My journey to Permaculture began in a community garden in 2011 in Carrboro, North Carolina.
Like most people I knew, I didn’t know how to grow vegetables. I couldn’t identify one tree from another. I remember being asked to mulch a path and having to admit I didn’t know what mulch meant.
What I did know was that the way we were living couldn’t go on. The foundations of life – clean water, clean air, and deep soil – were being destroyed around me. The people who grew the food I ate were being paid almost nothing to work in fields thick with toxic chemicals that I didn’t want them to breathe or my body to eat.
The number of problems we were facing seemed insurmountable, and yet somehow I knew that if we couldn’t get our food right, we had no hope of anything else getting better either. I came to gardening to try to change the world. What I now know is that I first needed gardening to change me.
I grew up anxious – like, really anxious. In school, I spent two years barely talking to people. I looked down when people talked to me. It got a little better in my twenties and I made good friends, but inside I still always felt this persistent sense of being unworthy.
I remember the anxiety I felt on the day I went to the community garden. I was afraid of meeting all those new people, but I felt like to do the right thing, I had to start growing some of my food. I mostly kept my head down and set to pulling weeds and planting seeds as I was supposed to.
Hours passed and it took me hours to notice something important: I didn’t feel anxious or unworthy anymore. Somewhere along the way, the soil took away my anxiety.
It wasn’t that I’d never feel anxious again (… I mean yikes, this world…!). It was that when I put my hands in the earth, the earth made me feel better – all the way better. The earth made me feel human.
The word for “humus,” the rich dark soil that every gardener dreams of, and of “human” come from the same root. To be human, I had to be with humus.
Before I went into that garden, I didn’t value growing our own food that much above any other area of activism. It was just another thing I thought I had to do to be a “good person.” After I experienced that relief from the pain I thought I’d have to live with forever, I started paying closer attention.
It was in one of those return visits to the community garden that a friend would put the “P”-word (Permaculture) into my head. Following that lead, I picked up a copy of Gaia’s Garden and something long sleeping in me awakened.
The simple song of working with nature instead of against her touched on a truth I’d been waiting all my life to hear. For the first time, I saw clearly that we didn’t have to live in this destructive, disconnected way. There was another way possible and it began right where we were with the simplest steps we could imagine – and, unlike the activism I’d been doing before, the way would actually help us feel better (and taste delicious!). I knew I wanted to devote my life to this vision in whatever way I could find.
Some thirteen years, dozens of clients, and 3 off-grid Permaculture homesteads later, I can’t imagine living a life that doesn’t cleave close to the song of the earth.
It matters now even more than it did those years ago. In a world where everything around us seems to be breaking, the slow and steady growth of trees, the wisdom learned by living with the seasons, the taste of wild water and medicinal roots, and the simple joy of many hands making work light together in harmony is the way to help our often broken hearts stay strong and true in a time like no other time. The crazier the world gets, the more the sanity of rocks and trees, compost and medicinal weeds, and catching rainwater and building soil help us ground into something healthy and real.
I don’t know what my or my daughter’s world will look like five, or twenty, or fifty years from now – but I know that rain will fall, sun will shine, and trees will grow – and I am learning, every season, that maybe that is enough.
-Matt
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