Here is my Final design for My Life Path; My 'Personal Permaculture Plan'. It is clearly too small to read at this scale, so I am going to magnify each section & describe them all in turn. This mindmap describes where I am at this point in my life; so it is only final for now. More details about these elements can be found on the following Implementation page.

Zone 00

 This section describes my activities in following my life path. Top of the heap is zone 000 & I have put it here because everything else that I do stems from my thought processes. Through meditation & dreamwork I explore my subconscious mind & I have worked on releasing old negative patterns still residing there most recently using Rebirthing. I find that the help of crystal energy & drawing sacred geometric patterns has also assisted this process. I have found that selected 'channelled' writings have raised important questions for me & made me aware of the way I can manifest into reality whatever my mind projects into it. As a result of exploring these ideas I have discovered that following my excitement & the appearance of strange synchronicities is a good way of staying on my optimum life path.

 I have chosen to go barefoot for the past six years & this has given me much healthier feet & enabled me to become more sensitive to the messages around me. I drink the best water I can get & this is rain collected off my roof as long as it is fresh enough. Only as a last resort will I drink tap water. For fitness, I have found Aikido to be the best all-round exercise, giving me improved coordination, flexibility, fitness & stamina. Despite it being a martial art, it is not a contact sport as such like many of the others, as the essence is put upon blending & flowing with one's opponent.

 My actions speak louder than my words I'm told, so I want the way I live to be an example of good sustainable living for other people to see. The underlying essence of my life choices is the honouring I have of all life forms. Permaculture principles have helped me to design a life that enables me to live out my wishes in the best way that I can. I seem to be fairly empathic & can easily put myself in others' situations & be aware of how they feel (& I don't just mean humans here). This helps me to be compassionate to all beings & to adjust my own actions accordingly.

 I feel a need to communicate the feelings & ideas that I have & in the past I have done this by writing & talking to people, either informally or as presentations to large groups. For the last few years I have been exploring the medium of song as another means of communicating, as it offers me the extra opportunity to add emotion to my message. This is one of the outlets that I currently explore for my creativity & another is in creating beautiful patterns with the salad leaves & flowers from my garden. Both of these have other yields; my songs can also communicate a positive message & maybe the salad art will encourage people to eat & grow more varied plants themselves. If nothing else, people enjoy the beauty before they enjoy eating them, so the nourishment is absorbed on two different levels. I also like making ecological things, the most recent being the cover for my yurt.

 In my relationships with all beings I aim to communicate clearly & honestly, without attachment to outcomes. I have discovered the hard way that if I pretend to be someone that I am not, I will attract friends who like that projected personality & not the real me. Being the real me is also essential in truly honouring the other being.

 Right livelihoods is something I am still getting to grips with, so there are no other details here. Perhaps though I could have made an extra link to poly-incomes as this certainly seems to be the way that my life is heading now & in true permaculture terms provides me with a 'multiple supply'.

 My two main strategies for gathering the information that continues to guide my journey are to rely upon firstly my own direct experiences & secondly only the sources that I trust. The latter strategy also relies upon my gut feelings which tend to be uncannily accurate in such matters.

Home

 This & all of the following sections cover the choices that I make on my life path. I start here with my home environment. I choose to live in the Dorset countryside for the quiet & the opportunity to see & hear the fairly abundant wildlife. This is also likely to be the cleanest air that I am going to experience without getting into some serious wilderness, but right now I need to maintain a certain amount of connection with society to be able to communicate with it. I am torn between the pros & cons of two shelters; the mobile home that I have been living in for the last two & a half years & a yurt that I have since completed. The former has the mains electricity that powers the tools that I am currently using to communicate with the World. It is however very boxy, metal skinned & poorly insulated, making it cold in the Winter & hot in the Summer; even with all windows & roof vents open.

 As it is only a temporary dwelling in a planning sense, wrapping it in a wooden skin & insulation is not currently a viable alternative. The yurt is circular, very beautiful, has a woodburner & is much more the kind of home I feel comfortable in, but is unable to accommodate those currently important tools. I have erected the yurt over the Summer months so that I & others can use it & a lot of people have already enjoyed its welcoming space.

 My garden provides food for my body & my senses & an abundance of wildlife now visits it to feed & make their homes themselves. It is also an opportunity for me to get gentle exercise, sunshine & fresh air & to earth myself (my mobile home is off the ground). I compost my food waste for my garden in zone 1 & use some of my urine to activate the heap & as a nitrogen rich feed for my plants. The treebogs further away in zone 2 deal with the rest of my bodily wastes.

 Zone 2 is also where I interact on a communal level. I live here with two other people, both of whom have their dwellings less than a hundred yards away. In a town this would be quite a long way for a neighbour to be, but here we all have a shared interest in caring for the land & we work cooperatively & permaculturally towards that end. I am also part of various wider communities of people connected by common aims & Permaculture is the one that I have been most recently actively engaged in.

