Clear Springs Sanctuary

Ten days at Zaytuna Farm

In October 2013 I took the Permaculture Design Course at Geoff Lawton’s school, and wrote a post every day of it. It took everything I’d learned shoveling compost at Rancho Margot and digging on Ometepe and gave it a structure. Permaculture is all about the design and the thinking that happens before the shovel hits the soil.

Day ten was about money, and it’s the one I still use. Money is a lot like water seen through a permaculture lens. The value isn’t in how much of it enters a community. It’s in how far it flows, and how many parts of the community it reaches before it leaves.

A team from the edges of Australia

After the course I stayed to help nudge a dream into reality: a self-sustaining wellness and retreat center. A lot was already in play: a relationship with a specific property, possible partners scattered across Australia, and heaps of good ideas.

I found what the would-be partners had in common and brought them together. I ran the team-building sessions, wrote the business proposal, and built the financial model they would raise money with. Then I taught them how a social enterprise gets funded, so they could carry it without me. Writing the proposals and the model was the easy part. The hard part was bringing together people with the right mix of skills to make it go, and getting them to trust each other enough to try. There were days I wondered why the mycology, permaculture and earthship people couldn’t just join hands and sing Kumbaya. Three months in, the opportunities were still greater than the problems.

An ugly prototype

Between drafts I flew 2,000 km north to Cairns and drove five hours into the bush, past the northernmost town in Australia, to help a community build a wood gasifier: a stove that would run a generator, heat water and keep a fridge cold at the same time. Nobody there had built one. We tore apart an old freezer, sketched, and started building. By the end of the first day the wood was gasifying and the frame held. The uglier, the better: when in doubt, start with a rough prototype and see where it leads.

What happened next

After I left, the team raised more than $500,000 and bought a 200-acre property that had been a Buddhist retreat center, and began rebuilding it. My part was the plan, the model and the team, not the build. Watching a plan I’d drawn up on paper turn into land and money and people is when I knew I could help other people build these things.