#regenerativefuture

I’m looking at the blinking black line on this white page trying to frame sentences in my head about the experience of working on a farm. Physically, I can feel the pain in my arms and legs, like the next day after a hit workout. It’s a sweet pain. It’s a pain that gives you satisfaction. People who go to the gym might relate; physically.

Here I am tucked away in this small town in a corner of the world, in silent Cilento. This summer I have had the privilege to cook with some remarkable produce, from this Mediterranean region. From fresh vegetables, cereals, and grains to seafood.  In these past 3 months, I have gone to the market to pick it up fresh on farmers’ day, I have directly come to the farm to pick up the produce kept aside for us. But I never woke up at 6 am to start milking the animals, feeding them, taking them to graze, and later, even witnessing cheese making from that morning milk. Walking under the high afternoon sun to hand pluck tomatoes, pumpkins, squash, aubergines, and bell peppers filling up crates of them. Those same crates that used to arrive in the kitchen receiving area. 

It is exactly like Alfredo the guy I was working with told me, “So now you completed the circle, you're full". Yes, I am. So full does my heart feel that I understand better the meaning of the word 'content’. It's not that feeling when you're very hungry and you've been given a full plate of food to fill your stomach, satisfactory was too meager a word to describe this feeling. It is that inexplicable feeling of happiness at the end of the day when you're washing away the sweat and dirt from your body, you then sit down to reflect on your day and all you feel is contentment.

As I plucked the last of the tomatoes and the aubergines of this season, I couldn’t help but think of a happier place to be. I was at the precipice of the next crop rotation. Finishing up the last harvest of the vegetables of this season, inspecting the newly sown seeds of the autumn-winter season: fennel, cauliflower, broccoli, and salad leaves- winter is all about those leafy greens and summer those bright-colored vegetables. I was in a new territory, food yes but a city-born and bought-up girl I knew nothing about farm life, but it felt like home, fitting in, from the farm animals to the mean machines on the farm.

When I started here three months back, I was on the verge of a probable breakdown. I had not stopped working, I was finishing my studies while working, then moving to another city, and going to India for a few weeks what I thought was a break turned out to be more stressful than it should have been. And I knew I had not slowed down for months at a stretch and it was really taking a toll on me. I never had worked like this before, I always made sure to take care of myself. I wanted to just stop and give up and go back home. But being here for these last 2 days has healed me. Physically I was working, I was on my feet from 6 am but mentally I couldn’t be in a more peaceful situation than this. I knew that Mother nature has its own way of regenerating you, but I thought you had to stay still, do absolutely nothing, relax, switch off from social media and sit with a book, but not really.

Regenerative agriculture is the most resilient way forward for the current climate crisis. Regenerative agriculture focuses on soil health and regeneration of the topsoil, letting that soil heal and improve, and getting ready to nurture the next crop. I was reading an article my friend recently shared about the need to regenerate ourselves, at first, it felt silly, like coming from a person who had the resources to take a break from work but, I was also reading 'Women who run with wolves' it talked about similar things and it started to make more sense. We, women, do need to regenerate ourselves like the soil to be able to receive more. But we are always running behind the next project and next client, forgetting ourselves and depriving our spirit. It is not easy to achieve all the things we want to, sometimes we need to change course. We neglect to hear the inner wolf voice that’s telling us to stop and realign our direction. We are nurturers and growers at the end of the day, this is our common connection with Mother Earth. I do envy Edmondo and the others for having this life every day, even though I understand it’s not an easy life for them.

For me, the last two days of work at the farm was the regeneration I needed. It put into perspective a few things for me, including an understanding of who I am. ‘Who are you without your work?’, is a necessary question you need to ask yourself. Grounded on that soil, on mother earth I understood the true meaning of what it meant to be content, joyful, caring, loving, sharing, kind, grateful, and humble.

Life is indeed a full circle.

Thank you to Luigia, Simona, and Edmondo Soffriti and to every single person at the La Petrosa farm for welcoming me and making me a part of your family and for teaching me and sharing your knowledge. I shall remain forever in debt to each of you. Thank you to Future Food Institute for making this happen.

As the world literally burns around us, we have to admit that we have brought ourselves to the brink of everything. The narratives, structures, and perceptual framings that we had assumed and accepted as the 'way things are' have fallen apart. We don’t yet have a credible, alternative, collective narrative that can help us to reimagine a new world – a more beautiful world our hearts know is possible. 

We are now residing in a place between stories – a liminal space filled with possibilities, potentials, and promise. We don’t yet know the exact outline of the New Story. But we can sense and feel the seeds; we know that the soil is being prepared; we recognize that we all have a part to play. It is up to each one of us to be heralds and emissaries of the new story – a story founded on us reclaiming our humanity, recognizing our interconnectedness, regaining our agency, authenticity, and wholeness.

The new story calls for a collective awakening, of making choices that will emanate from a shift in consciousness and impact every aspect of our existence – social, political, economics, ecological, and spiritual. It is no longer about individual preferences or even the choices of a handful of organizations. 

For this collective shift to happen, we must move from a Story of Separation to a Story of Interbeing.

Charles Eisenstein puts is beautifully when he says:

Befriending Uncertainty

To fully step into this liminal space of uncertainty-- embodying potential, possibilities, power-- and to become stewards of a new way of being on this planet, we must befriend and welcome the uncertain, the unknown, the ambiguous. Only by learning to dwell in this liminal space with gentle curiosity can we actualize the future that wants to emerge through us.

