Author: jennynazak

A few years back, I stumbled on a great little booklet, “Tyranny of the Urgent” by Charles E. Hummel. “Tyranny of the Urgent” … isn’t that a great phrase?

In life, there is the urgent and there is the important. They don’t necessarily overlap. Most people are so used to being ruled by the tyranny of the urgent, that a person who puts the important first can be perceived as a bit eccentric if not downright crazy.

Another phrase for putting the important first is LIVING DELIBERATELY. Putting the urgent first all the time is defensive living. I liken defensive living to standing on a melting ice-floe and trying to make oneself smaller and smaller to adjust to the shrinking space. No way to live!

Further Reading:

• Living Deliberately (book by Harry Palmer, author of The Avatar (R) Course materials). Available in print form, or immediate download as PDF. “Many people are trapped in mind-numbing routines. Their lives carom through a changing landscape of directions, rules, wins, and losses. THEN, occasionally, someone wakes up and realizes, ‘Hey, I am alive.’ This is an extraordinary moment. When it is examined, a seeker is born …”

• Review of Charles Hummel’s Tyranny of the Urgent (Tsh Oxenreider, theartofsimple.net): “In the 1960s, Charles Hummel published a little booklet called Tyranny of the Urgent, and it quickly became a business classic. In it, Hummel argues that there is a regular tension between things that are urgent and things that are important—and far too often, the urgent wins. …”

In junior high and high school, I led a double life. Early on I had been labeled book-smart and treated accordingly, placed in the “advanced classes” with all sorts of passes and privileges. I did truly enjoy some academic subjects, namely English and foreign languages. But I felt a little embarrassed about that, as those weren’t considered “cool” subjects.

The people I idolized — OK, let’s be honest, the boys I idolized, because for the most part back then I didn’t really idolize anyone of my own sex — were all hardcore intellectual in what I considered the “hard” subjects. The ones that required a person to learn and retain a lot of facts or formulas. Math, sciences, history.

But I had an even deeper secret. Even more than English and foreign languages, my real favorite subjects were art, and … Home Ec. My love for these subjects was tempered by the shame I felt at loving them. They were for “less smart people,” according to beliefs I had absorbed from the world around me.

My mother was a fulltime homemaker. She worked outside the home at times but mainly stayed home to raise us. Back then I didn’t really respect “homemaker” as an occupation, though I didn’t understand why at the time. I didn’t respect homemaker for the same reason I didn’t respect myself for Home Ec being my favorite subject — though I didn’t understand any of that at the time.

I loved sewing. One skirt I made in seventh-grade Home Ec class stayed in my wardrobe til my late 20s.

Prone to depression and anxiety from the time I was small, I experienced a vacation from my troubled mind by working with my hands. Even much later, after I got help and learned how to operate my mind deliberately, I never lost my love of hand-work. To this day (even though I’ve learned tools for navigating my emotions and harnessing them for the good, and use those tools every day), when my mind starts to get to me I still experience a huge boost in mental wellbeing the minute I pick up a needle and thread, or a paintbrush.

I went to college, got on the mainstream white-collar career track, stayed on it for the first decade or so of my working life.

It wasn’t until 2012, when I spent a few months living and working on a farm in Texas, that I got a taste of doing home ec fulltime. My main duties consisted of cooking, managing flows, and keeping an eye on things, and helping to promote my friends’ farm. I felt like every bit of knowledge I had, every cell of my body and brain, was relevant and needed. At that time I realized why my Mom had chosen to be a homemaker. And I came to understand and respect why Home Ec had been my favorite subject. And art — the two are intertwined for me.

And now I come across this brilliant article shared by a fellow permie in the Transformative Adventures group. I had somehow never heard of Federica or the movement to pay women for domestic labor.

Her insights about labor and pesonal fulfillment and societal wellbeing strike a deep chord in me.

