Chaordic Permaculture Institute Pilot

We might have seen the bumper sticker “Perform Random Acts of Kindness”. This morning I witnessed two such acts. The first one happened when my two grandsons, 10 and 7, were waiting in the garage looking out for a school bus that was not coming. My granddaughter, 3, was sitting at the kitchen table tired and fussy from staying up too late. Finally we decided the bus was not coming and that I would need to drive the two boys to school when I drove my granddaughter to pre-school at another school. We were trying to get everyone ready and in the car when my tired granddaughter made a fuss about wearing her plain stocking cap. Suddenly my 10 year grandson, who just about 20 minutes earlier had taken great pride in putting on his gold Green Bay Packers stocking cap, said to her “Would you like to wear my gold hat?” She said yes, and we were off. After I returned from driving the three to school, I checked my emails. There was one from the daughter of Will Allen — founder of Growing Power — who directs the Growing Power activities in Chicago. Hearing that there was a tour of Growing Power, 55th and Silver Spring, next Monday, January 28, 3:30 to about 5:00 pm, I had written to Will and to the local Growing Power staff, again requesting to talk about the DMZ gardens and how the AIR insulation system may help them save energy. Will’s daughter wrote me to say her dad was out of town and that the best way to reach him was by phone. I have been trying to contact Will about these two issues for a long time and found this email helpful. Both of these were small acts of kindness — unexpected or random, and helpful.

My friend Godsil, co-founder with my friends Tegan and Bill of Milwaukee Renaissance uses a term he calls chaordic. It means just what you think it means, a way of doing things that combines chaos with order. Sometimes I think that is how nature works at its best, in an unpredictable, organized way. Like random acts of kindness, as two examples above, nature, as life, seems to work best when there is a paradoxical combination of chaos and order.

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