Everyday Flourishing

🌿 Rethinking Daily Life with Ecological Principles

In a world that feels increasingly complex, finding balance and clarity can feel like a challenge. What if there was a way to design your life with the same care and intention found in nature’s ecosystems?

Ecological thinking offers a framework for creating systems that work for you—whether in your relationships, work, or personal growth. It’s about fostering resilience, sustainability, and balance by learning from the patterns and principles of the natural world.

This open resource is an invitation to explore these ideas and apply them in practical, meaningful ways. Together, we’ll discover how thoughtful, nature-inspired design can help you navigate life’s complexities with creativity and intention.

🐚 What This Resource Is

This is a resource for rethinking challenges and opportunities in everyday life through the lens of ecologial principles.

  • Observe to uncover patterns in your life.

  • Harness your time, energy, and resources to create systems that last.

  • Explore how valuing diversity and small, thoughtful solutions can help you navigate complexity with clarity.

The resource walks through each permaculture principle to ask ourselves better questions about how might live a more engaged and integrated life. For example:

  • Design from Patterns to Details: Start with the big picture and refine your plan as you go.

  • Use and Value Diversity: Strengthen your systems by incorporating multiple perspectives.

  • Creatively Use and Respond to Change: Turn challenges into opportunities with flexibility and resilience.

This resource is a work in progress and will be updated and shifted as we go. If you have suggestions, links or other resources to share, we’d love to include them.

🌾 2025 Online Workshops

In 2025, I’ll be hosting a series of collaborative workshops to explore these principles and how they might relate to our daily life. We will work through one principle each month.

These workshops are:

  • Open and Generative: Each session is an opportunity to reflect on the principles, connect with others, and explore how these ideas might fit into your life.

  • Safe and Inclusive: Workshops will follow a clear code of conduct to ensure everyone feels welcome and respected.

  • Flexible and Collaborative: Join us for the full year, or attend individual sessions based on your interest and schedule.

Each month, we’ll focus on one of the 12 permaculture principles, offering space for discussion, personal reflection, and practical application. Together, we’ll discern how these principles can guide you to design systems that work for you.

Participants will have the chance to contribute their own ideas and resources, making this an engaging and exploratory process.

👥 Who It’s For

This series of experiential online workshops is designed for anyone who is curious about applying ecological principles to their everyday life. Together we’ll seek ways to navigate life’s complexities with creativity, balance, and connection via inspiration from the natural world.

Who might be interested?

  • Professionals navigating transitions or looking to bring fresh perspectives to their work.

  • Creative thinkers seeking tools to stay inspired and resilient in a fast-changing world.

  • Anyone feeling stuck and ready to explore new frameworks for personal growth and balance.

❓FAQ

  • Will the workshops be recorded?

I’ll provide a short explanation of each principle and share written materials in the monthly emails for everyone registered. The workshops are designed for interaction, including discussions and solo time for personal reflection, so they won’t be recorded to maintain a comfortable and open environment.

  • I don’t know if I can make it but I really want to hear more.

If you’re interested but unsure about your availability, I encourage you to register. This way, you’ll receive the email invitations for each workshop and stay in the loop.

If there’s enough interest, I may consider adding an additional day or time.

  • What kind of experience will this be?

The workshops will take place on Zoom, with a shared Google document to collect and exchange resources during the session. At the start of each workshop, I’ll share a code of conduct and a few guiding principles to set the tone for our time together.

I’ll introduce content inspired by the Everyday Flourishing resource, and we’ll engage in activities to explore how these ideas apply to our daily lives. I encourage you to bring along a journal or use a notes app to capture thoughts and reflections just for yourself. This will be a space to pause, reflect, and engage with the material in a way that feels meaningful to you.

We’ll also have opportunities to connect and learn from one another. I approach these workshops with a spirit of co-creation—recognizing that we’re all here to grow, share, and learn together. You can explore what resonates most with you and leave what doesn’t work for you. Everything is by invitation.

  • Who is leading this?

Hi! I’m Beth Duckles. I’m a social scientist, researcher, writer and consultant with an interest in sustainability and ecological thinking.

You can learn more about me on my website or my consulting work with Organizational Mycology.

📅 Calendar

Workshops will be held on the second Monday of the month* at Noon Pacific Standard Time and will run for an hour (except for January). If there is enough interest, we will run another time slot each month - likely on a weekend or evening.

  • Observe and Interact - January 20 (*this is the one exception to being on the 2nd of the month)
  • Catch and Store Energy - February 10
  • Obtain a Yield - March 10
  • Self Regulation and Feedback - April 14
  • Renewable Resources - May 12
  • Produce No Waste - June 9
  • Design from Patterns to Details - July 14
  • Integrate Rather than Segregate - August 11
  • Small Slow Solutions - September 15
  • Use and Value Diversity - October 13
  • Use Edges and Value the Marginal - November 10
  • Creatively Use and Respond to Change - December 8

How to Join

Workshops are pay-what-you-can, with a suggested contribution of $5–$20 per session. You can register and either pay for the entire year upfront or contribute month-by-month, when you attend a session.

If you’d like to pay for the full year, the links are below. For those who would like to contribute month-by-month, there will be a way for you to do so when you attend a session.

No one turned away for lack of funds.

Written by Beth M. Duckles. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. Contact me.