Further Reading:

• The Lockdown Showed How the Economy Exploits Women. She Already Knew. (Article about Silvia Federici and the idea that domestic work is unwaged labor; by Jordan Kisner in New York Times, Feb 17, 2021): “Federici is a longtime advocate of the idea that domestic work is unwaged labor and was a founder of the Wages for Housework movement in the early 1970s. It is a form of gendered economic oppression, she argues, and an exploitation upon which all of capitalism rests. … These ideas weren’t exactly obscure before the pandemic. But mainstream feminism — not to mention mainstream economics or politics — has mostly ignored domestic labor. Instead, it has measured women’s empowerment by their presence and influence in the workplace, which is attained by outsourcing housework and child care to less economically advantaged women for a low wage. Even so, women remain mired in housework. It’s common now to hear the term “the second shift” (coined in 1989 by the sociologist Arlie Hochschild), which describes how the work of maintaining a home and caring for children still falls disproportionately to women, even if they have full-time jobs and pay for help. What’s more, people who are paid to do domestic labor or care work (like elder care or house cleaning) are, as a group, badly compensated and denied workplace protections or benefits. These jobs are held mostly by women of color and immigrants. … ‘You cannot make good policy if the single largest sector of your nation’s economy is not visible … You can’t presume to know where the needs are.’ … How might this year have looked different had the work we do to care for one another, ourselves and the world around us been valued at a premium?”

• The Weaving Women of the Bauhaus Have Inspired Generations of Textile Artists (Alexxa Gotthardt; in Artsy.net): Relegated by sexism to the fiber arts department, these women artists took their craft to phenomenal heights, and wove themselves a supportive community as well. “Despite the limitations imposed on them, artists like Gunta Stölzl, Anni Albers, and Marli Ehrman made the weaving workshop not only the Bauhaus’s most commercially successful sector, but also one of its most collaborative and audaciously experimental.”

What a lovely & informative article – thank you Denise Miller for sharing!

Today I’m thrilled to be able to bring you this guest post from Mike Hoag. As always, Mike’s writing mixes creative inspiration and motivational juice with a refreshing dose of common sense. Mike is a permaculture teacher and designer, who has founded a grassroots economic resilience network called Transformative Adventures. Mike’s mission is for us all to support one another in finding ways to earn our livelihood doing things we love while helping the planet. Note, where Mike talks about farming as an example, you can plug in any other occupation you aspire to, be it candlemaking, opening a restaurant, tutoring kids online, making ethical clothing, having a bicycle-based composting service, building websites or doing PR for eco businesses, organizing a neighborhood homeschool/unschool co-op and developing lesson plans for it, pet-sitting, repairing bicycles, operating an errand service, helping people with end-of-life planning, singer-songwriting, painting custom signs, making and selling your art, starting a bioregional publishing company, being a doula, or whatever other beneficial occupation grabs you.

You’ll find links to the Transformative Adventures group, and Mike’s website and Permaculture Design Certificate course and other classes, at the end of this post. And now without further ado … I bring you this wonderful shot in the arm from Mike Hoag! Take it away Mike!

For me, the best Permaculture is about figuring out our own values and goals and then designing to meet them.

It’s not that there’s a right or wrong way to do things. Bill Mollison won’t rise from the grave and send the ghost of soil loss past to rattle chains at you if you row crop your garden.

It’s about our goals and designing to meet them.

This is actually pretty transformative! Most often we never really do that.

So what we have is folks want to escape the rat race. If they thought about it, they’d say their goals were things like:

I want to reconnect with nature, plants and animals.
I want to spend my days in a beautiful natural environment.
I want to have more time for friends, family and community.
I want to eat better, fresher, safer food and have better health.
I want to do something good for the planet, and Industrial Ag is horrible.
I want a simpler life with less stress, conflict, and pressure.
I want to cut free of the corporate system.

So we start learning about farming and take a $1,000 “profitable farming“ course that promises we can “make $1,000,000 on an acre!!!” (Yes, there’s a famous course that promises that in its ads.)

