Plukrijp Newsletter – 2023 week 17

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Plukrijp.be vzw – Zetel: Trommelstraat 24 – B 2223 Schriek
RPR Mechelen – O.N. 0553.553.660 – www.plukrijp.be

Upside-down the good newsletter

2023 – week 17

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:

We filled more small pots with compost and sowed a new series of pumpkins, cucumbers, corn, melons and pickles.

We reorganized and cleaned up the greenhouse. We removed the extra layer of plastic that gave our seedlings double protection so that the peas we planted in the middle of the central bed could continue to grow.

We filled the paths of the greenhouse with the hay we received this week from a neighbor. Thank you Pole for this precious gift!

We weeded open tunnel 3 where very nice spinach is already growing.

We bent the many large plastics we used to cover some places to let the grass die so we could plant flowers there.

We want to experiment with more flowers in the garden because we believe that the vegetable/flower combination is ideal to support the natural balance in the garden. It creates also more beauty and this directly gives a feeling of harmony.

We continued the sorting out of the workshop. What is still of good quality and that we have too much will be offered to projects similar to ours.

We cleaned out all the closed tunnels, removing all the plants that had already gone to seed, and discovered with wonder the many new small plants that are already there.

We repaired some more europallettes.

We continue little by little to do the big cleaning on the farm by eliminating what is damaged or which can no longer serve us.

In a desire to complete the repair work on the gutters at the back of the family home, we are moving (and sorting out at the same time) all the many tiles that are patiently waiting for a destination.

Jojo made street music in Antwerp with some friends.

Inspiring Videos

A’ida Shibli on ‘Gaining Realistic Hope’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04xJYHPqmp4

I find myself again and again in places where I am chanllenged to grow to the next phase of love and despite what I did undergo as a child, as a teenager, I feel that there is a huge amount of Love inside of me that did not get corrupted by all these means of oppression.

“I was born as an Undiscovered treasure,
so I created the conditioned conditions to be discovered”

– Rumi

Crisis As A Turning Point: The Gift Of Liminal Time |
Jean Shinoda Bolen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9u3JZPCW9Dw

All crises, whether big or small have one thing in common: what was is no longer. During a crisis, you can’t go back to what was, and you don’t know what’s coming next. Learn what to do when in this in-between space with Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D., a psychiatrist, Jungian analyst, and an internationally known author and speaker.

Inspiring Poetry

Start close in,

don’t take the second step

or the third,

start with the first

thing

close in,

the step

you don’t want to take.

Start with

the ground

you know,

the pale ground

beneath your feet,

your own

way of starting

the conversation.

Start with your own

question,

give up on other

people’s questions,

don’t let them

smother something

simple.

To find

another’s voice,

your own voice,

wait until

that voice

becomes a

private ear

listening

to another.

Start right now

take a small step

you can call your own

don’t follow

someone else’s

heroics, be humble

and focused,

start close in,

don’t mistake

that other

for your own.

Start close in,

don’t take

the second step

or the third,

start with the first

thing

close in,

the step

you don’t want to take.

– David Whyte

Inspiring Book

The Same Ax, Twice by Howard Mansfield

An old farmer boasts that he has used the same ax his whole life — he’s only had to replace the handle three times and the head twice. In an eclectic, insightful meditation on the powerful impulse to preserve and restore, Howard Mansfield explores the myriad ways in which we attempt to reconnect with and recover the past — to use the same ax twice.

Mansfield’s In the Memory House (hailed as a “wise and beautiful book” by the New York Times) explored the complex interconnections of memory and place, showing how the loss of a sense of place in our ever more mobile society has profoundly impoverished our collective memory. Now he tracks our need to reconnect with place and memory. Moving easily between meditative reflection and compelling insights, he offers lively journalistic descriptions of some of the extraordinary people who are imaginatively, lovingly, sometimes obsessively, realizing their own visions of the restorative impulse.

Mansfield himself is deeply engaged in the search for restoration. He travels with Civil War reenactors to help recreate the Battle of Antietam; he enrolls in auctioneer school to observe the endless recycling of artifacts, and he compares this process to the sterile preservation of these same objects in displays and museums; he tours 18th-century houses that have been variously restored to their “original” condition or stripped to their essence; he observes the ever-ongoing work of preserving the USS Constitution, “Old Ironsides,” a ship that has been replaced over the years board by board.

The act of restoration, Mansfield concludes, whether it’s rebuilding antique engines or reviving the village model of community organization, must contain an element of renewal. Rejecting the sentimentality of nostalgia and the superficiality of commercial appropriation, Mansfield argues for an understanding of restoration that is concerned as much with the future as it is with the past, that preserves and communicates a spirit as well as a form.

Wisdom

Four questions to find your life purpose:

What motivates me deeply?

Where do I feel really engaged and creative?

What’s essential in my life?

Which values do I see as deep values in my life?

– Thomas Hübl

Life’s purpose

The ultimate purpose is your soul developemnt. How it learns its lessons, how it manifests its gift through you. The drive force is doing it just for the love of doing it without expectation of a reward. Without need for attention or fear of how people think about it.

– Bernhard Guenther

Inspiring Text

How To Measure Your Progress by Bernhard Guenther

Regardless of what is occurring in one’s outer life, the TRUE measure of how developed one’s soul is and how integrated and embodied we are, is mirrored to us by how we REACT to ORDINARY everyday circumstances.

It shows itself by our emotional reactions (or numbness/suppression) and how easily we get triggered and thus blame others and external conditions or project our unconscious shadow on others – or we shut down, avoid and try to hide from life and the world, getting stuck in our comfort zone.

The point of esoteric, spiritual, psychological, and somatic work is not about eliminating challenges (even though they might be alleviated to some degree), but rather how we change, transmute and transform by facing life and reality directly; becoming more objective with ourselves and the world and face any challenge with full self-responsibility.

This is also the gateway to real Love. Childish and immature love is conditional and demands attention and validation from others. If it doesn’t get what it wants, it blames others for it, or it blames itself for not “being good enough,” getting stuck in self-pity, poor-me, shame, self-importance, entitlement, and narcissism.

Mature love is unconditional, takes self-responsibility, and loves even if it doesn’t get what it wants or prefers. We all have the immature child within us, acting out at various times.

If we can spot it, it’s a chance to heal this wounded child, which can also relate to past life trauma and not necessarily related to your current childhood in your present lifetime.

It’s important for this child to experience, express, and feel repressed emotions of sadness, fear, anger, abandonment, shame, etc. without projecting it externally.

This process needs to happen somatically — through the body. You cannot think yourself through it as this only results in more self-deception. The intellectual recognition of your “issues” is not enough and is only the very beginning of a much deeper emotional and somatic inner process.

In fact, your intellect can fool you that you are doing “self-work” but you can waste many years just intellectualizing the process. Moreover, there is only so much self-work you can do just by yourself.

Therefore, you can gauge your own progress change by witnessing changes in your reactions to the troubles and difficulties you face as well. Life keeps going onwards and keeps expanding, handing us challenges according to the law of ascent and descent, lessons that are different for each of us.

It’s part of choosing this 3D experience of duality and essentially not getting attached to either “positive” or “negative” experiences, going beyond hope and fear, attachment and grasping, pleasure and pain.

The more you are embodied and integrated on a soul level, the more these challenges in life will no longer have the power to throw you off, upset you, make you stressed out, fearful, worried, etc., and the better you are able to process what comes up in the moment.

Godspeed.

Bernhard Guenther