Your NameMichael Pergola
Email Addressmichaelp@integrativepermaculture.com
Cohort AssignmentCohort B (Americas, Online Intensive)
1. What do you see as your primary work at this stage of your life?

Finding ways to put into practice the essential experience that all of life is made of a single fabric that is interconnected and interdependent.

The interdependence of all life transcends the short term interests of any individual and the web of interconnectedness extends from a grain of stand to the stars.

My own calling is to use the historic property I have been blessed with to connect wise elders and emerging adults in ways that help prepare members of the younger generation to face the future in an honest, joyous and resilient way.

2. What role do you see as yours to play?

To steward the interconnected operations of a Retreat Center, Bed-and-Breakfast, Permaculture Farm and Education Center, Youth Leadership Training Initiative and Food Rescue and Nutritional Justice Program in ways that provide tangible opportunity for folks to work across boundaries and be of service.

3. What goals or aims do you have in regard to the above?

I’m not much enamored of goals that I invent at this stage in my life. I’m more interested in allowing the goals to emerge from a sense of service in meeting the tangible needs of our local community.

4. Where do you feel your next arenas for personal growth are?

To deep in my capacity for compassion, patience and skillful service.

5. And for professional growth?

Specific knowledge in regard to soil health, the nutrient density of food and the impact of both on personal and planetary health. Also a capacity to listen deeply to the cascading waterfall and the surrounding forest in the place that I live and work

6. What have you invested in to get you where you are?

I stepped off the carousel of conventional life, gave up money making employment and turned my energy to create an inviting space for community to emerge.

I invested all of my resources with the aspiration of growing my own resilience and developing a capacity for a welcoming hospitality that invites deep inquiry and vulnerability in a heartfelt way.

7. What fields of learning and which thinkers have been important in your life?

Peter Senge, Ken Wilber, Thomas Berry, Wendell Berry, Thomas Merton, Mahatma Gandhi, Richard Rohr, Permaculture, John McMillan, Systems Thinking, Scenario Planning, AH Almas and the Diamond Heart Work, Helen Palmer and the Enneagram, the Course in Miracles, The Bhagavad-Gita, Jesus and Saint Francis of Assisi, Charles Eisenstein and Sacred Economics, Didi Perhouse and the Soil Food Web, Zach Bush, Naomi Klein, Michael Dowd, Jeremy Rifkin, Jack Kornfield, Dar Jamal, others in my Graduate Degree Programs whose names elude me and many others who are not showing up at the moment in my consciousness!

8. Can you frame your philosophy or cosmology of life? What role(s) do humans play in it?

We are all in service of LIFE, whether we know it or not. Sooner or later, in this life or in others, we will all get it. I, and each of us, is a node in a network of ever emerging consciousness. My role is to live as fully as I can into the unique gifts of my soul in ways that are meaningful for me and in service of the Whole of Life - which goes by many names...

Date CreatedJanuary 25, 2023