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You don't need willpower, you need PERMACULTURE w/ Cecilia Macaulay
3 Playsin 13 hours
You’ve heard of swales… but what about swales in the brain to slow and deepen our human experience? Join me and Cecilia Macaulay for one of those special convos that gets to the heart of life’s gnarliest struggles; our biggest messes, our greatest failures, our everyday chaos… and uses permaculture design to harness their power.
This episode will particularly chime with “forgetful, distractible” types, clutter accumulators, chaos agents, overwhelm junkies, and anyone with a hunch that a few elegant household systems could MASSIVELY increase their effectiveness in the world.
WE COVER
Insane wisdom from Bill Mollison
Meeting Masanobu Fukuoka
The FIVE RULES OF HARMONIOUS PERMIE SHAREHOUSES
Japanese rules of Non-Complaint and Taking Full Responsibility
Growing an enduring permaculture spirit
How to become a world expert in a tiny little thing
Creating a failure protocol
Upward spirals
Permaculture for heartbreak
Being an effective human later in life
More than medication for neurodiversity
The connection between untidy houses and trauma
Making your kitchen sink a shrine to beauty and goodness
Setting a household culture using mirror neurons
The eco-footprint of university
STOP AWFULISING!
Permaculture zones in the home
Why to share what’s spare
STOP COLONISING CREATIVE VOID!
Expanding the edges of our gifts and talents
Beautiful messcapes
Knolling
What “can’t be bothered” really codes for
How to use imagination to improve your memory
🧙♀️ LINKY POOS 🧙♀️
Cecilia’s nine month home harmonising project
The Edible Balcony Garden ~ Indira Naidoo
Sand Talk ~ Tyson Yunkaporta
Screen Zen App
WWOOF, HelpX & Workaway
Polyvagal theory
🧡Join the Reskillience community on Patreon 🧡
Thanks to kangaroovindaloo for the singing bowls: License: Attribution 4.0
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Transcript
Introduction and Purpose of 'Riskiliants'
00:00:00
Speaker
And this is making swales in our brain. Our life energy is our emotions. It gives us our motion. And you want your emotions to go long and slow in the landscape of your life.
00:00:15
Speaker
And when you set up systems in your home so you can't rush and break things and forget things and lose things, when you set that up so it's really pleasant, you can take your time.
00:00:29
Speaker
and your neurons change. This is physical, this is making swales in your brain. Hey. hey This is Katie and you're listening to Riskiliants, a podcast about living closer to the ground so we don't have quite so far to fall when the fuel runs out.
Personal Gardening Reflections and Permaculture Potential
00:00:51
Speaker
I am lovingly recording in Jara country, central Victoria, where black kites are cruising low over wheat fields looking for glutinous mice. Swamp wallabies are stuffing their faces with wild cherry plums and and the roaring sun is scaring off the storm clouds.
00:01:10
Speaker
So i have been doing a lot of watering of the garden, hours upon hours of it, each day hotter than the last, each month drier than this time last year, and I'm tempted to pour water into our rain gauge just so it remembers what that feels like.
00:01:27
Speaker
While I'm out there spritzing and spraying, usually as the sun is rising or setting, sending torrents of water over the leaves and into the soil and accidentally on purpose all over my pants, i brine.
00:01:43
Speaker
Brining is when you just kind of sit in your thoughts, thoughts that are a little bit salty and instead of coming to any conclusions or solving any problems, you just sort of pickle.
00:01:55
Speaker
So I've been brining about how long the watering takes me and how daft it is that we don't have drip irrigation, like what was I thinking? And all the other more productive things I could be doing with my time rather than just standing here with the hose pointed at the base of a tomato bush.
00:02:13
Speaker
And then I start meta brining about how maybe I'm not doing watering right at all. Imagine if I'm actually over-watering our plants and making them weaker, or perpetuating thirsty genetics when I should be selecting for the camels.
00:02:28
Speaker
Or maybe the watering problem is way upstream. Like, I should really be enhancing the retentive capacity of our soil, or at the very least mulching a hell of a lot thicker, not letting any of this precious liquid rise as steam.
Guest Insights: Chaos and Meaning through Permaculture
00:02:44
Speaker
And then i arrive at a very personal situation. very briny thought process. What if this time-sucking daily watering ritual is, in fact, my own elegant subconscious creation to keep me in a safe and familiar sense of scarcity, of overwhelm, making me a willing victim of my own vegetable patch?
00:03:07
Speaker
After all, who planted all of these plants? Who chose to turn her back on irrigation? Who refuses to delegate? Who, me? My guest today said something super interesting.
00:03:22
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Actually, she said so many interesting things that I've been playing Cecilia Says all week long. But one of them was how we cling to our chaos.
00:03:33
Speaker
We cling to our chaos. Yes, probably as some kind of pain-avoidant trauma response. But the great news is, Cecilia says, that chaos is also where the treasures are. Chaos is pure, undifferentiated potential, and the way to harness it, because there truly is a lot of energy there, is through permaculture design.
00:03:58
Speaker
Permaculture could actually solve all of my watering ailments, including the deeply personal struggles that keep me watering ineffectively. Permaculture just isn't about growing food.
00:04:10
Speaker
It's about everything. This conversation with Zen Japanese-inspired permaculturalist Cecilia Macaulay is a masterclass in remaking your life to be more beautiful, more meaningful, and more potent.
00:04:26
Speaker
So if you, like me, regularly shipwreck yourself on the simplest daily tasks, If you struggle to implement smart household systems or feel weighed down by clutter or the clutter of those who you share your home with, if you're fascinated by alternative living arrangements, especially when you don't fit into a neat nuclear box, or if you're neuro-spicy and yearn to feel more capable and powerful rather than a hot forgetful mess, this convo with Cecilia McCauley is for you.
Lifelong Passion for Freedom and Permaculture Principles
00:04:59
Speaker
And do listen right to the end as we really dig in in the second half of the interview. Thanks so much for being here. Here's Cecilia.
00:05:14
Speaker
Katie. Thank you for having me on the show. I you, Cecilia. I'm trying to focus my intention to understand what the highest use of this time is. And I know that you're someone who who's very much about subtracting to potentize the quality, whether it's of your life or of a conversation. So I wonder this is true what is what is most alive for you to talk about right now?
00:05:40
Speaker
I'm looking forward to see what emerges. Of course, i love my work and I have a 30 year adoration of permaculture and it's it's with me every 10 minutes of my life. What's most alive is possibly how my work's been evolving, but also how listeners can find in permaculture answers that they can apply like today to things that are weighing heavy on them because I love to be useful.
00:06:15
Speaker
I'm the eldest of a big heap of children and being useful is my what makes me feel safe and and happy. So if you have any questions that you think are going to be handy for people who are earlier in the permaculture journey than me, oh, I'd be so thrilled to you know be an elder and share what I know.
00:06:37
Speaker
Yeah, thanks, Cecilia. I suppose one thing that really resonates with me when i look look into the body of your work is how personal it is and how how it meets us really in those those everyday struggles that, to me, really need to be worked with and examined if we want to be effective humans in this world. A lot of us, I'm sure, listening are pretty horrified by the bigger picture at the moment and it's precipitating, at least in our household, conversations about what do we do, what is enough, what is what are our roles to play in this great unravelling, in this great turning. And I wonder, Cecilia,
Childhood, Discovery of Permaculture, and Bill Mollison's Influence
00:07:17
Speaker
what you would say to that, knowing how fond you are of permaculture but also the personal realm where we all have these these struggles, simply getting out of bed sometimes, like where is your real passion? I think that's what I'm very curious about. Is it as a big picture activist or is it as that human who can help us design simply better lives for ourselves and go from there?
