Kia ora e te whānau PDC (Hello PDC family),
I am deep in my permaculture design and loving every second of it. For me, as a Buddhist, designing my garden is exploring gardening as Buddhist practice and Right Livelihood. It involves reverence, communing, active listening to the garden and an opportunity to explore garden as my path.
This arose from a course called Mana Ora that explored business models through a Te au Māori lens. Viewing business within a matauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) showed me a holistic way of incorporating indigenous knowledge into what has usually been an intensely colonised space. Working in corporate and purely profit driven spaces has always put me at odds with my practices and left me painfully conflicted. I saw an opportunity to build a career in organic horticulture and shape it around Buddhist practice in a way that finally enabled a deeply dedicated and mindful livelihood. This is the foundation of all my designs and permaculture principles guide a lot of this.
For context, I live in Aotearoa, New Zealand. There is a rich history of Chinese market gardens which is the ancestry of my husband's family. My garden grows food and medicinal cultivars that were brought over by my children's ancestors.
In Aotearoa, gardens are deeply spiritual places. In the origin stories here, we were created as gardeners. Essentially, nature was incomplete without humans, and we were created to tend to Her. There is no line we can draw where everything on this side is without a deep spiritual connection. All of it is a direct connection to Papatūānuku (Mother Earth). Gardening is an open conversation with Her and everything within Her - plants, biology, animals, soils, weather, the smells, sounds, Her Wairua (energy). She is the underlying invisible structure woven into every aspect of a garden.
Now I come to my Permaculture Design, and I am finding a lot of head space is being used up in working out how to essentially code switch to respectfully navigate the no religion policy. Which seems to be accomplished with omitting certain phrases, not using Te Reo Māori (Māori language) and swapping out words like 'Right Livelihood' for 'ethical employment', etc. It does feel disingenuous and like I am stripping away the connection to the garden's ancestry and her connection to this whenua (land).
Can someone give me some guidance?