We get a loan to buy our teacher’s brand name rototiller, tear up our acre of lawn, and row crop it. Inevitably, reality sets in:

Instead of connecting with nature, we spend all day at war with nature, killing any plant or animal that happens into the system, spraying poisons on the insects.

Instead of a relaxing natural environment, we are working with noisy, bad smelling machinery.

Instead of safer food, we are using lots of plastics.

Instead of more time, we have less, and the “profitable farming” guru keeps saying we just have to work even more hours to be successful. Like most farmers we are working far longer hours than folks in the corporate rat race.

Like most other market farmers we eat Pizza Hut all growing season, because we are too busy and tired after the long work hours to turn fresh veggies into meals.

Instead of feeling healthier, we feel worn down, like most farmers do, from long hours of repetitive labor in harsh conditions.

So we hire some cheap labor and get Wwoofers to pick up some slack and get back our time. Now we have got conflicts and stress, and have to fire people. It seems people being paid less than minimum wage are unreliable and unhappy.

The million dollars hasn’t appeared. Without rock star status, customers won’t pay the 4 times market prices for our produce, and we don’t have an army of 100 Unpaid interns who want to use our name to sell their own profitable farming e-courses.

And we’re still doing as much sales and paperwork as we did in the corporate world.

Another study comes out showing that because of increased fossil fuel, fertilizer and plastics use, small scale intensive farming has a higher ecological foot print than industrial farming, and we don’t even want to think about that!

This is actually a really common story.

If we had connected with our values to begin with, and done a good design phase, everything might have been different.

We could have started with a design to create a beautiful natural environment with space for flowers and native plants and wildlife all around them.

We could build a small 10,000 foot no till garden and find we have the same overall productivity working a few hours a week with no wwoofers. It isn’t optimized for the market, but the hourly wage for the work is far higher to just harvest for the family and sell the produce to their immediate friends.

With our extra time not spent managing machines and labor, we cook amazing farm fresh meals of exotic ingredients, which first turns into a value added business, and later into a farm dinner and catering business fueled by all the excess produce.

Guests are drawn to come have amazing meals in this beautiful environment, with super fresh ingredients. A neighbor was an ex publisher and another was an artist, and together you write and publish a cook book …

The garden requires no fossil fuel, few plastics, and no exploited labor. This is a landscape designed to meet our real goals …

Further Exploration:

Permaculture Money, Livelihoods and Society via Transformative Adventures (group on Facebook): Come on in, the weather’s fine and the conversation is popping! Sorry, I don’t seem to be able to get Facebook to let me share a link to the group, but just type into the search field and you’ll find us. “Transforming our lives/transforming the world, through connection with nature and community. Focusing on practical ways to transform communities and landscapes that are economically empowering, whether it’s growing gift economies, right livelihoods, vibrant villages, or regenerative enterprises.”

Transformative Adventures website: Go here to check out Mike’s classes, blog posts, stunning photos, and other great stuff! By the way, I am currently taking Mike’s online Permaculture Design Certificate course. It is my fifth(!) PDC and I have been thrilled by the learning and the community.

Our rain chance that had been forecast for today looks like it has dried up overnight. At least according to my weather app.

A few years back I started noticing a weather pattern that I dubbed “The Big Crispy” here in my bioregion. In spring, the hot weather starts before the normal spring/summer rainy season kicks in. And then again in fall, the summer heat lingers long after the rainy season ends. The two “Big Crispy” intervals seem to be getting longer. Do you notice anything similar in your area?

Well, maybe rain will come today still. And no use fretting over things I can’t control. Sharing with other people, even in writing, gives comfort. Wherever you are, I hope you are getting a nice amount of rain, and are not beset by drought-flood extremes.

Hand-carrying water from my rainbarrels is great exercise for me, as is walking the stepping-stones (they are tricky, which is partially intentional – fosters alertness).

