Category Archives: Principles

Resource Dilution

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It’s a concept that is used to describe the amount of resources available for the amount of children that you have.

The theory is based on the idea that parents only have a limited amount of resources. With each additional child the parents resources get diluted. Imagine two families with the same amount of resources, one family only has one child and the other family has four. The family with one child has four times the amount of resources available for their one child than the other family.

This same idea is true for projects, friends and just life in general. The more you do the more spread out you are, the less energy, time, and resources you have for each addition to your life.

The common pattern is that less is more. Don’t fall into the trap of doing everything. You’ll end up with nothing.

The exception in my opinion is when a person has conquered a project to the point where people and their environment can build up on it or when a person is questioning what they truly want to do with their life. For example, conquering a project to benefit mankind and nature could be feeding and growing the soil to cultivate food for us and the microbes in the soil, win win. Next steps in succession could be selling the extra produce, giving it away, or making value added products like making pickled vegetables or raising farm animals. Questioning what you want to do is simply trying a lot of things to find the few things that you are passionate about, running through the gauntlet.

All of this is slow and small solutions in permaculture or the Tortoise and the Hare if you like fables.

Patterns to Details

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They’re everywhere in natural systems and cycles. We’ve forgotten that we communicate with these patterns and interact with them everyday. Wake up.

If we learn to understand a pattern, we can then learn to manipulate it to manifest new possibilities. The current problem is we focus too deeply on details of a pattern than the pattern itself. For example, soil ecology is over complicated with the details of modern gardeners. People will talk about carbon, nitrogen, potassium, and all the other micro and macro nutrients. All you need to know is soil is a live. Determining the pattern on which and what materials and how they are piled are finer details, but the feedback systems of nature will communicate to you what’s going wrong.

How does nature communicate? It gave us the gift and burden of smell, taste, touch, hearing, and sight. If something smells, tastes, or feels horrible you may need to reassess how something is working. Over using any one sense can lead to a destructive feedback system; try to use as many as possible. It looks great is not good. Go feel it, get your hands inside, and smell it. Smell is close enough to taste. Smelling and touching will give you a good idea of what it’s like on your teeth.

Just remember, look at the big pattern and then try to determine how the manipulate the finer details. The micronutrients! the macronutrients! it doesn’t matter. Soil is living; that’s the pattern. Now find out how to bring soil back from the dead and you’ve discovered the pattern of life.

Patterns to details, patterns to details. That’s all.