good morning this is angela with parkose permaculture i'm in my dad's garden here
in portland oregon zone 8b one block away from my house my schedule right now involves a lot of time
being up here so there will be a lot more videos from this location about permaculture so today
i thought i would talk about the power of being a beginner in permaculture
which may sound like a strange topic because i've been doing permaculture for 20 years it's been a
long time since i was a beginner but i really feel like it's an important topic because i see
a lot of comments or concerns that folks are new to it and they don't know what they're doing and
they're concerned about making mistakes and so i thought this is a good opportunity to
encourage you that if you are a beginner in permaculture that is an awesome place to be so
i've been looking back through a bunch of my really old youtube videos and i had an ancient
camera phone and no skills at all and it's been a really interesting learning curve for me i'm
not very technology oriented and learning to use editing software and learning about microphones
and cameras and uploading things to youtube and like all of that has been a big learning
curve for me so i look back at my early videos and think oh these are terrible um the content
is good in terms of there's a lot to learn from them but they aren't particularly appealing and
the more that i make videos and the more repetition that i have the better the quality
is i used to not appear on camera at all i don't like being on camera i don't want to
be the focus of these videos i want permaculture to be the focus but i've realized that if i'm on
camera it connects with people better and is more interesting than just a shot of a plant
but it took a process for me to get there to where i improved some of my quality and i'm always
improving i have a long way to go i am by no means a cinematic expert in fact i feel like a lot of
times people leave comments on my channel where they are expecting some polished professional
highly produced television show and i'm a homeschool mom of four children
farming on a quarter acre but that's okay it's okay to be new at something and so like i look
back at my old videos and i think these were terrible but i was really earnest and
i was learning and i can watch the progression of the quality of the videos but it doesn't
mean those early videos don't have value and it doesn't mean that the process to get from
where i was then to where i am now kind of like an intermediate level to hopefully improving my
quality in the future that journey has value so i thought the same thing is true for permaculture
the journey of permaculture has value and there's a song sparrow i don't know if you can hear it
uh so in in permaculture
i feel like there are seven reasons why it's really good to be a beginner
so the first one is it's it's good for your brain to engage in a new activity it's good for
your brain to for you as an individual human to learn a new skill to learn the design process of
permaculture it's good for you and your brain to learn any new skill but particularly permaculture
because i have found that in doing permaculture the way i view the whole world has changed i view
everything through a lens of the 12 principles and three ethics of permaculture design if you
everything now is interconnected and how my actions here have repercussions over here for
me i feel like permaculture not only the act of learning something new and being new at it is good
but the act of specifically learning permaculture helps reshape your brain and reshape the way you
perceive the world in a really positive way in a really connected way that helps build all of those
um webs and links um in the way you perceive the world and in the way you think about things and i
think it's really good to start on that journey of building that connectedness in your brain number
two permaculture is really highly complex y'all it seems like it's really simple on the surface and
i try and break it down and make it simple that doesn't mean that it's not complex so
it keeps you really humble i think to start on the journey of learning permaculture
it helps you realize that there is so much that all of us have been kept ignorant about about
how ecosystems work how living things relate to each other how trees communicate with each other
how our actions as humans have influence in ways we cannot perceive how our actions
as humans and how corporations actions and governments actions impact ecosystems and
impact other communities of people and impact our personal lives so it helps you see not only that
everything around you is so much richer and deeper but it also helps you realize that while you are
an individual a unique individual that the scale of the real world and the scale of the network
of connections and ecosystems keeps you humble and keeps you in your place so yeah i think it's
good to be new at permaculture because you're just starting to understand your insignificance
in terms of you know the grand scale of time and ecosystems but also just to realize there's so
much you don't know yet and what an opportunity to start to learn really complicated things number
three being new in permaculture means you have an opportunity to grasp a passion and run with it and
i 20 years later i'm still incredibly enthusiastic about permaculture probably embarrassingly so but
when you are new at something that new flame of passion is such a great thing to feel and to start