Thoughts:

1) I am trying to get more of my neighbors & friends to see the value of installing rainbarrels — seems like more folks should be open to it, the more disasters we have all over the USA and the world that shut off water and electricity;

2) A big part of why I am so disheartened by rainfall shortage is that I strongly believe that land-management practices (by homeowners and by governments) are responsible in huge part for pushing us into desertification. It’s frustrating to watch. I get discouraged trying to find people who will listen to me about this.

But, it occurred to me just now that I need to be like WATER: persistent, and flowing in the direction where I see an opening. One strong potential entry point I see is “promoting urban food-growing.” There’s a lot of enthusiasm from many different factions right now about that, and it’s a perfect Trojan Horse for rainwater collection, soil-building, mulching etc.

Also: Practicing gratitude is key. It is a soft cool cloudy morning.

Suggested action steps for creating a buffer against drought-flood extremes:

• Get at least one rainbarrel. Even one is a great start. Once you see how great it is to have a big container of free water from the sky, on hand for all sorts of emergency uses (and everyday uses too!), you’ll be hooked.

• Cultivate a dense micro-forest garden on your yard or balcony. Every little bit helps (microclimate is powerful!), and also, your visual example will influence other people. Terrible at growing plants? Me too! Start with natives or other locally adapted plants; they’re tougher. Note, you might have to make a little up-front investment (both in terms of acquiring plants and watering them at first to get them established), but it’s well worth it.

• Mulch and compost are other “water storage buffers” that are easy to implement even if you don’t have plants or want to mess with plants.

• Encourage your city government to plant more trees and other vegetation; encourage likeminded citizens to make known to your local leaders that this is a priority.

Further Exploration:

Babying Transplants Through the Hot Dry Time, and Celebrating Small Wins (a YouTube video I did awhile back)

(Recycling a Facebook memory post that is still true. Will add more thoughts on this later.)

On the “$54 billion increase in war spending” thread, one person commented that “Good people don’t start wars.” This is a popular misconception. In fact, good people DO start wars. Good, well-meaning people start wars all the time. They do it because, in humanity’s toolkit, war is the default “go-to” response to this or that (perceived) insult, this or that craving for resources, this or that fear or prejudice. At least it’s been a default go-to response up til now. But we humans are becoming aware that there are more tools available. Will we human beings evolve quickly enough to avoid bringing about our own extinction? Maybe, maybe not. I like to think so though, and I’m betting on it. Those of us who believe in peace, and who are aware that peace is a PROCESS and a PRACTICE and a SKILL-SET, just have to keep on working to share the tools of peace with anyone who is receptive.

Today I read yet another news article about how so many young people are suffering from depression and suicidal tendencies in response to the social isolation brought about by the pandemic.

Reading this really makes my blood boil. Of course, I hate that so many people — especially young people, who haven’t yet had a chance to experience many years of life — are in such distress. But even more than that, I hate seeing their distress labeled “depression” or “mental illness,” when what’s really going on (in my opinion) is that our young people are having a perfectly appropriate response to a deeply messed-up society.

Even before Covid, depression and anxiety were epidemic in young people (and in older ones for that matter). But instead of facing up to the root ills of society, we keep insisting on trying to fix the “troubled” people.

I think the so-called “troubled” people are actually really tuned-in. And when we numb them out with meds and diagnoses, and dumb them down with mindless entertainment and with so-called “education” that doesn’t really teach them how to think and act for themselves — that actually teaches them to distrust their feelings — it’s like we are disabling one of the “fire alarms” of our society.

We don’t want to disable the fire alarm to stop it from making that obnoxious noise so we can roll over and go back to sleep. We want to get to the root of the fire.

We need to be modeling resilience for our kids. We need to be modeling honesty, authenticity, integrity. Things are wrong with our society. At a time when we need to be using every last cubic micron of our brains to marshal up mad waves of quantum creativity, we are inventing … self-driving cars. Really??

