Permaculture asks the land what it wants to grow and then helps it — a reversal of conventional agricultural direction that turns out to produce more food, more biodiversity, and more beauty in the same space. The principle is older than the word: work with nature rather than against it. Nasreddin would have said this applies equally to farming and to human relationships, and that most of the suffering he had witnessed came from people trying to grow the wrong crop in the wrong soil.
Each step builds on the last.