The Beginning: Falling in Love with Permaculture

I found permaculture in 2000, and it was like someone finally gave me a language for everything I'd been puzzling on for years. Here was a design system that said: "Yes, humans can live in a right relationship with the earth. Yes, we can heal instead of harm. Yes, there's a way forward."

I devoured everything I could find. I took my PDC in 2005, and I came home on fire. I was going to design food forests, teach people to work with nature, and help create the regenerative future we desperately needed.

For the first few years, I did exactly that. I designed gardens, homesteads, and small farms. I apprenticed as a permaculture teacher and began teaching PDCs and workshops the same year. I started a permaculture guild. I studied patterns, observed landscapes, and got better at the technical side. Building on a lifetime of gardening, foraging, and immersion in place, my designs were solid.

The Pattern I Couldn't Ignore

A family would hire me to design their land for extended family. I'd create something beautiful—careful plant guilds, water flow maximized, zones perfectly laid out. They'd be thrilled. A year later, I would check in and find half of it scrapped. "We couldn't agree on who was responsible for what," they'd say. Or, "We had a conflict; and we might move anyway."

A farm would bring me in for consultation. We'd map out water systems, plan windbreaks, design for maximum diversity. Technically perfect. Two years later I'd hear they'd sold the land. "Burned out," they'd tell me. "The lifestyle wasn't sustainable." 

And it wasn't just the people I taught or designed for. When I talked to permaculture teachers and designers everywhere, they shared the same experiences. 

I'd teach PDCs where students would light up, see the world differently, understand the patterns. Then they'd go home and... nothing. Or they'd start projects that fizzled. "People didn't get it," they'd say. "I couldn't get buy-in." "I didn't know how to facilitate the conversations we needed."

Seeing the Broader Pattern

Dynamic Governance: Sociocracy as "permaculture for people"

The Integration Became Clear

Nature Connection: The Foundation Under Everything

But there was still something deeper.

Around 2010, I started a daily sit spot practice. Just 20 minutes, same place, watching and listening. Then I began studying tracking.  I began paying attention to bird movements and language. I deepened my foraging practices to include harvesting and caretaking in new ways. I was learning to read landscapes not from books but from awareness.

These practices changed everything again.

I realized: I'd been mimicking my permaculture teacher and mentor; I hadn't been teaching from my own experience of permaculture as relationship to be lived. I could draw beautiful designs, but was I helping my clients actually pay attention? How could I help my students and clients live in relationship with the places I designed for?

And in organizational work—was I truly present with groups I facilitated? Or was I running techniques?

The nature connection practices taught me presence. They gave me confidence in my observations and to seek them out before acting. They taught me to trust patterns and cycles. They taught me humility—because the more you pay attention to nature, the more you realize how little you actually know.

Now when I teach, we spend time outside in silence and deepening our awareness practices. When I facilitate, I practice the same quality of attention I use when tracking. When I design—for land or organizations—I begin by listening, not planning.

Living and Teaching Integration

Now, 20 years into this work, I finally feel like I'm offering something truly helpful:

• Permaculture design skills refined by two decades of practice
• Organizational development from lived experience, not just training
• Facilitation rooted in presence and nature awareness
• Nature connection practices that ground everything else
• The ability to see how it all connects—because it's always been one pattern

I teach PDCs where students learn to design AND facilitate AND pay attention. I work with nonprofits on governance AND connection to mission AND relationship with place. I take on integrated design projects where we address land AND people AND culture all at once.

This isn't "holistic consulting." This is how thriving systems actually work. In nature, there's no separation between structure and relationship, between the physical and the social. Ecosystems that work integrate everything. 

What Drives Me Today

I'm not trying to save the world anymore. That was my 20s talking.

Now I'm interested in something more subtle and maybe more powerful: helping people and communities remember they're part of nature, not separate from it. And then supporting them to design systems—land systems, organizational systems, cultural systems—that reflect that truth.

When we design from wholeness instead of fragmentation, from relationship instead of extraction, from care-taking instead of control—everything shifts.

Some of the work is with land: farms, homesteads, and communities. Some of the work is with organizations: nonprofits, cooperatives, mission-driven groups. Most of it is with both.

Current Life

When I'm not teaching or consulting, you'll usually find me:

• In my sit spot at dawn, watching the morning unfold
• Tracking animals through the forests and wetlands of southern Indiana
• Tending my own garden (which teaches me constantly about what I don't know)
• Reading, always reading—ecology, anthropology, organizational theory, poetry
• Walking the land near my home, watching the seasons turn

I live in the Ohio River Valley. I work primarily in the Midwest, though I occasionally take projects elsewhere. I keep my practice small and focused because I believe in depth over breadth, in relationship over scale.

Continuing Education