It’s only logical that the first blog post traces the roots of Permaculture Design within my own personal biography. It involves facts, subjective views and also quite a bit of Introspection. A pinch of anamnesis too, for good measure.
Growing up, I remember setting my mind (or my body) on discovering certain things that intrigued me, spending enough time on the subject so that I can at least answer my own questions, and then moving on. My mother had always encouraged me to do so, so I felt validated in these quests.
From afar, these (young) life choices appear somewhat chaotic, and they probably are, since I was only obeying my own instincts; probably around the age of 16, I reached the plateau where Introspection was needed. I would usually achieve a decent level of success in my endeavours, so as to gratify my ego, but my friend Introspection would kick in and I’d start looking for logic between the last thing and the next-to-last things I had done.
So I started noticing these Patterns of Behaviour, as a Permaculture Designer would term these seemingly random acts of the free will. In certain cases, you’re comfortable with yourself, in others you discover that other people are not so much enamoured with yourself. When the time came to choose a professional life path, I chose with my heart, one could say. I chose the somewhat creative field of Theatre.
It was seen as one of the marvellous trades reserved for the Bourgeois, because back in the day, only that social class could actually afford to keep their offspring in such an ephemeral environment.
I was anything but a Bourgeois, and so was the case of my family, but try to tell that to an 18 year old …! I did it, obviously, but I hated almost every part of the process (the preparation, the hours spent on repeating certain things, pretending that “it’s truthful” and so forth.)
I really hated it, but this was one interesting life lesson: a voice inside kept telling me to keep going. Just like dogs are attracted to the spokes of a moving bicycle wheel as if their life depended on it, I kept on keeping on with theatre. I changed cities; I changed schools and also the friends that came with such an environment.
A few more changes later, I found a theatre method developed by Augusto Boal (The Theatre of the Opressed), that allowed me to have enough tools to assess myself and my own Patterns of Behaviour, and also to use it as a tool for work. While this work carried on for several years, both internally and externally, when I became comfortable enough with everything, I wanted to move on.
This time around, the changes were more profound as I was also changing fields of work; I had become older and my mother too. Validation came from her, as usual, but then life was so much more complex. There wasn’t just me to take into account, but also my family situation; so the motivation was to provide solutions to my problems, and for my family too.
I discovered Permaculture Design and decided to take a certified course, and while completing it I realised the deeper meaning of my quest. This time, it was no longer my Behaviour Patterns, nor just Human Behaviour Patterns in vitro; it was the Behaviour Patterns of Humans in Nature, and the Imprints we’ve left collectively, on Mother Earth.
With this realization, an even deeper personal Pattern became more visible: I had carried out, concurrently to my own interests, my mother’s passion for design. She had wanted to study Architecture, but circumstances would not allow it; she had to settle for Mathematics, and later, three-dimnesional Geometry was clearly her forte. She would also draw a lot, and she has passed this on to both my sister and I.
But in Psychological terms, I was also attracted to my mother’s passion for spatial relationships; once you take into account how sociable we both are, this equates to the spatial relationships between living and non-living things.
It makes sense, today, to carry on conversations with my mother, where we debate what the best usage for Christmas trees is, in relation to the chicken in her homestead.
A while back, we’d collect lots of pines from the neighbourhood, all of them discarded once the Christmas period would be over. Regularly, the branches would be cut and the resulting woodchips would be spread over the garden. Obviously, not the best mulch material for the garden, but it was the best use, with the garden soil in so much need of attention.
Today, as the average soil pH has dropped towards 7 (we had alkaline soils, to begin with), and with more chicken needs to take into account, we act differently. To keep the ground protected, and the chicken on dry soil in the Autumn and Winter, we make lasagnes of pine branches and hey. Two layers of each, combined, and the soil is somewhat more protected, the chicken can still scratch the soil to their liking. There are air pockets left in between, and the decomposition of this mix takes longer.
Less work for her and more subtle interactions between elements, while providing better conditions for both the chicken and the soil life.
What Permaculture Design is all about…