because to me the logical conclusion of starting with that premise is that we all live on beach front property.
If the biggest ocean is the sky, and how you design if, if I'm correct, which I believe I am, if that's correct, then we all have an opportunity to design ecological abundance around that fact.
Because I live in one of the most arid places on Earth right now and I successfully refilled all of my water tanks, and I'm about to add multiples of rainwater catchment capacity that's gonna make it so next time it even rains a trickle, I'm gonna have more water than I know what to do with.
I'm just a one man ecosystem trying to survive and live a more rustic form of the american dream out on the frontier of survivalism.
But if I can make it to this point and have a total paradigm shift for my entire life, even as a landscape or even as a permaculture designer, where it was all about, oh, where do I connect the hose?
Even if I had some consciousness of the source of the water coming out of that hose, it was always I was spoiled.
Now, I may be spoiled in certain ways, but it is not hydrological.
I'm not hydrologically spoiled. At least I'm normally not over the course of the last three years, but over the last few weeks, I have to admit it, I'm hydrologically spoiled because I have found a way to be an alignment with the biggest ocean that is in the sky.
It's a real art and a joy to I'm not a I'm not an expert. I just barely kind of skimmed that course I put myself through it while I was suffering in the heat last year but it stays with me, I'm haunted by those metrics.
What I see the clouds in the sky and the way they move, and the fluid dynamics of the air and the moisture in the air and the different types of clouds, I don't know all the science of it, but I behold it as a cloud and atmosphere science pretty illiterate fool, but I behold it because I know that certain smells and certain hues.
There's this the bursage plants that I'm surrounded by, they seem to exude a certain scent when it's moist enough for the rain to fall, and I'm high enough elevation, in the clouds, kind of.
So it's just something beautiful and magical, majestic to behold. Not everybody gets to do this.
I appreciate that I'm able to do it. And I speak from a place of reverence, to be humbled by the elements.
It's been very interesting the last few weeks, because whereas a lot of the rainfall that I've known over the years that I've been here has been through very terrifying thunder and lightning storms and major torrential downfalls, where I have to hide from it.
Interestingly, these last few weeks, it's been this intermittent but sometimes steady flow of just very like northwest type of misty, soft rainfall.
It's very meditative. And then you wouldn't believe the verdant, wild vegetation that I'm surrounded by now that's such a blessing, makes me think about what it must have felt like, those Egyptian folks who were in the early days of incipient agriculture, trying to make a living out of the floods of the Nile.
And sometimes it would be so blessed with rain that they wouldn't even be dependent as much, and that they would have so much abundance for a time.
And then that would disappear. I don't know if this is ever gonna happen again in my lifetime.
I don't know what the patterns will be moving forward. But all I know is that right now, my water supplies are topped off, there's green vegetation all around me, which I marvel at every day.
I just wonder, in the next few weeks, when it all disappears until the monsoons, or at least speaking about the way I'm now, I'll have something to reference.
But as the seasons change and I have to adapt one to the next, each season is so demanding that I lose all memory of the previous and can barely conceive of it coming back.
It's very humbling.
In LA there has been flooding. My designs have failed in the rains of LA in the past and I've got some horror stories of rookie permaculture design failures in the rains but most of those failures had to do with just the context of being in an urban environment.
But out here, where I am now, factors of slope, factors of soil type being very loose sand...
I'm still waiting for the big biblical rains that would actually put some streams back on these dry streams beds, so I can see how my swales are gonna function, and whether or not I might have seasonal ponds.
I hope we all find a way to enjoy that beach front property that we all live on, whether we own it in the eyes of the state or not.
We all live on the surface of the planet, and therefore we all live on beach front property to the biggest ocean on our planet, which is the sky.