to live, to love, to learn, to leave a legacy… and to laugh along the way
On our last night in Davao, I asked what they had learned from our trip. After hearing many of the kids offering gratitude for the trip, a young boy – someone who had stayed silent and detached for most of the trip – raised his hand slowly, his eyes wide and innocent, and when acknowledged, spoke candidly in their dialect. His words pierced straight through my heart: “I learned that not all soldiers are killers.” Silence. “And not all Christians are land-grabbers,” he added.
Coming home, marching out from those dark woods, I would appreciate more clearly why General Abadia insisted that officers must first prove themselves in the trenches before aspiring for higher commands. Men do not follow rank. They follow credibility. They follow leaders who have carried the same heavy pack, walked the same knee-deep muddy trails, endured the same sleepless, shivering nights, and shared the exact same mortal dangers.
The workshop’s greatest gift is that it taught me that stewardship is not reserved for environmentalists, scientists, or large landowners. It belongs to all of us. It begins in the choices we make each day. The trees we decide to plant. The plastics we choose not to use. The compost piles we create. The local farmers we support. The children we teach to love the earth. These may appear to be small acts. But nature has always taught us that small things, repeated faithfully, eventually transform entire landscapes.
Toward the tail-end of my military career, the question I would ask myself was: “How do we build peace among our own divided people?” Now, as a small farmer, I have a new kind of war to address. And I ask: “How do we build peace with the earth?”
As I walked back across Gran Verde Farm that afternoon, I found myself looking down more often than ever before. Not because I was tired, but because I had developed a new respect for what lay beneath my feet. I realized that the greatest lesson of the day wasn’t about compost, bees, worms, or insects. It was about relationships. Nature survives because everything contributes to something greater than itself.
The workshop took us one step further. It challenged us to think differently. Like many people, I had always imagined permaculture to be simply another approach to farming – an organic way of growing vegetables or raising fruit trees. By the second day, I realized how incomplete that understanding had been.
