Gardening & Permaculture

A lot of this blog focuses on the intersection of spiritual practice with gardening and permaculture–land tending, wild tending, and building the relationship between humans and nature.  That is, embracing the “earth centeredness” of earth-based spiritual practice by direct living and inhabiting our amazing earth. The overall philosophy for this work can be found here Healing Hands: Replanting and Regenerating the Land as a Spiritual and Sacred Practice: The key philosophy that I present on this blog–how we can engage in spiritual and sustainable practice using permaculture and sacred gardening principles. As well as here: A philosophy for druidry and sustainability as sacred action.

Permaculture Design Principles

The following are the growing number of posts describing permaculture as a spiritual practice, and further elaborating some of what I posted above:

Introduction to Permaculture

• The Power of Permaculture: Regenerating Landscapes and Human-Nature Connections: This describes tools for being proactive and directly engaging in long-term regeneration: healing the land, healing the planet, healing ourselves, and rebuilding the sacred relationship between humans and nature. We need tools that go beyond the above approaches and into envisioning “what’s next?” or “what’s better?” We need an ethical system that is simple to teach and yet profound. We need tools to help us envision the future today–what will our next iteration of lower-to-no fossil fuel living look like? What if we could design for that now? What if we are the ones building what the next iteration of human living could look like?  This post begins to answer these questions.
• Introduction to Permaculture: Terminology and The Ethical Triad: These are simple ethical principles that allow us to live life in a way that is fair, equitable, and sustaining to all life. I use these ethical principles as “mantras” to live by and they can be deeply woven into druid practice.
• Permaculture’s Ethic of Care: Explores the relationships between the mind and the heart both as a spiritual issue and as part of permaculture practice.
• Permaculture’s Ethic of Self Care as a Spiritual Practice: The fourth ethical principle–self care and show how principles from druid practice can help us engage in better self care through the bardic arts, sitting quietly with plants, and celebrating the wheel of the year.
• Sankofa, the Weaving of Past and Present: Explores the concept of permaculture and where it comes from, our human legacy, through the principle of sankofa.

Permaculture Design Principles

• Permaculture for Druids: Design Principles through the Five Elements: The first part introduces the design principles, Part 2 explores the outer design principles and part 3 explores the design principles for the inner landscape.  Read these before any others!
• Design Principle: Observe, Interact and Intuit: The Personal Niche Analysis, Honing your Observational Skills, and Cultivating Receptivity.

Sacred Gardening and Ritual

These posts focus on the principle of sacred gardening and building awarness of plants and growth into our sacred practices:

• Garden as Sacred Sanctuary: The garden is a sacred sanctuary.  The calming nature of the plants; the patterns of light, water, and growth; and the tranquility the garden provides are unmatched.  This world we live in is so busy, so full of concrete and television and wars—the garden is the antithesis to all of that.  You can get lost among the plants, you can experience the magic of growth.
• Sacred Gardening through the Three Druid Elements – Designing Sacred Spaces and Planting Rituals: The Druid Revival has a set of three elements (we like to do things in threes) that are quite useful to understanding and enacting some sacred space rituals and building sacred spaces.

Creating Sacred Spaces

As part of druidic work, we can create sacred spaces on our landscape in so many ways. Here is a whole series of posts detailing that!

• The Sacred Site in America: Understanding, Working With, and Developing Sacred Sites: One of the challenges that North American druids face is understanding, visiting, and working with sacred sites.  The real question becomes–what is a sacred site here in the USA? What, if anything, should we do with them? This post explores these themes.
• Creating Sacred Spaces: Bee and Butterfly Sanctuaries: This post describes the about the process of developing a bee and butterfly garden as a sacred sanctuary including plants, philosophies, and more.
• Building Sacred Outdoor Spaces, Part 1: Stone Carin Building / Stone Balancing / Stone Stacking: Whether in your own home garden, in a corner of a local park, or in the forest behind your workplace, you can build and maintain small sacred spaces that can provide peace, restorative energy to you and the land, demonstrate reverence and respect.
• Building Outdoor Sacred Spaces, Part 2: Stone Circles, Stone Spirals, and Permanent Outdoor Spaces: In permaculture gardening, one of the key principles is to mimic patterns found in nature in designing garden and outdoor spaces.  I believe this principle is critical to creating outdoor sacred spaces–look around you, and when you are designing a sacred space, think about what inspires you.  Is it the circle of the sun or the moon?  Is it the branching pattern on the veins in leaves or on the trees? The spiral pattern of a snail shell?  The curve of a tulip or the flight path of a bird?  Look at each of these patterns found in nature–they can be your inspiration and your guide.
• Building Outdoor Sacred Spaces, Part III: Other Small Projects: This posts details even more ways to create outdoor sacred spaces–shrines, fairy houses, gateways, and more.