Gathering Roots

"Gathering roots holds up a mirror between the map in the earth and the map of our minds." Robin Wall Kimmerer "Braiding Sweetgrass" Permaculture Design is about landscape shaping programs and projects with nutritional goals and ethical/aesthetic WinWin cooperative processes. In Apache, the verbal label for land also means mind. To design landscapes for healthy polycultural progress is also to mindscape for wealthy polypathic process. PermaCulture Land/MindScaping, like Positive Health Psychology, is not restricted to external roots of nutrition, although these are our internal root Elders. Forest root systems are largely planted through cooperative self-governance. But, when Designers plant roots we usually feed and water those we are most invested in, and sometimes those with greater internal needs than others, harvesting their combined effects, affects, resonance and dissonance, and culling the most regenerative for replanting to continue evolving next year's deep diverse rooting system of cooperative associations, mature foresting networks. So too, our sensory-neural mindbody root systems we appositionally and oppositionally plant and grow in reverse tree hierarchies of co-subsidizing responsibility, co-responsiveness, resonance feeding and dissonance bleeding our cooperative and competitive roots most exegetically invested in each other to continue harvesting resonant and dissonant climate effects, affects, culling the most polypathic LeftYang deductive and most resonantly polyphonic RightYin inductive, dipolar co-arising future internal landscape progress through mindscaping process, cooperatively recreating WinWin enculturation of cooperative health norms, ethics, aesthetics optimizing ecopolitical wealth of lands and minds, avoiding dissonantly pathological WinLose landmines. It may help to see and explore parallels between interior and exterior root systems if we ease off on LeftBrain's more form-labeled static view of organic root nutritional networks and invest a bit more in RightBrain's ego/eco-functional view of root health purposes. How root systems act nurturingly naturally spiritually in Yin-matriarchal symbiosis with their Yang-patriarchal trunks and branches, both within concave Right and without convex Left quite so awfully dominant. Formed knowledge is to LeftBrain deducting roots as function-flowing wisdom is to RightBrain inducting roots, and breaths, and bilateral models of tree functions, adapting/adopting symbiotic acclimation networks of health-rooting systems.