This might be dawn, but it’s far from clear. My eyes have no intention of opening yet. They want further confirmation. Even so, I realise I’m waking.
 
In the north of Spain the sun is like me – not a morning person. Here in deepest midwinter, the sun god hauls himself grudgingly out of the eastern ridge at around 9:00 if you’re lucky. You can’t call it daybreak. Nothing of night has been shattered. It’s more of a reluctant, day-preamble.
 
It’s 8:55 am. Somewhere in the caves of my awareness I know daytime is coming. My skylight turns slowly from coal black to ash as the darkness is burned away. I know I have to move. I have little time. The light won’t hang around for long at this time of year, and I have plenty to do.

A coffee and a breakfast later, as I switch on my laptop and prepare to write, it dawns on me as slowly and wearily as the day itself: I’m living in an alternate universe. There’s another world down there, full of masks and worry and people watching numbers rise on screens. There’s another place where folks’ minds are moulded and folded by virtual information. Where newsreaders and internet commentators create realities, often opposing ones. Things that were unthinkable a year ago are now oddly swallowed whole. There’s no mastication, no chewing over of anything at all. Just waves (second and third and fourth) of fear or confusion, and lots of people falling into line.
 
I’m afraid I’ve never been a faller-inner, so don’t expect me to change my spots now. I was brought up to question and contest authority. Having spent a good portion of my life ruling over classrooms of students and I'm sorry to admit, using many of the ‘management’ (read: control) devices I see being wielded over populations at large today, I’d advise anyone else to question authority too. Take it from me, handing in your homework on time and doing what the teacher asks doesn’t in any way safeguard you from trouble, or improve your quality of life. Best take the prefect’s loose promises with a large pinch of salt.

For a long time humans have cleaved everything they meet into good versus bad, right versus wrong. We are still mired at that evolutionary junction. So for some I’ll now be good. For others I’ll now be bad. For yet others I’ll be mad too, but that’s always been the case. Anyway, let it be known, I can't adopt either of the narratives (one a lot more socially acceptable than the other) being offered about the human situation today. I have my own brain, my own intuition too, and I intend to keep using them both.
 
I remember living in Turkey and seeing what the foreign media outlets used to say about the place. Bird flu, terrorism, one day the Western media was against the Islamic conservatives, the next day it was supporting them. Most of the Western news I ever read or watched about Turkey was over-dramatised at best, and utterly misleading at worst. A good tranche of it was written by people who didn’t even speak the language, so had little hope of understanding the nuances of the culture anyway. I remember an American blog reader writing to me one day telling me I was in terrible danger from Al Qaeda, that they were everywhere and were going to kill me, because he’d seen it on the news. Personally I was more worried about earthquakes, and some arsehole poisoning my dog.

​I remember travelling through Iran too, and seeing a very different country to the one the BBC, CNN, Fox News, or any other media outlet on the supposed left or right was showing. You see, there's a certain narrative that sells, a certain story about Iran that is expected. Excellent bus and train networks aren't a part of that story. A solid middle class that's pretty educated isn't either, nor are kind people sharing their dinner with you, or families out promenading at night along the banks of the Zayanderud in Isfahan. The image of the Muslim world that sells, is the one of a group of male protesters waving their arms in the air shouting chants. That and veiled women, of course.
 
It’s 2020, isn’t this all old news? Didn’t we already know the media was distorting the truth, shining its light on some parts of the story while conveniently obscuring others? That it’s owned and manipulated by a few billionaires with their own agendas? Apparently not. So when Facebook, MSN, Yahoo, and Twitter, having blatantly shared the worst kind of racist, sexist, violence-generating fake news stories under the pretext of ‘freedom of speech’, suddenly all have COVID-19 buttons blazoned upon their home pages, and miraculously decide to become the arbiters of truth for a pandemic, don’t ask me not to raise an eyebrow, especially when they've earned millions in extra profit out of it.
 
Raising an eyebrow these days is tantamount to treason, though. You’re not allowed to show the slightest hesitation in the machine world where science is apparently God. This is a little strange, because the science I remember used to be all about asking questions and contesting theories and results, which I’m glad to say the British Medical Journal still do.

Down there in the Maskervilles, there seem to be two sides. One is locked at home waiting for the saviour vaccine to let them get back to ‘normal’. The other loiters in a side street. It's an underground subculture which hangs on the words of a different masked puppeteer who draws his followers on another kind of fear, that of a secret cabal that is out for your soul. Personally I never trust anyone that speaks from behind a mask, be they on this side or that. But then again, I don’t need to. I make my own life and my own world. And therein lies the crunch.
 
Up here in the free world, free from screens and numbers and hysteria, we look through the eyes of the wolves and the eagles, eyes unclogged by exhaust fumes and artificial lighting. It makes little difference to the snow-clad mountains, to the cloud spirits or the rumbling rivers, which narrative you cling to. The point is you’re clinging, desperate to prove that your story is the 'right' one, and the others 'wrong'. Clingers are always afraid, always hoping a big strong other is going to save them.
 
I’ve long noticed, big strong others generally don’t save anyone but themselves. And even if they do, they disempower you in the process. Thanks, but I don’t need saving.

The pueblos down there are invisible now, all sunken below a thick veil of fog, but up here the vista is as clear as it is sobering. A jab in the arm isn’t going to make things go back to normal, just as neither Guantanamo Bay nor Osama Bin Laden's bullet-riddled body, made air travel go back to normal. We are still throwing our water bottles out at the security gates, and buying fresh ones for five times the price over the other side, remember? Still. Twenty years later.
 
Or rather we were. We don’t fly much anymore. And from up here that looks like not such a bad thing, what with air travel’s billions of plastic knives and forks, its cattle-herding security lanes, and its subsidised fuel-guzzling ecocide, I’d long gone off it. We don’t go anywhere much now though, do we? Even our own families are off limits. I didn't see a child's face here in Spain for a month. They were all locked up in flats. Not allowed out. At all. But shh... best not whisper anything about civil liberties down there. That means you don't care about the frail, or the dead, or the people risking their lives in hospitals.

Many people have died this year*.
1,700,000 people died from COVID-19
1,680,000 people died of HIV.
1,000,000 committed suicide.
Between 9,000,000 and 11,000,000 died of hunger.

If that last stat doesn't make you shudder, I don't know what to say. Why are we not all put under restrictions to feed those 11 million hungry? Are they some how less important than Covid sufferers? Yes I have questions. Does that mean I am an uncaring mask-phobic who thinks we're being taken over by the lizard people?

What is truth?
Oh how gratefully I close the lid of my laptop! I immediately sense it. I’m unplugged. The physical world pours in, beautiful, vital, fresh, and alive. The air on my skin invigorates. My eyes prick in the cold midday air. Some might call it harsh. Others might say it’s refreshing.
 
Truth. Reality. What is it?
 
As I step outside, the sheer beauty of my surroundings forces my mind to pause. It seems as though all the world is before me up here. I’m an observer from another dimension, peering out. The mist in the valley has faded and the creases of human civilisation are back in view. Villages hang onto the banks of the mountains in small white flocks, while somewhere in the distance I hear the rumble of a tractor.
 
The sun is piercing now, sharpening the contours in the mountains like knives. Dark. Light. Dark. Light. Green and blue and brown. It’s all there on planet Earth. The whole gamut. And as I hold that wholeness in my vision, something more fundamental arises, something I might dare call truth, or at the very least a deeper kind of reality. I sit within it for a moment, waiting for it to speak. When it does, it utters but a single word: oneness.
 
Yes, I feel that oneness, and that I’m a temporary ruck in its all-encompassing fabric. That I can slide into this side and that, into this narrative and that, down into valleys and up into the hills. But will I lose myself in that mighty warp and weft? How will I choose which yarns to hold, and which to cast aside? Which story should I embody?
 
Well, seeing as I have a choice and an imagination, I’ll write my own stories, thank you very much – I prefer tales of beauty, joy, and freedom. My worlds are places of adventure, risk, laughs, and passion. There are wild horses and bears, dragon ridges and fox dens, not to mention three chickens with charisma who seem to defy the odds. There are gurgling brooks full of spirits, and ancient trees that speak, starlit skies, and magical snowy peaks. Ah I could go on and on...
 
I’m not in the convincing-people game. I don't want people to believe in my story and mindlessly follow it. We all have a unique story inside us, waiting to be lived. Each holds their own faculties of reason, and their own connection to the planet. But...if anyone out there can’t quite gulp down the myths of the day without a touch of indigestion, just know there are other worlds that are yours for the taking and the making, where ever you are sequestered right now.
 
The point is this: It’s not about believing this story or that, based on these numbers or those. It’s about having the confidence to create our own stories, and live them.

​Already I feel day leaving, and night pushing against the horizon. There’s a lot of darkness at this time of the year, along with the frightened, the tired, and the usual predators who try and use it to their own ends. But up here, I have a warm hut and a fire and endless wood to throw in it. I have food everywhere I look. Fresh water, too. I have books full of tales piled on my shelf. Darkness can come, and it can go. It dances with the light to form this incredible planet. Yes night-time, you are welcome. I’ll make something beautiful out of you, just see.
 
Storytellers don’t fear the dark, because it’s part of the yarn, not the entire fabric of reality. It’s a cloud shadow on a meadow. A ruck in the bedspread. For one of the many spiders in my hut, that ruck could be a valley or a hill, a shelter or a threat. Hmm, I wonder what story webs they spin, these spiders. Yes, I wonder.

*All stats from WHO: https://www.who.int/
https://srv1.worldometers.info/

Enjoyed this one? Others you might like include:
 
The Chicken Run
Natural Personality
The Meaningful Lightness of Being

Also many thanks to the NAAS community for offering a non-violent space for some of these thoughts to perculate within.

