I find it rather odd that we, as a culture, sit around and talk about each other rather often. And honestly, it changes, seemingly, not a whole lot. I was recently working in New Jersey on a project, and at the house where I was hosted the TV was on and we were flicking through channels and on every channel people were talking about other people. And what is most odd, it was not only one person talking about another, but another was talking about what they had absorbed through circumstantial information that had been reported by someone else talking about someone who had a different perspective from the one who spoke about another person who had another idea about someone who…ad nauseum.
We tend to sit around an awful lot and listen to second, third, fourth, whatever hand sound bytes, layers and layers of sound bytes. The first information gets caught in the meat grinder of endless interpretation. What of first hand, first sight, first scent? What of seeing what we are looking at and smelling a rose? I do not think that another could explain to us the scent of a rose, do you? Try to describe this in words, or small talk.
In Permaculture we speak, ad infinitum, about direct observation. Yes, we are constantly taking inventory of our immediate environment, in context of a wider-angle whole that we have witnessed first hand. We are inside the layers of our designs working at them by what we sense, feel, absorb. We are an observational lightning rod that jolts the layers we design into energetic, biological dynamos. And we seek the subtle nuances of the land, the atmosphere, the way water swirls and purls across the topography.
Struck by lightning: is there anyone who could explain what this feels like in words, delimiting the experience? Or the taste of a cucumber recently plucked from a backyard vine?
So, back to the two-dimensional-telephone-game of modern “culture”, brought to you by so-and-so talking about so-and-so who found something out (we have our sources pray tell) about so who thought they saw so say something to them and so on. Do we really live and breathe by this “information” (informed automation)? Is the meaning in this message?
Or is it that someone wakes up each and every morning in my place? Or is it me peeing, brushing my teeth, washing my face and trying to open my eyes to the next moment and the next? Or is this about someone else talking about something so familiar to me yet so fifth hand?