00:07:43
Speaker
Oh, so I probably live at both ends of the spectrum simultaneously. Something interesting happened the other day. I was telling my niece, who just started grade five and loves reading, about all the books I loved reading when I was in grade five. And I remember them in complete detail. And I was talking about books like I Am David, about a little boy who escapes a Nazi concentration camp and walks through Europe to find his mum, and stories about children who think their auntie doesn't want them so they go and live on the street and stories of needing to be independent and stories of escaping totalitarian rule. And my sister later was kind of shocked and she said, you really read all that when you were only in grade five?
00:08:32
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you've been You've been worried about keeping your freedom for a very long time. thought, this is true. In my day-to-day life with the news I take in my big passion is making everyday life with people work out.
00:08:53
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Because I believe that the way to freedom, no matter what happens in the world, whether the evildoers take over or we make a beautiful world, the most important thing is to keep your inner inner freedom.
00:09:08
Speaker
In my case, get the skills that make daily life work so that I can, my my good housemates want to keep living with me. When i try and make something, if it fails, I get the feedback and it gets better so that I'm effective in how I use my hands, how I cook, how I keep people in my life, how I i grow things.
00:09:31
Speaker
And every year I get more effective. who it's a It's a long time to have been... consciously or unconsciously invested in freedom and thinking about freedom and I wonder if you can paint a picture for people listening what your life looks like given that we know now how much of a core value freedom is to you.
Life in Japan and Evolving with Permaculture
00:10:00
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I'm i've now closer to 60 than 50 and
00:10:05
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and still feel my life's just beginning. But looking back, like on the blog posts that I sent you, I'd forgotten I i wrote them and that I've been blogging for 20 years. So I've been permaculture designer. Since I discovered bill Mollison's book, I was shown Bill Mollison's book when I was doing my gap year in London. And I thought, this is how I want to spend the rest of my life. and let's see Let's see if I can do my history in like two minutes. How's that?
00:10:33
Speaker
What a challenge. Wow. So I'm an Irish sheep farmer's granddaughter and I grew up as eldest of six little brothers and sisters, seven of us in seven years.
00:10:47
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And this means I became very useful at a young age and I was very proud of how I was a genuine help to my mum and dad in looking after all the brothers and sisters, changing the nappies, making the lunch, cooking dinner, shopping,
00:11:03
Speaker
And it's amazing what an an eight-year-old can do. We forget that through history eight-year-olds had to help people survive, help their families survive. to And it's it's so good for children to feel genuinely useful and I had that privilege.
00:11:21
Speaker
I would cook dinner every night for nine people when I was... 12, I sewed my own clothes when I was 14 because I was embarrassed at casual clothes day at school because even though I was eldest, I still had hand-me-downs.
00:11:38
Speaker
My dad wasn't well, so we just couldn't buy things like other kids. And I remember asking, Dad, are we rich or poor? And he said, we're poor. And I was shocked because like we had the the Project Compassion money box on on the on the kitchen table from the Catholic Church so we could give money to the poor people. I didn't know that was us. And and this is ah a wonderful thing that my parents gave us a life where I didn't realize we were poor.
00:12:08
Speaker
I was very resourceful. So making things has always given me joy One day the Permaculture Designer's Manual came along and all the little bits in my life of wanting to be resourceful, all the bits in the how to be resourceful map that were missing got filled so I was totally fell in love with permaculture.
00:12:31
Speaker
This happened when I was in London when I was 21. just starting my life and wondering what will I do. The year before then, in my diary, I generated 10 ideas for how I'd spend the decade and they were all plausible, like go and work in Antarctica as a cook and somewhat even not good, like become a single mother and be miserable. like it was plausible.
00:12:54
Speaker
Marry someone spectacular and go and do luxury things. Permaculture was the the road the only road I could have taken, but I didn't know about it then. And then when I found out about it, my travel, my year of travel changed and I started visiting eco-villages all around the world.
Global Eco-Village Visits and Deepening Permaculture Journey
00:13:13
Speaker
I'm going to make an eco-village, said innocent little Cecilia, not really knowing her capacity and capability. And for the next 10 years, in my 20s, did lots of travel to many eco-villages, Crystal Waters and Skansen in Denmark and village homes in in Davis, California and me and my understandoscope travelled the world trying to work out how does life work, how can people get along and while I was doing this I had moved to Japan and that's where I could earn money and do things I loved with people I loved.
00:13:58
Speaker
The Japanese and I were a match made in heaven. I became an independent English teacher I taught myself Japanese because i wanted to be the best English teacher in Japan because if you're the best you get more freedom because skills give freedom and a way to be the best Japanese the English teacher is teach yourself a language which most English teachers in Japan didn't do.
00:14:26
Speaker
so I taught myself Japanese and then i thought well how do you how do you get the best students? And I thought, well, I can't earn money for long in Japan. There's a limit to how many visas I get. So I've got to earn as much money in as short a period as I can. How how do I earn as much money as I can? Because I can only earn money for a few years. And permaculture has all the answers. I remember Bill Mollison saying something about if you've got lots of time and a space, grow potatoes. If you really need money and don't have much space, grow saffron because you're going to get some money for saffron. But it's, you know, you've got to like get your tweezers out to do the harvest. and Okay, grow saffron. I'm going to find the richest and loveliest students I can possibly find. I'm going to teach really interesting CEOs.
00:15:13
Speaker
How do I do that? I like bust into really expensive gyms and No, I didn't meet anyone. They didn't work. I went to charity balls and that worked.
00:15:27
Speaker
And I said, no, don't put me with the foreigners. Just put me with the the Japanese people because, you know, I'd been practicing my Japanese. And one of the first charity balls, I was at a table of very stern people who didn't smile and the boss guy looked like the Sesame Street bald eagles.
00:15:48
Speaker
I don't if you know from the Muppet show, the bald eagle, no smile. yeah what have been done What have I done? And i was really scared. And by the end of the night, he'd he'd arranged for me to come in and teach all the all the board members of the Japan Horse Racing Association, number one taxpayer in Japan.
00:16:10
Speaker
And I did that for years. And that opened my world because once you know one person, with an endless budget, um they introduce you to others.
00:16:21
Speaker
So i saved up my money. i never saw a movie. I had my eco-village I'm going to make in mind. And the Japan life got better and better because while I was making my stash, I was practising public speaking, giving permaculture presentations for free. and woofing. I woofed in Japan. I'd go and find cool people and say, hello, I'm Cecilia. Can I be helpful?
00:16:49
Speaker
And go to their house, stay there. And whatever I loved about them, hopefully, with the power of mirror neurons, would become part of me. Imagine life if you just said, I'm going to stay with everyone amazing in this in this country.
00:17:05
Speaker
And you turn up on their doorstep and they say, okay, in you come. So I met Masanobu Fukuoka, the one-straw revolution guy, a god of permaculture.
Returning to Australia: Challenges and New Beginnings
00:17:17
Speaker
I met Bill Mollison when he came to speak at United Nations University in Tokyo. So after Japan, because all good things must end, I went to Australia and it was devastating.
