Reflections on the Earth Activist Training Report Back

One lunar eclipsed full moon evening we organized an event to share our learning and experiences at The Earth Activist Training. With 25 attendees we opened the space with introductions and a song. We moved on to explain permaculture design basics through stating the ethics: care of the land, care of the people, and fair share to all plus creating surplus by design. This lead into a meditation using the first of the 27 principals that one uses in designing permaculture spaces, observation. People closed their eyes and imagined they were in a spot in nature and looked for the patterns in that spot. It was about using all their senses as well as working with the phrase "I wonder" as they imagined moving through that natural environment. We then had them open their eyes and look at the shapes in front of them, see what patterns were in the room. We wrote these patterns down on a white board and talked about what patterns one might use in designing a permaculture space.

The observation time lead to a slide show exemplifying our experience and highlighting the rainwater catchment gray water hand washing station we built as well as the cob and waddle storage shed we began building. We rounded out the evening with a hands on ritual workshop in singing and making seed balls. As we rolled together the clay, compost and native wild seeds Heron described the plants many uses and the no till method of the seed balls. People put energy for the world they wanted to live in by singing over our finished product, a pile of tiny balls ready to repair degraded land and beautify a piece of earth with their medicinal and flowerful qualities.


As a co-creator of this report back I felt quiet happy with the results. I felt that all our hard work and advertising payed off. It was fun to see a large group of people including people we did not know gaining new insights and asking so many questions. It was hard to choose what to focus on; this training covered so many topics so to choose how best to present it was challenging. In the end I am glad we stuck to teaching only three key things and just sharing our experience for the rest of the time. We had report back forms and it was good to get a lot of appreciation and some constructive criticism. I feel that in time my teaching skills will get even better, especially in transitioning from one topic to the next. I liked helping to lead people in ritual that had never or very rarely experienced it. In the feed back form we asked people directly what they thought about the ritual and most agreed that they did not usually do this sort of thing but were happy with the relaxed atmosphere and how they could choose to participate or not.

I like learning how to be a teacher, how to make things fun and dynamic as well as packed with information. I also liked the process Heron and I had to go through to lead this together. It was hard choosing who would do what tasks. We both ended up working independently of each other a lot and there was a feeling that we could not rely on the other for help. We were able to communicate this and work it out so that we could collaborate when it came time to lead the report back. I feel like this is one of the many lessons I am learning in working collectively. These are great steps towards being able to live in an intentional community.