Permaculture Brain

(warning: totally internal dialog ahead)

The tune and the song keep looping in my brain.

This is the way we wash our clothes
wash our clothes
wash our clothes
This is the way we wash our clothes
early in the morning!

This is the way we plan our life
plan our life
plan our life
This is the way we plan our life
early in the morning!

Yesterday, a friend who's studying permaculture came here to our place to walk around in the field and yard and garden and everywhere, to talk to me about possibilities and plans and let me know what to do next. She's a published author, married to a published author, and so, of course, a thought occurred, and I concurred, and we will probably write about this entire thing, from its present wildness to its conclusive sustainability and joyful restoration. We'll take pictures and talk about the folklore of the plants and the ways in which we can work with the natural world instead of trying to force it to be something it is not. Comfrey under the orchard trees, and many kinds of trees instead of a monoculture in the orchard. Carrots Love Tomatoes, after all. Might as well admit to nature's power and work with it, right? We can't beat it. It hurts us and it to try. Joining it is better.

As we were talking about all of this, she asked me about the way I come at a project, and said she feels a need for "all" of the facts before she can move - but she's letting go of that perceived need because permaculture is so huge that there's no way to do it! (hahaha! Nothing like a little dose of impossibility to make us stop a behavior, eh?) And I knew just what she meant. It's a habit I've been working on for awhile now, too. There may be wisdom in "look before you leap," but eventually a person setting out on an adventure has to leap, even if the statistics regarding leaping might not be fully memorized, nor the future fully imagined or pre-recorded. After awhile, you just gotta jump if you're ever going to do a thing. And there is also wisdom in knowing that "he who hesitates is lost."

(This is the sort of discussion that happens when Little Miss Huge Ideas plans a landscape with Little Miss Magical World, and neither can stop being a writer looking for the words.)

Anyway, I've been thinking about the way to approach a task - or a life, for that matter. My life. I've realized that I need the Macro-Plan first. Or, that I want it. I don't always get it, sometimes I have to move into the job anyway, but I hate like poison to work that way. I want the zoomed-out map, and I want the ability to zoom in on the particulars. I want the atlas and the guide to the local bacteria. Both, and the movement between them. That's how my brain works.

Before I could start on our landscape here, I needed a way to plan for the whole thing. For me, the plans morph along the way. That's okay. The thing's in motion, or it's dead - so movement and change are good things. But I really must have the Macro-View in my head - and on paper, or else the apparent (to me) futility of working against an ultimately more powerful Reality pulls all the wind out of my sails and makes me sadder than sad. Futility demoralizes me.

Some folks like to complete tasks. Some folks like to think up Ideas. I prefer Ideas to tasks (and now note that I've even capitalized the word Ideas, and evidently do not consider tasks to be a proper noun) but I know I need to be able to move between Ideas and tasks, or I find it very difficult to move at all. After yesterday's first planning meeting for our house inside our yard inside our fields inside our woods (a meeting of two of the most non-task-oriented brains in Skamania county), I think the name of this sort of thinking is Permaculture.