00:17:30
Speaker
It was hard to get up out of the bed in the mornings. Probably I was depressed, but I lost all my identity. I lost my beautiful home. I lost my rabbit and my turtle and my... I'd made i'd made at my apartment a permaculture paradise with solar-powered fan and all this wall garden and growing lettuce and I had a frog to eat the pests off my plants and I had mushrooms in the shower
00:18:02
Speaker
and And it all had to go because my visa ran out. So that was one of many deaths for me when I rent a house and I make a paradise and the landlord takes it back or the visa gets taken off me.
00:18:20
Speaker
And that has happened a few times since then. And so I'm a multi-reincarnated lady. Katie.
00:18:32
Speaker
yeah Yes. fortune teller might have trouble with you, Cecilia, because will see all of these lives happening simultaneously. Oh, yeah. We do lose everything in the end. And all I can say is it's a privilege to be able to die and then have another life and then another life.
00:18:52
Speaker
And I'm still having them. So I'm going to finish my my big long life history. I made a a permaculture, finally got out of my very sad period, rented a big house, which was really scary, and filled it with wonderful people. And that was the rule. I had to adore them or else it would be too hard to live in close proximity with them.
00:19:15
Speaker
And decided i would never complain. And that's how I'd make it work because that's what Japanese CEOs do. That's how Japanese CEOs get their power.
00:19:26
Speaker
They never ever complain. And I've been teaching these guys for, you know, years and thinking, wow, if you never complain, you can make an eco village. Because when you never complain, you always, they're always looking for how was I responsible in creating this? And if they're 1% responsible for what went wrong, they say, I was responsible.
00:19:52
Speaker
And then next time that 1% of the problem doesn't happen. So that is what gave me power to get my guest houses from, you know, nothing, just a bit of whatever furniture I could scrounge um and then investing in them and making them more beautiful and having woofers and that's the upward spirals just getting faster and faster and filling it with flowers and, having events and getting even better people and and then the landlord takes it back.
Creating Successful Share Houses with Hospitality and Design
00:20:28
Speaker
And then I rented another one in Sydney and did the same thing over there. and I have a recipe for share houses that work, which I can share with you your listeners later if there's anyone that wants, i shouldn't say share house, it's really a guest house because um there's one person who's the leader and that's me and that takes responsibility for everything and that's me and gets to set the culture.
00:20:56
Speaker
My job's to be everyone's servant and make sure everyone's really really happy and that everyone is being an amazing version of themselves. They think we're not in Cecilia's house like I'm a good cook and things just work and and I'm having a great life, and they don't know that I've done all this invisible infrastructure to make it happen, that I learned through doing it and not complaining and getting the feedback and taking responsibility.
00:21:27
Speaker
Now, this take responsibility rule isn't for other people. I only use it for myself. I would never tell anyone, take responsibility, terrible thing to say. You know, I do have a ah big heap of wisdom that I've learned in running this share house that I now teach in workshops and people pay me, which is you know I'm getting to do my life mission and get paid.
00:21:47
Speaker
What a privilege. So when the Sydney share house finally got taken off me by the landlord after it got turned into permaculture paradise, chickens and beautiful systems and Japanese edible gardens, This is why my permaculture focus changed from growing food to growing our spirits that will endure and can be passed on to other people.
00:22:17
Speaker
Getting an excellent permaculture spirit. So when I was in my Australia share house for eight years, my permaculture focus changed from ecovillages to We can turn our city into an eco-village where every street has a household like mine, a guest house, where there's a householder.
00:22:42
Speaker
And householding is a profession because it does it can financially look after you. If you rent a big house, fill it with good people and make your job making everyone happy, you can be financially supported.
00:22:58
Speaker
maybe do a few extra things, bit of translation or editing or illustration. And so that's what I did. And I had another revelation, which is if you want a career in permaculture, become the world expert in your tiny little thing, like be the world expert in strawberries or swales or plums.
00:23:22
Speaker
And, you know, I've met permaculture professionals and they're expert in one thing, all of them. So I decided I'd be expert in balcony gardens. And... That's what I did. I had endless and energy for it. Whenever I'd be walking down a street, I'd be looking up at high rises, and if there was a good balcony, I'd knock on the door. Hello, I'm Cecilia. Can I come and take photos and find out why your balcony works?
00:23:47
Speaker
This project lasted nine years, and for nine years, local government would employ me to run eco-workshops on food resilience and balcony edible balcony gardening.
00:24:00
Speaker
ah One reason I was passionate about balcony gardening is if you can grow food on concrete you can do anything. It's not just a something you do in the real world you can do it in the spiritual world too.
00:24:15
Speaker
If you can have a beautiful life when things are going to hell if you can have a rich inner life no matter what the outer situation well well done you. So that was my goal for myself. So permacau um balcony gardening was also cultivating the spirit and I really believe it and that's what motivates me when I'm having a hard time or something I did failed or got taken off me.
Transforming Challenges into Opportunities with Permaculture
00:24:45
Speaker
Yeah iterate, do it again, stay positive, don't get discouraged, don't complain, find more allies, find what went wrong, make a protocol so next time Something different goes wrong.
00:25:00
Speaker
Keep in action. Keep the upward spiral happening.
00:25:06
Speaker
So balcony gardening was great. And then balcony gardening suddenly ended. Passions can suddenly end. I can see two things that made it end. One, this beautiful newsreader wrote a book called The Edible Balcony Garden.
00:25:22
Speaker
I thought, Great, I don't have this responsibility anymore. She can do it. I can do something else. Also, all my workshop participants were ladies or gay.
00:25:36
Speaker
And I wanted to get a husband and have children. And I thought, well, this strategy is not working. I've got to hang out with more blokes. So let's just do something different. So I did more farm consulting in those days.
00:25:50
Speaker
But that those doors closed, I ran out of time. And so that little dream can also be delegated to other people to have the beautiful children that I'm not gonna have.
00:26:04
Speaker
And their children can grow up and come to me and be my woofers. And I will do the finishing touches on their education. And I won't have to pay for them, yay.
00:26:15
Speaker
So when you've got permaculture, most heartbreak can be turned around because permaculture's attitudinal principle is see everything, how it can add to your system.
00:26:32
Speaker
When the wind blows cold and hard, you make wind turbines and refrigeration systems and that's your income. So there's suffering and there's disappointment and permaculture turns it around.
00:26:47
Speaker
Being a designer turns it around. Yeah, I've got this question floating in the air for me as I listen to your colourful and fantastical tales, everything you've filled your life with and how you seem to metabolise things and use them properly.
00:27:08
Speaker
for fuel and draw energy from even those heartbreaks and those failures. I wonder, to Cecilia, if you can share a little bit more about your inner world because for someone I'm speaking very personally, I feel like it can be a very rapid switch from one day when i'm I'm sailing and I'm positive and I'm able to understand the potential of things to the next day, falling in a heap and ah really struggling to rally myself and stay on course.
00:27:41
Speaker
And What is it that gives, you know, how much time do you give yourself to grieve? First of all, you talk about the heartbreaks. Do you allow yourself to wallow in that for as long as you feel then ready to kind of come out the other side naturally? Or do you immediately come in with your permaculture design positivity and figure something out like if you could unpack a little bit more about what it feels like to fail what it feels like to be tripped up or demotivated i think that would bring extra richness because I know that something I believe is that this capacity that we have to do things in life can be really severely limited by our mental state our mental health neurodiversity or not being in an environment that truly supports that mental faculty or well-being so yeah what do you have to say to that well i'm trying to feel grief for more minutes at a time because i i am too quick probably in getting jumping out of grief and into designing a solution because it it does work pretty instantly but grief connects us to everyone else alive it is it's
00:28:59
Speaker
a really healthy thing to be doing.
