|
Building communities of trust is fundamental
to healing our collective wound.
At Plukrijp, we offer spaces of transparency and solidarity.
The community allows people to encounter each other
in truth and so develop trust.
|
|
We do the garden for YOU
Plukrijp functions on your frequent visits & harvests. Take along for friends & neighbours, this way we recreate real networks between us all, breaking down the illusory restrictions that now still separate many of us from our fellow man = UBUNTU.
The updated list of vegetables & fruit that can be harvested this week is available on our website under the heading “Current Harvest” : https://plukrijp.be/en/op-dit-moment-te-oogsten |
|
|
|
Plukrijp was founded in October 2007. A great 15-year adventure, rich in many encounters and experiences in various fields. The result is there: a magnificent no-nonsense permaculture garden and an increasingly harmonious and joyful community life.
Since Frank’s death, I have invested myself in better positioning Plukrijp in the local landscape. More and more local people find their way to our gardens and it makes my heart sing.
The wonderful volunteers who accompany me have done their best to keep the gardens abundant and cared for the general upkeep of the greenhouses and buildings. Through them, the transmission of knowledge received from Frank is guaranteed. They are the guardians of a good basic social dynamic. Thanks to their enthusiasm and dedication, Plukrijp continues to inspire.
Together we have already reorganized a lot to set up the-Plukrijp-after-Frank. This great adventure brings us closer and teaches us to live better and better together on a daily basis.
|
|
|
Today, we need to recharge our batteries and rest because the last 5 months have been physically, mentally and emotionally trying. The garden only requires basic maintenance.
From 1/11/2022 till 28/02/2023 we have decided to take a big winter break. We take a step back to take stock, to realign ourselves. We jump into the void trusting the process. We will let ourselves be guided by our desires, by joy. We will spend time with the people we love. We are going to do and not do a lot of things by allowing ourselves to take time for ourselves.
Practically, what does this mean for you?
-
Our gardens remain open and await you to come and harvest the abundance they offer
-
During our winter break, the newsletter will be limited to the list and some photos of the vegetables that are ready to be harvested
-
We cannot offer volunteer work for the moment
|
|
|
|
I would like to thank the many people who have shown me their support and affection. I feel blessed to be surrounded by so many beautiful people!
It is with fresh energy and new inspirations that I will be happy to meet you again in the spring for new adventures to share.
I wish you all the best!
With deep Love
Martine
|
|
LOVE AFTER LOVE
by Derek Walcott
The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
|
|
|
“To love without knowing how to love
wounds the person we love.”
|
|
|
|
What does love mean, exactly? We have applied to it our finest definitions; we have examined its psychology and outlined it in philosophical frameworks; we have even devised a mathematical formula for attaining it. And yet anyone who has ever taken this wholehearted leap of faith knows that love remains a mystery — perhaps the mystery of the human experience.
Learning to meet this mystery with the full realness of our being — to show up for it with absolute clarity of intention — is the dance of life.
That’s what legendary Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk, teacher, and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh (October 11, 1926–January 22, 2022) explores in How to Love — a slim, simply worded collection of his immeasurably wise insights on the most complex and most rewarding human potentiality.
At the heart of Nhat Hanh’s teachings is the idea that “understanding is love’s other name” — that to love another means to fully understand his or her suffering. (“Suffering” sounds rather dramatic, but in Buddhism it refers to any source of profound dissatisfaction — be it physical or psychoemotional or spiritual.) Understanding, after all, is what everybody needs — but even if we grasp this on a theoretical level, we habitually get too caught in the smallness of our fixations to be able to offer such expansive understanding. He illustrates this mismatch of scales with an apt metaphor:
|
|
|
If you pour a handful of salt into a cup of water, the water becomes undrinkable. But if you pour the salt into a river, people can continue to draw the water to cook, wash, and drink. The river is immense, and it has the capacity to receive, embrace, and transform. When our hearts are small, our understanding and compassion are limited, and we suffer. We can’t accept or tolerate others and their shortcomings, and we demand that they change. But when our hearts expand, these same things don’t make us suffer anymore. We have a lot of understanding and compassion and can embrace others. We accept others as they are, and then they have a chance to transform.
|
|
|
| Wisdom for healthy relationships |
|
|
We think that we act, whereas what we mostly do is react.
By noticing our own responses
rather than fixating on the responses to us,
tremendous energy for growth is freed up.
By simply shifting our focus off the others
and becoming more responsible for our own actions,
the other will automatically assume more responsibility for himself.
