How does change happen?

How does change happen? It happens with the question? Why? Is it true that? What would happen if? How about? Could it work? What you think about? Change happens with an invitation, an invitation to a new space. It doesn’t necessarily need to be a big step, you don’t have to leap across a void, leap out of an aeroplane, fly to the moon, but just step off the trodden path. You don’t even have to step right off into the brambles, but maybe just to the right of it, just to the left a bit, maybe you have to squash down a few brambles but you don’t necessarily have to take your machete and cut away vast swathes of undergrowth. Change doesn’t always have to be big and scary.

The permaculture course stated with questions. Could we also include changing the self? Could we build community as well as building soil? How could we bring all our skills together to create something new? How do we articulate this vision and attract the right people? Who’s going to do which bit when?

The best questions, the really great questions are ones that we don’t easily know the answer to. If the answer comes too soon, too quickly, to obviously then it wasn’t a good question because a good question searches to create new connections, to bring force information in new ways combining with experience, emotion, relationship. Answering good questions involves reflection and creativity synthesis and imagining.

It was by asking questions that we built our integrated PDC ‘Rooted in connection: for self, community and earth’. By asking questions and exploring, new ideas come, new ways of doing things; not revolutionary, not a complete overhaul of permaculture, we’re just adding our blends, our skills, our flavours.

– What questions would you dare to ask yourself?
– Try sentence structures like, ‘how about…’, ‘What if….’
– And my favourite, ‘If I didn’t know any better could I… ?’

Enjoy

Farmotherlands is my award winning collection of poems about nature, farming, community and family. You can buy a copy here.

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Thanks for being here.
Julie

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