The Middle of Nothing

(scroll down for English text)

Een plattegrond van een huis. Mijn thuis. Ik droomde er van toen ik niet terug kon. Hoe ik de voordeur opendeed, van de hal naar de woonkamer liep, eerst de badkamer in en daarna de keuken. Koffie zette. Terug door de woonkamer naar de slaap- en werkkamer. Hoe ik de balkondeuren opende, naar de platanen en blauwe lucht keek, de hectiek van het centrum van Barcelona overzag.

Het was midden maart en de grenzen gingen één voor één dicht. Geen weg terug. Geen idee hoe lang het zou duren. “Je hebt geluk dat je daar vastzit” zeiden mijn vrienden. De stad, het land, zat op slot. Niemand mocht naar buiten tenzij het niet anders kon. En waarschijnlijk hadden ze gelijk, waarschijnlijk had ik geluk. Maar het maakte het verlangen niet minder.

In april en mei werd ik verwacht in CACiS, een centrum voor kunst en ecologie in Catalonië om een project af te maken waar ik een jaar eerder aan begonnen was (en waar deze blog mee begonnen is). Het was belangrijk om het in het voorjaar te doen, zaden en zaaien stonden centraal. Uitstel zou afstel betekenen. Of nog een heel jaar wachten op de volgende lente. Maart ging voorbij, april boodt weinig uitzicht en ik miste de zee en de pleinen en de zachte avonden, het leven dat zich buiten afspeelt, het menselijke tempo, de middeleeuwse stegen, de statige gebouwen, de bergen in de verte, omhelzingen in plaats van handdrukken, een taal die hard en zacht tegelijkertijd kan zijn.

Ik besloot een groeiende, ademende, bloeiende representatie van mijn thuis te maken. Een plattegrond gevormd door zaden die ik eigenlijk in Spanje zou gebruiken. Duizenden Cosmos Bipinnatus Daydreams, langzaam muren vormend, een ruimte creërend die niet alleen een accurate weergave van de dimensies van mijn woonplek is maar ook een metafoor voor de zoektocht naar een thuis, voor het ontheemd zijn, het onthecht zijn, het wachten op …..

Ik had me geen passender plek voor kunnen stellen dan het land van mijn vader’s vader’s vader, de plek waar mijn wortels liggen, een boerenbedrijf dat nog steeds in de familie is, melkveehouders die bewust produceren en een deel van hun grond hebben ingezaaid met wilde bloemen (www.mijnbloemenland.nl).

Toen ik er de tweede keer kwam om te kijken of de planten groeiden, zag ik dat het precies aan het einde van de regenboog was. Of aan het begin.

The groundplan of a house. My home. I dreamt about it when I couldn’t return. How I opened the frontdoor, walked from the entrance to the livingroom, first into the bathroom, then into the kitchen. How I made coffee, walked back through the living room to my bedroom which is also my workspace. How I opened the balcony doors, observed the plane trees and the blue sky while overlooking the lively centre of Barcelona.

It was the middle of March and the borders in Europe were closing one after the other. There was no way back. I didn’t know how long it would last. “You are lucky you are stuck there, in the Netherlands” my friends told me. The city where I normally spent time with them was in lock-down. Nobody was allowed to go outside unless you had a good reason. They were probably right, I was probably lucky. But it didn’t diminish my longing to be home.

In April and May I was expected at CACiS, a centre for contemporary art and sustainability in Catalonia, to finish a project I had started a year earlier (and for which I started writing this blog). It was important to be there in spring, I had to work with and sow seeds. Postponing would mean cancelling everything. Or wait another year for the next spring. March passed, April didn’t offer any solutions, I missed the sea and the plaças and the soft evenings, the life that takes place outside, the human pace, the medieval streets, the elegant buildings, the mountains in the distance, embraces instead of handshakes, a language that is harsh and gentle at the same time.