Enhancing Productivity and Wellbeing with Everyday Permaculture
00:29:03
Speaker
But I know I can end grief by or feeling it in the moment. And I've got all these strategies when I've had enough grief.
00:29:13
Speaker
I take a cold shower, a hot and cold shower or a swim I feel amazing. Or make a protocol. So protocol is something i recently discovered.
00:29:25
Speaker
No, I've been using actually all my life, but I now have them written down and in folders neatly in the computer, which is a very new thing for me. When I fail, I feel grief. When I mess up and due to having one of those creative, unruly minds, yes, we can call it neurodiverse, I would do so much failing.
00:29:49
Speaker
And one of the reasons I made my guest house is so i could outsource all the competence to my woofers that my brain was not doing.
00:30:02
Speaker
So i would host beautiful people, travelers who would live at my house. And I had a lot of long-term woofers that would stay six months.
00:30:13
Speaker
And they'd help me make compost and look after the chickens and grow the food in the city, like 10 minutes from central Sydney or central Melbourne. But they also helped me do my taxes, which used to be agony.
00:30:30
Speaker
They helped get out of the house on time with my bagpacks I could go and give a presentation and not get lost on the way. I got one story on my blog of when I went to Bandusia Permaculture Park, beautiful place run by Penny Pyatt, to help with the PDC.
00:30:48
Speaker
And I was meant to arrive at lunchtime. And I arrived at lunchtime 24 hours later because I got waylaid and lost and cool people I had to meet and cats to pet.
00:31:02
Speaker
And that was my life when I was younger. So distractible. But it was also my fate I was meant to be doing that when I was younger because I was trawling the world and gathering data like a Google bot on how people work and what makes life beautiful.
00:31:22
Speaker
And being efficient and effective was meant to come later. i see that now. I didn't see it at the time. But I knew that if someone wasn't making efficiency happen and organization happen, I would No one would want me. They wouldn't hire a me.
00:31:42
Speaker
They wouldn't want to live with me. So I always delegated competence because I wasn't ready to do it. It's okay. You can delegate it as long as it happens. But now, like people just this week said, Cecilia, your spelling's just become so good.
00:32:01
Speaker
You're growing and changing. And it's true. I'm growing rapidly at the age I am. It's an age most people's lives are finished. I'm learning to spell.
00:32:15
Speaker
i do taxes as a procrastination method. Like when i want I want to do something, I say, yeah, I'll do something fun. I'll do my bookkeeping.
00:32:26
Speaker
And I open a spreadsheet that's beautiful that my woofer gave me and I'll go to my bank accounts that are now totally separate because I have two totally separate bank cards, one for business, one for personal and it's so easy and it took me decades to make a system where doing your tax is like playing Tetris.
00:32:49
Speaker
This is my job now. It's turning up to people who are suffering because their culture didn't, they're not in a culture of personal competence.
00:33:02
Speaker
This is not Japan. And in Australia, some people are lucky, they're organized and on time and they get the rewards. They get a job with lots of money and they can do what authority requires of them, but they're fine.
00:33:19
Speaker
And if you didn't get born with that, then you've got to make your own way. And the neurodiversity part of it, we're we're stuck. And we have a culture that says, well, the answer to neurodiversity is medication and that's all they give us and our children.
00:33:38
Speaker
And the medication is a good start, but you still have to get structures that get you to places on time and be able to find stuff in your house and be able to cook dinner and play cards afterwards and have that family time.
00:33:58
Speaker
and our culture doesn't teach us and I do so that's what I teach now because I've been trawling the world staying in houses finding how do people how do they get the energy to wash the dishes how do they get the energy to earn money how do they even like one day I heard someone say oh yes and my hobby is um entertaining and I I I was in disbelief, like having people over for dinner is hell.
00:34:28
Speaker
You have to clean the house and risk embarrassment and what if the food doesn't work out and then you've got to pay for the food and then it's really scary and maybe they're not going to like it and, oh, this is this is just so painful.
00:34:43
Speaker
Because I remember being 19 and putting on a dinner party and it went so badly that I went to bed in the middle of a dinner party, Katie,
00:34:56
Speaker
So what is that reframing that occurs to then offer us, like open up that extra capacity to do these things, which I'm guessing do do bring us to a life of greater richness or meaning? Obviously, we have to discern, we have to use our discernment around the things we actually want to do versus the things that are just bullshit that we're avoiding because we know they're bullshit, because we have such a finely tuned bullshit radar and so much of what happens in this modern life is actually just pure futility that is, um you know, enslaving our spirits. so
00:35:29
Speaker
A, how do you discern those things that are worth your time? And then B, how do you develop a system? Like at what point do you sit down with that motivation and wherewithal to create a system that then opens up this possibility that, hey, you might actually like entertaining, you might actually do your task for Tetris-like entertainment? What the actual fact, like,
00:35:51
Speaker
Please help me explain, Cecilia, because you're actually speaking to exactly my struggles in life, right? So there's two two two important fundamentals. One is we cling to our chaos because it's our treasure.
00:36:09
Speaker
Chaos is a survival mechanism for everyone in the planet that we generously carry So chaos is a Greek word and it's about the chasm. It's about the undifferentiated potential before God said the word and created the world and brought order to the chaos. So chaos is pure potential.
00:36:31
Speaker
Chaos is only a problem when it becomes unusable. And Bill Mollison, that genius, he discerned that unusable chaos and usable life-giving potential are the same thing. Just one has an intact feedback loop and the other doesn't.
00:36:52
Speaker
So people with houses that never get tidy, there's always this trauma that stops them seeing feedback, that stops them working out, that if I plonk this here later, I'm never going to be able to find it and I'm going to be in pain.
00:37:09
Speaker
And I'm not going to see where the pain comes from. It's just the universe is being cruel to me. They're not allowed to see, oh, if I put it somewhere else, it'll all work.
00:37:21
Speaker
That feedback loop has been blocked to protect them from the past trauma. So it's a downward spiral. The more incoherent your home is, and I'm using the word incoherent, not chaos, because that's a technical term and it's a mathematical and thermodynamics term that describes chaos that's never producing life because there's no feedback, incoherence. Think the molecules don't cohere, they don't stick together, you can't create anything. You put energy in, you wash the dishes and 10 minutes later it's back to what it was. Why did you waste your energy?
00:38:00
Speaker
And the answer is permaculture. Permaculture solves everything. So every time I had a loss of power, I'd think, what would Bill Mollison say? What would David Holmgren say?
00:38:13
Speaker
And they would have the answer. I remember one day I was standing at a sink of dirty dishes that my new housemate left when I'd just started housemate wrangling.
00:38:25
Speaker
And I was standing there powerless thinking, do I wash them myself? Do I live with them? Do i get angry at her?
00:38:36
Speaker
And all these were unacceptable. If I get angry at her, I poison my body. Our relationship will be ruined forever. you You can't make your housemates feel bad even once and think you're not totally changing the terrain of your life.
00:38:52
Speaker
Do I wash them myself? Well, I'm being the victim and I have another guideline which is never, ever, ever be a victim, which is really fun actually. ah unless it's ah unavoidable.
00:39:03
Speaker
it's It's a game I play with myself and it means I've got to take a lot of responsibility and be more powerful when things go wrong. So I invented a design so my housemates don't leave dishes.
