When words become seeds

(image: seed ball made during a Natural Farming course)

Each seed ball is a universe.
Nature is doing the design itself.

Soil is my entry into the cosmos.
I’ve been madly in love with it all my life.

Observation is the heart of the whole thing.

We have to create this natural farm inside of us.

Through language people knew he had been in rustic places.
He took his embarrassment along with him.

It sounded too incredible.

Take human decision making completely out of the picture.

Grow for fun.

Natural farming is like dancing.

We have to turn this ship around. (= the modern world).

Gradually you will become a natural farm.

In nature there is no good or bad.

Sunlight is stored in the soil.

Ploughing destroys civilisations and the planet.

We can’t understand soil but we can become it.

People can never understand nature.

We have no touchstone of truth.

In our language the frame of reverence of “me” is overall present, we use ‘I’ excessively. We say “I hear church bells" where in Japanese it is only “churchbells”, only the phenomenon is mentioned.

If we generalise we have a focus on reality. (Remo)

Natural farming is about becoming one with everything.

Fukuoka hoped that we would return to the present. His was a methodless method.

The breath is the line that connects to life. (Remo)

How can you obtain action through non-action? (Remo)

Time is a kind of cage.
To be strict is a violence towards life.
(Remo)

Machines are useless for beings that are not in a hurry.

Nobody tells the tree how to grow.

One person can’t change the world but one person can change himself.

Fukuoka was trying to find his way to his known truth.

We can only embrace the old when we call it new. (M)

There is no question without an answer.

Nature has laws and principles.

Life is an illusion I like to be part of.

You don’t have a clear predisposed idea, you start, you experiment, you play and then you let what you are creating speak to you. (M)


(The above are all words I wrote down in my notebook during a course about Natural Farming by Larry Korn, all quotes are words spoken by Larry during the course -unless stated otherwise- but some might be quotes coming straight from Masanobu Fukuoka. Below are some quotes from Masanobu Fukuoka's books)


He saw time as an uninterrupted moment of the present with past and future embedded in it.

Actually, I think people would be better off without words alltogether.

I danced in the beauty of nature as I travelled.

Perhaps the people who most easily perceive that nature is sacred are a few religious people, artists of great sensitivity and children. With their compassion they often perceive, at the very least, that nature is something beyond human intervention and that it should be reverred.

When people try to grow crops using human knowledge, they will never be anything more than farmers. If they can look at things with an empty mind as a child does, then, through the crops and their own labor, they will be able to gaze into the entire universe.

(Quotes above from: Sowing seeds in the desert)


The best planning is no planning.

Humanity knows nothing at all. There is no intrinsic value in anything, and every action is a futile, meaningless effort.

Nature does not change, although the way of viewing nature invariably changes from age to age.

The irony is that science has served only to show how small human knowledge is.

There is no time in modern agriculture for a farmer to write a poem or compose a song.

Just to live here and now - this is the true basis of human life.

People nowadays eat with their minds, not with their bodies.

Within one thing lie all things, but if all things are brought together not one thing can arise ... A person can analyze and investigate a butterfly as far as he likes, but he cannot make a butterfly.

If I push myself to write something, the only thing to write is that writing is useless. It is very perplexing.

All someone has to do to know nature is to realize that he does not really know anything, that he is unable to know anything .... If he does not try to think about knowing, if he does not care about understanding, the time will come when he will understand.

The more people do, the more society develops, the more problems arise.

There is no east or west. The sun comes up in the east, sets in the west, but this is merely an astronomical observation. Knowing that you do not understand either east or west is closer to the truth. The fact is, no one knows where the sun comes from.

Originally, human beings had no purpose. Now, dreaming up some purpose or other, they struggle away trying to find the meaning of life. It is a one-man wrestling match. There is no purpose one has to think about, or go out in search of. You would do well to ask the children whether or not a life without purpose is meaningless.

The fact that people who think a drop of water is simple or that a rock is fixed and inert are happy, ignorant fools, and the scientists who know that the drop of water is a great universe and the rock is an active world of elementary particles streaming about like rockets, are clever fools. Looked at simply, this world is real and at hand. Seen as complex, the world becomes frighteningly abstract and distant. The scientists who rejoiced when rocks were brought back from the moon have less grasp of the moon than the children who sing out, "How old are you, Mr. Moon?"

(Quotes above from: The One-Straw Revolution)