I decided to create a growing, breathing, flowering representation of my home. A groundplan formed by the seeds I had planned to use in Spain. Thousands of Cosmos Bipinnatus Daydreams, slowly forming walls, creating a space that wouldn’t only be an accurate representation of the dimensions of my living space but also a metaphor for longing, looking for a home, being displaced, detached, uprooted, in waiting of …..

I couldn’t have imagined a more suitable location than my father’s father’s father’s land, where my roots are, a farm that is still run by people who are related to me, we share the same name, the same forefathers. Dairy farmers, producing in a conscious way, caring about diversity and sustainability, part of their land has been used to grow wild flowers, bees and other insects thrive there (www.mijnbloemenland.nl).

The second time I was there to check if the seeds had sprouted, I noticed that is was at the end of a rainbow. Or at the beginning.

(this text was published in Dark Mountain Issue 17 about Restauration and Renewal)

In June 2019 I was invited to spend a month at CACiS, a center for contemporary art and sustainability in Catalonia, Spain, to research and start a working process inspired by the thinking of natural farmer and philosopher Masanobu Fukuoka.

Daydreams for Masanobu Fukuoka

“There is no big or small on the earth,
no fast or slow in the blue sky.”

A week had passed. I hadn’t done anything. I sat on the roof of the historical building taking in the views. I followed the river. I wandered around in the forest. I discovered where the bees make their honey. I listened to the frogs, at their loudest just after the evening had fallen. I observed insects, watched birds and bats fly, sat inside the old round limestone ovens, all three of them, looking down at the bottom at the plants growing, the stones not moving, the snails sleeping. Looking up, at the sky transformed into a blue circle, clouds passing, casting shadows.

I had come here with a lot of plans but the first day I let go of them. They would come back if they would make sense here. In the next weeks or next year or somewhere in the far future. Like seeds carried in the wind. Landing and sprouting, growing and flowering, or simply vanishing. But even when disappearing, they still become part of the soil and nurture it.

Doing nothing isn’t as easy as it sounds. And it doesn’t really mean doing nothing. You only do nothing when you are dead. Until then, at least you breath. Your blood flows through your veins. Your hair grows. You shed your skin. You see, you hear, you smell. You think. You dream. You empty your mind and you fill it up again. You make space. And when the space is there, things happen.

One of my favourite lines from the book The One-Straw Revolution is “the best planning is no planning.” It doesn’t mean to just sit back and refrain from taking any action. It means creating the right conditions for things to come into being. For the world to unfold. The writer, Masanobu Fukuoka, was a farmer who was trained as a microbiologist and plant pathologist. He worked at the Agricultural Customs Office in Yokohama, enjoying his laboratory work, until at the age of 25 a life changing experience made him decide to abandon science and city life, return to his father’s farm and work with nature in a different way. Mr. Fukuoka’s way was to let nature decide what was the right thing to do instead of trying to control it and intervene. The first thing he did when he returned to the land he grew up at was to stop pruning the citrus trees. The year after, most of the trees died but instead of seeing it as a failure, he realised he had learned something important. If trees or plants have been controlled by people you can’t just abandon them and expect them to thrive. He realised it would take more than he had realised. More time and observation. By coincidence he discovered some rice plants in an old field which had been unused and unplowed for a long time. In-between the grasses and weeds he noticed healthy rice seedlings. The “normal” way to grow rice is to plough the land in early spring, then sow the seeds and flood the fields. It is a lot of work. Farmers have been growing rice like that for centuries so of course people started to think there was no other way. But he decided to stop flooding his rice fields, he planted a specific mix of weeds to keep others down and allow the rice he would sow in autumn - when it would naturally fall to the ground - to grow through. This also made it possible to grow a different crop in autumn. The straw of the winter grain could be left on the fields, being perfect mulch for the rice and the rice straw was perfect mulch for the winter grain. It made perfect sense and it was far less labour intensive.
His yields were big. Not in the beginning, when his efforts - or staying away from specific efforts - failed, which he always embraced because he had learned something new, he had learned what not to do. And as time passed, he could compete with even the most productive farms in Japan. Still his neighbours looked at him with suspicion. I guess people always do when you do things differently.

