Winter Solstice, the longest night and shortest day of the year. The time of the year when darkness reigns and light seems a weak challenger. When the sun appears to stand still, and time stops. A time for letting go, for cleansing and release.
For decades now, the Reclaiming community of Pagans here in San Francisco has celebrated the Solstice at the beach, with a plunge into the ocean and a dance around the bonfire. The shock of cold, the trail of gold on the water, the exhilaration, the wild wind all carry away the last scraps of meanness and whining and disappointment left from the year. And the bonfire with its leaping flames offers warmth and light and community.
A simple ritual, its power carried by the elements themselves. It doesn’t depend on profound thinking, or poetic trance, or eloquent words, which you can’t hear anyway at the beach. Just the ocean, the fire, and the community.
But this year we won’t have a fire. Some years ago, the Golden Gate National Recreation Area banned fires on the beach. There were a number of reasons for this—trouble with litter and fires left untended and rowdy drunks, none of which applied to us. But there were also other issues, some of them environmental. After a big public outcry, they designated a small area at the north end of the beach, a good couple of miles from our more sheltered site, and the Burning Man artists created some special fire pits for it. But that area is crowded, wide open to public view, and not so beautiful and sheltered as the area where we traditionally hold our ritual. So for many years we simply ignored the ban.
Until this Summer Solstice, when we arrived to find the street lined with cop cars and the beach swarming with rangers armed with fire extinguishers. There had long been a plan in place, if the fire was threatened, to defend it with civil disobedience. But we’d had in mind a dignified blockade, leading perhaps to arrest where we could fight the matter in court as an issue of religious freedom. We hadn’t pictured the sacred fire extinguished with chemicals, and the firemakers served with something more like a parking ticket. In any case, after a discussion and a rough consensus, the group decided simply to forego the fire.
In retrospect, we should have gone to the GGNRA the next day and filed a protest, and begun our discussion then. But being busy people with a lot going on in already crowded lives, and having six months before our next beach ritual, we pondered, and grumbled, and muttered, and it wasn’t until the fall that we got organized and held a meeting, and not until this last week that we actually met with the GGNRA.
And the result was—mixed. On the positive side, we were assured that the GGNRA actually does respect our religious rights and is willing to work with us. But the issue involving the fire is out of the hands of our local office. For the beach is part of the snowy plover protection zone, one of only two places where they nest, and their protection is a matter of federal law.
Which leaves us in the position of asking for an exemption to an environmental law we actually support. Civil disobedience did not seem like the appropriate move, here. And so the discussion will go on—after Solstice, to determine what we do next summer, and next winter, and the summers and winters beyond.
And the issue has thrown me smack up against something I realize I have been trying to avoid, a deep and abiding sadness. I think everyone who loves the earth must be feeling it, that sense of things slipping away, pulled by the tide out of our grasp and gone—places of great beauty, species of remarkable birds, rain patterns we can count on, the confidence that our children’s children will inherit a world in which they can thrive. When we attune ourselves to what nature is saying, she’s shrieking in our ears that it is all spiraling out of control, too fast now to be easily stopped. And all the big systems, the governments and international agencies that are supposed to kick in and shift our direction are themselves all spiraling out of control, like tops wobbling in a wild gyre, crashing hardest on those least able to construct bulwarks of money and power.
I’m an optimist by nature, and an activist by choice. As long as I can still balance on creaky knees and draw a breath into wheezy lungs, I’ll keep on fighting the destruction and working for regeneration.
But on this Solstice when time stops, I have to stop, and draw a breath of the sea air, and face the possibility that we might lose. All our efforts might not be enough. Decisions made far away from us in inaccessible stratas of power steal away our future, and maybe we won’t be able to stop them.
It is everyone’s birthright, to plunge into the clean waves, to dance around a fire.
But the waves aren’t clean. By next summer, or next winter, if not already, they may carry to our shores the radioactive poisons of Fukushima. And the fire is banned.
Laws are blunt instruments, and I don’t for a moment believe that our bonfire on the beach would actually endanger a single snowy plover’s egg. (For one thing, they don’t nest in the winter!) But in this time of great extinction, I’ve got to throw my weight behind every effort at preservation, no matter how clumsy.
Yet I need this year’s cleansing. I need the great elemental forces to wash through me and carry away some of this grief and renew my faith in life’s resilience.
So tonight I embrace the cold. Call it in—cold is what we need, to cool the overheated earth, to bring back the rains. I offer up the fire, to the snowy plover, to all the endangered species, to everything and everyone whose simple birthrights are stolen.
Let this be the Solstice magic. Tides turn. Miracles happen.
Out of darkness, light is born.
International Permaculture Convergence 11 in Cuba!
Cuba—in late November and early December I spent two weeks there to attend the International Permaculture Conference and Convergence and participate in the related tours. The IPC meets roughly every two years. In 2011 we were in Jordan, and the theme was drylands. In 2013, Cuba was the choice because Cuba turned to urban agriculture and permaculture after the Soviet Union fell and it lost both its major source of petroleum and its major markets. We gathered there to meet, to learn from other permaculturalists around the globe and to see some of the projects our Cuban friends have developed.
One of the beautiful old cars of Cuba!