00:39:16
Speaker
And it's a five-part design and it worked and it works and it's worked for decades and it works for other people who want to be householders of high turnover share houses.
00:39:27
Speaker
I can tell it to you if you like, Yes, please. Yeah. So I've got all these little designs for everything everything that goes wrong when I'm stuck. So this is the dishwasher design for housemates. There's five parts.
00:39:41
Speaker
The first is ask, don't tell. So permaculture is about force-free living. You don't tell the earth what you want it to grow. You ask the earth, what do you wish to grow?
00:39:52
Speaker
And if it says, I don't want to grow lettuce, I'm too dry, you say, well, I will plant cucumbers instead. So you ask your housemates, would you like to live in a house where we wash, dry and put away dishes every day? Because it's also my workplace and and like my customers has come and because I'm neurodiverse and if I have one bit of chaos, everything goes to hell. Would you like to live in such a house? And they say,
00:40:19
Speaker
Yeah, I'd like to live in such a house. like That's who I am. That's my identity. And when someone's id identity is involved, they often are able to do difficult things.
Harmonious Household Systems and Stress Reduction
00:40:31
Speaker
So that's step one, before they become a housemate. And here's another thing, Katie, any house rules can't be sprung on someone after they join the house. you got you They must be told before they join the house or else it's just you being a totalitarian cramp of their style and they didn't sign up for that that's no fun for me so that's step one and then step two is I have to make the sink totally beautiful I turn it into a shrine of beauty in love I take everything off it that vaguely resembles a dirty dish I fill it with vases of flowers and take away the rack so that Dry dishes don't accumulate because there's no rack for them to accumulate. I make it shine before I go to bed so when everyone wakes up, it's smiling at them. And it's so beautiful.
00:41:25
Speaker
Just no one would know. It's really hard to desecrate it with your your dirty curry bowls. It's just a mental mismatch.
00:41:37
Speaker
And that's without force because there's this mirror neuron thing happening and mirror neurons are very powerful. If something's got a really strong culture, the other being or person will become entrained.
00:41:49
Speaker
I don't know if you know much about entrainment or mirror neurons, but they're the most force-free, beautiful alternative energy system for human systems. Mirror neurons. You know how a newborn baby, if you look at it and smile at it and you poke your tongue out slowly, the newborn baby will poke its tongue out back.
00:42:10
Speaker
When you see someone that's sad, You feel sad just looking at their face so you know how they feel. And this is a gift from the universe, a gift of grace that helps humans get along.
00:42:23
Speaker
So the mirror neurons of a beautiful, shiny kitchen sink of beauty, truth and love get into the person and give them the power to put the dish in the dishwasher or wash the dish.
00:42:37
Speaker
And I have backups because Bill Mollison says every um essential service should have a backup. So, you know, if a bushfire comes, you've got a place to go.
00:42:48
Speaker
um if If the water catching fails, you've got a um bit of metal backup so that you don't lose all your water. So I made a backup, which is, I tell them, if you're really, really busy and can't wash the dish,
00:43:02
Speaker
You can ask a housemate to wash it for you or here is a tub. you can put your dirty dishes in the tub and you can put them in your bedroom till you get back from work.
00:43:15
Speaker
And they smile and there's no way they're ever going to do that. So they just learn to just get up one minute earlier and do the dish. And as the final, final thing that makes it totally essential, I say, and if you really can't look after the dishes, I'm going to advertise your bedroom. I'll tell and Because you're really nice, I'll probably choose you again, but I'm going to advertise it because that's my policy.
00:43:47
Speaker
So just my choice. And i'm I'm not going to kick them out because I choose people that are so special that you don't come across them every day. And I make sure we have a great relationship. But they they know.
00:44:02
Speaker
that's That's the final thing. And it's not me deciding, it's the plan. so there you go And for years, i I didn't have a problem with with um housemates and kitchen sink. And it meant I could get really sensitive people as housemates.
00:44:21
Speaker
Generally, I was the messiest person in the house, but they didn't know that because I had systems to manage myself. And that was dishwashing system. And since then, I've learned all these other tricks for people who don't have a share house and can't threaten to like advertise their child's room if the child doesn't doesn't cook things.
00:44:44
Speaker
So if it's a family, of course, I have to lean heavily towards the first parts of the the design, which is get dishwashing to be part of the love in the house.
00:44:56
Speaker
Have dishwashing and drying togetherness time like the highlight of the day. And it was for me as a kid, my dad washed the dishes every night and I i was often his sidekick and I'd dry them, dishes for nine people.
00:45:09
Speaker
And we just had the best conversations that I still remember. So nothing is inherently a horrible job. It's what our mind makes of it. So the job as a householder was to turn all the essential but rejected jobs into ones that people would embrace and that I'd embrace.
00:45:29
Speaker
And back to your question about the suffering in my life. So a big percent of the suffering is caused by my own, i want a better word than incompetence, because that sounds derogatory, but just powerlessness, not being able to do things that I wanted to do, not being able to keep a relationship I wanted to keep.
00:45:50
Speaker
And, of course, there's a big bad world. But even that, i'm I'm trying to be strict about saying stick to your own lookout. That's not my lookout.
00:46:02
Speaker
That's a great line I learned from Tyson Yunker Porter's book, Sand Talk. That book is so full of techniques I've been using for decades to save my world. And there they are, and Tyson worked them out and saw them in his own Aboriginal culture.
00:46:19
Speaker
So one of them is to say, that's not my lookout, that's not my problem. Bill Mollison taught us, don't complain about things you can't do anything about, only put your energy into something that you can have a result in and put your energy where you get the best result for your work. And he was really angry at his at all the hippies in Tasmania living off Blackberries with university degrees and who weren't using their university degrees. And university degree is has a big eco footprint, like to pay for it and to get on the tram every morning to go to university.
00:46:57
Speaker
So use the capacity you have for its best ability, Bill said. And don't don't do a job that you can't make a big contribution in.
00:47:08
Speaker
Bill doesn't recommend complaining about the failings of other people. Just go and make your own life really good in your own community and the people around you make them stronger and more capable. So it's really tempting because of the terrible times we live in to get on the internet and awfulize.
00:47:27
Speaker
And it makes us feel better about our failings because we're better than very powerful people and we know how it should be, which makes us more powerful than them actually. and And that's a big trap. It's a trap of our energy and our time.
00:47:44
Speaker
And awfulising makes us feel we've achieved something, but we're just barracking for a team like Football Spectators. Nothing gets made in our energy. You know, it's tempting to get on the internet and see someone failing bigger than me and doing terrible things, messing up the world.
00:48:04
Speaker
But I know that's just drugs. It's just cheap drugs. I know I shouldn't do that. And, you know, I do it. But luckily i've got I've got structures. I've got structures for all my weak points and they get better and better. So now I've got Screen Zen on my on my um Facebook page on my phone to get on the internet and do awfulizing. I've got to go through all these hoops. So Screen Zen makes me do breathing and it asks me what I'm going to do after I've watched this thing and i'm given 10 minutes to be on the internet and then it cuts it off.
00:48:41
Speaker
Screen Zen's amazing. Recommend you download it if anyone is wasting their virtue on the on the ills of the world.