After a week I took action. I started collecting the seeds from as many plants as possible. I tried to identify them as well but sometimes it was hard. I knew that the amount of different plant species on even a square meter can be vast but just sitting down on the ground and looking at all the different plants around my feet, big ones, small ones, tiny ones, bedazzled me. The reason for wanting to name them, to make a list, was not entirely clear to me, “just in case” I thought. But in case of what? In case I had to proof that I indeed collected 100, 200, 500 different kinds of seeds? To proof the great variety present here? And proof it to whom?
One day I worked on a different plan. It involved walking a shape in the meadow in front of the limestone ovens. It was important that the amount of steps that were needed to walk it again and again was exact, so I took my tape measure and marked the corner points with some big rocks in order to know where I had to turn. When it was all set and I turned around and let my gaze wander over the landscape, the dog was there suddenly, Trufa. One of her favourite pass times was to pick up rocks and carry them around. She had one in her mouth and wanted to play. I looked at the parkour I had set up, saw that a stone was missing, cursed, took it from her, measured again, put it back where it should be but in the meantime Trufa had taken another one already and this continued for a while until I gave up and took her for a walk, or she took me for a walk. When we reached the river, she dropped the rock. We looked at our shadows in the moving water. At the frogs leaping. The tiny larvae swimming. The dragonflies mating.

Mr. Fukuoka wrote “I do not particularly like the word “work.” Human beings are the only animals who have to work, and I think this is the most ridiculous thing in the world. Other animals make their livings by living, but people work like crazy, thinking that they have to in order to stay alive. The bigger the job, the greater the challenge, the more wonderful they think it is. It would be good to give up that way of thinking and live an easy, comfortable live with plenty of free time. I think that the way animals live in the tropics, stepping outside in the morning and evening to see if there is something to eat, and taking a long nap in the afternoon, must be a wonderful life.”

Although Natural Farming is also called “Do-nothing farming”, it doesn’t mean one can just sit back and relax. It means questioning yourself. It means thinking about what not to do. It means staying away from chemicals, fertilisers, even compost. To do as little as possible with a maximum result so there is a good supply of healthy food and time to enjoy life. In the Japanese countryside you can still find poems written by farmers on old walls and stone bridges but in modern agriculture there is hardly any time for a farmer to make music or read a book. It is not any different in the Western world.
In Mr. Fukuoka’s orchards, trees grew alongside vegetables and weeds. He would randomly spread different seeds around, not thinking about what was the best place for each seed to develop into a plant but thinking, knowing, that nature would know best what would grow where. To grow on a bigger scale, rice, barley, vegetables, he made clay seed balls. The seeds were protected by a layer of clay so animals wouldn’t eat them and nutrients were added. It was an old technique he revived and after using it successfully for a while he started dreaming about ways to regreen the desert using this technique. The clay balls should contain seeds of more than one hundred varieties, trees, fruit trees, shrubs, vegetables, grains, useful fungi, and could be broadcasted from airplanes to revegetate large areas.

After his book The One-Straw Revolution became an instant success he started to travel the world to talk with farmers, policy makers and politicians about sustainable farming methods and fighting desertification. He carried his art supplies everywhere he went during his travels. He sometimes drew to explain his philosophies, always combining them with words and poetry, Japanese symbols that look like drawings in themselves. Usually they depicted anonymous people as representatives of mankind but once, at an international permaculture conference where the main event was a talk by Bill Mollison, the father of permaculture, Wes Jackson, the founder of the Land Institute in Kansas and himself, a talk that was meant to find common ground from three distinctive viewpoints, in lack of words he drew the three of them. A picture of Don Quixote’s donkey with a blind Bill and a deaf Wes riding backwards while he himself was hanging desperately from the donkey’s swishing tail. Three Don Quixotes, trying to return to nature, trying to stop the donkey from rushing wildly toward the brink of disaster. When the audience asked what was going to happen he drew President Reagan sitting comfortably on the donkey’s back facing frontward, dangling a carrot in front of the donkey’s nose.
He didn’t believe in religious practises, meditation, yoga, required reading. He didn’t believe in books even, not even in his own. “Actually, I think people would be better off without words altogether” he wrote in one of them. He didn’t see any purpose in modern science, apart from showing how small human knowledge really is. His daily farming was his spiritual practise. He considered nature as sacred. As impossible to understand. But the key to it all was not trying to understand it. Just be in it. Be it. Not a lot of people are capable of doing that. According to him, only people “who have the mind and heart of a child”. The ones lacking the obstruction blocks of desire, philosophy, religion. Sensitive people.

