A vision for our year 2021
Author: Evelin Rosenfeld
Author Evelin Rosenfeld shares her vision for the unusual year 2021, in which people can rediscover self-reliance, personal responsibility and simplicity as they open themselves to the abundance and connectedness of life. She speaks from her own experience, as she lives these qualities herself in her permaculture garden. There sustainable management and the health of people and nature go hand in hand.
THE FIRST SUNRAYS
I’ve just emerged from the cool mists of a February morning. When the moon was still high in the western sky, I had gone out, into Aditi, my beloved land.
More than four years have passed since I gave everything I had and was into this place. I virtually merged with this small mountain on the Bavarian-Thuringian border, and as one we grew up.
Quietly the ash trees whispered to me earlier, embraced me with their loving presence. The first blackbirds stirred, rabbits rustled in the bushes. The mist dissolved in millions of dewdrops that it scattered over the meadow. The breath of the morning and the approaching spring brought us into the day.
As I sat down at the fireplace, thus nourished, and the view swept far across the rolling countryside, many images came to mind.
Never would I have dreamed, as an academic and well-trained achiever, that a politically effective and economically viable life could have so much to do with dust, sweat and heavy hand tools.
Admittedly, in the times when I advised political institutions and companies, I had always emphasized how central the – mental! – intention of a project of any kind.
It is not goals that drive us forward according to conditioned decals, out of the unsatisfactory present, into a future state of results, that are the conditions for a successful enterprise.
And certainly not fear – of any future developments.
THE SELF-HEALING POWERS OF CONNECTEDNESS
I leave the fireplace and walk over to the herb garden.
Quietly they lie there, the permaculture beds of hyssop and sage, coneflower and all the treasures that native nature provides us as food and healing.
I will never forget creating the microspaces for this herbal manufactory with the first hundred dog roses. It was the extreme drought year of 2018, and dreams had asked me to give space and attention to traditional medicinal herbs. In the heart of Aditi. By hand – without machines, fertilizers, pesticides and capital.
Instead, with endless joy in the thousands and thousands of germinating little herbs, countless hours on my knees planting the young plants, exhilarating sunsets watering the awakening garden.
It was incredibly tedious. And it was incredibly healing.
My hot-headed intellect calmed, my body, drained by urban restlessness, regenerated, my life had blossomed into a new, deep connectedness.
Within a year – a year in which the usual fruits withered in the fields and the German forests lost most of their spruce stock – (s)he healed a neglected, overgrown piece of meadow and brought forth a blooming garden of radiant medicinal herbs. But that wasn’t all: in July of that year, I surprised myself by buying a huge, antique copper still. I remember how we waited for hours with a much too small camping stove for the 100 liters of water in the still to finally boil. But soon it became a sacred act, a perfect celebration of the harvest. To bring my hand-collected herbs to the still, light the fire and witness the alchemical process that in this archaic way brings the soul, the healing power of the plant, to its highest potency.
THE VISION OF CIRCLE AND ECONOMY
Those who still have problems with money or believe that it takes a lot of capital to be self-sufficient, have not yet understood the principle of abundance.
Abundance arises IN us, from our love for things and for life. From the dreams we bring forth from within ourselves and pursue with given means. From the courage to simply go for it.
And not by the fact that someone who supposedly has more gives us something.
This does not mean that gifts from other people do not matter. I have been endlessly given gifts along the way. Just thinking about how countless friends and clients (!) came to help renovate the house! Or the seller who made it possible for me to simply pay the “chunk of money” that was missing at the beginning later. Interest free and without security. These are the kind of gifts that life and our fellow human beings give us every day!!! And it’s so sad when we don’t see that or value it low.
And yet and also:
The going, the tackling, the deciding comes from one’s own inner fullness and is ready to deal with what is there.
This is the beginning of fullness – and also of self-determination.
Self-determination and personal responsibility are also the basis of a healthy, sustainable economy.
If you need credit to get started, it’s better to leave it alone. Interest transactions – that is, earning money without working – are the real origin of the massive economic. And thus also ecological imbalance in our world today.
FIGHTING SYMPTOMS
The garden teaches us that all necessary and integrable resources are already there. That the “art” of human intervention is to arrange these resources in a meaningful way. And to keep them in a natural flow balance.
This is the principle of permaculture, on which my small farm Wild Natural Spirit is also based. As little as possible that does not come from the site is brought in (seeds, plant food, packaging, fuels, etc.). Rather, the grass clippings in the protected meadow are the fertilizer for the beds in the herb garden. Collapsed trees remain, in part, as dead wood in the forest. They’re feeding the soil dwellers and providing rich, nutrient-rich soil. And the excess is built up into Benjes hedges where even more insects and destroyers are invited to improve the soil.
A system that flows in a balanced cycle is stable and stays healthy.
This is also what I try to convey to people who seek one of the plant distillates for a particular skin disease or other defined “symptom” and come to me for advice: It is never a matter of fighting symptoms. Whether they are overflowing state apparatuses, mutated viruses, high unemployment, dysfunctional family systems or physical disorders.
About the author
Evelin Rosenfeld studied biochemistry and then business administration. In her early 30s, she left her previous life plan as a corporate strategist for an energy provider and spent many years in seclusion in the jungle for months at a time. In 2003, coinciding with her first book publication, she began accompanying people and organizations in transformations. Since 2016, she has been living on a 5.5 hectare nature property in Upper Franconia, where she lives her vision and grows medicinal herbs in permaculture and without the use of machines, and processes them as part of her company Wild Natural Spirit.
This article appeared originally on the German Homepage of Tattva Viveka: Morgendämmerung
