From Lammas – an off-grid ecovillage in Wales – to permaculture writing techniques, my conversation with Jasmine Dale was a wonderfully enjoyable and insightful experience! I hope you enjoy.
As a permaculture author, designer and educator, Jasmine has many amazing stories about her journey finding & exploring permaculture through many years of teaching and writing as well her experience in being part of a forming ecovillage – where, with her husband, she build the famous hobbit house (which sadly burnt down a few years back). Right now, Jasmine mentors community groups with a focus on nature connection and basic skills for resilience.
Jasmine’s book is the Permaculture Design Companion: A practical workbook for integrating people and places – a step by step guide to applying permaculture in your own life, in any context. It combines creative and analytical activities with self reflection and observation. Published by Permanent Publications.
- Here’s a link to one of Jasmine’s articles – Developing Personal Resilience with Permaculture (Issue 107: pg 69) in Permaculture Magazine available until June 18th 2023
- Here’s a link to another of Jasmine’s articles – Permaculture Design in Practice in times of crisis. (Here is access to the whole Magazine issue free courtesy of Permaculture Magazine until June 18th 2023 – her article is on pages 45-46)
Throughout the conversation, Jasmine shares such wonderful tips about writing and what you’ll find in her book the Permaculture Design Companion – a step by step guide to applying permaculture to any project from start to finish, integrating places and people, buildings and ecosystems into the process.
When I asked her about the kinds of permaculture books she things we need more of, her observation is that there is a great need for more books that cultivate greater levels of ecoliteracy, earth psychology and bigger picture thinking.
Permaculture, she says, has also been something that keeps her sane and grounded, and is something she can offer to help others deepen their connection with nature, and for kindness to the planet.
Enjoy!
Accessible through any of your favourite podcast streaming services.
Read the full transcript:
Morag:
Welcome dear listeners, to the Sensemaking in a Changing World Podcast. This is one of our Permaculture Writers episodes. And I’m delighted to welcome Jasmine Dale today, all the way from Wales. She’s written an amazing book called the ‘Permaculture Design Companion’, a practical workbook for integrating people and places. And I had a bit of a look through it because I haven’t actually got this book on my shelves and as I looked through some of the little snapshots that I can see, oh my gosh, I need to get this one and share it far and wide. So I’m really excited to explore this with you. But before we dive into your book, Jasmine, maybe a really good place to begin would be just to let us know a little bit about how you ended up finding your way into permaculture. Because not only are you a permaculture writer, you are a permaculture educator who lives a permaculture life in a deeply intense way. So how did you come to discover permaculture and then weave it so much into your life?
Jasmine:
Well, I had was doing a degree in politics and it was largely focusing on
food, poverty, land use, you know, and international trade and all that stuff. It’s very heavy. It’s very theoretical. And so in that process, I became, I suppose a green person. But I was, I think, in my early 20s. I was quite a bit of a pain to my friends because I was, you know, overwhelmed by the problems. And I used to subscribe to a magazine and there had been something about I think Lot 83 at Crystal Waters.
It was about an older guy, it was just an article about him and it kind of stuck in my mind, but I didn’t really understand what permaculture was. But a vivid enough picture was painted of that place and of his work. And so then, the year after uni, I went to see my cousins and best friend in Tasmania and ended up in the call centre with Telstra which anyone who might appreciate, you do 12 hour days, ringing hundreds of people a day and it’s pretty stressful.
And yeah, I think it’s worth sharing this anecdote. So you know, you get these calls come up automatically, and up popped Crystal Waters! You know, I’d forgotten about it. And it was just an answering machine with the sound of like bullfrogs or something, and insects and birds in the background. The stark difference of sitting there in this tower in Melbourne, which I got acne from the stress of the calling and everything. So I just finished that job and I hacked off up to Queensland, Maleny. And when I got there, they didn’t want any volunteers but this young man whom I believe is Max Lindegger’s son, he just said, ‘oh this PDC (permaculture design course) just started yesterday, why don’t you go?’ And I looked at the money I’d earnt at Telstra, and it was my whole amount and what I managed to save. And so I went on that course and pretty much within 12 hours, I probably was blown away, because I never learned to play with creative methods before. Apart from that, the whole environment was amazing for me.
By being presented with solutions, it kind of dissolved that four years of negativity around the intractable situation of global and local, economic and environmental problems, that kind of just mitigated it instantly. And so then within a few years, I’d started picking up more training on that, and I decided to move to the countryside. I had also seen lime plastered buildings at Crystal Waters. And quite shortly, then me and my husband got really into lime building and rammed earth building and lived off grid for many years.
So that was sort of how I was in it. I got access to fields, first as a volunteer living on a project, and then later in my own place. Although on the course that Crystal Waters we’d been taught it through in play, I didn’t have analytical processes to follow, but I knew about them. And I quickly started applying that quite diligently really partly because it felt like such a big responsibility to have bare land to repair.
I’ve always thought that permaculture was useful for people like myself who were a bit too timid to impose our views on land. I felt like it was ideal because it stewards you through a sensitive approach to the other species and patterns that are happening on that land. But then I also think it’s good for people that are gun-ho and maybe a bit too confident, because it holds them back. So it’s a great process, I think by using it in quite a step by step way.
Morag:
I really like the way you’ve just described that because it is so useful for both of those ends of the spectrum, as you say, and everyone else in between. It’s a really lovely way of explaining it. So I know you’re you’re one of the founders are the co founders of Lammas Eco Village, you want to just maybe tell us a little bit about that place and how you landed there and what it is like living in a in a permaculture, off grid, one planet eco village, what does that all mean?
Jasmine:
Yes, there were so many people living what they might call low impact lifestyles in West Wales, that there basically a policy was made to kind of formalise that to sort of stop it happening erratically. And we were living at someone else’s place as full time volunteers and I happened to get a small inheritance that was enough to go out field. So up came this project, and it has certain requirements on it to live a land-based lifestyle, you need to have
to have an enterprise, I suppose. And I in no way was in the mood for retail, and I hadn’t, ever, but I did want to live in the countryside. And I really would’ve like to have my own holding. So that was the motivation and because nearly every other family had children of the same age.
There was a four year process of getting planning. And I would say we didn’t use the permaculture process really to design the plots or anything. I think I was the only person there that had done a PDC out of 17 adults. There was a loose understanding amongst other people and so we went at it quite formally. There was this amazing opportunity – 70 acres, which is quite a lot out here, but denuded overgrazed land and everybody had their seven acres. And so we did set out and it was an amazing thing at the beginning. You know, every single one of us had been massively craving to have that connection with soil and to get orchards in and everything else. So that was that.
On the downside, you know if your listeners can see the picture, if you move on to fields without road access, without toilets, without electricity – with most people living in caravans and having children and having to still work. And pretty much apart from three families, the other six hadn’t ever done off-grid living. So you might imagine that there was an incredible pressure on us. And we also didn’t really know to what extent we might come under quite a punitive system, because we had planning permission to uphold. So we’re there in like, the shadow of the stress and that overwork.
I remember years later, Robina from New Zealand, I think she’s quite famous, and Robin Clayfield. And some others came through. And they showed a lovely slideshow of all these places all over the world, permaculture holdings, and they all had these beautiful shrines. A lot of care had been put into making ornamental places. And I felt a little sadness for us at last, because we just worked like dogs, really. There were one or two people who were very committed to beauty that had managed to provide those sorts of spaces. So there was a lot of hard grind, as well as being very beautiful. And sadly, in a way, we had huge governance problems. Our original documents were rubbish and that combined with stresses, I think led to quite entrenched conflicts for a while. That resulted in some court cases and things.
So I think all that as far as I understand, it’s all been clarified. Now, there’s still a little bit, I think it’s still a little bit beset by difficulties, but it’s grown its own culture, there’s excellent people, obtained permission all around. What did happen there really clearly, and this is partly to do with the people but partly to do with nature’s forces itself, is the biodiversity is amazing.
Everybody, however, skilled or not, cared so much about their places. And even if they were just arguing with neighbours, they cared about their places. And everyone made ponds and planted trees with a lot of attention to, you know, accommodating wild plants as well as bringing in plants. So within quite a short few years, it really showed me how quickly land can be repaired from totally bare with just a few hedgerow, hardly any mature trees. To I think within three years, you could notice a big difference. Five years, it was pretty obvious all the microclimates were there. And one of the great things about doing lots of things by hand and not having many resources, is people didn’t have the money, say to make massive changes with machinery, I mean we did use machines to terrace. But you can’t manage to impose your will on those many acres if you’re busy. And so there’s huge, lovely areas of wild corridors everywhere. And it sustains an immense amount of bird life and because it’s little patches, it’s a mosaic, you know, it’s highly diverse.
Morag:
Yeah, you know, I really feel the challenges that you’re talking about, but also the beauty in that natural regeneration. As you know, I live here at Crystal Waters and it’s the good, the bad, the good too! It’s kind of part and parcel of being in a place. I’ve been living here for 25 years now. So, where are you now then? And what positive lessons did you take from that experience and take with you into your new place where you where you’ve landed?
Jasmine:
Yeah, well, I’ve landed quite nearby that we’ve had for two years now. We’re in an area where it’s the same elevation, but it’s rough grassland with lots of standing stones and big rocky outcrops. And it’s very low farming, as in not intensive, you know, it’s a low input farming around me, and National Park. And it’s very, very old. So we were always building new houses on fields that have never been lived on before, marginal places. Whereas where I am now, there’s been a house for hundreds of years. And so that probably means there was someone here for forever, really, because that’s the way they plant houses in these ancient places.
One of the key lessons that have stayed with me was the observation phase. So, with Lammas we had three, four years in the planning process, so I made an extensive design. Then there was a hell of a pressure to get it on the ground and get producing. Whereas here you know, I’m older now. I work outside rather than working for my plot. And so for this first year or so, I haven’t felt any impulse to put anything down.
Part of me could think that the land’s actually said, ‘Look, I’ve been like this for a long time, don’t just come in here and put your newfangled ideas down’. Though I did, actually, this week, order my first fruit trees. So that’s after being here for two years. It’s not really a good microclimate for anything like that. But as you could appreciate, as a permaculturalist, we got to have some fruit trees, don’t we! And I did put in a lot of, you know, wildlife and timber trees last winter, actually. So I think that that sort of sector analysis, if you like, the wind, sun, water, view – that sits in me, although I’ve gone away from the analytical, more and more, especially from teaching, those ideas are really deeply imprinted in me. So I strangely haven’t been bothered to do a proper base map or anything. And I wonder about that, maybe that was because I have been thinking about it like this for 20 years? Well, since 1999, roughly, I’ve been thinking about these tools. Maybe they’re in me. I’ve used sectors to plant a small veg garden. I’m going to put these fruit trees in and in me very deeply, you know, where is the wind coming from? Where are the most sheltered spots?
Morag:
And that’s interesting, what you’re saying, because once you get it into your elbows and your knees, as you’re saying, it’s in you, you just naturally tend to think and plan and map things out. That’s kind of when you get to that point, I suppose – that’s a mastery of a topic, isn’t it? When it just is there, and it just, it becomes sort of obviously seen how things go together, you don’t have to work it as much it just kind of is. You’ll obviously be going through all those processes, but it’s like riding a bike, you know, it just is.
Jasmine:
I’ve tended to use the word ‘fluency’. I wouldn’t like to say of myself mastery, exactly! But yes, especially when I used to teach the design process as a sort of certified course and workshops, it can seem a bit sort of contrived and analytical for people to go ‘step by step’. But that’s always what I felt the benefit had been, especially during the diploma which was quite tedious. The benefit of that was that you kind of got a fluency in it. There’s a great young farmer called Matt, who’s probably not that young, up in North Wales who I went to the Wales permaculture gathering there in September. He’s running a brilliant regenerative farm, a couple of market gardens, the whole thing. And he said, ‘You know, when you walk past something 1000 times, you don’t really need to do the steps anymore’.
So there was that thought, but I think I’d probably pick this idea up from the Bill Mollison type of books: that in our genetics in ancient selves, we had to be completely connected – reading landscapes and materials. We were so connected with them that we knew. So I always think that we kind of lost that completely just in two generations. You know, there’s all ‘Oh, aren’t we terrible humans’ and everything, but I feel like it’s just dormant in us. Although we wouldn’t advise new people just to go into somewhere and start rampaging the soil or something. But surely, we must have some innate understanding of soils and shelter and plants, we must do.
Morag:
Yeah, I definitely feel that and I love the word fluency. I think that’s a really lovely way to describe it. How did you become a permaculture teacher? What was your pattern? And how do you like to teach? What’s your way of teaching?
Jasmine:
I suppose on that Crystal Waters PDC I did have a little bit of a like, ‘oh, maybe I might enjoy doing something like this’. Then it was completely parked. Then back a long time ago, 2005 ish, I was teaching something we have out here called Forest School, which is a sort of self-esteem building thing. It’s got quite a specific method to it and I just noticed instantly that play based learning went very well. So I was weaving permaculture in the games and in the things we did with the children, without obviously mentioning the word, devising little games where we were using our bodies to represent the layers of woodland edge – because forest gardening out here we got so little light compared to you in Australia that we are productive with the woodland edge. Devising games and that creative teaching method of Robin Clayfield that really had stuck in me. When I got to Lammas, I suppose as a volunteer for other projects, I started to give the odd lead session of some type. But a brilliant woman called Jody Talon came along and she was already used to teaching introduction courses. We just devised one and the first one we ever did we put so much into it, we thought out every single tiny bit and used every single permaculture tool to do it. I just felt like, ‘Yeah, this is something I really feel I can offer and I feel like I’m really thriving’. After a while Jody went, but because I had the smallholding, we did tours that nearly every other week and we’d get a lot of visiting groups, from all sorts of people – artists, architects, anybody, all sorts of people! So, within a couple of years, I was really fluent at doing that and it went very well. But I couldn’t really get people to come for permaculture courses, but my husband was quite a well known natural builder of straw bale round houses. And so people would come for that.
So that’s really where it went. I did all my talks and things, I’d do this, show them the plot, the sectors and the layers and everything and had all those wonderful resources there to kind of really bring it to life and develop my own style of delivery – trying to use the body wherever possible as a sensor to complement the analytical side of everything. But it ended up really being varied. Because everyone wanted a hobbit house, they called it, which was what my husband had become well known for making. But they weren’t really thinking about the landform, or it connecting in. It’s to do with this dream people have, it really awakens something in them. So I was like, what is the solution? Well, they don’t want to come from me or my or my skills, but they will come for him! And he didn’t really want to be a teacher. So I thought ‘Oh, there’s the gap, isn’t it?’ They want the house but they haven’t thought about where to place it or any of the surrounding systems like food or firewood, water – everything that makes a house usable and sustainable. So that’s how I based it, I did the formal sessions in the morning with the design tools and the observation. And then they’d go and build for the afternoon and do something with lots of straw and mud. And in West Wales, we’ve got the Lammas project itself. But there’s also a huge array of really interesting other sites to visit communities and organic farms. So we had a wealth of places to do great visits. And that’s something I’ve learned from the course that yours as well as other courses was that, you know, you really got to have the diversity and mix it up with, with all sorts of experiences to help people really learn on multiple levels. Yeah, yeah.
Morag:
You still teach permaculture now?
Jasmine:
Not strictly, occasionally, someone will say, ‘Oh, can you come and do a day or weekend?’ So they organised everything…
Morag:
And you just turn up and teach! That’s nice.
Jasmine:
It gets tiring, doesn’t it?
Morag:
Did your book come out of the teaching? Where did that fit into your flow?
Jasmine:
Yeah, so the book is basically the sum total of everything I learned up to that point in 2017 – from other teachers and from the more than 1000 people that came through my hands, and from working on that piece of land. The chapters are in effect, the sessions we would run, so they’re like an idea, like half a page, followed by some body thinking exercises that you do on your own place. And so yes, with a few other things chucked in, it was very much the basis and I had come to a point where I didn’t want to teach that course, all those types of topics. But I didn’t want to lose that harvest, it felt like it had been very rich. And although I was increasingly not kind of enthusiastic, I knew that there was something good in there. And so I don’t know, do you know the morning pages, the Artists Way? The Artists Way is a brilliant book. But it has you do these things called Morning Pages, where first thing in the morning you write three pages of A4, or whatever is on your mind. And it’s partly a way to get out all the crud that’s in you to allow your creativity to come through. But sometimes you get really clear crystal bell ideas come through.
A few years before writing the book that had started to come through, like, why don’t you just write up at least one sector, because I’d developed some really cool exercises for that. I thought they were a great interface between analysis, design and observation, you know, they were all those together. And so I had this idea to write the pamphlet. And also because it gets boring people would buy land, and they’d ask me to come and do it and I always want people to do it themselves – never really been one for being a consultant. But then I did a big survey of what was out there and existing permaculture books, because there’s no point writing something that’s already out there. And I thought, okay, like the Artist’s Way, it’s a practical workbook. It’s a self led process. And so I drew on quite a lot of things like that in my survey process and I mapped it out. I could see it felt like, I don’t know, if you as a writer, you get this feeling where there’s quite a massive energy behind it, and you just know, it’s going to come out and come out clearly. So I did start that.
At the same time, I finished teaching certified courses on October 17. But then, in January, the first of 2018, I spent a couple of days writing a chapter on the wild sector and fire sector. Like writing about the fire sector, I’d said that in Australia or Portugal, we need to take care of this in our design. We don’t really have wildfires here in Wales. And I’d write more about the sun sector and under fire. And then I wrote the next chapter was just a one page on wildness and the unexpected and how that can come and change a design completely. Or how do you accommodate uncertainty in the wild when you’re doing such controlled processes designing something? And then strangely, my house burned down in one day in like, a few hours. That happened just the day after I think I wrote that chapter. So something that was then being built for six years went in a couple of hours. A month or two afterwards, because there’s obviously some sort of trauma involved, my husband just said, ‘Come on, pick up that book’. So it was just what I did for that year afterwards. That’s why I wrote it all up. Because I didn’t want to lose everything. You know, it seemed like a great thing. They said, then it’s out there and I don’t really mind what happens to it. But I think teachers and diploma students find it really useful.
Morag:
Yeah, I think it sounds to me like a book that would be so helpful for everyone starting to work out how to teach design as well, whether you’re actually doing your own design, or also working out how to teach design. So you know, that’s kind of what I do a lot of, is teaching permaculture teachers. And one of the things I’m hearing a lot now is asking for support for more activities or how to share this and it sounds to me like that would be something that would be perfect. So I’m going to be sharing that out with everyone from now on! So thank you for articulating that so beautifully. I wonder whether there’s any other tips in terms of writing that you would have for people who are thinking about getting started to write or any other kind of gaps when you were doing your survey? What’s out there in the permaculture world? What are the gaps you might have seen in the permaculture writing sphere?
Jasmine:
Yeah, I don’t know exactly. I mean, I do buy the occasional book still, but I feel at the moment, there’s maybe a bit of a call for…I’ve just picked up a wonderful book called Imagine which is about how an ecosystem works and I feel like in this reductionism that’s going on about carbon and carbon dioxide, whichever you want are two very different things, but people seem to conflate the same word. I think that that might be quite useful because I’m now a mentor for community groups, and they’re mostly people that has just become a new idea to them – about being green. And there was, I think, compared to any time in my life, I’m nearly 50, is that people are actually turning their attention towards being green. Now, I don’t have that much faith that I could suddenly turn them on to permaculture suddenly, but there’s this great love of nature and the preciousness coming through. But there is a skills deficit and an understanding deficit, I feel around ecosystems. I don’t know. That’s just what I seem to feel. So say like the obsession with planting trees when there’s lots of data to show that well managed grasslands and shrubs sequester as much carbon dioxide if not much more. Or I was with someone and they were seeing a willow tree – in our cool, temperate climate, all our plants have evolved to be coppiced, you know and to be grazed and eaten and cut continuously. The person I was with actually had a science PhD, we were looking at a willow tree, it was all straggly and overgrown. They said how sad it looked and that people should come and cut that tree down. I felt sad and not because of the willow. It’s this lack of understanding, because that tree’s roots will pump down and do much more if it’s regularly grazed or coppiced. And it’ll provide more bird habitat. So I think that could be a place for bringing people into nature stewardship, and combining that with self awareness and self care. There could be scope there just to help people understand natural processes a bit more. Because they’re not really getting that through the mainstream information, I don’t think. So that’s one thing.
I also noticed that there’s this book called Earth Pass by Starhawk, I don’t know if you know it, it’s probably quite old now. But pretty much guaranteed every year, my courses, someone would borrow it and never bring it back. I think it was the most borrowed, least brought back book. I’ve bought it like six or seven times. So I think there’s something in that. That’s probably influenced my book quite a lot in that she combines analytical with self observation. You go into a field and you think, ‘Oh, God, it’s I don’t like this’, but you park those thoughts away, you don’t really acknowledge them. They’re marginalised. But there’s information in there. Because you’re in body and mind is having a response. And it might not even be about the physical environment, it could be, you know, about anything and the people element, whatever. So, that could be because I noticed, yeah, that could be something that really yokes together, our own inner workings with this observation outside, and then the practical solutions. There could be scope for that. In fact, someone called it Earth psychology to me.
Morag:
Yeah. Fantastic. I love those two ideas, and it’s just really wonderful. And I really think there’s so much scope, even just coming from a permaculture perspective and thinking about books, like really trying to expand the field of where we go with it and finding those edges of intersecting between eco psychology and design, and how we can bring those things together. I think that would be amazing. And also thinking about how to apply different scales as well. For example, bringing it down to something that children could really access all art or even maybe some more materials for youth. I’m hosting a whole series of forums coming up soon, and we’re really looking at sort of what’s permaculture when you’re thinking about active retirement? What’s permaculture when you’re thinking about homeschooling? What’s permaculture when you’re thinking about mental health? So really going ‘permaculture and’ ‘permaculture and’ – where can we go when we start to expand the field. Yeah, I really feel like there’s a lot of possibility of bringing together different fields of knowledge, like forest schooling and permaculture. What does that look like together as this beautiful piece that can be shared out?
Jasmine:
Well, I’ve got a question for you in a sec. But there are quite a few people who are quite active like that in Britain. I got a friend. She’s 78 or something. She’s doing her diploma. And so her designs have been a lot about how to transition to not being able to physically do things. I think there’s quite a big body of work for children in permaculture, like Lucy Leagan, people would find some stuff like that. But I was interested to think, for you, if I do workshops now, like yesterday I was with some wonderful people. And I was bringing in permaculture ideas, but I never mentioned that word. So it seems a shame, doesn’t it, to lose the legacy and the coherency of all that first principle stuff and the massive movement that goes on in its modern form. What do you think about this dilemma of bringing in the word or not bringing in the word?
Morag:
I always do. And I, you know, I question it too. There was this woman, she must be 70 odd, and her name is Rhonda Hetzel and she’s written this book called Down to Earth. I was interviewing her in a local food festival and she’d just released a new book so I was talking to her about that and I was just amazed – I wasn’t expecting when she said, all of a sudden, she said, ‘and I blog and I have, you know, 20 million followers’. I think I almost fell off my chair! Like these people are interesting. So she said, ‘come over, and I’ll teach you how to blog and do all these things’. So I did, I went and sat with her for a long time. And we talked about it and I said ‘Look I don’t know, I’ve always done permaculture, but I don’t know whether I should call it permaculture or not, whether it would limit what I’m doing’. She just said, ‘no, Morag you are so already involved in it. Feel it, infuse it with all that you are as well. And bring new ideas into permaculture, expand the field of permaculture, redescribe it through your language, every person who comes into permaculture will redescribe it in their language’ and I really have tried to do that, tried to make it more gentle and open and accessible and welcoming. Particularly as we’re teaching permaculture, here, it’s sort of saying, what is all that you bring to permaculture? You apply a permaculture lens, and who is it that you want to be working with? Who would you like to teach? Like, it’s not like a fixed thing or a cookie cutter approach that ‘we do this and it has to be that way’, it’s kind of a way of seeing. It can be a permaculture way of doing something, and I just find it a really gentle way of bringing the concepts in, because as you start to introduce a tiny bit, you can then open doors gradually to multiple dimensions of what it is. It kind of creates this connective thread. What it does is it brings forward that body of knowledge and it also helps to create this global language of connectivity between people all around the world. I think too what gives me a lot of confidence is when I see people in the refugee settlements in Uganda saying ‘Permaculture is making a difference in our lives that is actually saving lives here’. When you sort of step out of your own comfort zone and imagine the possibilities of what that actually means there, that there is this system of knowledge that can be handed accessibly through this democratic education process to communities like that, and it makes a difference? Then I really embrace it so wholeheartedly.
Jasmine:
Okay, well, that’s gonna give me food for thought then because you probably know like, you’ve probably got your own ways of giving it the one sentence explanation for different types of people, because that little first mention of it makes a difference. I suppose quite a few years ago, now you’d meet people, they’d go ‘I don’t want to hear about it, its just composting’ or something, you know, I developed various quick ways in and if it’s a certain type of person, I might say, well, it’s a design system that’s modelled on ecosystems, or another type of people, I might say, well, it’s a way of planning human needs. Sometimes if it’s a new audience who wouldn’t have heard the word then I will try. Now you’ve said that maybe I’ll give it a bit more effort. Because yeah, they can’t really access the further and wonderful world of it if they don’t know the word.
Morag:
I know. That’s right. And you know, as soon as you sort of drop that in, it can just start to open up a whole whole world of knowledge that exists out there and a connectivity. And I think too, through this podcast series that I’ve been doing now, for a number of years, I’ve been talking to people from all different backgrounds. Some people who are not directly in the permaculture world and I start to talk with them. People say like Fritjof Capra, and he will say, ‘Permaculture is the way of applying this system thinking, it makes sense’. You hear people like Vandana Shiva saying, and ‘Permaculture is a big part of the solution’. So I’ve looked to different people from different backgrounds and tried to see. People like Helena Norberg Hodge, and all different people, people I’ve highly respected for many years, who’ve actually now sort of understand what permaculture is a bit more and go are ‘actually yeah, that’s what we’re talking about’. And I’m delighted to hear that because I was inspired by them when I was in my early 20s and, and it was because of the kinds of things that they said about what’s happening in the world, what we need to be thinking about, what we need to be doing, that drew me to permaculture as a way to respond. Like, ‘okay I understand all these big pictures, but what do we do in our own communities? How do we apply that?’ And then share it and myceliate out into the world in a way that makes sense. Something that’s tangible, accessible, shareable. And I’ve yet to find anything that is more than that, that I am able to kind of offer as a bundle. You know, there’s a lot of different independent bits and pieces, but something I can go ‘okay, well, here it is’. And it’s got permeable edges, don’t kind of see it as ‘that’s it’.
But it’s kind of like something I can grasp hold of and offer as a way that people in their everyday lives, anywhere in the world can actually grasp and do something with and that’s why I think doing what you did in terms of writing down your process is such a valuable thing and I would really love more permaculture writers in the world. Which is why I started this series, to say, well what is your experience? How have you done that? And how can we inspire more people who’ve developed a body of knowledge within this to be able to get out and share it out into the world. I think that would be so wonderful, that we share our stories. We’re so busy doing our stuff, that we don’t actually share what this thing permaculture is all about from all these different angles. I think the diversity of perspectives and ways that it manifests in people’s lives, it’s really important. And not to be dogmatic or fundamentalist about it at all, I just see it as a field of knowledge and a connective thread of concept that helps people to kind of grasp what it is that we’re talking about. How about a paradigm or a way of seeing?
Jasmine:
Yeah, I’ve used that term of a lens too, that you said there and it’s a pattern language in a way, isn’t it? That’s why it’s so applicable to any context. So there’s been a good movement in Britain to apply it beyond land. There’s been quite a few teachers and people who have really pushed that one forward. It’s really healthy the way it grows. I love the early works of Bill and David and all that stuff, I think they’re amazing and I was just lucky enough to get my hand on a manual. They’re hundreds of pounds in Britain now. Someone I know died and somehow I got their copy. But yes, but it grows really organically it fills niches, doesn’t it? It’s like an ecosystem process itself, a niche appears likeLooby Macnamara and she’s taken this idea called Cultural Emergence. And, you know, that’s very popular, and it’s really taken the people side of it up.
I was thinking about the process of writing, although for that particular book, I very much wanted to lay out the design process, and we call it often using survey, analysis, design, implement, maintain, evaluate and tweak. That’s partly just an adamancy, to help people who’ve kept finding permaculture confusing so you see that side of it, and there’s a section on principles and stuff. What I thinking might be nice to just share with the listeners is if I’m starting a fresh piece of writing, which will now be more like something like an article or report for someone, I like to sit fairly still and then maybe this wouldn’t work for everyone, but I then pick or go to what I would call ‘the shamanic bookcase’. I think this is an idea from Edward de Bono or someone else, that you just go without thinking and you hold the topic that you’d like to write about and then let it go. And then go to the bookcase, put your hand in, pull out anything. The first thing you open it on – you see how that links, like in a holographic way. Because as Carl Jung, he’s one of the first people to really describe that everything is linked in some way, like in psychology anyway, first one. So yeah, so I did that.
So I might be thinking I’ve got to write this thing about peer mentoring. Yeah, I had to write a peer mentoring handbook recently. But I know that for writing to be good, it has to have a catchy thing, doesn’t it? We’re not in the 1800s anymore where you can do a long, slow novel. You need to have something that draws people in instantly. So I might go and open the book, open the bookcase, and it might say anything – I’ll make a link and that’ll be my opening gambit. Especially because lots of people get writer’s block, sometimes you have to do the body of writing first and go back and make the intro, that’s quite common as well. Because it takes a while to settle – to know really what that powerful opening sentence will be that really draws people in. But it’s a bit like being a magician like spell casting. We do need something with some quite a sparkle to it to get someone to actually bother to sit down and read. And then I have this one called ‘walking on alligators’, which is something the Artists Way recommended from a ‘Book of Meditations for Writers’. And it’s like hundreds of one point ideas. So I will quite often use that. You know, if I said ‘I’m going to write to Morag today’, I’d open up and it says ‘nearly all important transactions of life, we have to take a leap in the dark’, and blah, blah, blah. And so then it says, ‘Today, I’ll set aside my doubts and simply write’. So there’s a much longer thing there. I don’t think it’s ever failed me. It’s by
Morag:
Very good. Yeah, I think those sorts of things. And I love the idea of just grabbing something random, and then doing the moiré effect and bringing those things together. I think that’s fantastic. There’s a couple of ways I seem to find a way to start, I sort of map out all my ideas even before I start writing the text, and then I’ll just see it there as this big kind of soup of ideas and then go for a walk. And just kind of then something will just land. Like an oomph in my belly. And I think right, that’s the starting point. Sometimes that works. Other times, I’ll go off, similar to the bookshelf, I’ll go off and listen to a seminar about something else or join in a conversation with a group of friends talking about something else and then just some little thing of that, and raise the topic and see what happens in the conversation where the energy of the conversation is.
Jasmine:
Going for a walk or something, I have had it recommended. Again, it was Artists Way – any right brain activity, like making a big soup or something. Yeah, I mean, just create that space for the thing to bubble up.
