Class 2 notes by Ron S.
I had a horrible cold and I wasn’t quite sure that I was going to make it to the second class of our permaculture design course. I really am glad that that is not how my day ended up. Having been exposed to the first week’s transformative vibe, I think that a lot of people in this course (myself included) were really eager to see where this idea of (Social) Permaculture can take us.
We started in with the ethics of Permaculture. I didn’t have time to take notes on them but was assured that all of this information was going to be made available to us. My first sense of these ethics was that it is a pretty basic compassionate view of our relationship to the world. As we discussed it I could see in my own experience how we don’t really live in that space for mainly a lot of selfish and silly reasons. We don’t take the time to understand the impacts made by our decisions. Our frustrations keep us from acting with compassion in all of our interactions and relationships. The goofy thing is that all of this should be pretty easy to do and benefits both ends of the relationships. You simply have to be present with that information/experience/belief. Sure is a good thing that being present was one of the ‘ethics’ . It’s something that I think our broader culture sure needs a lot of work on. I really enjoy a lot of the ‘active listening’ exercises that we have been doing and I think it helps re-enforce the idea of coming from a place of compassion.
In trying to come up with our own principles of permaculture and then the best case scenarios of what could come of this, I kept trying to seperate the idea of ‘Social Permaculture’ from ‘Permaculture’ . We were introduced to the Principles and we started in on some exercises and the Permaculture charades game and right before the dinner break it kind of dawned on me that one isn’t apart from the other. Kind of like we aren’t apart from nature, or that community, over there….There is no apart! Thanks!!
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