13011 Tell Your Story
By resourceful design, we keep the number and scope of our actions to a minimum required to meet human needs, provide a quality life, protect and (if necessary) heal the ambient ecosystem, all living things that our actions might touch. The less we change to achieve those goals, the better we have designed. Good design is not gaudy, it is efficient, humane, and above all restrained. — Dan Hemenway, Elfin Permaculture
As you work your way through the pages of iPermie, you accumulate a collection of design decisions. As this process continues, you next compile those decisions into a single document, with some narrative to connect and explain what you see happening in your life. As the document grows, you see how the beneficial connections among the various aspects of your life link together and support each other. You also keep an eye out for anything that contradicts some other decision so your decisions are consistent in moving you forward towards the goals and purposes for your life.
This document the permaculture design for your life. It is not a document that you write, and then file and forget about, as you had somehow finished the project. It will guide everything that you do for the rest of your life.
Create a living document. This is the intentional plan for your life. As your life develops and your circumstances change, you will revisit your plan and evolve it as necessary.
Some of your decisions (like never using credit cards) can be made and followed for the rest of your life.
Other decisions are contingent on your present circumstances. When those change, your lifestyle evolves to meet the new situations.
Your design isn’t done until you die. And even then, your design lives on after you in the influence you have had on those you care about and that care about you. Many of us will leave generations to come with lasting work in the form of invisible structures that make it easier to live a more sustainable life.
Community helps! Indeed, community is critical for good design work. The default modern option is the solitary scribe working alone. That isn’t a realistic picture of what is necessary for the good life. Everything about your design process will go better if done in a learning community. It’s not impossible to do good work on your own. It is easier and more fun if done in community.
Integrate your spirituality. If you are religious, spiritual, and/or have religious practices, or follow a specific spiritual path or religion, you will surely want to integrate that with your design work. As I noted early in this work, permaculture is indeed a secular discipline. Like all other secular disciplines — gardening, music, art, construction, etc. ad infinitum — people bring their faith and spirituality to the practice of secular disciplines. Permaculture is holistic so it would be odd to leave something as important as spirituality out of a design for the life of a spiritual person. iPermie doesn’t have a section on spirituality because the field is so diverse it’s just not possible to do justice to it, not to mention the fact that anything I would say on the subject would be colored by my own personal spirituality and I can’t be expected to be an expert on the application of permaculture within the context of other faith traditions not my own. The holistic nature of permaculture is comprehensive enough to incorporate your faith. Or not, as the case may be, if you are an atheist or agnostic.
Make specific decisions. At one extreme, a permaculture design could be contained within the phrase — “Think and live more sustainably.” But the devils — or the blessings — are in the details of what it means to think and live more sustainably.
How this happens — in somewhat exact detail — is the story you present in the permaculture design for your life.
Your design is a narrative you tell to yourself — and to those who you care about and who care about you — that describes where and how you will fare forth in your life.
Document your decisions. If you haven’t done so already, start your writing process by compiling your decisions into a document and add a numbering system to make them easy to reference.
Don’t make telling this story a source of anxiety. It isn’t a term paper that will be graded. Think of it as a long letter you write to yourself, setting forth your plans for your life.
One of the nice things about the iPermie process is that YOU set whatever deadlines you feel you need. Alternatively, you don’t set any deadlines whatsoever.
Avoid stress while you work on your design. There is no need for any fear-of-failure. This is you thinking about and designing your life. What’s not to like about that? Hack the design for your life as though it has meaning, because your life does in fact have meaning — to you, to people who know and care for you, and to the planet and its diverse ecologies and all of its critters, great and small.
QUEST FOR BENEFICIAL CONNECTIONS.
Compiling the design report is another opportunity to look for beneficial connections, stacked functions, important functions that need reinforcement, synergies, and also to avoid/redirect energy and resource sinks into more useful and beneficial purposes.
This process has been part of your design work from its beginning,. This is another opportunity to make your design even better.
Push this as deep as you can. The more beneficial connections and integrations, the better your design.
You may come up with elements and functions in your design that don’t — at least at first glance — have any connection with anything else.
When this happens, first look more closely and deeply and make sure that there aren’t some connections that you missed first time through. If these are loner elements, see what you can do to beneficially connect them with the rest of the elements, functions, and systems of your life. Integration, not segregation, is what works in permaculture design.
Whenever you do get stuck — and it would be an amazing design process if you don’t run into what look like dead ends and problems-without-solutions — break free and go do whatever it is that you do to de-stress and relax. Fish, hike, eat, party, contemplate, play, or listen to music, whatever it may be — take a break from design work.
Don’t fret about the issue at the conscious level of your brain. Your thought process hasn’t stopped. It continues at the subconscious level. Let that process run its course and see what pops into the conscious brain.
Document your connections. Don’t assume you have plenty of beneficial connections. Don’t take anything for granted. Document them! For example —
- Buying organic food from local farmers provides food for you and your household.
- Better food means better health.
- Better health means less medical expense.
- Spending money with local farmers supports the local food economy.
- Supporting the local food economy preserves existing producers and encourages new producers to start growing.
- More local food production supports resilience of your area.
- Resilience is good for your household on many levels.
Etc.
I suppose you don’t necessarily have to document every single beneficial connection. It doesn’t hurt to document as many of them as possible. Besides the benefit to your design, documentation creates a learning process helping you to understand the connectivity of everything.
Keep your eyes and ears and mind open. Do not stop watching your life, your geography, and your circumstances. Do not stop recording your observations. Your observation journal is an important component of your decision process.
Back up your work — often! All of us have lost important work at some stage of our lives because we didn’t make proper backups. Considering the time and effort that will go into your design, it would be a tragedy to lose it. Make more than one back-up. Keep at least one back-up off the site. A paper copy may actually be useful as part of your ongoing design process.