Like most authors, I don’t earn enough from my books to sustain me. These writings come to you thanks to the generous support of everyone on Patreon, without whom I would have no time or funds to keep the free material on The Mud Home coming.

Have a closer look inside my world:
If you enjoy my writing and would like to express that you want it to continue, please consider contributing. For the price of a newspaper, all mud patrons can watch my private land report videos, ask more questions, and get the inside story on my off-grid mud and stone project in Spain.

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There’s a stony feeling in my gut this morning. A cold clammy sinkhole beneath my ribs. I stare at my barn and wonder how I will ever in a million years reach the end. Walls need repairing, nay rebuilding in places. Limecrete must be mixed (without a cement mixer, lest you forget). Roof ties will be attached. The cement mortar between each and every rock must be chiselled out by hand, and the whole thing repointed. Window frames will be built and installed. Wood will be sanded and oiled. Then there’s the roof insulation, the floor joists, the floorboards...and that’s just as far as I dare to look at this moment. All this will be done by yours truly.

“I’ve set myself a target,” I said to Farmer Quilo the other day. He was lugging a chainsaw in one hand, having just pruned my ash tree. His cheeks were a little less red than usual, though he still had his Santa Claus belly. On the way up the hill, my neighbour slowed. He craned his head back to look at the barn. Then he whistled.
 
“Hay mucho trabajo.”
 
A lot of work. Yes. Indeed.
 
“Poco a poco,” he added cheerily. Bit by bit. It’s a phrase one hears often in Spain. Little by little. Step by step. In many ways it’s my mantra, because an awful lot gets done poco a poco. If you can advance one step a day, then in a month you’ve moved thirty steps, which inevitably looks quite impressive when you study the before and after shots.
 
“I’m hoping to get the outside done by February. Do you think I can?” I patted the stone walls of the barn. They were cool and rugged under my hand. February. Why February? It’s not that there’s any hurry, after all. It’s not that I have to move in for my survival. I’m warm and dry in my tiny renovated chicken coop hut, even if I do keep banging my head on the door frame. But I need these time frames, both as something to aim for and as a solace. Because if I can imagine the outside finished by February, then I’m moving. I’m climbing. It’s manageable.
 
And there’s something else. Something a little more mysterious about time. When I envision a thing completed by a certain season or moment, it usually is, sometimes in the weirdest ways. Time, like money, is a figment of the human mind. It’s a mental calibration laid over an inconsistent and sentient experience. It twists, expands, shrinks, and dances, and I often get the feeling it plays as well.
 
So in my mind’s eye I see the exterior finished by February. In my guts I feel it too. It’s just the right kind of time.

Timing is everything
 
 “Oh just take your time, there’s no hurry. It will take as long as it needs to.” I’ve told myself this many times. Still do. Certainly, we Westerners are mostly in a continual rush, pressing on the gas pedal of our lives with such force that we are in a continual state of overheat. Our days so often flick past our windows in a blur, and we have no idea what we are doing or why. Far too much of the time we never stop to think, or rest, or enjoy the present moment.
 
But life is not so easily solved by a platitude. “Take your time” has its place. “Live in the moment,” too. But there are other places. Other situations. And there is definitely such a thing as timing.
 
Timing is everything. We don’t always have time, because sometimes it runs out. We don’t live forever. Our bodies are not infinitely healthy. Seasons change. The world changes. And what was at one time appropriate, isn’t at another. There are times to jump, times to pause, times to work your butt off, and times to play, times to push, and times to stop pushing. Part of mastering this game called life is working out which time we’re in and acting accordingly.

Ash Time
 
As soon as Quilo left, I ran to my ash tree to pile up the felled branches. Now shorn of her limbs, the ash stands as an arboreal sculpture carving a brand new drama into the skyline. It all looks a bit brutal, a place where vultures might perch. But this pollarding is crucial for the tree’s well-being. Winter is all but here and the ash will now turn inwards, collecting her energy and resources. Come spring this magnificent tree will thrust upwards and outwards again with a power that is staggering.
 
There will be no pause in April, May, and June. My Power Ash will not take her time in spring and summer, nor just watch the daisies bloom. Because trees haven’t had their internal sense of timing messed with by some industrial machine. They haven’t been told to run when they wanted to walk, or told to work when they wanted to sleep, or told to slow down when they wanted to gallop. They haven’t been filled with doubt either. As far as I know (who knows for sure, eh?) they don’t fret before they push out their buds. They don’t have crises of confidence. No one tells them they can’t do it, or that they’ll fail. Trees are supremely confident because they're rooted in the dirt of reality, not in their heads. If the desire and vision have been forged in winter, they will manifest in spring.

When I stare at the crack-spattered limestone walls split both by Portland cement and age, and when I feel the dull ache of my muscles, it’s sobering. The immensity of the task ahead spreads before me like the Mountains of Shadow. I sense the cold dark pit in my belly, the place where all my demons lurk; distraction, fear, lack of self-belief. It would be easy to cling to a truism right now. To say, “Ah well, there’s no hurry. I think I’ll just head to the beach.”
 
But this is not the time.
 
Our lives are great tomes, each era a chapter. Once a page has turned, you can’t turn it back. This is what it means to live life as an art, a balancing act, the performance of an acrobat.
 
I know too many people who’ve sat on dreams for the best part of their lives. They always thought there was time, that they could follow their soul at some future point. In truth we mostly procrastinate for the wrong reasons. Shilly-shally is not the same as rest or reflection. It's often indicates a lack of faith, and is another symptom of being disconnected from our source. When we dither at a moment which has opened up to us for action, before we know it, it’s too late. We lose strength or health, or a pandemic happens and we can no longer travel, or we are simply not at that stage in life anymore, and no longer possess the drive.
 
So yes, I can take my time. And no, I don’t want to right now. Six months ago I thought I did, indeed I thought I would. I thought I’d chip away at that mortar, poco a poco. But the sun is out. The birds are chirping. And I have a fire burning in my heart. Maybe it won’t be there next year or next month, or even tomorrow. Who knows?

As I peer out of my kitchen, I see the stepladder propped against the barn wall. The mortar bucket is there too. Waiting. I can feel the fatigue dragging slightly at my thighs, and the push of my comfort zone as it tries to keep me from moving. But it’s time. Time to ditch the doubts, press against the elastic of my resistance, funnel my attention, and build.
 
An hour later I’m balanced on the ladder pushing a beautiful rock in place. It’s the last one on this small part of the wall, but it completes one part of my 3D stone picture. The fatigue has dissipated now. The motivation has returned. This time next year I’m going to thank the 2020 version of me for acting on time. For actually taking the step that needed to be taken at the time it needed to be taken.

Thank you dear contributors and supporters
Thank you so much to everyone who is contributing to The Mud Home. Like most authors, I don’t earn enough from my books to sustain me. These words are a gift and are published here thanks to the generous funding of the Mud Sustainers and everyone on Patreon, without whom I would have no time or funds to keep the free material on The Mud Home coming.
 
Thank you also to everyone who has shared my work, and thus helped it reach a wider audience. And thank you to those who’ve bolstered me with their kind and stimulating comments.

Take a closer look inside my world:
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“Oh you used mud for plaster? Oh dear. It's sure to go moldy in summer. That will never stand the damp.” The woman peered at my walls, mouth corners twitching. It was the only thing she said in the ten minutes she was there (and it was plain wrong of course). Frankly if she hadn’t been helping me carry a crate, things might have ended differently. Somehow I swallowed my outrage. Even so, it was detonating under my skin. My face felt like it was stuffed full of Molotov cocktails. There are a lot of people renovating old buildings around here, and for some reason more than a few seem addicted to put-downs and faultfinding. I'm often shocked how humans love to drag each other down and fill each other with fear and worry, rather than bolster each other up.
 
It’s a rare day I let someone on my land, because with a few notable exceptions, I nearly always regret it. Just like this time. Perhaps it’s me, but nine times out of ten when someone walks into this (for me) precious space, they seem hell bent on pulling it apart. Being a sensitive soul, these slights take me a day or two to recover from. I feel my home and her beauty have been violated. I fret. Perhaps I did it ‘wrong’. Then I recover my self-belief, and the anger rises. I consider the revenge (find something wrong with their creation and criticise that instead). Finally I haul my way out of the dark and see clearly again: That these put-downs are not about me or my home. They are about the other person’s fear of inferiority. And mine. I choose not to engage. But still it saddens me. Why are we so deranged?

Jockeying for some phantom of position is why I hate dinner parties, and (anti)social gatherings. It’s why I prefer conversing with trees. I can’t lie, when I see the level we are still at, it’s hard to feel optimism for our future. And yet...
 
As I sit, autumn rain pattering on the kitchen roof (which some other nitwit told me 18 months ago would start leaking after two years), I watch wads of sodden air washing over the valley. The drizzle creeps up the slopes in misty wreaths, turning the rocks into limestone amphibians. These slippery lithic creatures heave their way out of the earth and onto the grass, where they take their first breaths of winter.
 
The land is moving. It was never still. Things are always in transformation, either evolving or decaying. The shrivelled carcasses of leaves pile up on the ground, feeding the beetles and worms below. The old is sloughed off. Only the new survives, until it can no longer keep up.
 
Keeping up with the Joneses
It is of course a hallmark of the middle class to paddle frantically to keep up with the neighbours. The Joneses have a flat-screen TV darling, so we’d better get one. The Joneses redid their kitchen, so we must outdo them with our bathroom. More recently the Joneses have changed tack. They build cob ovens, buy organic food, and spend a stack of money trying to appear green (the urban poor can’t usually afford vegan shoes or ethically sourced avocados). Ecological one-upmanship is a the new big thing in certain circles.
 
