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Designing A Healing Journey
In times of uncertainty many of us are carrying more stress than our bodies were designed to hold. A personal reflection on illness, resilience and how permaculture design can help us create healthier systems for living. There is a lot of uncertainty in the world right now. You can feel it everywhere. The constant stream of news never really stops, the pressures of modern life keep accumulating, and many people are carrying far more than their bodies were ever designed to hold. For me this reflection has become deeply personal. At the end of last year I was diagnosed with…
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Why A Wild Life?
Many people today recognise that we live in a time of overlapping crises: climate and ecological breakdown, social and political instability, deepening inequality, and a rising distrust in our institutions. Alongside this, some of us feel a sense of isolation and a struggle to identify wise ways forward in what seems an increasingly chaotic world. This raises an urgent question: do we really believe that our current political, economic and cultural systems will solve the significant problems of our age? If the answer is not a clear ‘yes’, then what? What personal and collective action becomes necessary to generate meaningful…
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What permaculture gave me that my professional training didn’t
I trained in information management and later in electronic art, working across charities, the NHS, and public libraries. Through this work I learned how to find information, assess evidence, identify gaps in research, and design ways for people to access what they needed in practice, not only in theory. I became skilled at questioning where information came from, who funded it, what counted as evidence, and what was missing altogether. I learned to work carefully with both quantitative and qualitative data, and to translate complexity into forms that people could actually use. This training taught me rigour and critical thinking,…
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Seeds of Self-Doubt
It would be nice to reach an age where confidence feels effortless—where we simply know what we’re doing in all areas of life. The reality, however, is that we can only truly master a handful of things at any given time. As we get older, we become familiar with the feeling of competence, and that familiarity can make it surprisingly challenging to become a beginner again. For many reasons, people are now finding new career paths later in life. Most of the students I teach are between 30 and 55, and they are broadening their knowledge, skill sets, and expectations…