Cuba—for so long it’s been one of those places you can’t go to, not legally, not if you are a US Citizen. But now the barriers have been loosened and you can go for educational or professional reasons. Like many others from the Bay Area, I booked with Global Exchange and the Eco-Cuba network who arranged the flights, the paperwork, guides, busses, etc. Without going into the boring details of the many travel glitches and logistical problems we encountered, let me just say that Global Exchange and Eco-Cuba Network folks were great. They coped with a thousand problems, swung with the punches and took fabulous care of us under great difficulties! I would highly recommend them if you are ever thinking of going on one of their Reality Tours to Cuba or elsewhere.
My ideas about Cuba were still stuck somewhere in the dusty images of earnest young radicals cutting cane on the Venceremos Brigade and beret-capped revolutionaries stalking through the jungle. Somehow I had not quite grasped that we were going to a lush, gorgeous tropical island with fabulous beaches that had become a major tourist destination for the rest of the world. Fortunately, I did pack a bathing suit!
But for the first few days, I didn’t have much opportunity to use it. We were in Havana, at a three-day conference packed with information and overwhelmed by more than 500 participants.
Some of the highlights: hearing from the Cubans how they survived the ‘Special Period” after the Soviet Union fell by growing food in and around their cities and shifting to organic agriculture. Meeting up with Robin Francis from Australia whose amazing permaculture site I’d visited ten years ago and hearing her present both the grim facts about climate change and the permaculture strategies. Reconnecting with Robin Clayfield from Crystal Waters in Australia who led an interactive session on social permaculture. Hearing Albert Bates from The Farm in Tennessee on biochar and Darren Dougherty’s presentation on keyline and grasslands.
And Cuba itself—vintage cars on the streets, waves spilling over the seafront walk on the Malecon, music everywhere. Great bands in our hotel, a little salsa dancing while waiting to go out to dinner, heading down to the old town for Flamenco and walking through cobbled streets lined by balconied buildings like a bit of old Spain.
After three days indoors, we were eager for our daylong tour of urban agriculture sites in and around Havana. We visited a working class neighborhood in the west where many people had developed small, urban permaculture gardens, ‘sistemas’, they call them, systems. I’m not so familiar with the tropical plants myself but my strategy was to stick close to John Valenzuela of the Rare Fruit Growers who hails from the North Bay and knows everything!
John Valenzuela.
Or if he doesn’t, Brock Dolman of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center does. And so does my dear friend Penny Livingstone-Stark of the Regenerative Design Institute.
Penny Livingston-Stark in her palm leaf hat!
Brock Dolman and John Valenzuela show a little leg!
We visited three small gardens in one of the suburbs of Havana. I admired what Blanca had done in a small space while caring for a son with developmental problems.
Bianca’s sistema.
Bianca’s little pond.
Another ‘sistema’, called, “My Dream” in Spanish, combined a lush, tropical food forest with raised beds. And finally we went to the home of the Sanchez family, who have turned their yard into a permaculture teaching site.
Banana trees and recycled hanging planters.
In the afternoon, we visited an agroponico, one of the urban farms where much of Cuba’s produce is grown. In the nineties, they were producing something like 70% of their food in and around their cities. But, as one of our guides admitted, they weren’t eating that much. Now, alas, they are back to importing something like 60%, but the urban farms remain.
Beds of lettuce at the agroponico.
And then we were on to the convergence, five more days of presentations, discussions, long talks in long lines waiting for food, interludes at the beach or the pool, and at night—dancing! My high point of the trip: Bianca told me I was a good dancer, and one of the Cuban men said I danced like a Cuban girl!
Bianca and me!
At the convergence: Robin Clayfield from Crystal Waters in Australia looking beautiful in blue!
Yoga on the beach at the convergence.
Pandora Thomas and I presented a session together on social permaculture and building diversity in the movement, which was well-received.
I also led a spiral dance, and immediately afterwards faced a line of Cuban women asking me for advice on how to energetically cleanse themselves and how to ground before sleeping. One thing I loved in Cuba is that Santeria is accepted there as a religion—with more followers than Catholicism. There’s a respect for spiritual and energetic forces that all the years of Communism hasn’t dented.
Santeria altar at the agroponico.
Then on to more tours. Matanzas, where a permaculture food forest is planted to protect amazing, crystalline underground caves! Sancti Spiritus, where Edith, one of the women I’d danced with, has turned a flower farm into a permaculture farm with the first earthen building in Cuba. We saw another site where they are building a model house/classroom out of recycled materials, and a permaculture car wash.
Edith at the flower farm converted to a permaculture center.
Mandala garden at Edith’s permaculture center.
At the permaculture car wash, water is cleaned and recycled.
On our final day, we were taken high up into the tropical rainforest for a tour of a preserve that focuses on medicinal plants, and a lively herb walk. At the end, a few of us shared a quiet, stolen moment in a cave where long ago slaves had hidded to celebrate their ceremonies. We took a moment to honor their spirits, then hurried back along a beautiful path by the stream to get back to our busses.
Bromeliads in the rainforest–anti-inflammatory, and also burn fat! Gotta get some!
Bromeliads and orchids!
I’m going to try to find more time to write up some of my thoughts from the conference. Overall, I’m incredibly grateful for the opportunity to meet with so many amazing people from around the world, and to see the wonderful work Cuba has done with permaculture and with all the ways it takes care of its people.
Non-carbon transport!