Of course, be it competing about barn renovations, how 'eco' we are, or the price of a handbag, it’s all a symptom of one specific disease: Comparisona Virus. When exactly humanity contracted this illness I’m not sure, though it’s more likely to have been in a school or a home than a food market. Perhaps we really did inherit it from our chimpanzee relatives. Yet when I sit among the arcing hazel trees and inhale the peaty air, I smell the distinct whiff of change. Of evolution.

Observation
We can all see we are at a turning point, but it seems to me humanity is largely missing the point, with everyone more concerned about redecorating the Titanic and outranking their fellow passengers, rather than engaging in some simple observation of the terrain in front and within. Observation isn’t flashy. It’s quiet and still. It looks like nothing is happening.
 
When I sit and observe my own fragile mind, the pain of being slighted, the desire to retort with a snarky remark to put the other in ‘their place’, I see there are some psychological rafters which are now rotten to the core. One of them is rivalry and the desperate need to jostle for rank with our peers.
 
Without some attempt to turn inward and observe why we do things, to see the utter obsoleteness of competition and to realise we are all involved in it, we are finished. No one wins a war. Only the most short-sighted and broken viewpoint could ever think that dominating a situation or person means you’ve won. Time is long and victories amazingly short. Even those apparently at the ‘top’ live in a kind of perpetual paranoia that they will be ousted. No amount of wealth is ever enough. Imagine: private jets, yachts, whole islands, and yet you are still afraid you might lose status.
 
But it’s not just the elite. It’s not any group at all. It’s us. All of us. And this is actually very good news. It means rather than feeling we are powerless, we can do something. And do something we should. Fast. The time really is now.
 
I look up from my screen to see the rain pulling out and up, ripening into clouds that rise and drift like portents from another time and place. The Other World. That unquantifiable space where imagination and intuition call the shots. I feel a cool bluster now in the air. The trees have begun to sway. To call me. Yeees. Something tells me the time for competition is over. Whether it’s polarised political battles, immature home improvement rivalries, trying to be right in some absurd ideological boxing match, or bloody warfare, it’s going the way of the dinosaurs. Some of which are still with us. Some of which we may even be related to.

​Phylogeny, and the way of the dinosaurs
When a species goes extinct, often one branch of it survives, one clan, one side-shoot of genetic material. When it comes to the dinosaurs, in retrospect we all know who was their success story. In an Earth engulfed in fire and dust, suddenly it was no longer those with the largest teeth and the most brawn who held the advantage. It was those who could navigate the sky. Hindsight is a wonderful thing of course. I suspect if we told T. rex that a poxy chicken would be the future carrier of his DNA , he would snort, because on the face of it, the fragile bird looks a rank outsider. Today’s T. rexes are no different. In a world obsessed with being right, and where aggressive mouths take up the virtual space, those of us who are little more introspective are largely ignored. Perhaps that’s just as well. Perhaps that’s all exactly as it should be.
 
For those who can listen, Gaia is generous. There are always clues and nudges. Time spirals about itself, and ancient puzzles become rune stones for the future. But that knowledge and power is only accessible to those who can sit still and be quiet, for those who can observe. Through that stillness the subterranean cataclysm of transformation is audible. Many of the indigenous peoples of this planet know all about what’s coming. They know how to whisper with trees and follow the signs of the rocks and the eagles. Whenever I hear an elder speak, I’m struck by how similar our perspectives are. So much of the wisdom that has pulsed through my own land is old knowledge for the keystone peoples of this planet.
 
It’s that corroboration of experience that validates. Me, a Western woman in Spain hearing the same voices, seeing the same kind of spirits, feeling plants talk to me, nudge me, call me, listening to trees prophesising the future, and rocks remembering the past. There is indeed another reality out there. But the road toward it is far away from debate, and angry protest. It’s on another phylogenetic branch entirely from competition and battle and war. 
 
The time for one group pitted against another, that entire mindset of battle, is on its way out. It may not look that way if you believe the media and buy into its every sensational word. If you embroil yourself in that energy line and are sure you are right and ‘they’ are wrong, it won’t seem that way at all. Even so, the ground has shifted and evolution is happening.

It’s evening now. Through the forking branches of the darkening woods, I see the path. It glistens in ophidian splendour as it winds through the trunks and dead leaves. A salamander, yellow and indigo, perches in the wet dirt, imbibing the hint of rain. Does she recall her lobe-fish ancestor, or sense how her legs unfolded back then? If she does, she holds the secret inside her still. As I stare into her watery eyes, I fancy I see my reflection. Am I an ape or a human, or something new?
 
The old will be shed like snake skin. The new will survive and grow in its place. But it won’t be based on who won or who lost. It will be based on those who can navigate the sky. And those who can burrow deep into the origins of things to find the waymarkers of the future.

We don’t need to force our opinions down people’s throats. We don’t need to beat anyone or join this side or that. These things are a complete waste of time, heck they are on the wrong tree branch altogether. We don’t need to keep up with the Joneses, because the Joneses don’t know what they’re doing. We need to keep up with the planet and evolution, and build ourselves some wings. It’s not something we can blame some other group for, because if you still see opposing groups, you’re on the road to nowhere my friend. Evolution is something we do to ourselves for ourselves. And as soon as we liberate that self from its terminal terror of losing, we are flying free. Soaring high above the clouds like that, the landscape looks so different. So new.

Do you enjoy these posts?
Like most authors, I don’t earn enough from my books to sustain me. These words are a gift and are published here thanks to the generous support of the Mud Sustainers and everyone on Patreon, without whom I would have no time or funds to keep the free material on The Mud Home coming.

Have a closer look inside my world:
If you enjoy my writing and would like to express that you want it to continue, please consider contributing. For the price of a newspaper, all mud patrons can watch my private land report videos, ask more questions, and get the inside story on my off-grid mud and stone project in Spain.

​For the past five weeks my life has been through a kind of smelter. And if one thing has been reinforced over the course of the adventure, it’s that I am wholly uncohabitable*. Solitude is my fresh air. Silence is my true love. Take them from me, and I soon begin to wonder why I’m alive. Yet would I change things if I knew what I know now? Would I have done it differently? I doubt it.
 
Summer was long and generous this year, stretching over to the far side of September like a basking reptile. And this was fortunate, because we had a roof to put on. Roofs are never easy. The only ones I like dealing with are living roofs, because they’re nice and flat and earthy. This angular tiling lark, where you’re hanging on a sloping frame engaged in a battle of wills with tejas curvas? Nah. Not for me. Not for my knees either.
 
So like a bandsaw-wielding knight, my neighbour Brian took up the gauntlet. He drove over the hills at some ungodly hour one morning with his sidekick Julia, and unloaded an improbable array of machinery. Suddenly my land was filled with scaffolding, tubes, saws, drills, bricks, a cement mixer (for limecrete, I hastily add), and the largest collection of angle-grinders the world of construction has ever seen. Not to mention dogs and horses (which were the best bit by far).

My mornings, nay days, were not to be the same for a good five weeks. But sometimes you just have to suck it up, because a roof is going on, and time is of the essence. It was chaos. It was exhausting. But today I’m staring at that self-same roof, and admiring its subtle beauty. Yes, I am lucky and I know it.
 
Good fortune can be a funny thing though, twisting this way and that like a greasy two-faced serpent, threatening to bite you at some indeterminate point. Hmm. More on that further down. Because although I was lucky, someone else wasn’t.

​Broken eggs
It was a couple of weeks ago now that Gertie’s loss became apparent. And never have I felt so sorry for a bird. For over three weeks my least favourite hen sat on her nest, determined to hatch her chicks. But fate conspired against her, and the eggs didn’t open. It could have been the short cold snap in early September. Perhaps they were unfertilised. We’ll never know. But when after four weeks of waiting, one exploded in a stomach curdling mess, plastering the inside of the coop a sickening yellow, it became clear it wasn’t going to happen.
 
Like most us when things go tits-up, Gertie the hen started her grief journey in denial. She sat and sat on her eggless nest, presumably waiting for a chick to rise from the ashes. Two days turned to three and four, and then early last week I spotted her leaving the coop, and making her way into the world again. She’s a different hen now though. Smaller. Quieter. And oddly, far more trusting of me than before.
 
On one of our many hot, sun-drenched days, as Julia and I carried a few hundred foraged old roof tiles up the crag of my land, I spied Gertie the hen scurrying back to the coop, perhaps checking one more time if her eggs had manifested out of the straw. Stacking the curved terracotta scales on the rocks, I wondered why nature had been so cruel to her.

​Do we deserve our luck?
As September inched forward, my roof grew and grew. A backbone appeared along the ridge. Then came the ribs, as joist after joist was hand-cut and bird-mouthed, creating a bone structure elegant enough to rival Grace Jones. Two skylights gave this new creature eyes. Ancient wood and new beams worked hand in hand. Brian slogged and slogged – I believe he hand-sawed for a week. Meanwhile I stomped cob and sculpted it into a circle, feeling marginally guilty.
 
Soon the roof developed a taut layer of flesh as roofing boards slid over its skeleton. As the last board blocked out the sky, I entered my old barn and stared. It was then it rose from the deep, that greasy serpent of ‘good fortune’. Suddenly it all felt too much for a little mud hobbit woman. Did this antisocial, lonesome witch on a hill really deserve such magnificence? And how had it happened anyway? The whole thing was almost like magic, as though I’d drunk one of those potions that change you into the woman of your dreams, but with a series of disturbing side effects. I felt sick. I felt terror. Because surely I hadn't earned this roof. It was too good for me.
 
That night I didn’t sleep, convinced something terrible was about to befall me.

