Voices of Women in Permaculture

Permaculture Womens Guild

By Nihan Sevinc Uncertain times call for resilient hearts. Hearts that know how to feel and release. A resilient heart welcomes emotions, like a tree that offers shelter for weary wandering creatures. Emotions, after all, are a natural response to what goes on within and around us. May we attend to them with unwavering kindness and curiosity. Like a tree that knows how to survive strong winds, a resilient heart can bend and not break. Rooted firmly in the earth, it reaches up to the skies, while remaining flexible in every inch. Emotion, like the wind, is energy in motion.…

Permaculture Womens Guild

By Luiza Oliveira By the Spontaneously Creative Plants and a Human Hello, Little Flower. Hello, “Giant” Person. I didn’t see you here a few days ago. Are you new to the area? Hahaha! New? You are so cute. I am older than your entire kind, nevertheless, I guess I look fresh to your naïve eyes…What about putting the time aside and play together today? Because tomorrow you won’t see me, and you will think that I am gone. Every time I enter a space I first perceive its general feelings around it, but it doesn’t take me too long to find…

Permaculture Womens Guild

By Julia Pereira Dias A lot of our expectations are not our own. Culture shapes what we think about the world, about what people, including us, should do and how we should all be. Cultural norms — which are nothing but expectations — define what success is, how a marriage is supposed to run, how children are to be raised and even what happiness consists of. Social animals that we are, we strive to adhere cultural expectations, lest we be excluded from the happy zoo of conformity. If you have any doubt, think about how you raise your children. Why would it possibly stress…

Permaculture Womens Guild

By the Spontaneously Creative Plants By Luiza Oliveira I come along when winter is no longer around. I thrive where others find too hard to be, but once I have made some space, the others come along. My roots are deep and my arms embrace and dance with the challenges of what the new season has to bring. . I like to enjoy the kiss of the afternoon sun on my skin, I like to hear the local news by the wind whispering them in my ears, I like to experience the voluptuous touch of the water every time it rains,…

Permaculture Womens Guild

By Julia Pereira Dias We’re told that everything happens for a reason. But really, what good could possibly lie in those everyday irritating instances such as having to rummage through your bag once again to find the train ticket, which — of course — has hidden in the last folded corner of the bag? I never knew until one sunny day in March, more than fifteen years ago. I was visiting professor at the time at the Friends of Thoreau Institute. This was going to be my first lecture on environmental ethics with a group of German and Spanish master students. I stayed with…

Permaculture Womens Guild

Things We Can Let Go Of In A Crisis. By Priya Logan Sometimes we are like snakes that have outgrown our skins. Sometimes, we need to shed them for safety. It is a difficult time right now for many people and for many, it already was. Some of the more redundant elements of our culture can and could be easily walked away from; it may be good to remind ourselves these are not necessary. Here is a list of a few things you can pretty comfortably, ( in most cases ), live without. Expensive cosmetics, moisturiser being an obvious one. In…

Permaculture Womens Guild

By Priya Logan One of the most impactful books I have ever read was The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which is a memoir transcribed to a personal assistant by a French Journalist, Jean-Dominique Bauby. Where the autobiographical tale picks up, he had spent several years with a rare and completely debilitating condition called locked-in syndrome. It is a beautifully recounted, brave and soulful work. It hit a deep chord because I was also working as a personal assistant for a man in his mid-thirties who had become tetraplegic in his late teens. He had been unable to move anything…