– free translation from Gabor Maté
|
|
|
|
The Art of Loving
and What Is Keeping Us from Mastering It
– Philosopher Erich Fromm
“To love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love,” — a sentiment profoundly discomfiting in the context of our cultural mythology, which continually casts love as something that happens to us passively and by chance, something we fall into, something that strikes us arrow-like, rather than a skill attained through the same deliberate practice as any other pursuit of human excellence. Our failure to recognize this skillfulness aspect is perhaps the primary reason why love is so intertwined with frustration.
That’s what the great German social psychologist, psychoanalyst, and philosopher Erich Fromm (March 23, 1900–March 18, 1980) examines in his 1956 masterwork The Art of Loving — a case for love as a skill to be honed the way artists apprentice themselves to the work on the way to mastery, demanding of its practitioner both knowledge and effort.
Fromm writes:
This book … wants to show that love is not a sentiment which can be easily indulged in by anyone, regardless of the level of maturity reached by him. It wants to convince the reader that all his attempts for love are bound to fail, unless he tries most actively to develop his total personality, so as to achieve a productive orientation; that satisfaction in individual love cannot be attained without the capacity to love one’s neighbor, without true humility, courage, faith and discipline. In a culture in which these qualities are rare, the attainment of the capacity to love must remain a rare achievement.
Fromm considers our warped perception of love’s necessary yin-yang:
Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving, of one’s capacity to love. Hence the problem to them is how to be loved, how to be lovable.
[…]
People think that to love is simple, but that to find the right object to love — or to be loved by — is difficult. This attitude has several reasons rooted in the development of modern society. One reason is the great change which occurred in the twentieth century with respect to the choice of a “love object.”
Our fixation on the choice of “love object,” Fromm argues, has seeded a kind of “confusion between the initial experience of ‘falling’ in love, and the permanent state of being in love, or as we might better say, of ‘standing’ in love” — something Stendhal addressed more than a century earlier in his theory of love’s “crystallization.” Fromm considers the peril of mistaking the spark for the substance:
If two people who have been strangers, as all of us are, suddenly let the wall between them break down, and feel close, feel one, this moment of oneness is one of the most exhilarating, most exciting experiences in life. It is all the more wonderful and miraculous for persons who have been shut off, isolated, without love. This miracle of sudden intimacy is often facilitated if it is combined with, or initiated by, sexual attraction and consummation. However, this type of love is by its very nature not lasting. The two persons become well acquainted, their intimacy loses more and more its miraculous character, until their antagonism, their disappointments, their mutual boredom kill whatever is left of the initial excitement. Yet, in the beginning they do not know all this: in fact, they take the intensity of the infatuation, this being “crazy” about each other, for proof of the intensity of their love, while it may only prove the degree of their preceding loneliness.
[…]
There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet, which fails so regularly, as love.
The only way to abate this track record of failure, Fromm argues, is to examine the underlying reasons for the disconnect between our beliefs about love and its actual machinery — which must include a recognition of love as an informed practice rather than an unmerited grace. Fromm writes:
The first step to take is to become aware that love is an art, just as living is an art; if we want to learn how to love we must proceed in the same way we have to proceed if we want to learn any other art, say music, painting, carpentry, or the art of medicine or engineering. What are the necessary steps in learning any art? The process of learning an art can be divided conveniently into two parts: one, the mastery of the theory; the other, the mastery of the practice. If I want to learn the art of medicine, I must first know the facts about the human body, and about various diseases. When I have all this theoretical knowledge, I am by no means competent in the art of medicine. I shall become a master in this art only after a great deal of practice, until eventually the results of my theoretical knowledge and the results of my practice are blended into one — my intuition, the essence of the mastery of any art. But, aside from learning the theory and practice, there is a third factor necessary to becoming a master in any art — the mastery of the art must be a matter of ultimate concern; there must be nothing else in the world more important than the art. This holds true for music, for medicine, for carpentry — and for love. And, maybe, here lies the answer to the question of why people in our culture try so rarely to learn this art, in spite of their obvious failures: in spite of the deep-seated craving for love, almost everything else is considered to be more important than love: success, prestige, money, power — almost all our energy is used for the learning of how to achieve these aims, and almost none to learn the art of loving.
In the remainder of the enduringly excellent The Art of Loving, Fromm goes on to explore the misconceptions and cultural falsehoods keeping us from mastering this supreme human skill, outlining both its theory and its practice with extraordinary insight into the complexities of the human heart. Complement it with French philosopher Alain Badiou on why we fall and stay in love and Mary Oliver on love’s necessary madnesses, then explore more of Fromm’s visionary work on love not only as a romantic experience but as a social catalyst of collective sanity.
Source: https://mailchi.mp/themarginalian/erich-fromm-loving?e=c52af2887d |
|
|
John Lee Hooker – Bonnie Raitt. I’m In The Mood
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umIQalOkspA
|
|
|
|