​The cob coop
Building the cob chicken coop felt like a kind of penance, a balance between giving and receiving. While my roof progressed, in turn I also slogged and slogged in the mud bath for my hens. I sawed door frames and engineered little portals. I poured a limecrete floor. Added bottle windows, roof beams, and finally cut the boards for the living roof. The chickens moved into their new home at the same time my barn roof grew a skin of terracotta scales. Were they enthusiastic? Hardly.
 
As darkness stole up the rocky slopes that first evening, I had to pick my birds up one by one, and literally stuff them into their new highland abode. How out of sorts they were, huddling in confusion on the nesting balcony. They no longer knew who should go where, or which was the best spot. Nervously they peered this way and that, seemingly uncertain that this new chicken palace was an upgrade from their former wooden shack down the hill (and this despite the fact they now have split-level flooring, thick warm mud walls, and a chicken run big enough to actually run in).
 
For the following three evenings they’d loiter lost by their downtown slum, seemingly unable to adapt to their new residence, until finally they began to accept that reality had changed. I studied their wrinkled pink faces but saw no trace of gratitude, nor guilt. They had no issue ‘deserving’ their new mud palace, because there is no concept of ‘deserving’ in Gaia’s kingdom. It’s a human invention, there to keep us little people in our place, while the CEOs and priests and dukes do what they like, and always find some justification for it.

At the same time my own roof journey came to a conclusion. True to form, as the last tile was laid, I peered over the front gable to see dark clouds charging over the hilltops. The wind began to blow, bending the hazels this way and that. And then came the rain. It was a distillation of a dream coming true mixed with long-term fatigue, sensory overload, discombobulation, and the giddy terror that enters you when on the verge of success. 

Deserving luck
No matter how “lucky” you are, you can and probably will suffer vertigo. When you’re stretching a long way out of your comfort zone, or trying to upgrade your life, you inevitably tread the slippery line where a dream can morph into a disappointment or a disaster. This is why people aim low. This is why we often don’t go for our dreams. Most of us are scared of heights, and like the hens, subconsciously believe we’ll be less happy with an adjustment, even if it’s an obvious upgrade.
 
Resistance to change is fairly normal. Change is tiring. It requires adaptation and effort. But there’s more at play for us humans than that. Unlike the hens and Robin Redbreast and the Ash Tree, we have another cattle prod on our backs. It’s called morality, and with it comes the idea that we have to ‘deserve’ our luck.
 
The word ‘deserve’ is as insidious as most of our other moral indictments. The English word deserve threads right back to the Latin deservire, meaning to be entitled to something because of good service. Those old Romans were maestros of enslavement devices, and thus like good little serfs we still subconsciously believe we have to serve and debase ourselves in order to have anything nice. Luck is a dubious gift in such a world.

Thus history repeats itself on and on. We little people judge and blame each other, envy each other’s luck, and envisage the saddest, meanest, least inspiring realities where everyone loses. Meanwhile the string-pullers above laugh and laugh and laugh as they roll the dice with our futures.

A Turkish Legacy
Living in Turkey for 20 years broke down so many of my all-too British ideas of what I deserved, and how much pleasure I was allowed. When I first arrived in Antalya in 1997 I thought I had to work a horrible job all my life to get by, because that's what people did. I thought I had to live with someone too. I thought I needed a house with running water and power to survive. Earth plaster and chickens weren't even on my radar.

The biggest chunk of our battles really is breaking out of the cages of our beliefs, most of which we're unaware of until something happens and discomfort is felt. I see how my mental scaffold is still there, albeit a lot more sparse than it used to be. And every time I remove a bit of it, along comes the vertigo.

So today as I stare at my evolving barn, I choose (yet again) to throw this ‘deserving’ crap off the rafters, and raise the roof of my beliefs. We all deserve happiness and beauty and peace and joy and safety from aggression. We are humans. We were not made to be kept in boxes with some pseudo-digital reality pumped into our senses, nor were we born to graft 60 hours a week for some planet-devouring, inhumane multinational. We are a lot more valuable than that. But as with everything, ultimately it’s our story. It’s down to what we feel we deserve, what we believe we can have, and whether we are going to remain cowed little ‘good’ people hoping for a few crumbs to be thrown at us, or sovereign beings making our own worlds with like-minded people.

May we all raise the roofs of our visions. May we all have beautiful, secure lives.

*According to the Cambridge Dictionary and countless others, this is not a word. But it should be.
 
Much gratitude goes to my neighbour Brian for working his butt off for this roof all September, and going beyond the call of duty to make it original and special. I also want to thank Julia for her support and positive energy throughout. And last but definitely not leas, thank you to my dear Dad who lent me the money to get this done before winter. It was never going to happen otherwise.

Do you enjoy these posts?
Like most authors, I don’t earn enough from my books to sustain me. These words are a gift and come to you thanks to the generous support of the Mud Sustainers and everyone on Patreon, without whom I would have no time or funds to keep the free material on The Mud Home coming.

Have a closer look inside my world:
If you enjoy my writing and would like to express that you want it to continue, please consider contributing. For the price of a newspaper, all mud patrons can watch my private land report videos, ask more questions, and get the inside story on my off-grid mud and stone project in Spain.

​Every day she cried. They were small, forlorn little warbles. I was surprised she didn’t put up more resistance to be honest, because she was always the most aggressive of the three. Neurotic in many ways. And I wasn’t doing it to be cruel. I felt for her. But it was a hopeless exercise, because she was crying for something that could never be.
 
What Gertie wanted was to have little chicks. What she didn’t seem to understand was that her eggs were duds. Unfertilised. Devoid of the magic spark that could turn the small calcium carbonate cases into something holding life. So each day I took the eggs, hoping she would snap out of her broodiness until I made a bigger coop. But each day she just kept trying. And crying. And looking for her stolen egg. Despite the fact Gertie is my least favourite hen, my heart simply wasn’t hard enough. Sigh...

​Gertie, Frida, and Hilde are all very different in character, and they are lucky, not only because they live free-range on a beautiful mountain, but because their personalities work well together, like chilli, cumin, and salt. This means there’s little or no fighting, because they’re all pretty happy with their place.
 
Hilde is the most sociable of the lot. Bottom of the pecking order, but top of my affection. She’s surviving on pure charm. Chatty and cheeky, she will happily sit in my arms and be stroked. The others use her as a kind of feathered minesweeper, sending her out first to investigate the forbidden zone of the kitchen, and leaving her on door duty at night. But Hilde doesn’t care, because she's one of those blessed souls who were born happy.

​Frida, on the other hand, is the zen hen, and the most intelligent, in my opinion. She’s the quietest and calmest, but by far the most adventurous, always last to enter the coop at night, dawdling evasively down to it each evening, determined to eke out a minute more of freedom. Frida is not really interested in politics or climbing the chicken status ladder, because she’d rather be striding out over the land, discovering new bug zones. I will often find her standing a short way from me, her large chicken eye rolling over me, pondering. “Who is this big caretaker? What’s her story? What does she do?”
 
And then there’s Gertie. Hmph.
 
I try not to dislike Gertie, because I know she’s just a hen and probably been traumatised by some mindless ignoramus of a “human.” But she is rather annoying. She scratched me badly on the first day, her talons digging deep into my forearm. Four months of excellent treatment have done infuriatingly little to increase her trust in humankind. Every time she sees me she puffs up her feathers and hisses. But who knows the underlying web of reasons? Perhaps a lifetime of thwarted brooding has turned her sour.

​So here we are. August is now closing, which means autumn must be waiting in the wings, and who knows what comes with it. The world is masked and mad (sort of The Durango Kid meets Dr Doom) with quarantine rules flipping so fast, and borders so tenuously open, you can find yourself stranded before you’ve even left your house. The southern half of Spain invaded the north because our Covid stats are (or were) low. The beaches are stuffed because the towns are boring. You can’t get a doctor’s / accountant’s / lawyer’s appointment for love nor money. My publisher closed down. And then in the midst of all this bedlam, my roof permit arrived! The barn gremlin must have enjoyed the notoriety of my last Earth Whispering tale.

Sod it!
All this time Gertie still kept crying for her eggs, relentlessly focused on her goal of motherhood. I looked at her, and then at my overflowing egg pile (because I just can’t keep up with the output). And then I said a quiet, “sod it,” because life is bonkers anyway. What difference will a few little chicks make to anything?
 
“Hey, have you got five fertilised chicken eggs you can swap with me?” I sent a text to my neighbours up the road.
 
The next day, I found a bag hanging on my gate with five muddy ova inside. Trotting up to the coop, I pushed them one by one under Gertie’s hot belly. Her eyes widened a little in happiness. She knew. And I chuckled because hey, as I always say, obstinacy will get you a long, long way in this world.

​And then all of a sudden the roof came come off. It happened so fast I could hardly take a breath. My big old barn - a structure built almost two centuries ago from the very limestone he squats upon, and that has survived the civil war, sheltered farmers, cows and refugees, and may well even remember Isabella II back in the 19th century - lost his head in two days.
 
So the chicken coop had to be moved (with Gertie still in it, refusing to budge). Hillocks of tiles and beams and 20-year-old sheeps' wool have now transformed our little world, leaving my hens to clamber around them. Frida always casts a baffled glance at Gertie before striding off into the big green yonder, Hilde chit-chatting behind her. And I’m struck by the incredible array of what can only be described as personality in our world. Whether it’s trees, animals, humans or barns, we are all so beautifully quirky. Each of us different. Each of us unique. Each of us so utterly ourselves. How does life do that? I wonder.
 
Something weird going on
Many will say this is anthropomorphism of course, yet it isn’t simply a case of imposing our subconscious upon a blank slate of a world. Hilde does talk the most. Gertie is the only one who wants to be a mother. Frida is always the last back in the coop. These are objective facts illustrating clear individuality. But I’m aware I’m also bringing my own layers of experience and imagination to what I’m seeing, painting human faces I know onto chickens or huts.