None of us have a map to this unknown world. I have tried to distill some core qualities we need to embark on this voyage as compass…

Every choice we make is a vote for the kind of world we wish to manifest!

Individual and collective choices intersect and intertwine to create the sociopolitical, economic and ecological realm we inhabit. Many of our choices are coming back to haunt us now—inadvertent and thoughtless choices that directly affect our ecosystem; biased choices that are now showing up as fault lines and cracks in our societies—from vanishing worker rights to crumbling healthcare, from disintegrating supply chains to starving millions—causing untold misery and deprivation for many; selfish choices that are now mockingly emphasizing our ineradicable and intricate interconnectedness and interbeing. 

Covid19 has effectively underscored all the fault lines of our current civilization—from appalling inequality to alarming political apathy to absolute disconnect from the reality of life. All the fissures and fractures of this fragmented world has converged under one umbrella triggered by an invisible virus. And the world has come to a juddering halt. Our choices have shrunk to maneuvering the mundane.

“We are our choices,” wrote Jean-Paul Sartre. We cannot abdicate the role our choices have played in bringing us to this moment of global reckoning in the form of a zoonotic virus. The signs of catastrophe have been all around us for the past few decades, with an exponential acceleration in calamities over the last few years from the Australian bushfires to the Amazon rainforest fires to the floods in Asia and other significant world events of 2019—all of which portend some sort of disaster—social, political, economic, and ecological. 

We’ve known for a long time that our civilizational trajectory was heading toward catastrophe. Yet, most of us have chosen to carry on with “business as usual” in spite of dire warnings from scientists about the untold suffering we are heaping upon our planet. Apparently, even the coronavirus pandemic had been predicted. 

Do we dare to befriend this uncertainty? Do we dare to dream of a different destiny? Will we use the pandemic as a portal to magnify all that is magnanimous within us? Is this our collective tryst with destiny moment? 

What behaviors do we need to demonstrate and embody to lead us into a regenerative future?  What narratives can we energize and envision to act as compasses in an unknown territory?  What old stories, patterns, and structures must we hospice to move toward a regenerative future?  What are the new stories, patterns, and structures we must midwife to step into a regenerative future?  How can we hold space for meaning-making, sensing, and emergence?  Above all, how do we “need to be” to stay with uncertainty, to welcome uncertainty?  What messages will this liminal space yield up, whisper to us if we have the nerve to step back, slow down, let go of our resistance, and care to listen deeply?

None of us have the answers. But if we live into the questions, I trust that the answers will emerge from our collective intentions and actions. We need to acknowledge uncertainty, dwell in the unknown, and hold space for ourselves and others as rapid and irrevocable change tears down every known bulwark and buttress.

Human beings are psychologically addicted to predictability. We prefer to be cushioned by the mundane ordinariness of life rather than dwell in the discomfort of the unknown. We will grab at any distraction to escape the awful, hollow, and helpless void of the unknown. 

With the onset of the pandemic, our routes of distraction have been snatched away without any promise of return. What we have been offered instead are revelations into the fault lines and inequalities in our societies we would rather not see; exposures to the absurd and ludicrous ineptness of governance that leave us stupefied; and experiences of the creaking and collapsing public infrastructures that are woefully inadequate in meeting the demands of the moment. And the exposure to the brutal and unimaginable divide between the top 1% and the bottom 50% of the world’s population. 

The virus has laid bare the pervasive brokenness we had papered over for far too long in their shameful, pitiful, and burning details. Our privilege is no longer our refuge. Our privilege now bestows on us a grave responsibility. A grave responsibility to reclaim our humanity and all it entails—compassion, care, empathy, connection, justice, equality, and dignity for all. A responsibility to remove the viciousness of social pathologies where we have lost touch with our own humanity in the pursuit of power, profit, privilege, pleasure, and political perversions. It is our opportunity to heal ourselves and our only home.    

The concept of the pluriverse upends the self-proclaimed superiority and universalization of Western universality, embracing instead a world of multitudes and their myriad cosmologies and ontologies. It is in direct contradiction to the sterilized and homogenous narrative that seeks to iron out irregularities and inconsistencies to maintain a façade of universalism. 

A regenerative, thrivable future can only be constructed by holding sacred the vision of an abundantly diverse, interwoven, and interdependent universe. By remembering, reclaiming, and retrieving the lost stories from the fringes, by bringing back the “primitive” and the “folklore” because that is where the roots of integration lie. 

A regenerative future must needs be one where many worlds fit. Many worlds with their many ontologies. A pluriverse is constructed of embodied, partial, and situated knowledge, where playing the “god trick” has no place. 

In a 2015 Manifesto called Radical Tenderness, Dani d’Emilia and Daniel B. Chávez writes: “radical tenderness is to not collapse in the face of our contradictions… is to have peripheral vision; to believe in what cannot be seen.”

The words are hauntingly evocative, prophetic, and profound. The chaos and conflicts threatening us daily are overwhelming, and it is easy to sink into despair and a desperate yearning for some semblance of stability and certainty.

The pandemic, however, can be a portal towards a regenerative future inviting us to hospice what no longer works, and to midwife the new. If only we can “believe in what cannot be seen”.

For the full article: Reimagining a Regenerative Future-Part 1