We are spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars, and hours, a year on streaming entertainment services, yet we say we don’t have money or time to plant a garden, or go for walks with our families, meet our neighbors, tell our kids inspiring stories about courage and resilience, let them paint their rooms any color they want, look through old family photo albuns together, tell them stories about their ancestors (whoever of us in today’s world even know our ancestors anymore), teach them how to build things and write things and make their own science experiments.

I say “we” in a very general, least-common-denominator collective way; I know that here I am preaching to the choir. You guys get it.

What I want everyone to take away from this is that our work is important. Artists, homeschoolers, activists, tree-huggers, edge-walkers, eccentrics, weirdoes, hippies, kooks, advocates for unpopular but necessary causes. We need to help kids learn how to tap their creativity and imagination to meet their needs and find new ways of being in the world. Some of us are still in the process of learning how to do that ourselves. Still, the task of equipping our kids for life can’t wait.

We’re all students and teachers at the same time. Mother Earth is our homeschool planet. Outdoor activity of all kinds — interaction with nature, and with each other in outdoor settings — needs to be a top priority right this minute. For us adults as much as for kids. Disconnecting from nature is how we got ourselves and the planet into this mess in the first place.

Further Exploration:

• “Virus’s Toll on Mental Health — Doctors Describe Wave Among Adolescents” (G. Wayne Miller / The Providence Journal USA TODAY NETWORK; in Daytona Beach News-Journal): “the director of the Division of Pediatric Hospital Medicine at Hasbro Children’s Hospital … has witnessed what he described … as ‘a massive pandemic of mentally ill adolescents’ … And when I say massive, I don’t want to understate this’ … He referred to a recent Friday ‘when I looked at the census of the hospital. Three-quarters of the hospitalwas adolescents who wanted to hurt themselves because of mental illness. … ‘We’ve been seeing significant depressive symptoms and anxiety symptoms a lot,’ she said. ‘And a higher frequency of kids who are coming in because of suicide attempts –and very serious suicide attempts. … We’ve been seeing more irritability and aggression in the home. We’ve been seeing more psychosis as well.'”

• Back-to-Nature Bootcamp — Nature: The Golden Ticket to Happy Kids Who Become Balanced Adults (from naturemattersacademy.com): “Reconnecting Our Kids to Nature, March 1-5 @1pm MT. Remember when you were growing up … spending hours outside, playing in the dirt. No tablets or cell phones. It’s a different picture today, isn’t it? The truth is … kids need to be outside to grow up to be healthy and balanced. But it’s also true that in today’s fast paced world, it’s hard to find the time, patience, and energy to make it happen. In our Back to Nature Bootcamp, we help parents make a plan to get their kids back to the basics – back to nature and what childhood should be – all while practicing academics in the process. Easy strategies to ground your kids in this crazy, fast-paced world. Catapult your kid’s life to a happy & healthy adulthood using the power of nature. Give your kids the tools and support they need to reach their potential. Plan a week of academic nature activities in less than 10 minutes.” (This event sounds like just the ticket for helping kids, by addressing the “Nature Deficit Disorder” that is harming us all and is a root cause of our overall societal dysfunction.)

• Getting Kids Outside & Learning About Nature — with Dr. Jenny: A Facebook group I just joined, at the invitation of a fellow permie. I suggest you check it out also! This group is how I found out about the “Back to Nature Bootcamp” described in the previous paragraph.

Hi everyone! How are you doing? I hope you are all safe and warm and enjoying life. (But if you’re not, and want/need to talk, I’m here with a listening ear for you.)

Speaking of listening … For the past few weeks, I’ve been taking a bunch of classes and webinars, including the Transformative Adventures Permaculture Design Certificate course, and also this week a conference called The Nature of Cities Festival, which is all about retrofitting our cities to be “biophilic.” Loving nature; integrated with nature.