Daytime I kept collecting seeds. I made ink from oak galls and plant parts. At night I watched the stars. Although I had a comfortable apartment, I sometimes slept in one of the restored dry stone wall huts in one of the neighbouring fields. Those huts, still existing everywhere in the Catalan countryside, were built when people started clearing the land in order to use it to grow crops. The big stones in the soil were turned into simple structures, being used afterwards by farmers and shepherds. These days they aren’t in use anymore, they are only a reminder of life in past centuries. You get a glimpse of it when you wake up inside in the middle of the night in complete darkness, embraced by the same old stones as those farmers and shepherds were kept safe and dry by.
In the stone quarry behind the limestone ovens, once the place where big rocks were extracted to be turned into calcium, now plants where growing sparsely. The ground was dry. It was one of my favourite places. I felt at home there, sitting on a rock in the middle of the open space or high up on the wall to catch the last rays of sunlight in the early evening. I started walking lines in the middle of the quarry. Squares. The exact ground plan of my apartment in the city where I lived, Barcelona, 75 kilometers away. I walked it again and again, my steps formed lines in the hard soil, I walked it 100 times a day sometimes, not thinking too much. In the back of my head the first principle of Natural Farming: no cultivation, that is, no plowing or turning of the soil because the earth knows best itself how to stay in good shape. Plant and tree roots penetrate the soil. Microorganisms and animals work on it in their own ways. Sometimes I wondered if what I was doing was in line with the first principle. I thought that if I would walk the same path again and again, the soil would open up and be a less hostile environment for the seeds I was planning to sow. Cosmos Bipinnatus Daydream seeds. I imagined them growing side to side in the lines I had walked so in a few months walls made out of flowers would copy the stone walls of my city apartment and you could walk from room to room here in the same way as you could in my other home. But was I disturbing the soil by my actions or was I just an artist doing what an artist does? Like a worm does what a worm does? Was I overthinking after all? “In the West we believe that there is some permanent identity inside of us. This sense of self is most closely associated with our mental process - our rational, analytical faculties. That is summed up in Descartes’ celebrated “I think, therefore I am”, sometimes translated as “I am thinking, therefore I exist.” But it is precisely this assumption that alienates us from the world.” I switched off my thinking and continued in my own way. I walk, therefore I am.

When I finally finished walking and distributed the seeds it was the end of June and temperatures were high, close to 40 degrees. I waited for a day when an evening storm was forecasted so the seeds would have a little bit of help. I sowed them in the morning but I hadn’t taken the ants into account. When I came back to the corner where I had started dropping the seeds I saw a long line of them, following the lines I had walked, all carrying a seed in their front legs, on their way to their nest that was situated right in the middle of what represented my bedroom.

I stored the seeds I had been collecting from all the different plants growing in the CACiS area in paper boxes so they could dry and be turned into seed balls after winter, adding water from the river and clay from the river banks and then spread them in vacant lots in cities, every single clay ball containing the full potential of the beauty and serenity of the place where I had been daydreaming for a month. Then I walked home, through mountains and villages, 75 kilometers, following winding roads, sleeping under the open sky, leaving a trail of Cosmos Daydream seeds. When walking, time doesn’t exist. Not if you don’t have to be somewhere at a certain time. First it slows down and then it disappears all together. Mr. Fukuoka believed that time is only what is present, an ever-changing continuum of the present moment with the past and the future embedded within it. One of the reasons why Natural Farming hasn’t been applied more widespread is because it is a slow process. It asks for a leap of faith. And since it is hard to do it on a big scale, it can only have a big impact when many people not only believe in it but put it into practise as well. It seems that the idea to regenerate dry areas by distributing clay seed balls by planes has been embraced, although not to the extent that it makes a big enough difference. Yet. In Asia it is happening and experiments are being done with drones as well. You could question whether this is a proper way to reconnect with nature but it is no different from what Mr. Fukuoka concluded after his fruit trees died when he stopped pruning them. Before you can recreate the proper balance that has been destroyed by human beings, you might have to use the products of their intelligence, the ones that might not be in line with your philosophy but will help to not need them anymore in the long run.

