2002

Processes & Nature
Co-Creative Decade

Alasdair Coyne

Looking back through my notebooks, I see that it has been over ten years since I opened my first garden coning and set out on my journey of growth and expansion with the Perelandra toolbox.

In the Garden
I'm a professional organic gardener and a part-time environmental activist in Southern California, with a commitment to understand the neglected role of spirit in our culture. My work with the Perelandra processes is like a rock, an anchor, in a world that's changing so fast that it's hard to keep track, let alone keep up.

I spend much of my working day in a garden coning that I change as appropriate as I drive to a new work location. Keeping track of being in a coning, and with which plant devas, can be hard to do. When I'm weeding and trimming a wide variety of plants, I make a little pen mark on the knuckle of my forefinger that reminds me I'm in a coning. At the end of day, as I close out, I'll often ask to be disconnected from "any other plant or garden devas I may still be in touch with," just to make sure I haven't forgotten any.

My biggest hurdle has been getting used to living with some weeds and bugs in the garden. Organic gardeners (I've been one for over 25 years) do not poison bugs and weeds, but we're usually trained to eliminate them in a nontoxic fashion. I shudder now to think how many hundreds and hundreds of snails I've tossed away, joking that I was giving them flying lessons. With weeds, my turning point was when I came across a magnificent milkweed, five feet tall, full of flowers and seeds. It was radiating such incredible life force, such a presence, that I had to stop in my tracks and admire it, photograph it and let it be. This is not to say that I don't pull weeds — I certainly do — but rather that I no longer try to clear them all. The balance of a garden may need the energy and pattern of a particular weed in ways we don't understand.

I've described Perelandra balancing processes to several of my garden clients, who've given me the okay to use the processes on their property. When problems persist, for instance, a hungry gopher's annual visit to a prominent flower bed, I've concluded that what was needed was a triangulation balancing between the client and their gopher — although I havent yet asked a client if I could follow through with such a balancing!

Working with Others
I've integrated Perelandra processes into my life in a number of ways besides my personal balance and my gardening work. Back in 1995, I received a letter from a lady in Los Angeles who I'll call Elisabeth, who'd gotten my name from the Perelandra networking list. She suffered from chronic illness and thought she might need a Miasm Process. She had tried numerous alternative practitioners with no relief. Some of her aches and pains were in the arms and shoulders, making it impossible for her to use her hands for kinesiology testing herself. I said I'd try to help her (I've had a deal with myself that if anybody asks me for help with Perelandra processes, I'll willingly offer my time and assistance). Elisabeth came to my home, and I tested her incredible list of around thirty physical symptoms and ten non-physical ones, into 15 groups. Using the Miasm Process, we found that she had two miasms and I tested each until clear. On her next visit, nine of the 15 symptom groups showed improvement; she had also developed her own way of kinesiology testing without using her hands — she detected an energy lift in the neck, as representing a "yes." From then on, she felt able to take care of her own health and balance, though she did contact me a little later to say we hadn't completely cleared one of the two miasms on the first attempt.

Co-Creative Home Birth
When our son, Iain, was born at home in March 1999, his mom, Lauren, opened a MAP coning early in her labor. At 22 hours, it wasn't a short labor, nor was it pain-free. I tested her for essences 12 times in all. We had a wonderful midwife present, and when Iain's head emerged he just looked around the room; he didn't cry at all until he was separated from Lauren to be weighed and clothed.

Nature-Assisted Property Hunting
Lauren and I had been looking for undeveloped property in our area for several years; nothing we'd looked at seemed right. One day when out for a walk, a small bird kept landing on the dirt track in front of us and hopping around. It would fly ahead and land, hop-hopping until we got close. Eventually I thought to ask, "What are you trying to tell us?" The message that came to me was "The property will happen soon; and thanks for speaking up for spirit." Four months later, we found the beautiful one acre with 50 fruit trees where we're now building a small house. We first spent a whole day there on the Spring Equinox 2000. I looked for where the center of a circle garden might be, and felt a tingle up my spine at a particular spot. (These tingles I first noticed at sacred sites in the UK, where I grew up. Little did I then imagine that with a garden one can, with nature, co-create one's own sacred site — by which I mean a vortex of healing, balancing, creative energy.) Without telling Lauren where I'd noticed the tingle, I asked her to see if she could pick up where the location was — and she went to within two feet of where I'd stood. We opened escrow within two weeks! Needless to say, that spot is now the center of a circle garden.

Conservation and Co-Creative Partnership
One of our activities is the running of a watershed conservation group, within our local National Forest. The river is home to an endangered species of rainbow trout, which are preyed upon by several flourishing species of exotic fish as well as by non-native bullfrogs. Although we don't own the area in question (it's public land belonging to us all), I asked several years ago how we could balance these exotic species. The answer was, in part, that the river needs their tone, song and energy, right now, but that bringing them to balance would be good.

On the same river, we've led many hikes over the past decade to eradicate — by hand, no chemicals! — tamarisk, an invasive exotic that can completely choke a river. (The Grand Canyon is completely infested with tamarisk.) At the start of each hike, I open a coning with the deva of the area we're passing through and the deva of tamarisk, describing our intent and asking for safe passage. To my surprise, a few years back, the message came to me NOT to pull any tamarisk that year. After a few minutes I got used to that idea: a work trip with no work! But how to explain that to a crew of six or so friends, who were all here to pull tamarisk when we found it, over the next three days? As it turned out, there were very few tamarisk plants that year in the riverbed, partly due to heavy rains the previous winter which must have washed many away. Those that we did find were very small, which we knew from earlier trips would easily wash away in the following winter's rains. So we enjoyed a hike without an ecological mission, and the river had a respite from our tamarisk uprootings till next summer, thanks to nature's request.

Ladybug Lessons
Finally, some words from a ladybug at the beach covered in sand and salty water. We rinsed him off with drinking water and found a feather to knock the sand off with, but we worried he would be blown into the ocean again and drown. He told us, "Let me show you how to fly. We ladybugs do not look graceful in the sky like birds do, we just open our wings and the winds carry us. It matters not where; we are so many. Wherever we end up, there is life experience to be had. We know that many of us will lead short lives. To fly, you must open your wings and test them. The important thing is to fly." We carried him up the path away from the beach and he flew away.