diving in and feeling like every rabbit hole of permaculture sparks a new interest
sparks a new topic that you want to explore within the whole concept that's a really exciting place
to be and it feels really good to be having that passion increase and increase and your motivation
to want to learn more and do better be increasing that's a really positive thing number four i
mentioned this briefly earlier permaculture is an adventure and when you are starting to learn about
permaculture you are starting on an adventure toward not only sustainability but regeneration
toward beauty and abundance and so like think about all the anticipation when you're getting
ready to go on a big trip or start a new exciting project permaculture is that way
there are so many possibilities open to you when you are new at it and you are first beginning and
that's that's a great place to be i i think back to when i first started planning the site that i'm
on now 13 years ago and how it was just a blank canvas and all possibilities were open to me and
it was a great adventure that i was starting on so that's exciting if that's the place that you're at
number five being new at permaculture being a beginner is a chance to connect with other
people when we are hungry for knowledge expertise advice we often reach out to people with more
experience than us having this youtube channel i have connected with so many people who want
to learn about permaculture people who have more experience than me and from whom i want to learn
about permaculture people who have very different systems set up in very different biomes than me
that i want to learn from and i've connected with a lot of people who are really new at permaculture
and they are forging those bonds of community of people care of social permaculture in their
attempts to learn about regenerative design so that's exciting builds community okay number six
when you are new at permaculture you bring a unique perspective to all of us old stirs
who've been doing it for a real long time fresh energy fresh blood fresh motivation fresh eyes
on a situation brings so much to the community so when i talked to a moment ago about building
community and connections when you're new that benefits not only you but it benefits those of
us who can sometimes become entrenched in our own mindsets and our patterns of behavior you bring a
fresh perspective and that's super super valuable so it benefits not only you it benefits all of us
when you are new to permaculture and you want to connect with people all right lastly number seven
we learn through failure being new at something gives you the opportunity to
fail real hard it gives you the opportunity to not be an expert
to not be embarrassed by your failures and to embrace the process of failing and trying again
permaculture talks about slow small solutions it talks about how we need to take our time and how
we need to apply self-regulation apply feedback and learn to do better we can't do that without
the process of making mistakes without trying some little new project and it going real sideways
trying a fruit tree in our orchard and it fails miserably like my apricots
trying something observing using the permaculture principle observant interact
observing what went south what went wrong and then after observing and observing and observing
taking what you have gained and applying it so that you can do better next time
i have had so many failures in my garden early on and so many things that i am now fixing that i
messed up in the beginning that now that i have more expertise i know like that didn't work so
great but even early on i had immediate failures that i was able to recognize and learn from much
like mother nature does we learn through failure we learn by experimenting and watching the outcome
and then applying changes to our site based on experiential learning so how
exciting to be at a place where you are new at permaculture where you can just dive in and
really embrace those concepts of observant interact of applying slow small solutions
and then observing what happens with those slow small solutions
and then my neighbor's pheasant scared me um and then taking those experiences
where we fail or we have successes and building on them by applying the feedback and making changes
so i hope that gives you a little bit of encouragement that you don't need to feel
discouraged or embarrassed or um feel like it's such a long road ahead and you'll never
get to the arrival of your destination of permaculture there is no destination it is
the journey so how exciting to be at a place in your permaculture journey where you are new
where you bring so much energy where you bring so much um vitality a unique experience and you are
just starting on that adventure of permaculture where the whole world is open to you to create
a place where we have sustainable food production beauty and abundance around us in our gardens and
in our communities and where we help restore the entire planet and we bring ethical compassionate
ways of living as human beings for all people on the planet so please be encouraged i hope
you're encouraged i hope if you're new at permaculture you help an old veteran like me
gain some new perspectives and gain some new energy i would love to connect with you so if
you enjoyed this video please give it a thumbs up you can check out my patreon in the description
please subscribe and you can check the little bell to get an alert every time i make a new video
you