But there’s something much weirder going on, in my opinion. It’s as though the things I look at start to join in the game, exaggerating the very traits I project onto them. It’s a feedback loop. Hilde knows I like her the most, and just like the puffins on the Isle of Treffin, she plays up to it, sitting on the step, throwing me funny little looks in a way she never used to, and never does with anyone else. Frida too has become ever more Gandalf-like, standing stoically on her rock, studying me, asking the bigger questions (or at least doing a great job of appearing to). Even the barn is into it, his eccentricities now laid bare, he looks more gnome-like than ever. And because I see that character in him, I too work with it, enhance it, and highlight it.
 
This myriad of character in the world around us is exactly why black and white rules, mindless administrative systems, the majority of 'education' facilities, and factory farms are so unnatural. There’s no place for personality within them. They can’t cope with the tiniest quirks, and actively seek to obliterate them. Unlike in the natural world, difference is the enemy. Yet simultaneously, this is why Gaia and questioning humans will always win in the end, (though for those that seem incapable of questioning, I'm not so sure). Because there’s something far more profound going on below the surface than the 3D world of tech and logic will ever understand. The soul of life is so creatively genius and untrappable, it has found a way around the rules before they’re even laid down.
 
This is why I'm leaving a fat slab of the worry behind. The machine is only ever that. We, on the other hand, are both gods and their children simultaneously. Systems, robots, and old control mechanisms are no match for the intelligence and power of this planet; to think otherwise is sheer old school arrogance. Take a look around, Gaia is only just getting started here, and if we pause from fear long enough to hear her, she’ll tell us where to step next. Each of us is a cell in her body, a finger on her hand, a side of her personality, extraordinarily and unpredictably unique, and thus impossible to second guess.

Good luck old paradigm, I say. You’re going to need it, because life is moving far beyond you right now.

Do you enjoy these posts?
Like most authors, I don’t earn enough from my books to sustain me. These writings come to you thanks to the generous support of everyone on Patreon, without whom I would have no time or funds to keep the free material on The Mud Home coming.

Have a closer look inside my world:
If you enjoy my writing and would like to express that you want it to continue, please consider contributing. For the price of a newspaper, all mud patrons can watch my private land report videos, ask more questions, and get the inside story on my off-grid mud and stone project in Spain.

I’ve been waiting for a building permit for almost a year now. The speed of the bureaucracy stuns even me. I’m not an especially stoic individual but when it comes to paperwork, years of facing off mindless pencil pushers have hardened me into a mud diamond of obstinacy. Nonetheless, the sheer dogged incompetence of the system makes me blink.
 
But let me not rant. There’s so much of that going on. Let me take you to another place, beyond ideological pugilism. Because whatever the reason, waiting is perhaps one of the most underrated pastimes we humans undertake. Each moment so full it holds worlds within it. Each drop of life so delicious, so unique, so vital. When minutes expand into days, suns set beneath a gaze, and stars blink one-by-one into being.
 
So I’ve been waiting. And when the irritation creeps in, I take a short walk down to the rocky side of my land, where the ash tree feels the sky and glowing hunks of limestone gather. As I sit there – leaves rustling overhead, insects whirring in the grass – I feel my impatient mind soften. Slowly that Other World stretches out of the dirt. The spirits of the land waft out from the crevices, and something somewhere begins to sing.

Waiting. For a permit. So while I sit here twiddling my thumbs, let me give you a quick tour of the very structure the permit is for.
 
It’s an old Asturian barn, and its stone walls are fat and undulating, well-sunken by now into the mountainside they were dug from, as squat and affable as gnomes. The roof literally hangs on by a thread. A wire is tethered to the main beam, and wrapped around another ash tree to prevent the thing from sliding off! The roof is covered in a flaky skin of tiles, all warped and mottled by the weather, and held in place by rocks. It is, for all intents and purposes, a death trap. Yet having seen a fair few of these ancient stone cabañas by now, I know it will sit there for a good year or two more. The thing is welded together by habit. It’s a stony dragon with terracotta scales, clinging to life and form as anything else does. Is it waiting for the permit too?
 
Waiting. Waiting. From autumn to winter, when the winds howled through it. And from winter to spring, when the rains pummeled it. A wren family and a finch family moved in, nesting in the dusty old eaves. Lizards and mice have roamed aplenty too. Other mammals wander in and out, some clearly quite large, judging by the poop parcels they leave. My wait is their opportunity.

More things happen while I tarry. Bathrooms complete. Bedrooms turn cosier and prettier. Kitchens become fully functioning. And imaginations find the time and place to plant seeds.
 
I have sat in that old barn a hundred times or more now, ideas popping open like boxes of treasure. Secret staircases, curvy cob walls, glass partitions, skylights, and split levels all wander in and out of the lobby of my mind until they eventually find their place in the barn and settle. Colours and textures wash the walls. Glass, clay, wood, and stone take their seats. My mind’s eye twitches. My heart flutters. It may take two years. It may take more. Who cares? I’m already living it.
 
But that’s not all that happens while I bide the passing of the months. Other beings walk in and out as the land herself has her say. You see, my cabañas were built from the very limestone I’m standing on. They are as much a part of the terrain as the ash tree. And those rocks grow louder now, despite the efforts of the ever-growing pasture to drown them out.
 
Limestone is one of the most plentiful rock types on the planet (which is one reason why working with lime itself is so sustainable). It’s a beautiful rock form blessed with many interesting properties, also called “poor man’s marble.” The word limelight comes from old stage lighting which used cylinders of lime, because this rock is almost luminous. When dusk falls, limestone begins to glow a curious iridescent white. It is at this time each evening I circle the land and listen.

​The Old Celtic Spirits
Not many folk know about Asturias. Fewer still are concerned with her spirits. It’s a very different region of Spain, along with her sister Galicia, formerly Celtic. Just as with Ireland and Scotland, mythical beings are embedded in the dirt itself. They wander the forests and bathe in the rivers. The stories and legends are locked in the caves and gullies, where village folk still whisper of fairy goddesses (xana), dragons (cuelebre), and a funny little being called el trasgu.
 
The trasgu is a kind of gremlin. Or is he an imp? Or a leprechaun? He’s a short chap with a red hat and, for some reason, a hole in his left hand. His haunt is human homes, where he’s always looking for fun. The trasgu is a bit of nuisance to be honest. If you’ve ever wondered where all your left socks are going, it’s not in fact because of a wormhole in the back of your washing machine sucking them all to the Delta Quadrant; it’s the trasgu. He’s the one stealing your pens and hair bands too. Your car keys that you know you left on that hook, but have now incomprehensibly vanished? The trasgu.
 
El trasgu is basically harmless, and Asturians are quite fond of him. He’s a pagan symbol of chaos, a reminder that no matter how tightly you plan things, there will be disruptions and delays. His likeable character is a suggestion to make peace with disorder, and see the funny side of our human plans going awry. To take ourselves and our agendas less seriously.

​So with all this in mind, I begin to wonder about the trasgu of my barn. And I remember how the little stone chicken coop that became my bedroom seemed to talk to me, how it seemed to possess a kind of personality.
 
Collecting my visions and plans from the building, I put them gently back inside me. Then I enter the old barn once more, inhaling the peaty aroma of decades-old sheep manure. My head almost scrapes the original wattle canopy that separates one floor from another. Cobwebs and dust flutter down.
 
“You need to clean the top out first,” the old barn mutters. “Why haven’t you done that? You don’t even know what’s there!”
 
I nod. I’ve heard this before, and done nothing about it, because getting up onto the second floor looks pretty lethal. But can a building really speak? Surely it’s nonsense to suggest a bunch of rocks have some kind of soul. There’s no brain, no cortex, no ability even to control its fate in any way. A barn is a passive thing, not a living being, right?
 
Yet I’m still waiting, aren’t I? Waiting for permission to move in, very obviously not in control either, very clearly as stuck as the stones. Suddenly I sense the fingerwork of el trasgu here, reminding me that this barn has been here far longer than I. It was built by the ancestors of this land, quarried by hand from the rock it sits upon, passed from father to son, father to son, until one day one became a political man of the town with no use for a dilapidated outbuilding on a hill.
 
El trasgu reminds me that the idea that things are ‘objects’ for us to act upon is a modern illness, and that in Gaia’s landscape everything is acting upon everything else, that everything has a personality in its own kind of way, rocks included, and that all strive to maintain their integrity.
 
He reminds me that everything has a history, too. A lineage, and a story. That these myths and legends are absorbed into the very fibres of existence. That there is a mysterious crossover between our imaginations and our dwellings, where nonphysical ideas and entities embed themselves into physical structures, perhaps for centuries or more.
 
I recognise the relationship. I see we are in this together. Me and the barn.

So I log it all here in the Earth Whispering blog, and wonder what I’ll think a year from now. Then I  shut the laptop lid, and walk down the hill. It’s hot today. Baking. I go to refill the chickens’ water bowl. And then I see it in the grass just by the barn door – a beautiful green-blue snake. It takes one look at me and wriggles off straight into the barn, hiding in the darkness and the stones. I chuckle, because I realise I heard correctly. El trasgu is definitely here.

Do you enjoy these posts?
Like most authors, I don’t earn enough from my books to sustain me, or even this website! These writings come to you thanks to the generous support of everyone on Patreon, without whom I would have no time or funds to keep the free material on The Mud Home coming.

Have a closer look inside my world:
If you enjoy my writing and would like to express that you want it to continue, please consider contributing. For the price of a newspaper, all mud patrons can watch my private land report videos, ask more questions, and get the inside story on my off-grid mud and stone project in Spain.

