When passion plants a permacultural seed,
then justice flourishes a polycultural flower.
These two words, permaculture and polyculture, grow holistic significance for our physical, and mental, cultural and spiritual health.
Permacultural, as I intend it this morning, refers to Yang’s power for cooperative sustainability of natural systems; power that is universally comprehensive consciousness. Permacultural wisdom is rooted in ancient Golden Rules and Ratios as balanced proportion and right relationship between ego and eco, between self and partners, family, tribe, environment.
Polycultural gardens and landscapes,
whether natural-exterior or human natured-interior,
are positive outcomes anticipated,
designed,
beloved by Permaculturalists.
The opposite of polycultural paradise
we might describe as:
- monocultural (not multiculturally therapeutic)
- monopolistic and dominating (not mutually cooperative governance, economics, or ecologic)
- monochromatic (not polymorphically natured, gened, generated, evolved, not full octave frequencies of color and harmony).
Permacultural development is to Yang’s force and power.
as Polycultural outcomes are to Yin’s therapeutic flex and flow.
And so it is that in this our permacultural parable, we reach back to through all Four Seasons in our UU ReGenesis Community’s polycultural co-passion story.
One winter of discontent, about 1000 years from now, and more, and less, the Universalist Prophets of Justice turned rather coldly upon the Unitarian Mystics of Warm Compassion.
“What happened to Truth, Justice, and the American Independent Way of Freedom; low risk, high yield economic and political life? Why do you overheat all your passion and love and ecological empathy, then serve it wholesale to every suffering, angry, self-medicating, felon and victim of violence and poverty, every socialist and sexual deviant, and those relentless feminist tyrants of chaos and public self-flagellation?”
“You Unitarian Mystics are way over the top, placing too-soft mercy where we need a more tough-love prophetic universal truth voice for justice. As much as you don’t like to hear this, may we most prophetically remind you that justice, like investment, trickles down from entitled power authorities and wealthy depositors from whom more is expected.”
So, as was their practice, these suffering ReGenesis Community Yin-Mystics of too-great compassion went off to hibernate this harsh dark justice, to decompose this permacultural puzzle of the thrival of the economic fittest, and yet also fattest. How could it be that competing weapons of bloated wealth are more powerful than our compassionate Gaia Goddess of ecological “why can’t we all just play cooperatively” wisdom? How could an omnipotent benign Unitarian Hostess give birth to litters of runtish parasites without giving them at least a flat playing field for winning more positive outcomes than the dinosaurs?
Having posed their question, the yin-mystics sang their langorous liturgical prayer:
[sung slowly and quietly first verse, building toward passion, second verse]
Twinkle twinkle litte star
how we wonder when you are.
Did you used to be more bright?
Is there still time to touch your light?
Twinkle twinkle too small star,
how we wonder when you are.
Twinkle twinkle shining star
how we wonder who we are.
Are you us when we are light
Are we you when we shine bright?
Twinkle twinkle shining star
How we wonder who we are.
Following gratitude for winter’s metamorphic suffering and chronically stressed tough-love teachers,
Grandmother Moon responded with polycultural wisdom of waxing and waning hope for spring’s new life:
“When winter’s suffering composts in each person,
compassion grows more inclusive and diverse,
richer, more fertile root systems,
arguing with rather than arguing against,
struggling with rather than struggling against.
Composted in the family,
co-passion will optimize wealth of nutritional values for all senses, feelings, awareness;
Composted in the neighborhood and your local cooperative economy,
and political platforms, policies, plans,
co-passion will positively slow-growth multiply;
Organically composted throughout the nations,
cooperative ownership and lifestyles could optimize economic and sociotherapeutic regenerativity,
recreating cooperative Win-Win cultural assumptions
from that old-school pre-millennial Win-Lose competitive economics,
permaculturaling our wealth of nations;
Composting Earth’s natural systemic information,
co-passionate comprehensive consciousness grows Universal Justice.”
“Therefore:
According to the individual’s compassion, the individual practices integrative justice;
According to the family’s compassion, the family practices inclusive justice;
According to the Beloved Community’s investment in downstream cooperative compassion,
the community practices ecological justice with and for communities
both upstream and downstream.
