In the photo above, Sheilah uses a small fire to char the ends of bamboo poles for our low-cost deer fence.
We are not our names; and yet, what we name a being calls in bright resonances. When a name is aligned with our essence, it rings like a chord and guards as an amulet. When a name is no longer in alignment, we begin to mumble or apologize for it when asked. Hesitation around our name can be a sign it is time for the name to be released so that new resonances can be welcomed in.
Releasing Our Name
Golden Egg Permaculture is a name this humble Permaculture practice began with in Carrboro, NC before I was involved with it. When I became Golden Egg’s other main designer, I was grateful for the shelter of the established name to gentle the wind as I got my bearings.
The Golden Egg name was from a cautionary parable about greed and the goose that laid golden eggs. It called in the Permaculture teaching to accept the slow gifts of life rather than the shortsighted profits of quick extraction. It is a good teaching story, and yet I felt a need to let it go. My own association with the golden goose story was that, while it was a warning, it was also a bit of a judgement already passed. If the goose who laid the golden egg was already killed, what hope do we have? Something was left out of this story that I wanted to call closer.
One of my core beliefs about life is that we can’t actually lose the earth. Earth’s gifts are not a finite supply or a fluke phenomenon. They are the ground condition of being and the model of what unconditional love looks like. Unlike the stories of judgement wedged into many religions, earth raises no hand in punishment. As Mary Oliver sings in Wild Geese, “you don’t have to be good.” After the multiple cataclysms and waves of extinctions earth has already experienced, what happened next? Life kept creating life. And after the small apocalypse of a forest clear-cut, what happens next? An abundance of disturbance plants appear as if from nothing, bringing food, medicine, habitat, and a rapid remediation of the wounded. Some of the rivers that ran yellow or orange with poisons thirty years ago are drinkable now and full of fish. We can do everything wrong and we will never change life’s will to create more life.
This is part of what puts me out of tune with the parable: if the goose that killed the golden egg were slain, its body would almost immediately become an eruption of other forms of life – microbial, fungal, insect, and other detritivores. The slow fire of decomposition would make the goose’s body like the phoenix, a center of rebirth. Death is end and beginning. We would not be doomed for our sins; we would only have to tune back into where life force was now flowing. This understanding is central to the trust that Permaculture has taught me.
…and besides all that, golden eggs are terrible for omelets. To melt them, you’d need to make a fire of 1948° Fahrenheit, and that’s going to use way more fuel than a Permaculture practitioner is comfortable with…! And if civilization falls all the way apart, it’s likely that an egg is going to be far more valuable than gold…
Slow Change
When I became the main Permaculture designer for the practice, I considered changing the Golden Egg name, but I didn’t want to do it lightly. Caring for what we inherit is a sacred part of Permaculture. Being too fast to overturn what was there felt like making big changes in land before we’ve lived there for a year. I needed time to inhabit and appreciate what already existed before listening to see if something else wanted to happen.
The past year of my life has brought birth and rebirth in many forms: getting married and changing my own last name, becoming a father, starting a whole new homestead in a new place, and making the commitment to return to Permaculture full-time. This past day has also brought more drastic change and uncertainty in the wake of the 2024 election. All of it has brought the essence of Permaculture into finer and finer clarity for me. In feeling all that coming home, I knew it was time to shed something old and embrace something new.
A Slow Fire
“Slow Fire” is a phrase that surprised me. I didn’t understand it when it first arose as a possibility for a new name for our budding school and practice. It only was in sharing it with Sheilah that we found together that our lives and our way of practicing Permaculture was full of slow fire.
A slow fire is passion that gives steady light and heat without burning itself out too fast. It stays with us through the night and through the seasons. It does not consume itself rapidly with the oxygen of too many ideas and abstractions; nor does it fizzle and smoke in heavy indecision. A slow fire is the steadiness of life force, nurtured, and fed, contained but not constrained.
The slow fire of controlled burning has become one of the most powerful regenerative tools available in ecosystem regeneration. Indigenous peoples in the Eastern Woodlands and around the world have worked with fire wisely and skillfully to bring about overflowing abundance of forest ecosystems. This is in contrast to tilling, which causes a quick burst of oxygenated “fire” in the microbial life that gives a short yield of fertility only to burn through and exhaust the soil in barely a season’s time.
And compost is a slow fire – especially the unturned piles. Decaying wood is a slow fire sometimes erupting with the incendiary hues of Chicken of the Woods or Reishii. Our cells hold slow fires that keep the slow fire of life burning long, just long enough. A tree is a slowing of sunlight flame stored in the incremental dendritic archings down into the dark and in the branches reaching back up towards the campfire at the center of our solar system.
A slow fire is the biochar we make with our cook fires and bonfires. The slow fire pyrolyzes as much as combusts. Instead of breaking the bonds of carbon and pouring smoke to the air, it crystalizes it into sable coral reefs that we bury to in turn slow the movement of water and nutrients in the soil.
Every Spring, we looked forward to burning some of our feral garden beds with a slow fire. There is something about watching the force of fire express itself so gently that gives courage. Burning a garden bed for planting was able to raise us out of the worst of heavy moods.
Our new homestead’s high-efficiency wood stove burns with a fire so slow that we had trouble believing what we were seeing. Instead of the bright flickering tongues we had grown used to, the glass firebox door reveals a languid turbulence of dark violet and red vortices of tumbling fire. If our old stove was a nightclub, the new wood stove contains a belly dance. Through the mystery of slow fire, two pieces of wood the length of my hand and circumference of my forearm heat our home for hours. The slow fire makes wood burning a sustainable option for everyone.
Long Work is Slow Work
Tending land, caring for trees, regenerating rivers, keeping seeds; Permaculture is generational work. It requires pacing. The fire of excitement learning Permaculture awakens won’t be able to help us if it burns itself out in an enthusiastic flash. The fire of our vitality needs rhythm to have the strength to work with earth for years.
And our civilization, defined by its heedless ignition of ancient fossil life is, in my honest feeling, on fire. There is little chance many aspects of it will survive in forms our parents would recognize. Permaculture does not offer to put the fire out; in fact, many of us in it may not consider that desirable, as the institutions around us seem to serve short-term profit above anything else. What Permaculture does give us is the opportunity for a “slow descent.” The collapse can be made more gentle by our store of fertility in the soil, water in the land, and rooted earth wisdom in our hands and our hearts. Permaculture offers to slow the fire down so we can follow the inevitable conflagrations with our seeds and our songs.
True love, whether as a lover, friend, or parent, is a slow fire. It stays steady in the gale like a candle held between cupped palms. It burns easy and true in the stillness of listening. It consumes its fuel only at the rate of the days and nights appointed to it by the mystery.
And so I am grateful to offer this new name, Slow Fire School of Permaculture, (or just Slow Fire for short), as a call for all of us to shelter and tend the steady flame of spirit no matter what rains or winds may come.
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