Bruno came to stay a while back. Such a handsome dog he was, with long caramel fur and gleaming teeth. He had been rescued, or rescued himself, depending on how you look at it. For his entire life (three years) he’d been tethered to a chain under a granary. Not a great start. But sometimes you can see a soul is determined to create a better life for themselves. They are smart, likeable, and eager to learn. There is a certain willpower. They go for it. When the local animal rescue folks found Bruno a foster home with my friend Lonneke, he went for it.
 
Bruno needed a proper home, though. It wasn’t the right time, and I knew it. Even so, I could see the effort he was making, and how snugably gorgeous he was. Soon enough the Atlantic coast of Spain squirmed out of lockdown, and into yet another strange reality imvolving plenty of face masks and hand sanitiser. My land squirmed with it, over the border of spring and into summer. It was a glutinous time. Slugs and snails marched duly out from the underside of many things in Hitchcockian pestilence. My saucepans filled with them every night. Even cheese-graters weren’t exempt. On one of those slimy days, I bundled Bruno into my car and decided to give him a try.
 
Sometimes when destiny calls, there is a certain click. A cosmic cog turns, and the right thing falls in the right place at the right time. This wasn’t one of those times.

The week Bruno turned up, my land, mysterious being that she is, pulled her usual guest-welcoming stunt. The sky disintegrated, the temperature collapsed, and suddenly our world was blended into an unappetising gazpacho of fog-rain. She often does this when a newcomer turns up, refusing to reveal her better side until she’s seen a bit of commitment.
 
I opened the boot of my car and lifted Bruno out. His face fell as soon as his paws hit the dirt. His thoughts were as clear as the thickening mud. “She has brought me to hell. This is the place bad dogs go. I’m not a bad dog.” He stayed the night, refusing to approach the cushion I’d bought him, ticks crawling out of him and onto my floor. I scratched a lot. He sighed a lot. Neither of us slept. The next day, the only time Bruno smiled was when he saw my chickens. Yeees.
 
I could see I needed stronger fences, gates, and a kennel for him to shelter in. The weight of it all sapped my enthusiasm. My infrastructure wasn’t up to it. My energy wasn’t up to it. I simply didn’t want to. And that’s the fact of the matter.
 
“Oh you can’t take a dog from obligation, it never works. We need to live with lovers,” said a friend of mine when I explained my dilemma. How true this is. If there is love, then it’s easy. If not, it’s just a burden.
 
So I said no to Bruno. Not the right dog. Not the right time. And as soon as he left I could feel how ‘right’ that decision was. He jumped for joy when he arrived back at Lonneke’s house. The relief and release of a tepid deal for both of us was palpable. It formed a magic cloud of higher expectation that expanded in the air. Somewhere in the Otherworld above, below, and beyond this one, our intentions met another one. A new reality was conceived. Within a week someone else adopted Bruno. I knew they were going to. Because Bruno was going for it.

Time rolled on. Summer strode in without even knocking, the skies solidifying into a hot belt of azure. I hit the beach. I ate ice cream. June appeared, and along with it came Alice.
 
It was an overcast afternoon when I first heard a galumph and the unmistakable pat-pat-pat of a tail banging the ground. Peering outside my kitchen hut, I groaned. There inside my gate was a dog. A big, too skinny, not particularly pretty mastiff. She was covered in army camouflage stripes too, which didn’t help her cause. I closed my eyes. No, not now. I don’t want a damn dog! I did my best to shoo her off, and pushed her outside the gate. She just nuzzled me affectionately and hid in the undergrowth, holding out for a change of mood.
 
By twilight, I felt so sorry for her, I fed her, noticing her lack of dog-appetite. Perhaps she was ill. I called her Alice. The name wandered in from the wonderland of the hazel woods she appeared from, and it settled onto her like a garland.
 
The moon was a grapefruit that night, and as I tossed and turned in my mud-clad bedroom, I could hear Alice patrolling the hills, woofing and chasing. She was made for these highlands, and unlike Bruno, wasn’t afraid of them in the slightest.
 
The next day Alice ate at my heart like the smartest of her kind. She didn’t bother the chickens, nor wreck my garden, and learned to sit. She was easy. Again my land, mysterious being that she is, pulled over a veil of mist. The rain sank in, and we were pinned to the inside. Alice took one look at the cushion I’d bought for Bruno, and curled up happily on it. I sighed. This was the right dog, but the wrong time.

Timing is everything, and waiting for the right moment is more valuable than people think. Try to yank a chick out of an egg before it’s developed and it will die. Pluck your seedlings before they have matured and you wreck your  future harvest. Gaia’s time-space continuum is dotted with conception points and flowering points. Stretching between these two reality banks is a temporal bridge, a crucible where ideas, energy, and matter merge and fuse and melt into something utterly new. There’s no hurrying it.
 
It was the wrong time. But I had fallen in love with Alice, which was in itself a mystery. Why fall for this big stripy mastiff, yet not for cutesy Bruno? I couldn’t work it out. But love is love. So I ignored the timing, bought her a lead, food, and wood for a kennel. She’d been with me for three days when her owner turned up and took her away, in a van conspicuously stuffed with dog food. Apparently Alice was supposed to be tending cows on the hilltops yonder and had run away. As I helped lift her into her “owner’s” van, this time I didn’t feel relieved at all. I felt bereft.
 
Now I suspect as always with dogs and children and everything else, there could be a mountain of judgement. I shouldn’t have given her back. Or I shouldn’t care about the time, the dog is suffering. I should hate the owner because he’s “guilty” and “bad” and Alice is “innocent” and “good”. I should tell him off, wage a war against him, etc. But we all live in our own moral realities, and I’ve long stepped away from any perceived high ground. Finger-wagging and righteousness are an outdated human game. Very Old Testament, to be honest. As a lifelong educator, I know just how ineffective blame and shame are at transforming anything or anyone (take a look at the world if you’re in doubt about that). Hard as it is, I do my best to avoid basing my actions on the energy of “right” versus “wrong”.
 
Alice left because it wasn’t the right time. If it had been, she’d still be here. There are three viewpoints involved. Three souls: mine, Alice’s, and the owner’s. Three intentions. Three energies. And they are still fusing in the collision, being boiled down or up into the potion that makes magic happen. The alchemy is in process, but there’s no certainty what will emerge or when. That’s creativity for you.

As Alice and her “owner” trundled up the hill, I trudged heavy-hearted up to my old tree to watch the gloaming. The clouds turned the colour of ash, while the sky became an orange fire that burned the peaks cinder black. I felt the stalwart power of the tree, holding her ground as the day disappeared from the face of the Earth and into the pit of night.
 
From way up there or here, I saw the world jumping off its own crumbling embankment too, a billion viewpoints thrown in the cauldron of the now. A meltdown. Everyone pitting themselves against everyone else, thrashing and kicking and blaming, as pieces of the old order start sinking. And as darkness stole the last remnants of day, it became clear that to try and pull anything out of that molten hole now is pointless. It’s not the right time. The potion is bubbling, distilling down into something new, and will be for some time to come.
 
The birds had stopped twittering, and I could barely see the mountain ridges when my ash tree spoke. “Know well my Gaian friend, we are all contributing something to the broth. You and me. But what we add is of essence, not form, for no form will survive.” The words rumbled into me and out, along with the whole gamut of human expression: Sorrow, trust, love, kindness, anger, hatred, fear, conspiracy and distrust, pride, righteous judgement, blame, beauty, inspiration, support, empowerment, joy, peace, unity, honesty, inspiration, and grace.

Yes. I suppose the only thing to ask is, what’s the nature of our contribution? Whether we’re sheltering a dog, blabbing online, or out on the streets, which essential oils are we hurling in the pot? Because rest assured, none of them is lost or omitted. And our futures are being forged out of them.

I walked out of the laundrette to my car. A white van passed close by, almost clipping me. It slowed, and in it I saw a thin chap grinning from ear to ear. I smiled when I recognised the driver and threw in as much love as I could. The man was Alice’s owner. And in that second I saw him as Gaia did, free of the human veil of morality, and our old old system of good versus evil - the very keystone of the whole broken edifice. I sensed there and then the power in the moment, the see-sawing of possibility, that anyone can become anything at any time. At some point Alices' “owner” might cave. May be she'll fight to come back. Who knows? There are no certainties. If there were it wouldn't be creation. But for now the energies are all in the cauldron. Being distilled. Being brewed. Until it’s time.
 
* Bruno ended up in a place far better than mine. Against all odds, within days of me returning him to Lonneke, a young woman saw a video of him online, and fell in love with him. She drove two hours to collect him. He now lives in a proper house with a garden and other human friends. He goes for walks each day, and plays with his dog friends. Yeees, realities aren't created the way people think they are. But hey, you know that:)

** Also many thanks to Yvonne for connecting me with the link below, which inspired the crucible image for this post. https://www.leadtolife.org/

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​Does anyone remember back in the 20th century when people used to worry about the meaning of life? It seems a long way off now from our rather more poignant 21st-century standpoint, a point in human space-time all too brimming with significance. Will we or won’t we wipe ourselves out? Will we lose ourselves to AI, or a pandemic? Will we cut all our forests down and lose all our fellow animals? Or will we instead evolve into beautiful planet guardians? Will we or won’t we make it?
 
We used to feel like we were motes of random dust with little impact on anything. Now we are gods and we know it. The unbearable lightness of being has mutated into an unbearable responsibility.

The meaning of life
Ever since we became ‘civilised’ the quest for meaning has been an obsession for humans. It has provoked centuries of philosophical debate, and lifetimes of avoidance strategies, not to mention the reams and reams of literary masturbation on the matter. Attempting to give our earthly existences meaning has driven the most preposterous and destructive projects. It’s brought us inadvertently to where we are now.
 
