I started my permaculture course this past week and found myself immersed in a group of people with a lot in common. People who feel like we stick out like sore thumbs in our own world, viewed as crazy or extreme because we think there is something wrong with the way the current world is, and that we can’t just go on without doing something about it.
As we shared with each other, we found that we had a lot of common emotions and values and motivations.
At lunch the first day, I looked around the table and saw all this interesting, healthy food. Much of it grown in our own gardens, I found out as we went around the table, each telling what we had brought. There are a lot of perspectives on what constitutes healthy eating. This was my kind of healthy eating.
At the end of the first day, one of the other students offered to lead us in yoga the next morning before class. I had arranged for riding in with a couple of other people and went up to them to tell them I wanted to come early and do the yoga, expecting to bow out of the carpool. Before I could finish my sentence, they had both enthusiastically said “me, too!”
I came home and told Andy, “I’ve found my peeps.”
And yet, we are different, too. I started seeing some of that on day two. A lot of people are way more free-spirited and uninhibited than I am. A lot of them are a mix of what you would expect for people taking a permaculture course (earthy, crunchy, granola) and very different than what you’d expect at the same time.
We are the same in so many ways, and different in so many others. And I find that really, really cool. I think I’m not just going to learn through the teachers, I am going to learn through my fellow students, and feed off of the energy of a shared passion which unites a group of people with diverse backgrounds and personalities.
A fellow student – my carpooling buddy – speaks a lot about balance. This is balance. To have a shared passion with others which we can immediately relate to and understand, and to also be challenged in our thinking by different perspectives. I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced something like this before. At least not on a group scale.