Plus an 8-part weekly series called “Local Motive Tour” from Strong Towns (a grassroots urban-revitalization movement that I feel is very aligned with permaculture principles); and a class via EDX called “CitiesX: The Past, Present, and Future of Urban Life.”

And webinars from my local native plant society, and webinars from 1000 Friends of Florida … And … And …

In short, a big fat supercharged education bonanza!! (much of it free; all of it a high-quality investment).

It’s all very beautiful and powerful stuff, and all pointing in the same directions. Cross-disciplinary collaboration; grassroots empowerment. Making peace with nature, working in partnership with nature, respecting all species.

I feel inspired and comforted of course, knowing how many more people are “on the same page” in a very deep and organized and professional way than I realized.

But along with these feelings, I’m also experiencing a mixture of other feelings. Data dump overload (pretty natural under the circumstances). Deep sadness (for the planet? for what’s been lost already?). Regret (for not being able to do more even now? for all the years I did not think to do more, while all these other people were already so fully engaged?). Frustration (for having limited bandwidth, even for lectures on topics that I love, live, and breathe). And a mix of other shades of emotion.

I’m not posting this to whine though. I’m very grateful to be able to contribute anything to helping Mother Earth and all of her creatures. I’m all about moving forward and doing the best right now with what I have right now. I just felt like sharing the complete picture of my “inner landscape” in case some of you might be having similar thoughts and feelings. And if you are, I want you to extend kindness and understanding to yourself.

We are here right now. We are connected. And healing ourselves is definitely an essential piece of the puzzle. And that takes a certain amount of bandwidth.

Permaculture has helped me on my healing path. AND, also, I consider my ongoing path of healing (healing myself, and helping others heal) to be an essential part of my permaculture practice.

Thank you all for being here and for listening.

Oh, and on the physical landscape, I have been adding new plant babies to my yard (mostly natives, to feed the pollinators and other wildlife).

And, in other permaculture landscape news, I cut my hair today (I do that 2-3 times a year, leaning my head directly over one of the mulch piles or compost zones in my micro urban yard). When my hair gets long enough that it might need a comb or brush (neither of which I own anymore), is when I know it’s time to cut it!! (My other key haircutting cue is when the Florida summer heat starts to kick in bigtime, but that won’t be til May or so.)

What the heck does cutting my hair have to do with permaculture?!?! Well, it falls under self-care. Also, for me, it’s an act of self-reliance and personal aesthetic sovereignty. That might sound goofy and heavy. But in the past, various people have tried to exercise control over my hair and other aspects of my appearance. Even strangers have tried, as if they felt they had some right to me looking how THEY wanted — as if I were furniture in their universe, just there for decor. There was no need for me to go along with that. It doesn’t help anyone!

Today I laughed as it occurred to me that it has taken me til almost age 60 to de-colonize my own hair.

By the way, I know a lot of really nice hair salons, nail salons, makeup places, etc., that are run by good people. And I enjoy sharing my friends’ delight when they go get a new hairstyle, makeup, nails. I just personally happen to be into the DIY hair and low-maintenance looks for the past few years. And I think everyone should be free to do their own thing looks-wise.

And I enjoy being able to compost my hair cuttings! (I do love wearing huge huge earrings and necklaces though, even tho i am not thusly adorned in the pic.)

Hope you all are having a good day. Virtual Deep-Green Hugs to you!

P.S. Earlier this week I wrote a post “When it’s warmer outside than in.” My current super-mega-download of eco education and inspiration is definitely an example of that happening to me! The green professional world outside my usual familiar terrain is very hot! Fizzing and popping!! I also wrote a post “Moving the Needle.” And today it occurred to me that my mega-booster-shot of education currently in progress is moving the needle inside my own mind. Which of course increases my capacity to move the needle out in the world. I hope you are finding ways to do the same!

P.P.S. If you want to see my haircut (for those of you who have met me, it’s just my usual “short” mode), you can visit this post on my Deep Green page on Facebook.