A Letter from Student Jared

Posted on | August 22, 2010 | 4 Comments

Bill and Wayne,

Thank you for the opportunity to speak to your PDC course. You have quite a group of students. I’m impressed! I hope that I offered some inspiration and hope for the class, and I’m sure that I’ll be involved with some of them in the future. I feel like a critical mass of permaculturalists and advocates is growing, and we will have considerable influence in the future of our impoverished and battered state (especially SE Michigan).

Since graduating from college and your course, life has been moving at a break-neck speed. I forgot to mention that even though I’m “unemployed”, this work is the equivalent of having a full time job and being a full time graduate student in everything. All of my experiences are really two-fold – every work experience is a learning experience and every learning experience is a work experience. Especially the business aspect of the work. I, and all of us, have had to learn (and are still learning!) business structures, legal issues, contracts, finance, accounting, insurance, marketing, the landscaping industry, the education industry, the non-profit industry, politics, drama, organizing and the list goes on for quite a while! Not to mention agriculture, horticulture, ecology, botany, soil chemistry, carpentry, and Wayne’s whole list of “Permaculture Competencies” outlined in his webinar (I still review the webinars on a consistent basis).

And I thought I’d be living a more simple life! Bill Mollison puts it well in the Designers’ Manual:
“… once any on difference of any sort, even an idea, exists anywhere, then it demands or creates conditions for the evolution of subsequent events. That first event itself became yet another difference, which in turn needed translation, and so on. The process is self-complicating, continually creating of itself all that follows, and all that continues. All is stress, or the relief of stress, and that stress and relief is located between existing differences.” – pg. 81.

In the beginning stages, all is stress! I hope as I, and all of us, move foward and gain more experience, we’ll be better equipped to facilitate the relief of the stress we’ve created moving through our culture and created in our own lives, initiating and facilitating the transitions into the world we want to live in.

I’d like to thank you both, and of course Becky, for being a powerful event in the evolution of our lives and community.

I’m in the process of trying to re-simplify my course, gain my health back, and better define my role or function in our work. My passion is research and education (when I have time for it!). I feel that many of us need to undergo some rites of passage that is absent in our dominant culture. Something to free us of our past lives, roles and responsibilities, and transform us into the beings we are meant to be.

Jared

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The Permaculture Project LLC and Wayne Weiseman - permacultureproject@gmail.com, (618) 713-0537 or at 510 W Pecan St. Carbondale, IL 62901
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