What’s in a Name?

Permaculture Womens Guild

Arbitrary label or a point of connection? By Roshnii Rose What’s in a name? That which we call a rose,By any other name would smell as sweet. Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare I have an interesting relationship with names. In 2002, at the age of 20, I was given a Sanskrit name by my then meditation teacher and felt as though a powerful gift had been bestowed upon me. Roshnii — meaning Divine Light or ‘the first ray of sun at dawn’. It seemed the name was imbued with an energy that elevated my mind. In 2006, after living for 4 years…

A Long Way Home

Permaculture Womens Guild

By Helen iles It’s early morning. The sun is already flooding the woodland scene outside my window, when a robin hops onto the patio table and appears to look up at me. “It’s a beautiful spring day!” he seems to say. “Get up!” But I’m warm up in my cozy platform bed in the rafters, and that sunlight is deceptive. I take another sip of tea, snuggle closer to Husband and tell myself I’ll just read one more chapter… My relationship with home is a deep one. I grew up in Wales and brought up my son in one of…

Decoloniziation for Beginners: Inner and Outer Vision

Permaculture Womens Guild

Using the land and our tangible environments as the palette of living changes everything. Life is not just an idea that lives in the head, or a feeling that lives in the heart. Here we have embodied reality, or at least what we call reality at any point in our individual or collective experience. By Maria Zayas As a newbie to permaculture, and an old hand at personal growth, the matter of decolonizing has really piqued my interest. It is easy for me to picture the nature of the colonization process in our physical world: people coopting land and resources,…

Permies of the world unite!

Permaculture Womens Guild

A manifesto for an internationalist permaculture movement By Becky Ellis Migration, the movement of people over landscapes, is, arguably, one of the defining characteristics of our species. Humans have moved over landscapes in search of food and other resources since before we were a species. And yet in our deeply capitalist society, the movement of most humans is severely restricted and criminalized. Recently, there has been an increase in racist xenophobia throughout Europe, Canada, Australia, and the United States including the rise of far-right hate groups, anti-immigrant nationalist political parties, and governments who criminalize migrants. In the United States, Trump…