It dawned on me as the gates of lockdown opened here in Spain, and human civilisation with all its clamour for distraction began to flood through them once again, that without touching on the matter of meaning, few are those who will step off the consumer conveyor belt and into Eden. Because freedom weighs heavily on many. What’s the point, after all? We are born, we engage in some stuff, and then we die.
 
The beautiful pointlessness of a mud hut
Five months later than I expected, as the steam evaporated from the hilltops and a surprisingly gutsy  April sun strode over the Atlantic skies, I added (the last?) rock to my mud and stone bathroom wall. Yes, I have a bathroom. A sink. A composting toilet. A place for my toothbrush, too. Only hot water evades me now, but its days are numbered. I’m closing in.
 
I’ve been up here a full year now, roosting with each season. I watched the ash trees turn brown, and the rocks push their heads out of the undergrowth as winter yanked the grass asunder. I heard the wolves howl and felt the snow on my face while the stars moved across the night sky. The world disappeared into a pandemic, but my planet kept on turning. Wrens, thrushes, blue tits, and robins filled the hazel copses. Nests were built. Three darling chickens joined the team.
 
First the air warmed, then the ground. New buds sprouted on my fruit trees, while vultures swirled in thermals overhead. Lo and behold, I came full circle. A whole year is now under my belt. As I scan my creation I see I’ve built a kitchen, a bedroom, and a bathroom. I’ve created a juicy vegetable garden, too. A universe has been born up here. It’s still a toddler, but it’s definitely up and walking. Before long I will start on my larger cabaña, and turn that into a new mud and stone realm too.

​“But why? Why put all that effort into making this bedroom and bathroom when you’re going to do it again in the big one? It’s so much work|!” A couple of people have asked me this question about what I’ve done so far. What’s the point, right? I mean I’m just going to move on.
 
And we’re always moving on, of course. I moved on from Mud Mountain in Turkey and lots of people thought that was a tragedy, which was rather confusing for me because I didn’t.
 
So many human issues could be solved with one small shift in perspective: that meaning isn’t an endpoint to be reached. That process doesn’t have to be irksome travail. That creating Eden is not about hacking through the sedge of minutes to reach a conclusion. It’s been said a thousand times already of course; it’s the journey, not the destination. But somehow it doesn’t seem to have sunk in to the human collective consciousness.
 
Whether I’m beginning, continuing, or completing a project, it is all too meaningful. And I know when I move from one phase of this creation to the next, that with each gain, something else is lost (and vice-versa). When I first built my composting toilet, I was at once relieved not to have to effort to look for a pee place, but equally saddened not to watch the stars anymore. The more my veggies grow, the less I forage. Even a hot shower will mean I give up the invigorating cold one. None of this is bad or good, it’s simply a progression, a process, a moving through seasons. And I love each one differently. I’ve always said with mud building, the whole thing is a game for me. Yet it’s a pointed game, both as whimsical as pixies and as deep as a hickory taproot. It’s a game with decent footings.
 
The footings of the game
My frivolous game stands firmly on two feet: being and loving. It’s not about what I create, it’s about loving who I am. It’s not about where I’m going, it’s about being and loving where I am.
 
Someone said, if you love your job, you’ll never work a day in your life. I don’t just love it, I’m in love with it, just as I’m in love with the skies here, and the wolves and the rolling green slopes and the rocky outcrops. I’m in love with the minutes as they pass (usually - though I'll freely admit, I was severely challenged by the roof tiles). When has a lover ever needed a reason? Lovers don’t ask about the meaning of life, not because they’re distracted, but because they already have it.

Missing the point
From Heidegger to Sartre to Kundera, the point has been missed. Completely. And stunningly. The meaning of life has been yanked out of the very soil it germinated within and stuck in some pot on a dusty shelf in a dead man’s office. Meaning isn’t ontological Meccano. It’s not something you stick in a computer to find the answer. It’s not ‘out there’ beyond us, or something to be ‘worked out’ or reached.
 
If you are in the right place (here), at the right time (now), you have meaning. Meaning is felt, not thought. The depth of the here and now is awesome. It goes on forever and ever. To even posit that being could be inconsequential, meaningless, or ‘light’ is a good example of not actually being at all, but thinking instead.

As the sky pulls its magic out of the Atlantic, and cloud worlds bubble atop the distant summits of the sierra, I watch my three little hens go about their business, scratching at the ground with their four-toed feet, pecking this, rolling in that. Striding out or hunkering down. Being. Chickens. And I can sense it in each fibre of my own being that life is most meaningful for them when they are allowed to be exactly who they are, when they are deeply and completely chicken.
 
I follow their lead and wander to my ash tree. As I rest my back on its trunk and watch the grass stalks sway in the wind, I start remembering who and what I am too. With each pause, more and more pieces of me come rushing in, the earth and the sky meet, and I feel my roots plunging into the essence of it all. Things open and deepen in the most amazing ways and I realise I can embody it all. I’m in the perfect place at the perfect time. Here and now. And I know, that this is the point.

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“I’ve decided not to get a dog.” I was clear on the matter as I chatted to my friend Lonneke while we glugged our beers. She was now fostering a rescue hound, and looking for a permanent home for him. I clearly appeared dog-needy.
 
“Yes, they are a tie,” she said, eyeing the bottle-lined walls of the artisan alehouse with the kind of gourmet appreciation I reserve for cake shops. Things were already a little odd that Friday night in the city of Gijon. Half the bars were closed, and the other half were spraying so much disinfectant everywhere, I was coughing. It was Friday, the 13th of March.
 
I was resolute at the time. No dogs, nor any other animal for now. I was happy with the robins, wrens, crows, and finches that graced my kitchen door each morning. Having quite literally worked my butt off over the past year, I was ready for a little gallivanting. A little fun and freedom between the bouts of building slog. Dare I say it, I was ready to socialise?
 
Oh life! You have to laugh, eh? As Lonneke* and I ambled down the city streets that night, the residents began anxiously shutting their eateries and stores. Grilles descended with a clank, right and left. The 24-hour supermarket was already sporting a few empty shelves. The next day the prime minister spelled it out: Lockdown. You have to hand it to this virus, it’s got a sense of irony.

Thus began our (now fairly global) trip into the twilight zone. Here in Spain, we’re a little ahead of much of the world on our Corona journey. We’ll be almost in week seven of our incarcerations by the time you’re reading this. When you live alone, this means seven weeks without connecting with a human in physical form. Even eye contact, over mask-rims, is a little furtive, as if the virus might be transferred by sight as well.
 
It must have been about week three of our collective curfew, when two things occurred to me simultaneously. First, I wished I had adopted Lonneke’s foster dog, or some other fur-rich animal that I could pet and nurture. I just wanted to feel the warmth of another body and check I wasn’t dreaming I was alive some of the time. Second, the supermarkets weren’t exactly beacons of infallibility in a shifting world. While northern Spain wasn’t witness to the panic hoarding of some places, there were nonetheless always weird gaps on the shelves that reminded you just how fragile the food chain is, and how it could fracture at any time. I would inevitably return from a provisions trip feeling unsettled.
 
The beauty and gift of creating an off-grid world for yourself, no matter how rudimentary, is of course this: Collapses can happen, and you pretty much carry on regardless, empty shelves or not. There was just one thing I felt I was lacking: eggs.

It was a grungy morning when I turned on my phone, and saw a Whatsapp message from my nearest neighbour, 2 kilometres up the road.

> I’m heading down to the shop. If you need anything let me know.

The sky was dripping like a dilapidated roof, and as I waded into my kitchen I saw the flagstones were weeping. Sheltering inside, I began to type.

> All I need is chickens and a dog:)

There was another ping.

> How many chickens are you thinking of getting?

> About 3, but I don’t have a coop yet. Have to make one first!

> You can have our old one then. Will bring it round tomorrow.

And that was that. The next day, I drove to one of the only open agricultural stores. A tooth-sparse little chap in a boilersuit opened up a concrete cupboard in the courtyard. It was windowless and cheerless, and lined with metal cages. “There are only three left,” the fellow grinned, gaps hopping out of his mouth like blackbirds from a hedgerow. “Everybody has bought them up!” He grabbed the poor hens out one by one, and stuffed them squawking in a crate. As carefully as I could, I loaded them in my boot.

As I drove back through the empty town, I stared up at my fellow humans in their own crates. Concrete boxes they’d probably paid quite a bit of money for. But that was when they all thought they were free, of course. Some played music on balconies. Some chatted with their neighbours through windows. Where were the children? I hadn't seen a kid in weeks.

Soon I was back on my land with a box full of terrified chooks. Brian and Julia turned up in their truck soon after with their old wooden coop poking out of the back. We dragged it up my hill, and I set about erecting it. By evening the three hens were hunched up on their roosts, bracing themselves for whatever calamity had befallen them. Their little yellow bird eyes rolled, scanning me for clues of the impending atrocity that awaited. Change is rarely greeted with optimism in the animal kingdom, I find.

For three days my hens refused to leave their coop. They sat there in collective terror, hardly daring to peer out of the door. I could only imagine the types of chicken thoughts that might be running through their walnut brains. “That’s it. Terminado.” “She’s going to eat us!” “If only we could go back to our cold, concrete, lightless cupboard! We were safe at least. Woe is us!”
 
While they cowered, I built a small run for them out of the chicken wire and posts I had left lying around. My hens would be free range most of the time, but only on clear days. Because when the mist descends and dusk loiters on the edges of my land, the beasts of prey come out of their lairs. The run would serve as a type of balcony, or garden, a safe place for my chickens to see sunlight.
 
