John & Bella’s Story

John
In 2007 I resolved to do something about this illusion of powerlessness. I hooked up with Lee Hirsch (Amandla) and other filmmaking friends and we started a political PAC called Local Voices. We raised a million dollars and went to swing states and made political ads that helped get Obama elected. We made a difference, won Pollie Awards and thought the job was done – Obama would save us! Less than four years later, I had this rude awakening that politics is not the place to look for change. Change had to come from people who had the commitment and the resources to ‘live the change we hope to see’.

It became my priority to use what knowledge and resources I had to explore further this botany of desire to seek solutions. Since then, I have been studying everything from the history of homo-sapiens to systems thinking and science about natural systems. I met Cameron Miller in our six-month design course with Larry and Elijah Santoyo of the Permaculture Academy, and we have been working together ever since. We connect on many levels including music. He brings this encyclopedic mind, makes magic in the garden and has a sharp skill with writing.

I have been blessed with a beautiful and creative wife and partner. Bella has always had her apothecary for our kids and anybody in our orbit who needed a remedy. When she decided to expand her knowledge, she met Jessica Perez in a plant medicine course.

Bella
I met Jessica at the Gaia School of Healing in an apprenticeship led by Marysia Miernowska, in Topanga Canyon. Jessica spoke with such power and grace that after graduation I asked her if we could continue together this discovery of healing with plants. We are blessed to be working together on this project. She knows how to get stuff done, thanks to 15 years of administration with Parks and Rec, and yet she works intuitively with plants.

I used to work organizing the cultural affairs for the French film festival and producing films and making things happen like that but I was running low on purpose and courage. I needed healing time. Most of us are depleted with… too much to do, too little time, too much power, too little brain and again and again… as the Fred Frith song goes.

That year of weekends in Topanga was spent learning some botany, and while I was training in how to give body and mind the care of simple nourishing herbs, I was connecting with the spirit of plants. I could not have predicted that I would learn to talk to a tree and get a response. So yes, I’d say it was the plants that brought us all together.

John
When I met Cameron, he was working as a writer and actor for film production. Like me, he had become disenchanted with the entertainment industry, seeing that it primarily perpetuates an obsolete story of our world. I think the Permaculture Design Course was the tipping point toward his interest in plants and engaging in change. We’ve all come together around the nonprofit project we call the BirdHouse. Which is just our local expression of this global movement of people compelled to build a more beautiful world.

I see people everywhere, even in the most unlikely places, moving into a wakeup phase, coming to our senses, literally. That is to say, bridging the gap from the need for everything to be fully proven out by science, to be accepting of our ‘sense of things’, telling us let’s stop doing what doesn’t feel right, just to make a living, and try doing what we love in a way that does feel right.

Bella
The work of “bridging the gap” can be overwhelming which is why we must remember to care for each other in the process, with time in gardens, with healing teas, and of course singing and building friendships. Arts and Ecology go hand in hand in supporting us in this effort to regenerate each other and the land.

John
Once we started being public about our endeavor we met the prodigious Janet Sager-Knott, a consultant to major LA-based architects. She had ‘conscious consultant’ on her business card! She was on a mission to bring this kind of mindfulness to architects. We became great friends and she remains a co-creator of the BirdHouse with her expertise in everything from governance to long view thinking.

Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?

John
No, it has not been a smooth road. But I wouldn’t expect it to be when I consider the real adversaries to be comfort and convenience. My pursuit of comfort is what gets me into trouble at every turn. These are the addictions of modern man. We rarely question our notion that comfort is some kind of birthright to be attained at any expense. When you look at our biggest problems you see they are mostly caused by technological shortcuts in pursuit of conveniences. Then it is just a cascade of problems caused by trying to fix the previous fix. You see the same pattern in medicine, agriculture and politics.

Bella
For a long time there was a kind of existential parallel at the BirdHouse. There was all this construction going on, digging up sewer lines, building garden walls and grey water systems. All the ‘visible structures’ were under construction. Meanwhile the team was deep digging to build up a set of values, mission, and vision, the ‘invisible structures’ that we could all stand behind. It has been a rewarding challenge to clarify what we are up to and what we’re not.

