Dark Cloud Country - The Four Relationships of Regeneration
Dark Cloud Country Reviews
“If there were a poet laureate of holistic management, his name would be Daniel Griffith.”
-Allan Savory, author of Holistic Management and Co-Founder of the Savory Institute.
“Dark Cloud Country is a short book that reads like a long one. Carefully we must walk through Griffith’s words to find the nourishment our souls require. Dark Cloud Country is written in a language that digs through the innermost being, like a sacred encounter—the kind your keep closed somewhere special in your heart. Griffith’s words are a great call, a nudge, a whisper, and a tap on the should for all of us to remember the essence of regeneration: a beautiful story.”
-Precious Phiri, Co-Founder of IGuguTrust, African Coordinator for Regeneration International, and Accredited Professional in Holistic Management and educator and farmer in Hwange Community, Zimbabwe.
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From Next Generation Book awardee Daniel Firth Griffith erupts a groundbreaking collection about the WILDING of the regenerative agriculture movement.
Part mystical stories and poems where trees talk and briars walk, part lyrical studies of mathematics and art, Dark Cloud Country is a pioneering portrait of the WILD in and around us.
In Dark Cloud Country, Griffith debuts a new paradigm for WILDING-what he calls the Four Relationships: chaos, bounds, art, and singularity. Instead of offering us regenerative practices, Griffith's Four Relationships invites us to open our minds to transform the way we think so that our community with Mother Earth becomes elevated from dominance to reciprocity-a journey that begins by dropping your shears and opening your ears; one that begins by taking off your shoes. Here, in the sacred and reawakening heart of the wild, a love story of Creation emerges and a mythology centered around the singularity of spirit and matter, of the human heart and the heart of the world, transforms our once drought-stricken dirt into rain-stained magnificence. "Regeneration, if it is about anything at all, is about getting off your bum and dancing until the rains come," writes Griffith.
"If you relish poetic writing, if you are in awe of existence ever in the process of creating, and if you delight in beauty, mystery, and wonder, you will dance with Daniel through the four relationships of regeneration--chaos, bounds, art, and singularity--as Dark Cloud Country delights your mind and dazzle your spirit."
-Fred Provenza, author of Nourishment: What Animals Can Teach Us about Rediscovering Our Nutritional Wisdom and Professor Emeritus Dept. Wildland Resources, Utah State University.
“If there were a poet laureate of holistic management, his name would be Daniel Griffith.”
-Allan Savory, author of Holistic Management and Co-Founder of the Savory Institute.
“Dark Cloud Country is a short book that reads like a long one. Carefully we must walk through Griffith’s words to find the nourishment our souls require. Dark Cloud Country is written in a language that digs through the innermost being, like a sacred encounter—the kind your keep closed somewhere special in your heart. Griffith’s words are a great call, a nudge, a whisper, and a tap on the should for all of us to remember the essence of regeneration: a beautiful story.”
-Precious Phiri, Co-Founder of IGuguTrust, African Coordinator for Regeneration International, and Accredited Professional in Holistic Management and educator and farmer in Hwange Community, Zimbabwe.
“Daniel captivates us and stirs our souls through the four relationships of regeneration. I finished the book yearning for more but realizing that I could find more simply by embracing life!”
- Gabe Brown, Author of Dirt to Soil, Regenerative Rancher, & Founding Partner of Understanding Ag and the Soil Health Academy.
“We could say that wilding—poet essayist Daniel Griffith's more mundane professional occupation—is a mystical way to interact with the land: not to see earth as separate, yielding produce only when forced through labour, but earth as a creative whole, an unfathomable totality which requires that everyone and everything (including the gardener) makes themselves edible in order to partake in the bounty of growth and fruit. With Dark Cloud Country, Griffith has written prose that equals the wild itself—an entangled whole that is ever growing and only yielding fruit if the reader lets go of their illusion of being able to control its aliveness.”
-Andreas Weber, biologist, philosopher, and author of The Biology of Wonder and Matter and Desire.
“Griffith’s Dark Cloud Country isn’t your typical how-to save the planet guide. Instead, it proposes an antidote to the way we live our lives as individuals. Dark Cloud Country is a thought provoking challenge of the stories we tell ourselves. Open up and let Griffith’s words flow through you. You might be surprised what you find.”
- Anthony Gustin DC, MS, founder of Zero Acre Farms, Perfect Keto & Equip Foods. He is the host of The Natural State Podcast and author of the best-selling Keto Answers.
“An impassioned celebration of life in all its complex wonderment.”
- James Canton, author of The Oak Papers and Grounded.