Food
 

 This section deals with the choices I make about my food. While I am open to the idea that we may be able in time to adapt ourselves to feed from some other energy source (plants are only concentrated 'solid' sunshine after all, as are we), at present my body still appears to need to eat. Therefore I have to make choices about what food growing practices that I want to support. The safest, freshest & most local food will always come from my own garden where I am using Permaculture design & organic practices. I find it inherently satisfying to be able to go out & gather food from around my home for a meal for myself.

 What I cannot produce myself I need to purchase & this is where I meet my dilemmas. Obviously there are criteria which I can use to make my choices & top marks go to locally grown & organic foods & I also have a high preference for foods that I can eat raw (see 'The Next Step'), especially fruits because of their excellent nutritional content. It is where the criteria overlap that I have to choose; am I better off buying a non-organic locally grown apple or an organic orange, or perhaps a potato from my garden that I will need to cook or organic salads shipped from somewhere else? In practice I tend to choose a bit of everything & until I get more clarity around this issue I'm sure it will continue to be this same way.

 I also buy long shelf-life foods wholesale to save on packaging & cost; these tend to be primarily dried fruits & nuts & seeds. When I go shopping I always take cloth bags or panniers or a rucksack to bring my food home; I have long since stopped using plastic carrier bags. I also no longer buy anything in a can or a Tetrapak because I cannot justify the negative environmental impact of using these food preservation methods.

 So in general my diet consists of mainly raw food; primarily fruit with salads & some vegetables. For the last six years I have also enjoyed arranging the leaves & flowers that I gather from my garden into 'salad art'. This nourishes me on two levels, with beauty & nutrition (& it appears that it is becoming part of my poly-income too, as I have recently sold three pictures of them!). I also eat a little cooked food, steamed vegetables (often home grown) or sometimes bread or a vegetable pasty perhaps. The latter I buy & I assume that they are baked in large ovens as part of a big batch, which I sense may be more energy efficient than if I cooked them at home. I don't think that I have ever used the oven in my mobile home!

Energy

 The choices that I make around energy are also very important & can have a significant impact on my environment. Firstly, as Bill Mollison states in the Permaculture Designer's Manual; "It is easier to conserve energy than to generate it", therefore my primary aim is to do just this. I have become very aware of energy & always question what I am using; whether it be lighting, heating or power for my 'communication tools'.

 The two most sustainable sources of energy that I am currently able to harness are my own body heat & the output from a solar panel that I now have. In the winter I will always put on extra clothes or a thicker duvet on my bed before turning up the heat. The solar panel gives me enough stored electricity to power lighting & this is used in the yurt during the Summer & in the mobile home during the Winter.

 I now buy my electricity from Unite; a company that generates all its power using sustainable sources, such as wind & wave energy. This improves my energy accounting & gives support to a company that while we are still geared up to a national grid system, I would like to see being successful.

 Of course, with a woodburner I also have the opportunity to make the most of 'waste' wood. By this I mean wood that even I can't use to make something & that is best used to provide heat in an efficient manner. I have acquired quite a lot of tree prunings from my gardening work, when the houses have had work done on mature trees & diseased limbs have been removed. I can see that these are a valuable resource & make the most of them; of course the wood ash then becomes a valuable input to my garden.

Resources

 As far as clothing goes, most of what I wear I have been given as presents. When I buy clothing I try to find something I like secondhand & I very rarely resort to buying new. What I have is very practical & hard wearing & I wear them until they fall apart, at which point they become used as rags. Most that applies to clothing in this section, could equally be applied to many other physical resources that I might discover a need for.

 I have a habit of always reusing what I can & not refusing items that I might be able to make some use of somewhere. I only buy new what I can't obtain in any other way. With all such purchases, I weigh up the benefits against the production costs & aim to get the most beneficial outputs from them that I can.

Travel

 I have discovered that I need to travel less & less, the more that I design my life sustainably. During the Summer in particular, when I have plenty of food growing in my garden, I have got down to shopping once a week. This I could do on my bicycle, but I have to admit that I often use the van instead. I still haven't managed to arrange my life to be injury-free & a back injury or neck pain becomes an excuse not to cycle.

 When I do go by bike I have a good set of panniers & for bigger loads I have a bike trailer too. The public transport is very sparse in Dorset. The buses don't come near my home & the nearest train station is over ten miles away. Taxis are the main method that locals without cars seem to get around, though I can't see the logic in them driving twice the distance (from town & back to both pick me up & to take me home) than I would in my own vehicle.

When I use my van I aim to make journeys as fuel efficient as possible & to do this I use three main strategies. I have an Ecoflow magnet fitted onto my van's fuel line & this definitely seems to do what it claims to as my fuel consumption for a fairly big van is over 50 m.p.g. I also use carbon-neutral fuel, making the most of biodiesel or it's vegetable oil source directly. On journeys I also try to travel-share & this can apply to a trip into town for shopping or a long distance trip to a Permaculture event. At one time I drove like most other people; quite quickly & accelerating & braking quite hard. These days though I drive very gently & this no doubt adds to the m.p.g. that I get from the fuel that I use.

 More details about the ways in which I have applied my Personal Permaculture Plan in my life are to be found on the Implementation page.