Over two days in early April we hosted a small permaculture workshop at the studio's land in north Bengaluru. Twelve participants — gardeners, an architect, two school teachers, a software engineer who wants to leave her job. The aim was not to learn a method, exactly, but to spend time with the soil.
We began on Saturday morning by digging a half-metre pit and looking at the layers — the dry tan crust, the darker brown beneath, a thin red band near the bottom where iron has settled over decades. Most of the participants had never looked at their own backyards this carefully. None of them had taken a handful of their own soil and held it.
What permaculture is, without the jargon.
Permaculture has its own vocabulary and we kept most of it out of the weekend. What stayed was the principle underneath: observe the place. Then design with what it already wants to do. A slope wants to drain. A hollow wants to hold water. The neem tree on the east wants to put down a long shadow by 4 pm. The chickens, when we put them out, want to eat the weeds beneath the papaya. Each of these is a small decision that's already been made — by gravity, by sun, by appetite. Permaculture, at its quietest, is just paying attention.
"The land has been waiting for you to ask the right question." — A participant, Sunday afternoon
Three things that stayed with us.
One. Soil is a body, not a surface. We had been thinking of it as the place where building stops; it's actually the place where everything else begins. A good rammed earth wall starts with a soil that you have tasted, run through your fingers, watched dissolve in a glass of water.
Two. A site map should be drawn at the speed of walking. We took a small group around the studio plot and asked each participant to draw what they noticed. The maps came back wildly different — one was just the path light made through the bamboo; another marked every place a particular bird sounded; another tracked the day's shadow. All three were truer than a satellite plan.
Three. The compost pile is a teacher. Watching it heat, breathe, settle, change colour, was the most direct lesson in process any of us have had this year. Build a project the way you'd build a compost pile. Layered. Patient. Trusting that the heat will come.
What's next.
We will run a follow-up weekend in late September, after the monsoon. If you'd like a seat, write to us at hello@studionalme.com with one paragraph about the land you live on (rented, owned, balcony — all count).
And if you came to this weekend: thank you for showing up with your hands. The studio still smells faintly of compost.
