Featured Posts

Desire, Home, and the Destiny of Vicinity: Wherever You Go, There You Are

So, what do I mean when I say I want a home? Do I mean that I want to find a house and get a mortgage? No. Hell no.

How to Let Go: a Guide to Being Happier, Healthier, and More Creative

Releasing old pain by dealing with grief, caring for your body, making art, and getting dirty.

How to Critique Writing, using the EMMA method

A writer who critiques her own work has a fool for a critic.

Into Permaculture? Check out my YouTubes!

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6 easy ways to get started with permaculture, designing a more ecological home, garden, and life!
Learn more at www.freepermaculture.com

Partial video transcript

Hi, folks, it's me, Heather Jo Flores, and I just want to talk to you a little bit about getting started with permaculture because a lot of people ask me this question. So we talk about what is permaculture? Permaculture is a design system for sustainable living, it's a way to bring your ethics into alignment with your daily actions. The set of tools and techniques that permaculture uses can be employed for designs on every scale and in every project that they are employed, even if it doesn't become a completely closed loop system, that system definitely becomes more ecological, sometimes with very little effort.

One of the things that really inspires me about the permaculture practice is that the more you do it, the better thinker you become and the more you call in an awareness to the natural world around you and to the non-human species and to their needs and contributions, the more adept you become at creating a synergistic life for yourself. And that applies across the board. So whether you're doing business, or you're gardening, or you're raising your children, or you're just cooking a meal, once you start to employ these ideas and to use these tools, they become second nature to you and you just kind of become healthier and happier. And if we go on a big scale, if we look at the garden is a microcosm and if you look at the macrocosm of our global culture and the experience that we're having as humans on the planet, we can see that a lot of the behaviors that we've been engaged in, a lot of the patterns that we've created, are not working. They're killing off species. They're killing off the planet. And ultimately, we're next on the list.

So the idea is to reverse these effects by taking some different types of actions when it comes to our relationship with ourselves, with each other, with our neighbors, with the structures in which we live, with the plants and animals in which we interact and so forth. This is why we're geeked out on permaculture. It's lots and lots of fun to try things and to experiment and to just live with this idea that we're working with nature rather than against it. But a lot of the beginner conversations sort of stop there.

Not enough time is spent on the practical hands on how to of how to actually get started. I'd like to focus on a handful of actions that you can take, whether you're a renter or you own your home or whether you live in the city or you live in the country, whether you have a lot of money or you have no money at all. These are just some basic actions that you can take to start to employ permaculture ideas and to start to become a systems thinker and create the exponential effects of the permaculture journey. So getting started with Permaculture. Tip number one is enroll in a permaculture course, whether it's online or locally or both. I recommend taking as many as you can and reading as many of the most recommended permaculture books you can get your hands on. I do recommend doing a little bit of research about the teachers and the writers. There are a lot of different resources out there, a huge diversity of resources available to you. So look for stuff that you feel like you can relate to your local bioregion.

Even though permaculture is not just about learning how to garden in your climate, it's about learning how to garden in any climate, and learning how to build structures that work in any climate, it's about learning how to design, how to observe and design. And so if it doesn't seem like that's what somebody is teaching, then perhaps continue to look. Remember that it's a design system, it's not just about gardening.

Permaculture for Beginners

YouTube Video UC6NJi52re4RUUtHWhMLb9yg_21wuMdezJw4

Here's what some of the students in the Permaculture Women's Guild online Permaculture Design course are saying about our program.
Visit www.permaculturewomen.com for more info and FREE guest pass!

Permaculture Design Course students love our course!

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Exploring the invisible structures through emotional permaculture.

www.heatherjoflores.com

Partial video transcription

Hola, today I want to talk a little bit more about invisible structures. It's a bit of a misnomer because these structures aren't necessarily invisible. You just have to know what to look for. So hopefully by the end of this video, you'll have a better understanding of how we use invisible structures, not just in permaculture, but in these other creative activities that I enjoy talking about, such as creative writing and community organizing. So in permaculture, in traditional permaculture, invisible structures usually means politics, legal, economics, social sectors, and lately we've been talking a lot about personal and emotional factors that need to be considered as layers of your design project. And if we don't consider these invisible structures then they can severely impact the success of our projects and we might not understand why.

But in this video, I want to go a layer deeper and talk about the invisible structures that we don't necessarily think about as often that come up in gardening and writing and community organizing. And this brings us back to the notion of design thinking. So a designer's mind solves problems, design solves problems, that's the point of cultivating a capacity for design thinking so that you become a faster, more efficient and hopefully more ecological problem solver. So design solves problems and design thinking prevents problems. So some key components to design thinking are inquiry and observation and relationships, learning how to build and recognize and cultivate relationships, and pattern recognition and learning how to to divert the flow and embrace and reconnect wasted resources. And in each of these are layers of invisible structures if we learn how to recognize them quickly, then we can plug them back into the design.

For example, in the inquiry phase of a design process, we're looking for information and data and facts. We're looking for what do we know and what don't we know? But we also want to look at what don't we know that we don't know. So the inquiry never stops. And if we peel back a layer, rather than only looking at what's obvious, then we can uncover opportunities that weren't visible from the beginning. So this notion of invisible structures, of creating an ability to recognize invisible structures, you also get the ability to make those structures now visible. Regarding relationships, the main thing that we're looking for, where are the connections and how do they create a system? And then also we're going to be looking for patterns. So patterns aren't just an herb spiral or a keyhole bed, we want to be looking for patterns in time and space and patterns that aren't as physically obvious, but are still presenting once again opportunities and also giving us more information and more data and more facts. And so then we can go back around in the cycle more empowered to solve problems.

Invisible Structures, revisited

YouTube Video UC6NJi52re4RUUtHWhMLb9yg_jOsRq6n8d1k

Permaculture Women Magazine

I am one of more than 100 writers contributing to this collaborative publication.

Here's a selection of articles about organic gardening:

courses, challenges, toolkits

Free Online Courses for Creative Folks Who Love Plants

Select from a unique collection of unique and original courses & resources based on permaculture, friendship marketing, the heroine's journey. I specialize in stuff for women writers, but you don't have to be a writer nor a woman to enjoy my work--all types of creative people will love these resources.

344-pages of permaculture how-to

Food Not Lawns, How to Turn Your Yard into a Garden and Your Neighborhood into a Community

This was my first book, published in 2006 and based on a decade of community gardening and grassroots activism. Read the entire, original text, with more than 90 original illustrations by Jackie Holmstrom, for free:

Read It

read my novel

Naked Lady Soup

Part memoir, part manifesto, part magical realism, this fast and funny novel tells the story of a group of young, creative, single women trying to navigate the absurd and hilarious woes of modern relationships while also trying to stay sane, make the rent, and manage to enjoy what's left of their youth. Written in 2008, 180 pages

Read it for a buck!

Download a copy of Naked Lady Soup for $1

Get it