Plukrijp Newsletter – 2023 week 11

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Upside-down the good newsletter

2023 – week 11

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:

After coming together to express how we can support each other in the different tasks, we decided to join forces for the big job of preparing the big field at Hei for the new season. Together, we weeded, scratched, … and pruned the berries bushes.

We dug the paths between the long beds at Hei and put it on top of the beds. It is a method experimented by Frank which allows composting while keeping the paths clean. After digging, we filled them with straw to restart the same process.

On the high bed at Hei, we planted strawberries. In each hole we first added a little amount of pigeon manure to encourage them.

We scratched between the carrots in closed tunnel 1 and weeded once again the 3 closed tunnels.

We prepared the right sides of the open tunnels 4&5 and made lines. There we sowed beets of different colors with some radishes in between alternately with rows of onions. We covered the seeds with sawdust. This has two functions: it marks the lines and maintains an optimum humidity level for seed germination.

We did the same on the left side of open tunnel 2.

We planted onions in closed tunnel 3.

The red beets, kohlrabi and flowers we sowed at the end of February sprouted under the tunnel we built in the greenhouse. This double protection pays off!

Jojo built a little house on wheels so we could introduce two chickens in the food forest as a test. The goal is to see if they could scratch enough to keep the food forest weed free. After one week, we can already see the difference and we think of increasing their number.

We started watering the raised beds in the closed tunnels.

We put sawdust in the food forest

We continued the general cleaning on the farm.

Bram and Denis (who came to visit us from France) started to chip the large pile of branches coming from earlier tree pruning.

The greatest wealth in permaculture is the network. Thanks to the maintenance of our rich network, we were able to borrow the shredder (thanks Marc!) and a neighbor came with his heftruck to help load the Combination Woodworking machine onto the trailer (thanks Leon!).

Tom and his son Ilan gave us a basketball demo on an unicycle. What a show!

Three of Martine’s grandchildren shared our lives a lot this week. No risk of getting bored!

Inspiring Movie

The Lives of Others

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3_iLOp6IhM

The Lives of Others (German: Das Leben der Anderen, pronounced) is a 2006 German drama film written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck marking his feature film directorial debut. The plot is about the monitoring of East Berlin residents by agents of the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police.

Gerd Wiesler is an officer with the Stasi, the East German secret police. The film begins in 1984 when Wiesler attends a play written by Georg Dreyman, who is considered by many to be the ultimate example of the loyal citizen. Wiesler has a gut feeling that Dreyman can’t be as ideal as he seems, and believes surveillance is called for. The Minister of Culture agrees but only later does Wiesler learn that the Minister sees Dreyman as a rival and lusts after his partner Christa-Maria. The more time he spends listening in on them, the more he comes to care about them. The once rigid Stasi officer begins to intervene in their lives, in a positive way, protecting them whenever possible. Eventually, Wiesler’s activities catch up to him and while there is no proof of wrongdoing, he finds himself in menial jobs – until the unbelievable happens.

Inspiring Videos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSBWV0l6WOE

“I grow plants for many reasons: to please my eye or to please my soul, to challenge the elements or to challenge my patience, for novelty or for nostalgia, but mostly for the joy in seeing them grow.” ― David Hobson

There is something extremely satisfying about growing your own food. Knowing that you planted a tiny seed and with the help of the sun’s energy, you nurtured it into something that can feed your family.

And when an abundant harvest allows you to share with your neighbours, you have the chance to spread the love. Because love isn’t just a warm and fuzzy feeling – it is an action – it is the way we treat someone – the way that we share. And the deepest beauty of love is how it changes lives.

Chew over the prisoner’s dilemma and see

if you can find the rational path out

https://aeon.co/videos/chew-over-the-prisoners-dilemma-and-see-if-you-can-find-the-rational-path-out?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=0362ef0c88-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2023_02_15_11_56&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-0362ef0c88-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D

Prisoner’s dilemmas ponder what happens when two rational agents, unable to communicate with one another, must choose between betraying the other for a large individual reward or cooperating for a more modest shared reward. These thought experiments are accompanied by a caveat – if both agents betray one another, they’re left with nothing. One of the best-known examples of game theory, the implications of prisoner’s dilemmas are more than just theoretical, extending to real-life matters of government and diplomacy. Illustrated with whimsical felt stop-motion, this TED-Ed animation puzzles through two prisoner’s-dilemma scenarios in which gingerbread men are forced to chew over how to keep the maximum number of limbs.