00:48:51
Speaker
My hand is raised and my to-do list after this conversation is extensive, but definitely getting on spring then will be one of the top of that list. Cecilia, this is exactly what I want for the podcast, which this confluence of permaculture and self-help and and bringing those permaculture principles and ethics and pathways to bear on the lives that we lead and with such cleverness and joy and and like a bit of you know romance and whimsy and love the way think you've described your life as a page turner and something that i sit with is how we bring that romance to our own world because we're we're the ones who are going to do that right like nobody else is going to create the luster and sparkle and meaning of our own lives but us and i'm just also trying to walk my way to the perfect question because i have so many and
00:49:53
Speaker
One of them is around, you know, knowing that you are such a a proponent of a beautiful space, like even making our kitchen sink and also, I think that's absolutely genius. Can you please help us draw this connection, really clarify the connection between the stuff or the lack of stuff that surrounds us, our environment, our habitat, and how that impacts our psyche and kind of what the possibilities are when we bring beauty and harmony to our household?
00:50:25
Speaker
so So this is now actually my main job. I run webinars and workshops and do consulting on how to bring permaculture principles into a house that looks chaotic and I'm using that term really to mean incoherent and turn it around.
00:50:49
Speaker
It's a scientific fact, if you put any human into a chaotic home where things um aren't relating to each other well, they're not related, any brain will get a rise in cortisol. You can see it in the saliva, the heartbeat changes.
00:51:08
Speaker
And people who live with this every day don't consciously feel it, but their body feels it. And there's this base level stress all the time. And they think,
00:51:20
Speaker
There's something wrong with their brains. But the mind, the mind lives, we know, and we know the mind lives now, not in our brain. Our mind lives in our brain, in our nervous system, in our body.
00:51:35
Speaker
It lives in our relationships with other people and it lives in our physical environment. So harmonising your kitchen is like a drug.
00:51:46
Speaker
for your brain, your cortisol drops, your serotonin increases, you're able to um your peripheral vision widens. This is biology, it's not my opinion.
00:51:57
Speaker
I want that for people so we have more power to make the beautiful world and to be the boss of our lives and not be in fight and flight.
Organizing Homes with Permaculture Zones
00:52:07
Speaker
So I use permaculture design to get started.
00:52:11
Speaker
i use zones to start off and i explain to people whatever level of chaos or or beauty they already have, how zones can make their kitchen or their house or their whole life even better. So zone one is where your eyes and hands naturally land. It's your kitchen table, your bench, maybe your kitchen sink.
00:52:34
Speaker
It's the back of the toilet door. It's your very high attention zone. And anything you put there will tell you, hey, Cecilia, do this. Return the library book, eat the salad. Zone two ah things that you don't need to be reminded. You don't need to be reminded to use the toaster because you want to eat make toast anyway. So you open the cupboard and get out the toaster and it takes 30 seconds and you make your toast and then you put it away.
00:53:03
Speaker
It's really good to be slowed down because you don't want to eat more toast. You want to eat less bread, right? So all the things you want to do less, you put in a further away zone.
00:53:15
Speaker
And the things you want to do more, you put in a closed zone. And so zone two is when you open a cupboard or a little bit higher or lower are things in zone two, things you don't need to be reminded of, because you're going to use them anyway, your bowls or something. And zone three is a little bit higher, things you don't use often.
00:53:32
Speaker
Zone four is your party plates you only use once a year, you can put them in a in a tub and put them in another room. They don't have to be like right by your kitchen sink in really high real estate value area.
00:53:44
Speaker
A lot of stuff you realize, well, this should be in zone four, like it's not serving me. It should be in the op shop where it can serve someone else. Because you want a home where everything's fully employed and it's living its dream, which is to support you.
00:54:03
Speaker
you want a home where all the objects are living their mission because we want to hang with other people who are living their mission, right, because they're full of life and they're beautiful.
00:54:14
Speaker
Anyone living their mission is beautiful, including our stuff. yeah I like surface beauty. It energises me, but real beauty is when something's living its mission without being without obstacles.
00:54:29
Speaker
Zone five is nature unpolluted because you didn't put your crap there. So you're preserving it and it's not in your life. It's a bit distant. It's all the stuff you didn't buy because it was on special.
00:54:40
Speaker
There is a big obstacle that my clients have to get over, which is to put the crap that's living in their house out of their house. It's not waste. It was already wasted.
00:54:54
Speaker
In fact, it stops wasting your attention as soon as it leaves your house. And will it will cause you pain if you're that kind of person that loves to, know, recycle. But it will free you up to have space for the next chapter in your life with this space.
00:55:13
Speaker
My clients have decluttered a room and made a piano room and started doing piano lessons and earning money because they were brave enough to throw this crap out that they never asked to have in their life, it just somehow ended up there.
00:55:28
Speaker
The space to have ah a woofer, a volunteer from Helpex. If you just even think you could sign up to Woof or Helpex or Workaway and try and host travellers, share what's spare and most of your house is unused. If you do a heat map,
00:55:48
Speaker
of where you spend 24 hours or seven days, you're using 5% of your house. Like you walk from your bed your couch to your sink.
00:55:59
Speaker
Most of the house is unused. Imagine even if you made space for other people. And when I was young, I saw that potential in a whole city. I thought of even right now, all the empty bedrooms that you know I could be living in or someone could be living in.
00:56:14
Speaker
Think of the preciousness of empty space which is not for being colonized by stuff and when you're putting stuff in empty space you're colonizing so know don't complain about all the other colonizers you're doing the same thing you said oh it's empty it wasn't empty it was creative void it was a stage upon which things were meant to happen in your life people were meant to come in recipes were meant to be made games of scrabble were meant to happen People were meant to connect, dinner parties were meant to happen.
00:56:48
Speaker
It wasn't for colonising with your crap from the op shop that gave a dopamine rush. I'm getting a bit a little bit high horse here, Katie, so stop me But i you know i I get passionate about it because the stuff that comes into our life that we hang on to, takes away so much beauty and love.
00:57:12
Speaker
But you did ask for a solution and the solution is always taking away people's anxiety, taking away people's feeling of incompetence.
00:57:24
Speaker
Once you get people relaxing and feeling successful, The upward spiral begins. So that's my work. I go into a house where it's the kind of house where your cortisol will rise because you can't see what the system is and you can't find things and you don't feel honoured and the owner doesn't.
00:57:44
Speaker
And the owner's scared. i am not scared because I am a professional. i love home a permaculture designer. I know what to do. So I get them and me and we're playing hide and seek where we get our cameras and we make postcards. We go and we take photos, close-ups of combinations that are working in their home, pre-existing beauty, where there's things that just look good together. So it's like that dried flower and that unglazed pottery and that bitter wood with some gilding and it just looks amazing and you take a photo.
00:58:20
Speaker
And it looks like a postcard, like you could sell it, it looks so good. and And we make 10 postcards of what's already working in your house and beautiful.
00:58:32
Speaker
And we compare them and we find a theme and we give a poetic name to their style and they get excited and they say, wow, I'm successful, I create beauty.
00:58:43
Speaker
And I say, we're just going to expand this. And then we take 10 anti-postcards that no one, Ed, would ever want to buy. And it's like the tangled cords and ripped open breakfast cereal packages and plastic and balls of hair. and And they say, why am I living with this? I want less of that. And they feel it in their body and they feel hope that it's possible. And we start to make less of the anti-postcards. We just rearrange a few things.
00:59:14
Speaker
We give a poetic name to their postcards, their essential beauty creation style. And one house hers is um salted caramel sweet pea because she had lots of brown natural wood and 70s panelling and she had lots of pretty sweet magenta and jade and teal.
