Poetic Designs is a reflective practice exploring and catalysing regenerative futures through poetry, philosophy and design.
Acknowledgement of Country
I respectfully acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the Land, Waters and Sky throughout the continent of Australia and honour the unbroken spiritual, cultural and political connection they have maintained to each First Nation’s Country for more than 2000 generations.
I pay respect to their Elders past and present and accept the invitation in the Uluru Statement from the Heart and I am committed to walking together to build a better future.
Welcome
I grew up on a Sugar Cane farm on the Pacific Rim on the Continent of Australia. A beautiful bioregion in the Whitsundays, known worldwide for the Great Barrier Reef and islands.
Our farm house in a fertile valley was surrounded by voluptuous tropical mountains. The landscape’s spirit of place or as the First Peoples of this continent would say - Country - infected my poetic sensibility.
I was a day-dreamer. “Get your head out of the clouds” my Father would urge. I aim to stay in the clouds for as long as I can breathe. However, one gift farm life gave me was my passion for nurturing ideas like social seeds within a planet of possibilities.
This drove me to become an Architect, Urban Futurist, Regenerative Practitioner and Poet. You can explore my body of work through my website.
I believe in empowering people to be the architects of their own cities and futures.
My vision is to make holistic places, using all the senses.
In Poetic Designs, I intend to create and share poems that explore and imagine designs of alternative futures, places and neo-natures.
Poetic Designs is a reflective practice within my broader work of catalysing regenerative futures — using poetry and essays to imagine personal, place-based, and planetary transformations.
Why? - to inspire personal, place and planetary transformations in my readers.
Only by imagining better, might we create better futures.
Hopefully my quiet reflections as a Poet-Futurist-Designer in the form of illustrated poems and essays will attract a tribe of co-creators who aim do their work with intention and meaning to make beautiful “forms” in our world.
Picking Rocks
Its time to pick out the rocks from the fertile ground of our inter-being. To gather the obstacles and harmful weights that keep us from co-creating regenerative futures.
As a child I learned this lesson well on the farm.
Picking Rocks, Phillip Daffara 19/10/2018 in “Family Shifts”
Picking rocks – a rite of passage on the farm.
A tedious task of protecting machines.
Fingers scratch at the soil to remove the harm,
That could be wrought on iron tools unforeseen,
From the sugarcane rows lift with arm and palm,
the fruit of ancient volcanoes from the scene.
Stories were also harvested while I picked,
Listening to my father’s life lessons – pricked!
Join the tribe
I invite you to be part of a community of people who share a love of poetry, regenerative design, philosophy and world-building to transform ourselves.
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