How do I know Earth Rights and Wealth of Justice evolve this way?
Earth’s natural flow and function is my compost,
as Her regenerative flow and function is your Elder.”
During the subsequent long warm summer days
of maturing gardens and wisdom,
the ReGenesis Community’s Universalist Justice Prophets of the Unraveling Future
and Unitarian Compassion Mystics of Reweaving Cultural Herstory,
stewed this steamy stone soup compost.
Each prophet and mystic, Yanger and Yinner, Universalist and Unitarian,
shares his and her struggles with injustice and need,
we sing our segregating sexual, racial, ecological, economic, political, historical and cultural hurt and disappointment,
we dirge our painful risks of exposure,
and anger about harm and violence to and with all Earth’s nature.
including every “my nature matters” message and slogan and sign of impending flying apart, rather than investing in flying together.
We decompose our chronic sub-optimizing economies of impoverishment,
our wants and hopes with literally evaporating faith in anthrocentric future prospects.
We grapple for life fully lived in the future,
at least as well as now.
These are gratefully shared
within our families and cooperative residences,
within our diverse ReGenesis committees and projects,
commissions and vocations,
within our PTA education-as-if-life-mattered consumer co-ops,
and our public policy production and vocation industries,
our homeless shelters, prisons, rehab centers, and asylums.
Our Autumn Perennial Harvest Report begins, “True justice is no more anthro-centric than ego-centric. No more ego-centric than Left-brain dominant.
“Perhaps our permacutural justice opera is sung in a difficult and challenging key, but it cannot be a song if there is no full-octave key accessible within each, and equitably shared by all.”
“Compassion seeds suffer and burst, struggle and strain, first within our dark winters,
toward ego-Left and eco-Right balanced root systems,
seeking peace-filling integrity of justice for ourselves,
and then others,
our interdependent co-passionate mentors and messiahs,
and then Earth Herself, with all nature’s species and Tribes,
within all revolving time,
advocate for all generations of life.
Universal Justice expands up and out Yang from Unitarian compassion roots,
Yang from Yin,
mutually consuming and productive cycles of becoming fit to thrive together.
Universal Justice flowers from Unitarian bicultural yang/yin balance,
as Left to Right hemispheric balance,
as West to Eastern cultural wisdom,
as space from time’s unfolding,
rhythm from rhyme’s iconic order,
rational logic from eco-logically informed systemic function,
deductive reason discerned from inductive,
experiential,
reconnecting wisdom.
Left from Right
as regathering nature from regifting Elder spirits,
as belonging grows from longing to reconnect,
as July’s bloom emerges from January’s gloom.
“Communication of justice,
to be communication at all,
must be a cooperative enterprise;
not a competitively punishing exercise in dominatrix.
Information about rights and wrongs,
to be informing,
to be formational at all,
to have integrity,
to become integrative,
Unitarian,
must be a transaction between cooperative subjects with a shared nutritional growth objective.
Life, to be fully lived,
and not decadent, diseased, dissonantly restrained, victimizing and violent,
to avoid rushing madly toward flat-line economic segregating death
while still breathing bad air
and beating bad blood;
This polycultural kinda “beloved” justice emerges from cooperative co-passionate vocations
with and for and of all Earth’s Tribes, species, trees and forests and oceans.
Polycultural justice equivalently loves all Earth’s mutually grateful, resonant, seasons and generations,
including summer’s heated gratitude for the suffering sadness of winter,
Polycultural justice invites all Earth’s Past and Future Redeemer Regenerations to Universally Permacultural Life.”
And, so, with this Great Transitional season upon us,
all Beloved ReGenesis Unitarian Universalists said:
Amen!
Benediction:
May we breathe out more fully Unitarian co-passionate light.
May we go forth full-breathing in Universal Light of Justice.
May we add our UUs together, to resolve this hot mess of compassionate Win-Win justice for our ecosystemic bodies and soils, souls and minds.
May we suffer and forgive with gratitude each of Earth’s generous and lovely mutual mentors and messiahs,
transgenerationally revolving back to the beginning of Time’ Universal Integrity and Beloved polycultural consciousness.
Note: Remarks and Benediction prepared for USH, Hartford, CT, July 12, 2015.