00:59:37
Speaker
And when she heard that word, she got so excited and she wanted to make everything salted caramel sweet pea. Other people say, oh, yeah, I'm a granola kind of unglazed pottery, hempy person. I'm a hempy, happy person.
00:59:51
Speaker
And this is permaculture. I got this from the the Bradley method of weed control. So these two spinsters sisters, as they were called in the 60s, who lived together in Sydney, would go for a walk around what's Taronga Zoo and they'd find, they'd just notice that the CSI, the the government was coming, attacking the blackberries with machinery and the blackberries would just grow back with a vengeance.
01:00:21
Speaker
Blackberries love disturbed soil. They love the cleared land. They love the sun. And they thought, if we just expand the edges of the of the intact remnant vegetation,
01:00:32
Speaker
it will get bigger and bigger and the blackberries will get smaller and smaller. So just on their walks with their scissors, they just trimmed the edges of what was working. And what was working would get larger and larger and the blackberries would get smaller and smaller and shaded out.
01:00:47
Speaker
And it became the CSIRO new blackberry management method, the Bradley method. How good a story is that? We don't need to attack our weak points.
01:00:59
Speaker
We just need to find our good points and foster them and make them stronger and expand the edges and tell people, I'm really good at this. I'm not going to attack myself because I'm bad at that. i used to i used to always scold myself. You're so forgetful. You've got a brain like a sieve, Cecilia.
01:01:17
Speaker
Just remember. It just made things worse. It just made me more anxious. It never helped me remember anything. And then one day I realized that My memory is phenomenal.
01:01:31
Speaker
Like I told you, Katie, I could remember the plots from all the stories I read in grade five. I memorise Japanese and all these competent people that are on time and remember what time you meant to turn up, they didn't remember Japanese.
01:01:47
Speaker
We're different. And my memory is good. It's just for different things. And it's like ADHD, what a misnomer. they don't have a deficit of attention. They're just focusing attention on what gives them reward, which is not this boring thing you're asking them to focus on that isn't rewarding.
Efficient Daily Routines through Permaculture
01:02:08
Speaker
So my method of home harmonising or decluttering or whatever it is, is make every essential or useful or constructive action immediately rewarded. You've got to have an immediate reward.
01:02:24
Speaker
People who do get stuck in we'll call it chaotic environments for want of a better word because English doesn't have a word for it, which is why we don't have a solution for it, by the way.
01:02:36
Speaker
you don't have a word for a problem, how can you solve it? People with chaotic environments. The reward's too far away. Like if you wash the dishes, you'll be grateful tomorrow. It's way too far away. And washing the dishes is way too painful.
01:02:51
Speaker
The Japanese set up, and they make mess scapes that are beautiful. They put all the all the cutlery, they line it up. They put the round things together. They put the long things together in families. So even the dirty things are inviting.
01:03:09
Speaker
You're already in order, even though it's dirty. So I teach people to make mess escapes and to enjoy putting the thing down in a way that makes it beautiful.
01:03:22
Speaker
And I'm building rewards. And one of the things I do in my early workshops is lining things up at right angles. Now, you've probably seen people that naturally do this.
01:03:34
Speaker
About one in seven people naturally line things up at right angles. Have you got friends that do that? I think I think i do it. Yeah, I do it in shops when I go in and see something off kilter.
01:03:46
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, so this has become second nature for lots of us because we found it so rewarding. And the reason it's rewarding is it it calms our nervous system.
01:03:57
Speaker
The act of doing it calms you down. Like you get a micro meditation when you stay with the thing, stay with the thing till it lands on the table and it's straight.
01:04:08
Speaker
You do have a breath and it's done. It's done. And you feel a little click when it clicks with all the other things lined up. at right angles with everything else on the square table.
01:04:20
Speaker
You get a little reward. Now, if you've got a ah nervous system that's in constant fight and flight, you think, I am not allowed to two seconds lining this up because I have 2,000 unfinished tasks staring at me in this room as I speak.
01:04:41
Speaker
And I've got my clients to start counting how many unfinished tasks they're looking at. you know, when they get to about 50 and they know they're not even a fraction through, they realise maybe I could give up some of my projects.
01:04:55
Speaker
Maybe I don't have to turn every bit of broken crockery into a mosaic. Maybe I don't have to do kintetsu and glue every broken thing with gold back to how it was.
01:05:08
Speaker
Maybe I'm allowed to just say, sorry, I broke you. I want to be more mindful in future. i'm going to I'm going to be someone who's allowed to take the time to hold a cup really carefully and love it and put it down carefully.
01:05:26
Speaker
And it takes a change of biochemistry. It takes a change of neural pathways. We're remaking our body when we take the time to put something down in a right angle.
01:05:41
Speaker
We're changing our neural pathways. And this is making swales in our brain. Our life energy is our emotions. It gives us our motion.
01:05:53
Speaker
And you want your emotions to go long and slow in the landscape of your life. And when you set up systems in your home so you can't rush and break things and forget things and lose things, when you set that up so it's really pleasant,
01:06:10
Speaker
You can take your time. your Your neurons change. This is physical. This is making swales in your brain. This is real permaculture.
01:06:22
Speaker
I used to, Katie, this is how I'd start cooking. I'd turn i put a pan on the stove. I'd turn on the heat and then I'd start chopping an onion. Poor little me, poor little me. No wonder I cut my fingers. No wonder I burnt the onions.
01:06:39
Speaker
And now I'm allowed to have time. I take all the food out of the fridge. I cut it with a rhythm, a circular rhythm, because Bill Mollison taught me spirals are where you get your energy.
01:06:54
Speaker
I cut like the Japanese in a rhythm that doesn't stop. Have you seen someone cut without stopping in a spiral? It's beautiful. And it takes focus. It's like a computer game.
01:07:08
Speaker
I'm so involved in this cutting. I'm not thinking of anything else. And then it's all done and everything's the same size because I had a rhythm and it looks beautiful.
01:07:20
Speaker
And then I cut everything and then I put the bits I don't need back in the fridge and then I start the next bit of the spiral. I'll turn on the stove and all the food is already cut on, you know, one or two plates and I'm a composer. and the timing is right and things come in at the right time and everything gets exactly the right amount of cooking it needs so you don't have hard carrots and soft potatoes. And I'm in the middle of an artwork and it's rewarding.
01:07:55
Speaker
And I want to do it this way again tomorrow. and then i have the time. How's this? This is amazing. I heat the plate under the hot tap.
01:08:06
Speaker
The stuff's in the pan and it's cooked. I put the food on the plate and then while the pan is in my hand, I run it under the tap before it's cooled down and all the stuff's gone hard on it.
01:08:19
Speaker
And I go whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, only three actions. In tea ceremony, you're not allowed to go back and forward, back and forward because that's mindless. You've already done it once properly. You don't go back and forward. One, two, three, in a kind of circular way. The pan is clean.
01:08:39
Speaker
I put it on the stove to dry and the whole kitchen's clean. And then i sit down with my friend and eat really calmly and I'm in rest and digest. I'm in tend and befriend. My nervous system is exactly right for chewing slowly, getting the most of the food that you know maybe someone's put a lot of effort into growing.
01:09:03
Speaker
And i have a beautiful dinner and then I turn around and look at the kitchen Katie, it's beautiful. My cortisol does not go up when I see the kitchen.
Spreading Permaculture for Sustainable Cultures
01:09:15
Speaker
i just wash two chopsticks, two plates, two glasses, and then place gravel or two up or go for a walk or do something really nice.
