Rest

Another vital step to anything you undertake is rest. Rest is defined as a period of inactivity, relaxation, or sleep in order to become refreshed.

The National Sleep Foundation did studies and showed that 40 million Americans suffer from some kind of sleep disorder, even 69% of kids have some sort of sleep disorder a few times a week. Some sleep loss is natural in life and it only becomes a real problem when it is a chronic condition, but what happens to our bodies when we don’t get the proper amounts of sleep?

Some of the obvious consequences are car accidents, impaired ability to learn, crankiness, and poor judgement, but it also runs our bodies down and effects every aspect since not getting enough sleep creates stress in the body.

Just as sleep is important to our bodies I believe rest is just as important to nature. Our world moves from day to night, from awake to asleep, everything rests in some form or another.

My family even allows our land to rest every 7 years which allows our perennials and the ground to rest from constant pulling and digging from us. I have only seen benefits from this practice and when I apply permaculture to it as well, I believe that our land will blossom and thrive even more.