5 Ways to take Permaculture out of the garden and into your life :: LOVE

Maybe you think permaculture is just about gardening.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. Taking Lazy-Lady Living permaculture principles and expanding them into the rest of your life is one of the most radical things you can do to  leverage your capacity for living well- creatively, and in connection with your community and the earth.

Lazy-Lady Living is about abundance for all, and redefining what is good, and proper, and sacred. It’s about agriculture and so much more than that. It’s a luscious revolution, one that flows easily into your family, work, health, and hearth.

The only  real work is in the application of the principles and philosophy of permaculture, the rest is sitting back and watching the alchemy take place. This is the Lazy-Lady Living way.  It’s not about encouraging you to become a farmer, or urging you towards one “right” way to live… it’s about putting you in deeper touch with your own messy and beautiful life.

Your personal compost.

Its knowing your place in relationship with all things, and knowing how and when to take action. It is a practice of living beautifully.  It’s for everyone who wants practical how-know as well as a place for honoring  the deeper story of growth, harvest, decline and death.

Over the next 5 days we’ll be exploring what this looks like.

This week we’ll set our sights on Love and Relationship…

Love the Traditional Foods Way:

Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new. ~Ursula K. Le Guin

Its a pretty common idea in popular culture that Love is like a rock sitting as the foundation from which all other things are built. It is static and unchanging. It either works for you or it doesn’t.

The truth is Love doesn’t just sit there like a stone. It gets heavy pretty fast and when it does we start wondering if our love just wasn’t meant to be, that we were wrong and it wasn’t love after all? We mistook a changing thing for solidity of love.

Well, I have a secret for you…. it’s also my favorite permaculture principle, the problem is the solution.

Imagine permaculture as operating on the pliable dough of Love and Relationship, the work of kneading, the satisfaction of  warm soft bread. The truth is that we all want and need to rest in relationship. We need the softness, warmth, and nourishing messages from the other, with some pieces set aside to keep it going.

What if we came to see the heaviness and changeability of love not as the problem, but as the solution itself?

What if your feelings of disconnection were actually the prefect thing to bring you into right relationship with your loved ones? And the quarrels with your lover, a way into the deeper experience of love you’ve been longing for? Someone once told me that if I’m lucky, I’ll re-marry many times over my life-time.

Me? I’m already in my third marriage… with the same man. You will often hear me say, I will fall in love again… and I intend it to be with my husband. The truth is, there have been many times I thought my marriage was truly over – for good.

We all know the immense power of conflict in creating human suffering but what if it was the only way to re-make our love anew? What if our crisis’ allowed us to get good at relationships? What if our ability to repair is the thing that builds trust?

Our relationships don not just sit there, unchallenged, unmoving like stone.

They are a dynamic ecosystem and when we reflecting and call-in the help we need, like pulling yeast from the air, we can rise to freedom and find restful delight.

Leaning-in to challenges and kneading through the tough stuff helps us to speak of our truth more clearly. What it if felt safe to be conflict and that whatever came would be ok -that you would  have the support to get through it. You get to air your grief to the other, shedding all the tears that need crying. What if these tears were a sign of your strength and not of a weak relationship -and that it was understood that conflict not only has a place in relationship but is proper.

We live in a culture trying always to keep it together- Imagine if we let your old relationships die, not literally, but in way that they had the chance to be renewed and remade – like bread?

*note: Thanks to Emily Connell for her help in creating this week’s series!

Tell us what you think in the comments below!

Intrigued? Wanna learn more?

There is a whole week in our Lazy-Lady Living program devoted to Permaculture and all our urban farming secrets from the last 10 years. Click the image below to read all about it: