The Power of Intention – Part III

One of the principles in Permaculture is to seek the least change for greatest effect. Imagination, visualization and planning are excellent ways to put this principle into practice. Exploring, discovering and defining our intentions helps form the foundation for everything that follows in our design. The primary cost in doing this is taking the time to think about it, time to let our minds wander freely and time to probe deeper into what is driving and inspiring us as we develop our design. Knowing and focusing our intentions yields clarity, energy and context that will help inform the entire process going forward, within planning stages and throughout implementation. Rather than diving right into creating your dream garden, I recommend making the small change of mentally mapping out your ideas and intentions before hand as part of your design process. I believe this has the potential to make a huge positive effect over the lifetime of the design on many levels, including more efficient use of time and resources, and improvements in quality and beauty.

For those of you that have gone through a Permaculture Design Course or similar design instruction, many of these methods will be familiar. I follow this process for my own personal projects, and it can also apply when designing for a client if we can understand and internalize their intentions as much as possible (something any designer should be striving for!). One last thing to note is that this is an iterative and non-linear process. These “steps” should be revisited, even if just briefly, throughout the design and installation process to further refine, enrich and adjust your intentions and your garden design.

• Just Dream – I take the time to find a comfortable spot and allow my mind to roam free, play with ideas, ask questions, imagine possibilities. This is your chance to really let your imagination go and find what it is that you ACTUALLY want out of your garden. Questions to ask might be: What do I want to be doing in the garden? What is in my garden? How much time do I want to spend working on it? What does it look like? Who is in my garden? Why is ________ so important to me? What is the garden providing to me, my family, my neighborhood, my environment, my world? Anything goes at this stage. Your garden could be your own private nudist resort, a conduit for communicating with extraterrestrials, a laboratory for discovering the next greatest organic technology, a water park. Don’t be afraid to blow the lid off of what everyone tells us that a garden should be. My wife actually has a wonderful idea which is to make parts of our garden be an agility course for our two terriers. It means I will have to come up with some clever planter construction and earth works, but there is no reason why our family can’t do this AND have a place to entertain friends and family, grow all sorts of native, annual, and perennial foods, create wildlife habitat, have an abundance of flowers, flavorful and medicinal herbs and also have a wonderful place to relax in the evenings. Take the time to play with ideas, let your mind roam free and find what gets you really excited about your potential garden.

• Observe – Take the time to really learn from the landscape. If you are choosing a site for your project, the more specific you were in the dreaming/imagination exercises, the easier it will be to avoid a site that will become a source of frustration later. There are so many ways to observe a site that this could be the subject of another entire series of articles. When doing observation, I think the most important thing is to take your dreams, aspirations, pre-conceived designs and put them on the backburner. Many of my mentors emphasize the importance of “listening to the site” and learning as much as you can from the site without jumping to conclusions or being selective about the data. In the observation stage we have the chance to gain deeper and broader knowledge about the site before deciding the next steps. There are many ways to do this but the methods of learning fall into two broad categories, both equally important.

  Active Exploration: By physically exploring the site we create an internal mapping through sight, touch, sound, smell and taste. Move through the site at different times of day and in different seasons (if possible). Look at the site from inside and outside, explore it from as many angles as possible. Use all your senses. Our vision tends to be very dominant, so frequently blur your vision or close our eyes and allow your other senses to be heightened. You will experience the temperatures, humidity levels, terrain, sounds and smells much more intensely. The more physical knowledge you gain of the site, the more instinctive and informed your decisions will be.

  Passive Observation: This can range from just sitting and watching the site to gathering data on the general patterns about the site. Talk to other local gardeners, read, take notes, learn about weather patterns, prevailing winds, soil types, current and historical use, current and historical ecology, external environment…it is good to get a grasp bigger frame in which your site sits and also help hone your understanding of unique aspects of the site so that your design can work comfortably within these influences and factors.

• Brainstorm – If you have been envisioning (dreaming) and observing, now you have the challenge of bringing the two together to bring a workable design into being. This is where we often have to get really creative and allow our observations to play, wrestle and merge with our dreams. When we look at the chaos of the site, it is often hard to map it to the vague, grandiose ideas in our head. That in itself is a book unto itself, but these articles are more about the imagination process, so I won’t say much about design. Instead, I encourage you to allow the dreams to persist and inform your design even when your observations show you that some of your ideas may not be appropriate (or even impossible). If your idea is really important to you, allow that the possibility might exist, but you just don’t see it yet. You may even have to put that “impossible” dream aside for a while and revisit it occasionally to see if you have any new insights that might solve the puzzle.

  Lets do a brief, whimsical case study: So here’s the problem: you live as part of the acequia system in the New Mexico Desert and you really, really want part of your land to be a water park. Water is critical and cannot be wasted. Is it impossible to have your water park? I don’t think so. One way of respecting the scarcity of water, yet still realizing your dream, might be to use the event of your weekly water allotment as the opportunity to have your water park. When the dam opens, it could spill into a series of slides and pools on its way to irrigate the property. The splashing and playing in the pools themselves could be a method of irrigation…so there you have it! An appropriate, environmentally conscious, multi-functional water park in the middle of the desert! Now each time the dam opens there is the possibility of a wonderful water party to celebrate the event.

  If we hold on to our intentions, allow them to inform our decisions, and remain flexible in how the dreams are realized in our designs, amazing things can happen.

• Sleep on It – I cannot say enough about the power of sleep. Bill Mollison advocates the hammock as the designer’s most important tool, and I couldn’t agree more. A comfortable place where you can observe the site, read, peruse the internet and occasionally doze off…now that’s a design tool that everyone should have. While there is still a lot of mystery surrounding what our brain is doing during sleep, there is growing evidence that sleep is extremely important in the creative and learning processes. As discussed in Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind, it appears that in various stages of sleep our mind is actually very actively seeking solutions to problems that we are currently wrestling with in our life. In a fascinating RadioLab episode on sleep (at minute 31), Dr. Gulio Tunoni explains that when our brain has intently focused on something during the day, sleep will bring clarity and refinement. So rather than banging your head on the desk, or trying to cram that last bit of data from the book into your memory…if you are feeling tired, relax, just let yourself drift let your brain take it from there

• Listen to Your Body and Emotions – In western culture we have divorced the mind and body. This is one of the stupidest dichotomies ever. Our body IS our mind and likewise, our mind/brain communicates through the body via these powerful, sometimes irrational, sensations that we call emotions. When we set our intentions, these emotional signals can be indicators and guides. I try to pay attention to these signals, but I also try and probe them. I think anyone can have the magical ability of “intuition”. Rather than it being some rare gift, I think intuition is the learned ability to have a sophisticated internal dialog. For me personally, if something “doesn’t feel right” rather than just ignoring it as illogical, instead I try probing that feeling a little more and try to decipher where the unease comes from. It could just be that I am stepping into new territory and feel nervous about it, or it could be a huge blunder in my design that I am not consciously aware of. Likewise if something “just feels right”, I try teasing the idea out a bit further, to see where it goes. Sometimes the idea just doesn’t work, but often it adds a whole new element and improvement to the design. The most elegant and useful designs will probably arise from a balanced, active dialog between your heart and your mind.

• Create a Model of the Design – This is probably where things will get frustrating. Our ideas feel SO GOOD when they are in our mind. By creating models, whether they are drawings, digital plans, an auditory or written descriptions of the layout, timelines, actual 3D models or something else, you are bringing representations of your ideas into the world. This is often a difficult process, but it is invaluable. Again, this is the principle of least change for greatest effect. By creating a model of your design, it will quickly become obvious where your thoughts and ideas are not clear or where it is difficult to articulate the ideas that you have. It is way better to work these things out “on paper” than to find out later that you do not have space for that $1000 greenhouse, or that your planned planting of the oak tree would result in oak branches in your living room in ten years, or that your timing is off and your vegetables will be buried by snow before they even flower.

• Set a Deadline – Exploring our intentions can be very engrossing, fun, liberating and exciting. However, if you are at all like me you might spend a little too much time in these pre-design stages and not actually get anything done. So set aside a reasonable amount of “dream time”, but it helps to have a deadline for getting your ideas on paper and actually putting the design into action. It also helps to set little re-imagination points along the way in the design process so that you can take a step back and evaluate whether your design is still following your original intentions, or if in fact your intentions and the design have changed through time.

• Have Fun! – Find what brings you pleasure and satisfaction, and try to find ways to bring those elements into the garden and nurture them. If you do not have elements in your garden that excite you, gardening begins to become a chore. Just as a personal example, I love to grow food, but as the summer reaches its end many of the annual vegetables start to sprawl and flop around, die off, dry out…my vegetable garden begins to get unruly and even though there is a ton of great food out there, I find I don’t really like to be out there…even to the point of not harvesting some of the great food! So as I start to plan my future food garden, I’ll be looking more towards perennial foods, and integrating annuals in a way that doesn’t require major aesthetic maintenance and allows them to age ‘gracefully’ in the landscape. The aesthetic is as important to me as the functional (food), so I have to respect and nurture both elements in order to keep myself and my garden happy.

So I hope you can explore and get to know deeply the intentions that are most important to you as continue on in your garden and life designs. Hold them before you, and may you find deep satisfaction, meaning, joy and purpose in whatever you do.