If you want you breath taken away by wild nature, incidentally filmed on an all-girl canoeing adventure, here you are: a spectacular starling swarm. Simply beautiful.

Part of a Permaculture Design Certificate is dedicated to patterns in nature and how we can use them in design. This pattern recognition flows through all things. But sometimes it just stops you in your tracks, like in the video above…

More murmurations…

Humans are pattern recognition engines, plain and simple. It’s how we make sense of the universe.

And it’s also the foundation on which branding is built – our ability to quickly recognize shapes that we perceive as having value or benefit to us to recognize. A good example is below – which shapes can you identify by name?

One of the biggest ‘aha’ moments for me when I first discovered permaculture was getting excited about natural patterns, their implications, and how they might be used to design our every day. I still can’t get enough. I love it.

A couple of notes from Nick’s pattern recognition PDC teachers notes are here.

Or just look up. Look around. And think about the correlations that you see. What better way to spend a weekend…

We’ve got a bunch of Permaculture Design Certificates coming up if you’d like to sink your teeth into learning about permaculture and applying natural systems theory to your own life and habitat.  They fill up fast, and they are great.

Possibly-related posts:

• David Holmgren’s Permaculture Principles
• Making a Zuni Bowl: let the water do the work