When I came home in the city four days later I wondered if my research had brought me any further. If I had produced anything useful. If I had managed to understand Mr. Fukuoka a bit better or if I had just tried to force some of his ways of working into an artistic approach. When November approached I thought about retracing my steps to see if any Daydreams had grown and flowered. I was pretty convinced they hadn’t. I had sown them during the one but hottest week of the year and in the months afterwards there had hardly been any rain. Maybe if I would have put them in a layer of clay ….. but then they would have been too heavy to carry. I postponed walking back, I told myself I didn’t have time and I would see no result anyway. But one morning, when the days were already getting cold and the first Christmas lights appeared in the city, I just packed my bag and headed out.

It is strange to walk back in your own footsteps. When you start encountering your own old self, you also wonder if your old self encountered your future self. If so, they must be on that road continuously, passing each other every moment. I can’t be 100% sure that none of the Daydreams flowered because once I started walking my eyes wandered off all the time. I looked at the beautiful yellow of the Ginkgo trees, the fake flowers in the enormous cemetery, the deep red of the soil higher up in the mountains, the clouds covering the valley in the morning. I realised one of my dreams had been to walk back and I wouldn’t have done that if I hadn’t left the trail.

Just as in Natural Farming the ultimate goal isn’t the growing of crops “but the cultivation and perfection of human beings”, in making art the goal shouldn’t be to produce the best or as many art works as possible. The goal is the same. You could say though that the benefit of being a farmer is that you have something to eat at the end of the day. That you don’t have to break your head over what to produce. But that is too easy.
Many years ago after my wanderings had led me to Sweden where I lived and worked for a while in the forest with some modern pioneers and where I found the One-Straw Revolution in the house they had built from tree trunks and insulated with moss, I started corresponding with Larry Korn, who lived and worked with Mr. Fukuoka on his farm. He had translated The One-Straw Revolution and brought it to America. Sometimes I wrote him that I was tired of trying to be an artist and dreamt about moving to a piece of land and grow vegetables. But whenever I did that he told me you don’t have to farm to be a natural farmer. There are many ways to sow seeds and be a co-conspirator in the One-Straw Revolution. In the last chapter of his book about Masanobu Fukuoka he writes “The one-straw revolution is about remembering who we are so we can live freely, joyously, and responsible in the world.”

I thought about this on my walk back. I thought about the importance of remembering. When we want to restore, regenerate, repair, return, we have to remember. We have to remember like a child does, like people who are part of nature, like the indigenous people Mr. Fukuoka referred to on numerous occasions. We have forgotten this. We have even become so separated from nature that more and more people are starting to wonder if there shouldn’t be a new word for it. For nature as most of us experience it these days. But maybe it is better to try to remember what nature really is. What our nature really is. And that it doesn’t really matter what we do, in the sense of what we do professionally. What matters is who we are. When we remember this, when we construct our lives according to this, we will get somewhere. The beginning is also the end. The end is also the beginning. And in the middle you can go in both directions. You don’t have to choose. You just have to remember where you came from and where you want to go.

All quotes by Masanobu Fukuoka unless mentioned otherwise. Sources:
Masanobu Fukuoka: The One-Straw Revolution & Sowing Seeds in the Desert
Larry Korn: The One-Straw Revolutionary
CACiS: http://www.elforndelacalc.cat, my blog there: https://themiddleofnothing.blogspot.com