Forces and flows - Permaculture Magazine

“We experience the sensuous world only by rendering ourselves vulnerable to that world. Sensory perception is this ongoing interweavement: the terrain enters into us only to the extent that we allow ourselves to be taken up within that terrain.”

David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology

I was lucky enough to spend 2025 working with 80-year-old UNESCO peace artist, author and land-energy worker Marko Pogačnik. He is best known for his ‘cosmograms’, a form of what he calls ‘Earth acupuncture’, in which beautiful designs and shapes are inscribed in stone or metal and placed at points on the land that he feels need rebalancing. These works, which can be found all over the world, are Pogačnik’s way of entering into dialogue with place. His most famous image, the coat of arms he designed following Slovene independence from Yugoslavia, appears on the Slovenian national flag.

Pogačnik’s understanding, shaped by a lifetime of working with the more subtle realms of the visible landscape, is that ‘Nature intelligence’ is a sentient force that can be worked with, and that humans know how to do this and are doing so all the time, whether we are conscious of it or not. He believes that it is time for us all to start developing a more subtle kind of perception so that we can work more closely, more collaboratively, with this invisible realm of Nature.

We need, he believes, to move beyond a purely rational way of perceiving the world that privileges what can be seen, measured and analysed. “We need to complement it with bodily and emotional sensitivity,” he says. What we experience as the five senses, he suggests, is only the outer part of reality. By attending to imagination and to the subtle feelings and vibrations in our body – particularly in the hands – perception can deepen, “allowing these feelings to develop within our consciousness as images, insights and understanding, so we can understand the powers at work in the background of life” … To read more download the full article below.