“An eco-poet and philosopher, Griffith’s ecstatic imaginings and lyrical prose don’t just live on the page, they pulse in the body, calling us back into right relationship with our beautiful and ever-bewitching home planet. Myth and rumination, physics and ritual, soil and soul all converge, here, to give voice to the magnificence of life. Reading Dark Cloud Country is like watching a murmuration of starlings. The mind swerves. Dives. Rises. It travels to surprising places. The heart too.”
- Mary Reynolds Thompson, author of Reclaiming the Wild Soul and A Wild Soul Woman.
"Dark Cloud Country is a magical, artful meditation on what it means to be human in the here-and-now: a salve to the excruciating buzzing of a civilization composting around us. It’s a request to sit still and listen to all that circumambulates us through all timelines. It is a love-letter to lineage, togetherness, and all magic that can be gleaned from rootedness and relationship. It is a song for the death that unites us all."
- Maren Morgan, Writer, Filmmaker, Podcaster & Co-creator of Death in The Garden.
“Daniel Griffith's incantations don't attempt to merely teach, discover, or inspire; instead, he invites us to remember ourselves in an intimate dance with creation. Griffith guides our departure from the noisy shores of theory to a quiet stillness—a place where we perceive an ancient melody rise and begin to dance again. At once familiar and confronting, Dark Cloud Country is a deep well of wisdom whose waters I will no doubt draw from for many years to come.”
—David Leon
Co-Founder and Executive Director of Farmer’s Footprint
“Reading Daniel's writing reminds me that our teachers come in all forms. For him, in Dark Cloud Country, it is the oaks, the soil, the sunlight, the numbers, the language, the ancestral stories, and of course community. And for me, Daniel is a teacher, or perhaps a translator. Maybe both. Reading his writing, I feel my heart and mind opening up with a wonder and hope that I have not felt so completely since childhood. He brings us into the moment with him as we explore a pasture, a forest, a tree.
Amongst the hope and wonder, there is a sadness in this lesson for me. I discovered that somewhere in my higher education at an agricultural university, I lost my way. I was taught to dread calculus by my pre veterinary science peers (Daniel celebrates it). I was taught to control nature, to focus on yield, efficiency and financial profit. And most importantly--to never be a farmer. Slowly and lovingly, Daniel is deconstructing this disconnection for me (and others who read his work). Daniel's writing is vital to changing the way we perceive and thus behave toward each other and the natural world. If we do not stop completely, deconstruct, wonder and wander as Daniel teaches us, I fear the regenerative movement will become captured by the industrial model, and through reduction to a set of practices, scaled and replicated. And lost.
It is on this narrow path between hope and sadness, between chaos and order, that Daniel leads us. The forest, with its life/death/life cycle, and its community is there, he teaches, if only we can learn to see it.”
- Abbey Kingdon-Smith, Savory Global Network Coordinator/Savory Institute; Holder at UVE, the Savory Hub serving the Pacific Intermountain Region of the USA.
“Dark Cloud Country is a beautiful dive into the subject of regeneration from ecological, spiritual, scientific, and philosophical perspectives. In lyrical, meditative prose, Griffith invites readers to expand their understanding of regenerative living and thinking.”
- Stephanie Anderson, author of One Size Fits None: A Farm Girl’s Search for the Promise of Regenerative Agriculture.
“Like a brilliant mind wandering amidst beautiful chaos, Griffith explores the depths of regeneration through an outcry for observation, of ourselves first and our surroundings second. Dark Cloud Country is a necessary and beautiful wayfinding expedition to get lost in our musings toward a definition of what Regeneration actually means—it is an invitation to love, to choose, and to do better. This is a work that starts in Griffith’s words and concludes deep within our hearts.”
- Julie Jackson, Co-Founder of Taurio.
“Dark Cloud Country reminds us that landscapes, homelands, and communities, are not merely spaces to hold our invaluable quest for awe, beauty, love. They also are vessels for our despair, hardship, loss, grief. With all those emotions embodied, space becomes place and place is protagonist. Daniel’s words, which he encourages us to voice on our own through reading the text, melds with so many before us, creating the relationships necessary for regeneration.”
- Andrea Malmberg, A caretaker of livestock who help her to heal land. Savory Institute Master Field Professional & Ecological Outcome Master Verifier.
“In the beginning, it was Daniel’s voice echoing in my head when I followed the lines. But then, gradually, it became mine. The more I read it out loud, the more it resonated within me and resonated with my voice. The jump between story, poem, and lyrical prose broke my flow and I was startled into a deep awareness. I often had to pause to look out of my window to practice my own observations. The more I read, the less notes I took. The more I just am—sitting with the words ringing in my head. Griffith’s Dark Cloud Country make it clear—it is art we lack, not science; poems, not progress.”
- Leon Bucher, HUB Lead of Landregeneration, Germany.
