Most of us don’t need more things to do. We need a little more space to notice what’s working, what feels out of balance, and what may be ready to change.
That’s why we created 12 Permaculture Principles for the Design of a Life — a free reflection journal inspired by the same principles we use on our farm.
Inside, you’ll find simple prompts to help you slow down, notice patterns, gain clarity, and move forward with greater intention.
The same principles that help create healthy, resilient ecosystems can help us design more thoughtful lives, too.
We’d love to share it with you.
There's a family of blue jays living in the trees next to the orchard. I watched them this morning for longer than I meant to, flitting backwards and forwards across the same twenty feet of air, apparently on urgent business. They please my heart in a way I can't fully account for.
We didn't plant them. There was no line item. Five years ago that ground was bare, tired field, and we put in trees and dug a pond and built berms and hauled water, and at no point did anyone write down and then the birds will come. But they came. Robins every spring. Swallows low over the water. The jays in the young trees at the top.
The third permaculture principle is Obtain a Yield, and on the face of it there's nothing mystical about it. Make sure the work returns something real. You can observe and design and tend forever, but at some point the system has to feed you. I'm in business. I'm not in the business of forever polishing and perfecting and building the thing that will one day, eventually, if conditions allow, produce a return. Build the system. Take the harvest. That part is simple.
But the yields that have changed us most out here are the ones we never asked for. You build the conditions and then something arrives sideways, carrying a gift that wasn't on the list.
Here's where this started chewing on me.
The most useful twenty minutes of any EOS quarterly I run are not when we score the rocks. We do that, of course. It matters. Done or not done, no ambiguity, no partial credit for effort. But there's a moment near the start of the day where I ask the leadership team a different question.
What did you learn last quarter?
And the room usually goes quiet, people raise their eyes to look at the ceiling. They came ready to defend a number, and now they are being asked to look at what is underneath it. Then a brave soul says the thing they'd been carrying around unexamined for eleven weeks — that they hired for the résumé and ignored the core values tells, that the customer complaint they dismissed in March turned out to be the whole pattern, that the reason the project stalled was that nobody in the room actually wanted it.
That is a yield. In a quarter that hit every target and in a quarter that fell apart, that is a yield. The profit is a yield you might get. The lesson is a yield that's always there.
The trouble is that "always there" doesn't mean visible. Will you see it? That's the whole question.
If you will see it and take it in, then whatever else the quarter did to you, you obtained a yield and you're a bigger organization than you were ninety days ago. If you won't, you got the money or you didn't, and either way you're the same size.
Now the other half of this, which arrived from a completely different direction.
I'm in a transformational coaching course this year, improving my abilities to take my clients deeper, and in our session this week the old Zen line came up for me: “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.”
I've heard it a hundred times. This week it landed somewhere different, and I think it's because of what I do for a living.
Both of my practices are transformation work. With a leadership team it's organizational, with an executive coaching client it's personal, but it's the same claim underneath: something changes at the level of who you're being, and everything downstream reorganizes. And here's the part nobody puts in the brochure. The externalities usually don't move. The payroll still runs on the fifteenth. The difficult customer is still difficult. The ditch still needs digging, the wood still needs chopping, the water still needs carrying to the same place it needed carrying yesterday.
I used to find that faintly disappointing. If the work is real, shouldn't the circumstances change?
But that's the wrong end of it. The circumstances are not the lever. They were never the lever. The only lever any of us actually has hold of is the internal one — and when that one moves, the same wood and the same water are being carried by somebody else entirely. Not a person with a better attitude about it. A person for whom the whole thing has a different shape. The problem that felt like a wall three months ago is now simply part of the terrain, and it moved without anyone touching it.
That's not a consolation prize for failing to change your circumstances. That is the yield.
So I'd put the two together this way. You are going to obtain a yield. You're in business, you have a life to run, and the work in front of you is not optional. Nobody gets out of chopping the wood. The question worth asking is what it's costing you to do it — whether you're grinding it out against yourself, or whether the thing has come into some kind of alignment where the same day's work leaves you more alive at the end of it than at the start.
Somewhere between those two is where I'd like to spend the rest of my working life. I'm not there. I'm closer than I was.
Two questions for your August, then. The first one is for the quarter you're standing in the middle of: what has it already taught you that you haven't stopped long enough to collect? Not the number. The lesson. It's in the field right now whether the quarter is going well or badly, and it will rot there if you don't go and get it.
The second is the harder one. If nothing about your external circumstances changes this year — same team, same market, same weight — who would you have to become for that to be a good year?
With warmth from the orchard,
Steve
Sweet Earth Orchard — Hygiene, Colorado