Video by TED-Ed

Directors: Ivana Bošnjak, Thomas Johnson

Writer: Lucas Husted

Inspiring Book

Though much has changed in society since the first publication of the Way of the Superior Man, men of all ages still tussle with the challenges of women, work, and sexual desire. Including an all-new preface by author David Deida, this 20th-anniversary edition of the classic guide to male spirituality offers the next generation the opportunity to cultivate trust in the moment and put forth the best versions of themselves in an ever-changing world. In the Way of the Superior Man, Deida explores the most important issues in mens lives-from career and family to women and intimacy to love and spirituality-to offer a practical guidebook for living a masculine life of integrity, authenticity, and freedom. Join this Bestselling author and internationally renowned expert on sexual spirituality for straightforward advice, empowering skills, body practices, and more to help you realize a life of fulfillment, immediately and without compromise.

Wisdom

“Your innermost dominant thought
will become your outermost tangible reality.”

-John DeMartini

Inspiring Text

Many people are struggling and there are some heavy energies in the air as we enter a new big cycle during this Time of Transition.

We cannot spiritually bypass the necessary process of inner & outer purification for all that is hidden needs to come to light within ourselves and in the world.

In times like these, it’s important to zoom out and consider the bigger picture.

There is a divine plan that is playing itself out across the physical universe – an unfathomable interweaving of events and outcomes which our little egos (and our clever rational/logical minds) will never fully grasp.

There is also fate and destiny involved based on events and timelines that started eons ago through the span of lifetimes and over dimensions put into action via the immutable universal law of cause and effect.

Certain scenarios need to play themselves out – whether that be on a global scale or in relation to our own personal lives.

We shape our destiny by how we respond

to these “inputs” and “stimuli.”

Yet, the future is not set in stone.

Within this vast realm of cause and effect, of paradox and synchronicity, it is all about aligning oneself with Divine Will.

The gateway is the connection to Self, Essence, the true soul being deep within you as a transducer for Divine Will expressing uniquely through you based on your inherent talents and lessons specific to you. It’s the source of your creativity, power, and wisdom.

The neurotic and wounded ego likes to think that it is in control, but it needs to be purified to be a servant and instrument of the higher Will.

This is the destiny of ALL humans over many, many lifetimes until the soul is ripe enough to answer the call and engage in the Great Work consciously.

Godspeed.

Bernhard Guenther

Molded in the Furnace of the Divine

“Wherever thou seest a great end, be sure of a great beginning. Where a monstrous and painful destruction appals thy mind, console it with the certainty of a large and great creation. God is there not only in the still small voice, but in the fire and in the whirlwind.

The greater the destruction, the freer the chances of creation; but the destruction is often long, slow and oppressive, the creation tardy in its coming or interrupted in its triumph. The night returns again and again and the day lingers or seems even to have been a false dawning.

Despair not therefore, but watch and work. Those who hope violently, despair swiftly: neither hope nor fear, but be sure of God’s purpose and thy will to accomplish.

The hand of the divine Artist works often as if it were unsure of its genius and its material. It seems to touch and test and leave, to pick up and throw away and pick up again, to labour and fail and botch and repiece together.

Surprises and disappointments are the order of his work before all things are ready. What was selected, is cast away into the abyss of reprobation; what was rejected, becomes the corner-stone of a mighty edifice. But behind all this is the sure eye of a knowledge which surpasses our reason and the slow smile of an infinite ability.

God has all time before him and does not need to be always in a hurry. He is sure of his aim and success and cares not if he break his work a hundred times to bring it nearer perfection.

Patience is our first great necessary lesson, but not the dull slowness to move of the timid, the sceptical, the weary, the slothful, the unambitious or the weakling; a patience full of a calm and gathering strength which watches and prepares itself for the hour of swift great strokes, few but enough to change destiny.

Wherefore God hammers so fiercely at his world, tramples and kneads it like dough, casts it so often into the blood-bath and the red hell-heat of the furnace? Because humanity in the mass is still a hard, crude and vile ore which will not otherwise be smelted and shaped: as is his material, so is his method.

Let it help to transmute itself into nobler and purer metal, his ways with it will be gentler and sweeter, much loftier and fairer its uses. Wherefore he selected or made such a material, when he had all infinite possibility to choose from? Because of his divine Idea which saw before it not only beauty and sweetness and purity, but also force and will and greatness.

Despise not force, nor hate it for the ugliness of some of its faces, nor think that love only is God. All perfect perfection must have something in it of the stuff of the hero and even of the Titan. But the greatest force is born out of the greatest difficulty.”

– Sri Aurobindo (Integral Yoga)

Sri Aurobindo argues that Divine manifests as empirical reality through līlā, or Divine play. Instead of positing that the world we experience is an illusion (māyā), Aurobindo argues that world can evolve and become a new world with new species, far above the human species just as human species have evolved after the animal species. As such he argued that the end goal of spiritual practice could not merely be a liberation from the world into Samadhi but would also be that of descent of the Divine into the world in order to transform it into a Divine existence)