This past weekend, Paige and I drove up to Pennsylvania to
help my family move my Grandma Bubby out of her house and into a new apartment.
And, as a bonus, I was permitted to cherry-pick for the taking, all of the marvelous
tools left in my late Pap-Pap’s workshop.
It was a moving experience that brought to mind what my teachers Tao
Orion and Abel Kloster explained to us as a strong underlying theme of the
school of Permaculture, which is, in essence, “looking backward to move
forward.”
The only way we learn is by trying, observing, and adapting.
Permaculture draws many of its founding principles from the life ways of
indigenous cultures and groups of people who live(d) with the land in such a
way that integrates the humans into the natural rhythms and cycles of the earth.
In these ways of life, there was usually an unspoken dedication to the
long-term preservation, or better yet proliferation, of resources for the sake of
future generations. The people belonging to the tribes all over the world that
match this description, (and those which existed in this country until the
intrusions of Europeans in the 15th Century) did not learn how to
follow nature’s patterns, maximize yields, and sustain the richness of life
overnight, it was of course a process of looking backward, of trying,
observing, and adapting over the course of many, many years.
As one result of colonialism, imperialism, and many other
Eurocentric-isms, we are here today with incredible accessibility to historical
information regarding the life ways of these people. Had medieval Christianity prioritized
Christ-like compassion over Manifest Destiny, we may have had actual
populations of these folks still around today instead of museum exhibits of the
black and white photos of their ancestors. Nonetheless, we as gardeners, caretakers,
can seek out ethnographies, memoirs, and other documents which reveal the
myriad lessons of ecological stewardship that were implicit in these life-ways,
and we can do our best to learn passively from the remnants of history, and
humbly attempt to see the world the way they saw it, without romanticizing or
ignoring the context from which it came.
Similarly, we can
find lessons in our own ancestry by asking our elders what life was like for
them growing up, how they kept their soil fertile, how they made the most of
what they had. This is what “appropriate technology” is all about. It was there
long before Bill Mollison (the “initiator” of Permaculture) gave it a name, it
was resourcefulness, and in many cases, survival tactics.
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| The last photo taken of me with Pap-Pap, summer 2011. |
This past weekend, the looking backward to move forward came
for me in the form of removing the wrenches that have hung on Pap-Pap’s
pegboard for as long as I can remember, and packing away the well-organized
coffee cans and margarine tubs of precisely labels nails and screws of every
size that he had been accumulating since the time my Dad was in middle school. Each
item I packed away emanated his spirit and the decades of intentionality, of
acquiring, giving, and finding purpose for these things. Though he was not there in person to pass on his
collection, I felt honored to be trusted by my family to continue his legacy,
to take up this treasure that others may have put in the scrap metal pile.
By the time we left Pittsburgh, my little 92 Toyota was
packed to the absolute max with tarps, folding aluminum lawn chairs, shovels,
picks, iron bars and several of his old wooden boxes filled with a few of your
common files, wrenches, and hammers (the screw drivers had all been scavenged
by my father’s generation) but the majority of what filled the 5 old and new
tool boxes I found were things that you need every once and a while but you
always wish you had, specialty tools, soldering irons, glue guns, and plenty of
his homemade inventions. He had saved nutpickers, Tic-Tac containers, hunks of
lead, popsicle sticks, toothbrushes, bits of garden hose attached to old
saw-zall blades and created tools. He had had specific purposes for these
items, and use them to fix things that I can’t even imagine. It was great to
have my dad there to reminisce and explain how and when Pap-Pap had used many
of these self-creations, but there were other things that surly, only he could
have explained (e.g. a drawer full of peanut can peel-back tin lids).
After seeing the sagging truck bed, Paige, I know, was a bit
worried about starting my own trend of accumulating, but I defended the duality
of utility and heirloom, but she says the former is subjective. But I also know
that she is just as excited as me to have Pap Pap’s resourcefulness live on to
inspire us as we begin our journey together.