01:09:29
Speaker
So it took me years to make these routines where every single action gets rewarded. It has to be rewarded or you won't do it. So never use willpower.
01:09:43
Speaker
Willpower is a non-renewable resource. And Bill Mollison taught us, he said, you can use non-renewable resources.
01:09:54
Speaker
You use them to get the system started. He said, fossil fuel, you use it to power the the tractors that make the channels that let the water flow, that get a water turbine, giving you free energy forevermore.
01:10:11
Speaker
And the Japanese Zen master said the same thing. They said, the only effort should be in the maintenance of effortlessness. So i put in a lot of energy to designing a system so that it rewards me.
01:10:29
Speaker
So like learning to line things up at a right angle, It took me two weeks and then it became second nature because those neural pathways in my muscle memory, my brain, had been established and I could feel a little bing of satisfaction.
01:10:47
Speaker
And when I walk into a room and everything that's finished is lined up and the unfinished things are at an angle, I know what to do next. So if something's not finished, I don't put it at an angle. I say this is to be addressed immediately.
01:11:03
Speaker
like in the next minutes or hours. And the whole room is like a nervous system that's in tend and befriend, rest and digest.
01:11:17
Speaker
And a lot of us don't know it, but the act of tending gets you out of fight and flight. It gets you out of ah cortisol and adrenaline and into ventral vagal in polyvagal view theory. It gets you quietly radiant if you're using Ayurvedic. It gets you into sattvic mode instead of tamas and rajas.
01:11:39
Speaker
Some people in the audience may know these. So you walk into heaven. You walk into a room where you succeed and the things you need to do were set up before.
01:11:55
Speaker
And I got a little, you know, of my many, many tricks. One is when i kind of don't want to do something, I'm feeling i can't be bothered. I can't be bothered always code for you're not allowed.
01:12:07
Speaker
Your nervous system won't let you do this because it thinks it's too expensive, like it's too It's too mentally expensive to clean that mess. I'll say, no, I can afford it. I'm going to take a loan from tomorrow and I'll clean the mess and i'll send I'll send a little kiss to future me.
01:12:30
Speaker
And I'll feel the love in the kiss. And then the next day when I go and I see that clear spot that was going to be a mess, I go, oh, and I do a little cuddle from past me. I feel the kiss that yesterday me sent me and the gift of love that yesterday me sent me. I feel I'm loved and it's visceral. It's real. I feel it in my body.
01:12:55
Speaker
I'm in a love relationship with me of yesterday. and A lot of permies say, think about future generations, which you know is really important to not thrash the world.
01:13:08
Speaker
But the future generation of you is just a few minutes or hours away. If you can get the reward right now, sending a kiss to your future self and feeling it in your body, it motivates you to do a hard thing. Can you imagine doing it right like right this minute? like Think of something hard you want to do in a few minutes and just send yourself a kiss and like screw up your face and yeah you can feel the energy, the love energy and the serotonin's there.
01:13:41
Speaker
The reward has to be like immediate and you have to use your imagination. I used imagination to learn Japanese. Everyone else was using willpower and they forgot and I remembered because I used imagination.
01:13:55
Speaker
I made little stories for every kanji every character every element was a little weird movie so imagination's better than willpower that's einstein right i'm still thinking about um receiving a kiss from myself with my eyes terrible summer chapped lips so i'm gonna have to address that before sending any more my own way completely charmed beyond belief cecilia um soaking in the idea of making my brain whilst chopping salad and all kinds wonderful creative things that you've offered and I'm sure that I'm not alone in having 2,000 more questions to ask you I feel like if the listeners are also getting feeling that resonance with you and your work and your
01:14:49
Speaker
incredible vision of permaculture and Japanese wisdom and so many other things I wonder where you would point them to get a little bit more of Cecilia and perhaps even get in touch if they feel moved to here are some ways you can get in touch with me ha there are so many ways you can follow my blog If you Google Cecilia McCauley, you will find me online.
01:15:13
Speaker
And I'm starting a substack, Katie, are you with all my so many stories, finally. I have a nine-month home harmonizing course starting in June with my miraculous sister, who is a yoga therapist, who has been my inspiration in making sure that my body is part of the work that I do and my nervous system.
01:15:41
Speaker
And you could join my nine month home decluttering webinar series. Once a month there's a new room which is a springboard for a whole new universe in the mind, the body, the relationships of harmonizing your life. So it works in a spiral getting revisited every month and it's so entertaining because my 30 years of photos and work that I've been doing is finally getting seen.
01:16:09
Speaker
because most of my work is in my laptop and my memory and that's about to change. If you want me to present for your community, go to your local government and say, hey, this is Chick Cecilia and can you get her to do a workshop? And local government usually will pay for me to come and do a workshop.
01:16:30
Speaker
If you're really ready, you can hire me to come to your house. I travel. I'll be doing a workshop in Cairns, in Sydney, in wherever I'm asked actually. If you have a community, people with communities hire me and because they're good at gathering a crowd, we do declutter parties. So we get 12 people in their house and over two days I give workshops and and there's 10 people decluttering your kitchen.
01:17:00
Speaker
And in within two days, the the vision gets made. They learn how to do it with their body so they can go home and do it instantly without hesitation in their own home. They pay.
01:17:12
Speaker
um Usually they pay about 60 bucks and to you. And you provide a lunch or your friends do and it's delicious or you arrange your potluck depending on your friends.
01:17:25
Speaker
And the culture spreads. So I go back to the same towns every year in Japan. And someone that was in one workshop then puts on another workshop for me and brings all their friends. And the whole town, just the culture of permaculture spreads.
01:17:42
Speaker
Culture is the way to do things like making yogurt. It's just so little effort. You put in a little bit of of starter and by the grace of the way life works, it spreads because life is on the side of
Closing Thoughts, Gratitude, and Future Engagements
01:17:56
Speaker
life.
01:17:56
Speaker
I am writing a book with my sister but on the main topic of permaculture, which is putting us in a position to be in a state of grace because Bill Mollison knew that if you get conditions right, if you put the right thing in the right place, suddenly everything goes right by itself.
01:18:20
Speaker
Yeah, it sounds like you've got so much on on the hob, Cecilia, and I can't wait to cast my eyes over your book. What a beautiful premise. Thank you. I've just... enjoyed this conversation so much and your generosity in spending this time and sharing yourself with us and I really hope to hear from you again one day they do have unfinished business oh please I'm already feeling like there's so much more to talk yeah that would be super excellent so uh oh I'd love that so much thanks Cecilia what a joy
01:18:54
Speaker
Thank you, Katie. Thank you for making this for the world and letting me talk about my favourite things to all these beautiful people.
01:19:05
Speaker
I really needed that conversation and I hope Cecilia's words had a similarly magical effect on you too. That was permaculturalist Cecilia McCauley and you know where to find all her offerings in those good old linky poos in the show notes under the episode. And hey, thank you to the good people on Patreon who single-handedly fund this work, crowd-supporting Ruskillians to take a slow and meandering path through all kinds of interesting, possibly revolutionary ideas without any strings attached.
01:19:39
Speaker
It is a completely unfettered creative offering with nobody to impress but you, my amazing listeners. Thanks for your patience as the podcast warms into the year. a little bit haphazard as guests find their way to the microphone, but we have an incredible crop of humans coming up, including Robin Greenfield, Jem Bendell, Christy Green, and Emily Coates. We'll be ripe and ready for listening soon. Have a beautiful week.