Morag:
Metaphorically and physically as well! Yeah, gosh. Well, so if you’re if you’re not teaching permaculture now, how do you just as a final kind of thing, how do you see permaculture in your life? Or in having informed where you are now? Do you still feel it’s like bubbling away there? Because obviously it’s been a big part of the journey to where you landed now.
Jasmine:
Yeah, well, I still work as a workshop leader, I’m largely mentoring community groups. Mainly to do with being green. If I’m project planning with them, I still basically am using the permaculture design steps. I still bring in the principles, even if they’re not really mentioned explicitly. And yeah, I’m using it all the time to think holistically about what they might need. So yesterday, the people I was with, they were totally new to green ideas, but they were dealing with people that had trauma. So I’m thinking all the time about the people care, earth care, fair share, those three ethics. I’m gonna give a lot of thought now to what you’ve said about bringing it in more clearly. But I’m always thinking in it and then in my garden I am applying it. Probably more like in that sort of Holmgren principle kind of way. That sort of idea. Anything I’m doing here will be backed by permaculture in my mind in the garden.
And I’m not so good at this one but I use it for like, the inner landscape survey, you know, that sort of idea. I think I’ve copied it from other writers, but I made a resource for the inner landscape. So you say what’s the big trees in my life? What’s my microclimates? What’s my shelter from the wind? Like thoughts. What’s my sunny spot? And where am I in transition? Where does the water flows? You know, I used to do that really regularly.
Morag:
That’s beautiful. Have you written it up? Like has someone written up that process?
Jasmine:
It was in the Permaculture Magazine, they asked me to make something during lockdown about personal resilience and I wrote it up for them. So that was in about 2020, I suppose.
I think I’ve copied it from somewhere. I like the idea, maybe Starhawk because she interprets all the elements. But I have never seen it written like I did. But I just started it when I wrote my zone 00 design up for my diploma back in 2010. I just thought, well, ‘we’re a landscape, aren’t we?’ And when you’re with other people, when you have to do training for groups on conflict resolution. Well, it’s so boring for me, I don’t want to think about that! But what you could do, you can address your inner landscape. And perhaps that’s the best thing you could do to operate harmoniously in a group is pretend your inner world.
Morag:
Yeah, that’s beautiful. Oh, yeah. I’d love to read that piece. If you’re able to send through a link that would be amazing. So are you still writing articles?
Jasmine:
Only occasionally, if someone asked me or something. I haven’t noticed any big urge to write come through, like when I wanted to write that big book. And I keep thinking, why aren’t I writing plays to connect people in a deep, ecological way! But it’s not coming through. For the people I work for, I just made a handbook on peer mentoring. And I really enjoyed writing that.
Morag:
Fantastic. That’s a great topic to write about. That’s wonderful. I was going to ask you, too, you started your story saying that you went and studied politics? And do you see what you’ve been doing through permaculture and what you’re doing now as a form of political activism, in a way that responds to the things you’re concerned about?
Jasmine:
No, no, I kind of keep away from anything that’s considered political or ideological, there’s very complex reasons behind that, but I think it’s just been the way to keep me sane, you know. I wasn’t the person to interact on a policy level, or occasionally maybe I’m contributing to that in a really left field way but I’m no longer really massively someone that’s trying to build the eco-dream or something physically because I’ve done it for too long and I’m now tired. So I think it’s just my personal thing, but where I suppose I am an activist in a way, is when I’m working with all these community groups. I suppose I’m on a mission on some levels to help people thrive. And myself personally, I’m probably like an animist or something, you know, because I really love rocks as much as I love plants. But I’m not at all interested in going and pushing that on someone else. Anything that helps someone feel better and more confident, more connected, then I feel that the nature connection will come in and it’s up to people to make their own choices. Kindness, I think there’s a few good people and writers and everything like Buddhists or whomever have emphasised that perhaps that’s the really important thing and I can be quite mean (laughs). So yeah, I think that’s what’s motivated me much more than anything political, is kindness.
Morag:
Yeah, kindness. It’s a motivating force, I think that we really do need it in the world more than anything else right now.
Jasmine:
I think we’re really trying to do a wildlife project, and do it for the plants and for the animals and for them, more than because ‘I believe that we must have…’
Morag:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you so, so much for joining me today, Jasmine. It’s been an absolute pleasure talking with you and learning about your way of applying permaculture in your life and writing your book and your ways of writing too. I hope that those people who are listening to this will be inspired to pick up the pen or find a way to share their story or connect in with what’s going on. So thank you so much, Jasmine, it’s been just wonderful.
Jasmine:
Thank you for this. You seem to be taking it out into the world on many fronts! Thank you.