John
I’d say, one of my greatest challenges is how to live outside our global economic systems that are based on endless growth. It is so difficult to find a niche that isn’t contributing to the destructive systems that are the prerequisite to a modern life. I take the challenge seriously. Even if you are motivated as I am, there are very few models for how to live an urban life without pushing the natural systems into collapse. Our food systems for example are one place where we can take things into our own hands by tending to the soil wherever you can find it and growing food and medicinal herbs. But we all have to make it up as we go, keep it small and share the ideas and lessons we come up with.

Bella
That’s why I’m so glad we are meeting so many great people with similar ambitions, like the folks of Moon Water Farms down in Compton. We are on the same tracks in so many ways, and it’s good to share the challenge and the inspiration and the lessons learned along the way. And to know we’re not alone.

John
That’s exciting how community is found. When you need each other, that’s when the rubber hits the road.

Bella
Yes, but even if people are committed to change they still need to pay their rent. So they don’t have time to get too deeply involved, even if they’d love to work in the garden or make things happen. The real challenge is how to invent for ourselves a new story celebrating our connection to each other and the natural world while transitioning out of the old model.

John
We have a line in a song Bella and I wrote for our community choir, the Band of Singers, inspired by something said by Baba Dioum, a Senegalese conservationist.

In the end we protect only what we love.
We love only what we understand.
And we understand only the stories that we’re told.

Our challenge is to break away from this story of separation we’ve been told. Separation from each other, and the natural world making us feel isolated and powerless in a world of diminishing resources.

Bella
The natural world itself is an abundant and giving place that feeds the world when treated with understanding and protection.

John
To paraphrase something Martin Prechtel said that will motivate our next season of Band of Singers:
“Grief is praise for what we love, that we have lost.
Praise is grief for what we love, that we have not yet lost.”

He’s talking about caring for something so much that you long for it while you are still in its presence. That’s what we mean by be-longing. As we learn to name the unspoken sense of loss for people, places, species, languages and the wisdom they held, we can better love and protect what we could lose. Learning how to love and protect people and places is what motivates the Band of Singers songs and stories.

Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about The BirdHouse – what should we know?

John
We say that the BirdHouse is part think-tank and arts lab, part urban greening experiment and sustainable land use model, all cooperatively designed to address the question: What does it take to live a life that the planet Earth now demands? This inquiry finds its way into various activities and projects we host here in the Hollywood Hills, like workshops in permaculture, food preservation, plant medicine, singing, and storytelling.

Bella
We also engage the kids at our local elementary school in “garden immersions” . They come for field trips, organized by our sister organization, The Hollywood Orchard. We train them to recognize plants and we demonstrate regenerative practices. Like people, when you know their name you tend to care for plants more than if you don’t.

John
It wouldn’t be right to talk about what we are doing as a business because we’re not modeled to build wealth, or to grow, or to produce a product per se. Unless you think of ‘know-how’ as wealth, and even then we are trying to share it, not sell it. Larry Santoyo, the head of the Permaculture Academy has a saying, ‘don’t try to be rich, try to be useful.’ I’d say that is the currency of our times. And yet our organization strives to have longevity and to be self-sustaining, which doesn’t mean ‘making it on our own’. We thrive on participation and the gifts that circulate.

Bella
One of the strongest magnets of the BirdHouse is the Band of Singers, which is a non-traditional choir led by our musical director, the amazing singer-songwriter Maesa Pullman. Each ten weeks session starts with a theme and participants can either participate in the writing or simply come to sing. We workshop the theme using storytelling and song to inspire biophilia – the love of life and living things.

John
There is always a component of eco-literacy where we illustrate some aspect of the web of life. For the last two seasons, we’ve workshopped “The Song of the Tree Shepherd” based on a novel by Jean Giono, the Man Who Planted Trees. Cameron presented how we can transform a barren land into a nourishing forest by explaining how the Earth’s hydrological cycle is affected by trees.