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Upside-down the good newsletter

2023 – week 10

Upside down = instead of announcing what we plan to do
(& most often find out we do not need to do), we relate what we really did

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

This week @ Plukrijp

We did:

Thanks to the guidance of Wim, Tom’s brother, we were able to solve the problem of the gutters on the north side of the family house. Tom’s passion is water management and this intervention is part of a longer term plan to collect as much rainwater as possible which can be used to water the fields as well as for household use.

We sowed the right side of closed tunnel 1, in alternating lines according to the Gertrud Franck method, lettuce, parsley, watercress and coriander.

We sowed the back of the right side of closed tunnel 3 with New Zealand spinach so that it mixes with the Calendula flowers which will come back spontaneously.

We sowed in pots in the greenhouse salad and green&purple kohlrabi.

We scratched the ground between the endives (closed tunnel 3 on the left).

After the snow, we were surprised to see that the turnip/radish/mustard seeds had finally germinated. We never water in the closed tunnels (dry farming) when we sow early in the year so that the seeds can use their intelligence and wait for the right moment. This is one of the principles of permaculture: observing nature and supporting its natural rhythm.

Bram continued to reorganize the workshop and our Combination Woodworking machine found a new owner: a carpentry teacher who has been teaching young people with behavioral problems for 24 years in Borgerhout. He will use this machine for his hobby at home where he works in the same spirit as Plukrijp: not for the purpose of making money. We are very happy!

We have done the second phase of our Dragon Dreaming: the new house rules have been determined. We are almost ready to welcome visitors/volunteers.

Our chickens have finally decided to offer us a few good fresh eggs every day.

Bram added his books to the Plukrijp’s library. These are beautiful quality books that enrich our health, spirituality and sensuality sections. Jojo also offered a few new books in French with very diverse topics. A few little pearls to discover!

We cleaned the remains of the melon plants on the wire mesh located in the center of the closed tunnel 3.

Jojo and Rene participated in the Open Mic organized by Sander from CSA Ferm in Zemst. At Plukrijp with it’s open house policy, people are free to come&go. In a unpredictable meeting, these two musicians met & encourage each other to bring out the best of themselves through their crafts (Jojo’s songwriting & guitar playing, and Rene’s beautiful voice). Over the last few seasons, they have recorded and created a few songs together. Here is a taste: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNEjSgBUdis

We took the opportunity to go on a short outing with the whole group, including Pablo who was returning from his stay in Ecuador. Pablo has found a piece of land there where he wants to start a community according to Plukrijp’s model. He will join us regularly to get inspired and acquire the necessary knowledge & experience.

Inspiring Movie

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZ5sZpnNBVA

This beautiful film is the story of an ordinary man, reduced by years of oppressive office routine to a shadow existence, who at the eleventh hour makes a supreme effort to turn his dull life into something wonderful – into one he can say has been lived to the full.

Inspiring Video

The Coconut Revolution (2001)

A multi-award winning documentary.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Sl8KJDOqK4

This is an incredible modern-day story of a native peoples’ victory over Western globalization. Sick of seeing their environment ruined and their people exploited by the Panguna Mine, the Pacific island of Bougainville rose up against the giant mining corporation, Rio Tinto Zinc.

The newly formed Bougainville Revolutionary Army began fighting with bows and arrows and sticks and stones against a heavily armed adversary. In an attempt to put down the rebellion the Papua New Guinean Army swiftly established a gunboat blockade around the island. But with no shipments allowed in or out, how did new electricity networks spring up on the island? And how were the people of Bougainville able to drive around the island without any source of petrol or diesel?

Inspiring Link

They’re Just not Jaded by Charles Eisenstein

https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/theyre-just-not-jaded?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The story of economic growth over the last centuries is the story of a conversion on non-monetized forms of wealth—I call them natural, social, cultural, and spiritual capital—into monetized goods and services.

Natural capital refers to the wealth of the land, the soil, the water, and the living world. Its conversion transforms forests into board-feet of lumber, ecosystems into strip mines, earth into commodities, oceans into seafood production facilities, and ultimately, all of these into money.

Social capital refers to the practices and skills by which human beings care for one another. Its conversion transforms these into paid services: cooking, child care, entertainment, healing, communication, play, and many other functions are now things we purchase. A few generations ago, all were part of a social commons, carried out in informal systems of mutual aid, gift, and reciprocity within families or communities. Some call the process of their loss “deskilling.”

Cultural capital comprises music, literature, art, ideas, and everything else that has become intellectual property. Just as the original land commons was progressively enclosed into private holdings, so also is the cultural commons enclosed into separate fiefdoms separated by paywalls. Meanwhile, it has migrated from common currency into the hands of professionals and experts.

Spiritual capital refers to important human virtues and capacities like attention, humor, imagination, creativity, kindness, generosity, common sense, initiative, self-confidence, and trust. Their monetization is sometimes direct, as when the manufactured images of television and movies supplant the self-created images we call imagination, or when the fake adventures of video games supplant the self-discovery of challenging real limits. More usually though, it is indirect. Passive, depressed, alienated, lonely people are pliant consumers.

