Yes, the summer was brutal. I’m jealous to hear other people had a normal one.

Subscriber Janet emailed me this morning to commiserate about the same thing: Anxiety over flooding one year and extreme drought the next.

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Last year, during our mega-drought, I couldn't look at the weather anywhere else, because occasionally I would see rain happening in other places, and it just made me want to cry.

The new bone I'm chewing on?.....

The residual trauma that gets lodged in the body after going through climate experiences such as a mega-drought.

I'm currently exploring different ways that indigenous cultures developed for dealing with trauma (short answers: body movement/dance of a ceremonial/connecting-back-to-nature way, heat or cold - sweat or ice plunge, sacred fires, extended time in nature, daily renewal practices), because we are all going to need ways to keep those emotions that register in one's body from getting stuck.

I'm dealing with it here, because when I even think of oncoming summers, I have a small pit of dread in my stomach.

Because, as I mentioned, of the five summers I've had here, we've had one relatively normal one, and four filled with significant trauma-inducing events.

While only two of those events directly impacted me/mine (the drought and a historic late frost), I have witnessed many community members in my bioregion losing their homes, their towns, their livelihoods, etc. Mostly due to a couple of massive floods we've had, but there's also been tornadoes (not something we normally get here), late/early frosts that destroy harvests, etc.

And people recover, but every recovery takes important resources - time, money, effort, work.

Anyway, my point is....social/emotional resilience is gonna be increasingly important.

Sending clouds & rain your way.....

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To assuage that nameless dread at the pit of our stomach, let’s explore some systems we can set up on our property to make us more resilient against whatever the future brings.

For example, how can we design a “closed loop” to reduce damage from excess runoff and flooding?

In the Regenerative Loops Database (no fixed price, pay what you can), I scroll down to Water Systems. Here, there are dozens of potential solutions listed.

As I browse this section for inspiration, I can click on each element to pull up a quick description of what it’s about and what function it serves.

In addition, I can see at a glance all of the required inputs (what does this system need) and resulting outputs (what yields does it produce) to help me decide which project I want to set up.

After exploring various options, let’s say I decide on drainage lines:

Think of a drainage line as the path excess water naturally follows, or a channel you shape to guide it through your property.

Instead of letting water pool around buildings or carve its own route downhill, you direct it toward a pond, storage area, or another safe outlet.

Drainage lines take pressure off waterlogged areas, reduce erosion, and turn unwanted runoff into water you can use elsewhere.

So far, our loop looks like this:

Flooding -> drainage line -> water runoff -> ??

And then what? What am I going to do with that water runoff output of the drainage line? I need to find something on my property that can use it as a resource (input) so that I can “close” the loop.

So I click on Drainage Line -> Output: Water runoff -> to see a list of all the things that require that resource:

Ah! Excellent, I already have a cistern and a duck pond on my property -- so I’ll connect the drainage line there.

So the drainage line now guides the runoff into a pond or cistern, where I can store and use the water to irrigate nearby perennial plants. The perennial plants, due to all this water (filled with nutrients from a duck pond, for example), grow vigorously and produce huge biomass, which I can use as chop-and-drop mulch, making compost and increasing organic matter.

Here is what the closed loop looks like:

you guide excess runoff into a drainage line → which carries it to a cistern or duck pond → the stored water irrigates nearby perennial plants → which produce biomass for chop-and-drop mulch or compost → which adds organic matter to the soil → which helps the soil absorb and hold more water when the next heavy rain comes. One win feeds another.

Regenerative properties focus on creating connections and closed loops, where the outputs of one component become the inputs of another. This approach minimizes—or even eliminates—the labor, energy, and resources needed to manage inputs and waste.

After this, we’d continue to build additional loops that each address our flooding problem (thereby creating redundancies), which will make our property more resilient.

Now onto business:

If you want to use my Regenerative Loops Database to design your own interconnected systems to solve whatever problem you’re facing on your own property, you can get it here: https://permaculture-apprentice.kit.com/products/regenerative-loops

No fixed price. Pay what you can.

Alright, I hope it helps you as much as it helped me on my property!

-William