Chapter 1

In search of meaning

The origins of

Permaculture

Recall

Memory is a strange storage, hiding small shames, dull years.

I struggle to recall a single event from my schoolrooms, fortunately short. It all happened outside. Yet I read, write, count. What do they do to us in school that they blind our memory? Institutionalised man. Official days are gone, only ridiculous events are recalled, but I recall boats, men, hunting, storm, fire, injury, fight, love, escape, idea, entrapment, exploration, as if yesterday.

Bernal del Castillo recalls his Peruvian conquests – he is old, nearing eighty, yet it all comes before his eyes as if it were yesterday.

So it is with all of us. Playing ridiculous tricks. Willing myself as a boy to remember forever the blowfly on the branch, yet forgetting a boy was shot that day, recalled by an old friend who was there.

Yet it all lives in us, flashes of perfect recall, voices, clothes, furnishings, colour, event, all are there. A confusion of memory.