The season has been unusually hot for late spring and rainy, so lettuce has been growing rapidly, filling our refrigerator and rows at the produce auction. Arugula and Spinach have bolted, flowered and begun to set seed, which I will gather for next year once the plant has died. Mushrooms have been growing, providing the basis for soups and omelets. Using dead leaves from last fall, I have covered some of the area between the rows in our garden, acting as a weed barrier, a fertilizer and a way to retain moisture.

The produce auction itself has been active, but with unpredictable results. Our first auction for the club saw above-market prices for strawberries and asparagus and our buyer—an experience and crafty bidder—made the difficult decision to walk away with nothing, cancel the delivery for that night, and to add a later auction to our schedule. Following that, I went to a sparsely attended auction with an abundance of early crops and bought many strawberries for less than half the price at the market. It was the luck of the draw, and I know that I would have not been as wise as the buyer who walked away empty handed, but left our season’s budget in good shape.

Watching the woods, buying produce at the auction, natural gardening and harvesting wild crops like mushrooms has given me first-hand experience with how nature adapts to death. When I first began to sit in the woods and watch, I noticed how woodpeckers used dead limbs and trees as homes. I also saw that trees and other plants were constantly making the soil more fertile for future lives. As leaves and limbs fell and trees died and fell to the Earth, the work of their lives left a legacy that would make the ground more fertile for the generations that would follow them. Their lives were more than sustainable—they actually enhanced the future for their offspring.

I also saw that life came from death, creating an afterlife that was unpredictable but important. Mushrooms grew on dead wood, turning the death of trees into opportunities to grow new life and to help the process of enriching the soil. The trees themselves did not magically reincarnate from their own rotting carcasses, but rather sacrificed their physical bodies in death to provide nutrition to bugs, mushrooms, and other life living off their death. In turn, these entities would turn the rotting corpse of the tree into richer, more fertile soil from which new lives—including perhaps the grandchildren or great-great-grandchildren of the trees would flourish. I learned more from the wisdom of trees and of the Earth than any human teacher, and my human teachers have been brilliant lights.

As I grow older, I consider more and more my own legacy and what I can do to provide a better future for my family and community. This includes attending financial seminars by money-chasers who help me plan an economic future for me and my family. In a recent seminar, a money-chaser listed a series of economic challenges and approaches to life, ending with leaving a legacy after death. A virtue of money-chasers is that many consider what impact they want to have on the children, their community, and the larger world after they pass on; a failure of many money-chasers is that they only consider their economic impact, or seek to control others with that wealth.

A challenge for many sensitive people, such as artists and activists, is that we are often so burdened by seeking to live in a human culture that is at odds with our inner selves that we do not consider our impact and legacy on those we love the most—our children, our dear friends, and our community. We may spend many hours and a lot of what wealth we have to make the larger world a better place, to take part in consciousness-raising events, to protest the hardness of the money-chaser-violent-man-puritan culture that runs the larger human world, and to help make the ecological future better.

A sensitive person will suffer at the thought of the harm that money-chasers and violent-men do to the larger human world, with rampant pollution, the perpetuation of traditional hatreds and injustice, and the oppression of innocents. A money-chaser will complain that many sensitive people live only for today economically and do not consider our legacy in economic terms. In my own case, I would never have considered the economic impact I would have on my family and community had I not developed schizophrenia and retrained in computer work to get off disability. I would have pursued a much less materialistic life, especially had I not joined with my wife and her family. The middle ground of responsible economic living has much to learn from money-chasers and activists and sensitive people.

As part of my work with our food club, I attended a meeting that featured solar enterprise entrepreneurs and activists, who are seeking to find that middle ground. The keynote speaker was a woman who had, with her husband, started a solar business, helped create a green energy credit union and an investment organization to help fund and foster renewable energy. The merger of economic and ecological insight was inspiring, especially compared to the bitter greed of some of the money-chasers I work with, who both seek wealth in the vain attempt to find happiness and are miserable in living lives out of touch with the spiritual values of affirming life, family and community.

I sincerely believe that while these money-chasing puritan violent-men consciously believe that they are pursuing a life blessed by their deity, that their bitterness comes from unconsciously knowing that by doing harm to attain wealth they cannot “buy happiness.” For all their hard work, their happiness can only last as long as their purchases and attainments can salve their inner pain. Unless they can escape their materialistic, money-first mindset, they will never know peace, bliss or lasting happiness.

It is not easy to face the difficulty that lies ahead, or to try to find a balance between the greed of money-chasers and the economic poverty of activists and sensitive people. In my own case, being forced to find some compromises between the two extremes has been a very fortunate gift I received in the aftermath of my psychosis. However, that balance—essentially how we can care for ourselves and our families and communities while enriching the future of the Earth and future generations—is the essence of the challenge of our historical moment. For the answer, I always feel that turning to the Earth’s wisdom of life adapting to death is the deepest, most potent source of insight.