The conversion of natural, social, cultural, and spiritual capital into money is driven by economic forces so deep that they are rooted in the nature of money itself; money, that is, in its current incarnation as interest-bearing debt. Its design compels it ever to grow, and thus, the non=monetized commons ever to shrink.

Economists and politicians celebrate this process and call it economic growth. But in a deeper sense of the word, really it should be called economic conversion.

Inspiring Book

A. H. Almaas is the pen name of Hameed Ali, the Kuwaiti-born originator of the Diamond Approach, who has been guiding individuals and groups in the United States since 1976. Over time the teaching has found a home in Europe, Canada, Australia, and beyond.

In this book Almaas demonstrates that healthy ego development is part of the continuum of spiritual development. He also establishes the possibility of attaining inner realization and developing our essential being—”the pearl beyond price”—in the context of living a normal human life.

The work that you have in your hands is quite extraordinary in that it unfolds a comprehensive theory of personality grounded in a dimension of Being beyond our normal understandings of ego and identity. For here a knowledge of the spiritual path of transformation appears within, and is conjoined to, the modern context of western psychological process. Anyone with knowledge of the sacred psychologies at the heart of the world’s religious traditions will immediately recognize the significance of this major work by A. H. Almaas.

Our usual notion of “psychology” is being expanded through Almaas’ deeper spiritual perspective, namely, his understanding of the essential nature of the human being. This work is the first comprehensive account of the relationship of this dimension, the spiritual ground of the individual, to the empirical findings of developmental psychology. The structural theories of contemporary psychotherapy are reviewed and framed within this deeper context, and this gives us a whole new perspective in which to appreciate the value and limitations of the state of the art on contemporary psychology.

Wisdom

We’re often led to believe that getting older is in itself somehow a betrayal of our idealistic younger self, but sometimes it might be the other way around. Maybe the younger self finds it difficult to inhabit its true potential because it has no idea what that potential is. It is a kind of unformed thing running scared most of the time, frantically trying to build its sense of self in any way that it can. But then time and life come along, and smash that sense of self into a million pieces.

– Nick Cave

Inspiring Text

Illuminating our soul’s path with Thomas Hüebl

How do I balance my Soul’s Calling with my wordly needs and responsililities?

For many of us the Soul’s Calling is not going immediately to the cave. It starts to unfold in the life that we are living. When we make space for something new to emerge – what is called a Mystical Sacrifice – we allow more of our soul’s inspiration in our daily life.

Seen from the Mystical Dimension, there is nothing not spiritual. Some parts are very practical – some parts include money, how I’m with my family, how I’m in my job, how I’m with my intimate partner, how I’m a citizen in this society – and many things in this society may be difficult for me. But that’s the path. That’s not blocking the path.

When we start walking our path, we have ideas how it should look like. When we walk a little longer, we see everything that’s in our life is part of our path and of course overtime the more we listen to our core, the more we’ll make new decisions. It’s like slowly changing the course.

Some people go through crisis and it’s an instant course correction that was overdue already for a long time. We didn’t listen to the subtle whisper of our soul inside. Not because we are not adequate or because we can’t do it but because there are other things in our life that need to be explored.

Maybe whenever our Soul’s Calling comes up, fear comes up. Then we try to suppress it. We put evenmore pressure on ourselves that we are not following our Soul’s Calling instead of accepting that we are getting scared. That’s okay to be scared. We’ll give the attention that it needs to slowly transform that fear into more groundedness, more curiosity, more fluidity and flexibility in our life. That impulse shows us something in our own path or our ancestors or our collective path that we didn’t look at yet. It is not just delaying our life. This is our life. That’s how we embody more of our light in our life. We see more how to reunite our Wake life and our Practical life. We bring the wakefulness into our practical life.

When we do enough inner work, things loosen up. More new possibilities come into our life through the Law of Attraction. When energetically we grow inside also new things will meet us.

To break free with force in our life and just do what our Soul wants, is sometimes too radical and not inclusive of the parts of us that need to develop. Often that’s a way not to engage with the deeper parts of ourselves that actually need attention. In this light&dark story, we don’t want to deal with the unconscious parts of ourselves. We just want to be in the light and that perpetuates the same inner abandonment that we are struggeling with in the first place.

By including and taking with us is the embodied Spiritual Path that seems sometimes challenging, we are growing our wisdom. My Soul’s Path is not MY thing that I have to manage on my own. Actually my life purpose is a deeply relational thing with the world. Allowing it to be a relational and a wordly path is deep wisdom.

Life shows us every day what we have to look at. When we really look at them, we grow. We become more mature, more relational, more compassionate. We expand the radius of our impact and agency in life.

That’s how our Soul’s Path grows, including our financial commitments.