Eventually they ventured into it, pecking dubiously at the dirt. After studying them, fascinated, for a few days, I named them: Gertie (the pecky boss one), Frida (the adventurous, productive one) and Hilde (the quirky underdog).
 
Death and Danger
A part of me was as terrified as my hens, and I wondered whether I should ever let them run free. This is, without a shadow of a doubt, the badlands for a chicken. There’s a badger set at the bottom of my land, countless birds of prey overhead including eagles, wolves, foxes, stoats... you name it, it’s there in all its clawed and razor-toothed splendour. Death. Everywhere. And after all, my birds seemed reasonably happy in the run. They had food. Water. Daylight. I threw in grass cuttings and other goodies. Wasn’t that enough?
 
It was Frida who reminded me, that’s not what life is about. One day she flew onto the top of the run fence, and peered at me from her swaying wire perch, goading me with her little bead eyes. I sighed. Thus it was, I opened up the run, and let my precious hens out, watching their fluffy butts waddle away into the grass stalks.
 
It was obvious from the first moment. These birds had presumably never seen nature in their lives. Their feet had never scratched the dirt. Yet, as they strutted off into the undergrowth, you could see the fervour wafting off them like heat waves rising from sun-beaten tarmac. They were three feathery little Lara Crofts striking out into the wilderness. It was a joy to behold.
 
From that day forth the eggs they laid grew bigger and bigger. Their rufous bodies fattened. Their feathers shone. They looked extremely happy.

The Wolves
One night I was snuggled up in my stone hut, which ironically (you have to hand it to life) was itself a chicken coop before I renovated it. I was readying myself for sleep. As it happened, I wasn’t going to get much. It was three minutes to midnight when I heard them: the wolves.
 
There is no sound like the howls of a wolf pack. On the one hand it’s an honour, as though you are witnessing a sacred ceremony. At the same time, it’s spine-chillingly eerie, and depending on how close they are, somewhat nerve-wracking. I’d heard the wolves quite a few times this winter here in the picos of Spain, but never this close. The howling and yapping was frenzied, and alarmingly loud, so loud that the noise made me leap out of bed.
 
Grabbing my torch, I opened my door a fraction. I thought of my dear little chickens down there, cowering on their roosts, as silent as the prevailing mist. The howls rose to a cacophony. I tried to pinpoint where the wolves were. I was pretty sure they were loitering in the arroyo beneath my land, or perhaps on the path just above it. Near. Very near.
 
My spine wriggled and shook. My hair turned in its follicles. I flashed my torch at the darkness and yelled, the beam of light hitting the trees one by one. Immediately there was silence. It was as if a hood had descended over the pack. Presumably they fled, sleet-footed, as wolves with any sense are inclined to when they realise a human is around.

Wild Freedom
The next morning, sleep-deprived and bleary-eyed, I staggered down to the chicken coop. As always, the hens greeted me with relieved little clucks. Gertie, Frida, and Hilde were living to see another day, and it was a beautiful day at that. The sun had burned off the mist, leaving my land cloaked in lush green grass and bedecked in colourful petals. Snail shells glistened, and fat bumblebee bottoms poked out of the dead nettle flowers. As I opened the run, my feathered adventurers didn’t miss a beat. They strode off into the long grass, as eager to find grubs and scratch the dirt as ever, wolves or no wolves.
 
Perhaps tomorrow a predator will take them. Perhaps not. But I shan’t be locking my birds up in their run forever, regardless. Ten years safe behind wire? Or ten days in a risky, juicy Eden? I’m looking in their archosaur eyes, and I see what they prefer. I know what I prefer, too. I can’t speak for the rest of my species, because I don’t really understand them. Me? I’m with the chickens. That’s why I live in a hovel on a mountain with the eagles and the vultures.
 
Life isn’t the same as staying alive. It’s not a game of numbers and years, and there are no prizes for survival. Life is danger. It’s uncertain. It’s a mysterious rite of passage into the wild. It’s a quest and a story and a secret mission. It’s a poem, a song, and a caterwaul of howling under the stars. The world may be locked down now, but in truth, was it ever free anyway? Were the chicken runs of shopping malls something we can call living? Was fifty hours a week in an office, plus a couple of hours extra trapped in some transportation cage, a dignified existence for a human being? And these were the ‘lucky’ ones. Then there were the others. The children mining metal, the girls sold into ‘wedded’ slavery, the starving and the war-torn, all also a part of that old chicken run we know so well.
 
Some are feeling sadness and fear that the old way is dying. Sorry, I’m not. I don’t know what’s coming next, or what shenanigans (if any) will unfold. But there’s a profound freedom to be won in an unambiguous lockdown, when no one’s pretending everything is fine any more. Freedom and life both come at a price, that price is the illusion of security. There never was any real security. It was a lie. The future was never going to stick to our plans. We could have died in a car accident, or contracted a terminal disease, or lost our jobs at any time. It was always a game of chance, and no amount of insurance policies, or back-up plans, or being ‘good’ and following the rules was ever going to save us. It was a truth that was easily ignored in the gilded cage.
 
Perhaps now we’re all stuffed back in our coops, we’ll scratch a little deeper and dig up another more essential kind of freedom. Perhaps when they finally open the door, we’ll look up and out instead of down. Perhaps we’ll think twice before swapping our life for some half-arsed promise of security. Planet Earth is an untameable adventure, not a battery farm, and we are free-range Gaians. We can either strike out ruddy-cheeked into the backwoods, or run squawking back inside the mesh of rules. Either way, we won’t be safe. We won’t cheat death. We won’t avoid pain or loss. Either way there’s a price. So we might as well get our money’s worth.

Ah, the mist has lifted. I see the mountain ridges again. It must be time to let the chickens out.

 *For speakers of Dutch, Lonneke Lodder is author of Het leven is te kort om op kantoor te zitten (Life's too  Short to Sit in an Office). You can read all about her (in Dutch) here.  https://lonnekelodder.nl/

​Do you enjoy these posts?
Like most authors, I don’t earn enough from my books to sustain me, or even this website! These writings come to you thanks to the generous support of everyone on Patreon, without whom I would have no time or funds to keep the free material on The Mud Home coming.
 
If you enjoy my writing and would like to express that you want it to continue, please consider contributing on Patreon. All our lovely patrons can watch my private land report videos, ask more questions, and get the inside story on this one-woman, off-grid project.

Up here in Hutland in the peaks of northern Spain, all is pretty much as it always has been, except perhaps that I haven’t heard an aeroplane for a while. The clouds bubble and froth over the humped back of the sierra, the trees are budding, and the vole is still eating my root vegetables, no matter where I hide them. The two of us seem to be playing a muddier version of The Crystal Maze. I am the hapless contestant endlessly solving puzzles, and the vole is Richard O’Brien complete with sarcasm (at least I’m pretty sure he is mocking me).
 
If you don’t know much about voles, let me introduce you. The vole is a deceptively cute, long-toothed rodent, like a large hamster. It digs tunnels underground and gnaws (nay destroys) anything with a root on it. It is apparently an endangered species, though how is hard for me to work out. Either my vole is peculiarly genius, or (as I believe) they are in fact all hiding en masse below ground, just waiting for human civilisation to collapse when they’re going to surge out from their burrows, decimate the world’s carrots, and undertake global vole domination.
 
Their time may or may not be now.

Yes. Although my land exists in an alternate reality, I can nonetheless sense something going on down there in the valleys. There’s a stillness I can’t quite put my finger on. A silence. A gap that nature is breathtakingly fast to fill. As you know, I’m living in Spain, one of the COVID-19 epicentres. We are on tight lockdown, and our collective house arrest has been extended to God only knows when.
 
When I’m up in my stone and mud world, exploring the spirit woods, foraging for plantains, and defending myself against parsnip munching rodents, the drama unfolding all feels rather theoretical. Until I venture down to the town, which I have to once a week to buy in supplies.
 
Down there in the asphalt zone, I’m rattled sharply out of my reverie by that other reality. Streets that usually bustle and buzz and grate on my nerves, are deserted. Grilles are down. Doors are closed. It’s a permanent siesta. Pretty much the only people to be seen are the mask-wearing infantry of truly necessary workers. Yes, it’s all become crystal clear now hasn’t it, who we really need and who we don’t: cleaners, waste disposal workers, and food vendors are the only people out on the streets who aren’t scurrying nervously in the direction of a supermarket.
 
As I said a while back, there’s a great levelling going on.

Shelf-stackers are suddenly more respected than premier league footballers. Nurses and doctors are applauded in their apartment blocks when they finally arrive home. Who cares about some makeup-slathered celeb right now? Or a bunch of self-satisfied (and vaguely creepy) film directors at the Oscars? Investment bankers? Stock brokers? Sorry guys, you have been far too irrelevant for far too long, and that’s being generous.
 
As I take in this alien new world, it computes. Something big is happening down here. Oh, the irony though. That an entity so small you need a microscope to see it is causing this much havoc is very appropriate. Note how the virus spreads particularly fast among the world’s elites, apparently more partial to people who fly, and those who shake lots of hands. It’s raging through the wealthiest and most “economically productive” zones with not much indication of stopping.
 
A tiny infectious agent has managed in weeks what no environmental lobby or politician has achieved in my entire lifetime. Flights are grounded the world over. Traffic has all but stopped. And everyone is grounded at home with plenty of time to think about how vulnerable they are in the arms of The System, how from one day to the next food can disappear from shelves, and basic freedoms like walking are snatched away. Through the silence, the birds are singing and the bees are buzzing like never before. Not even the Great Attenborough himself could have achieved such an impact.
 
Finally (thank God!) I’m back in my car, watching the dystopian streets disappear in my rear view mirror. There’s a chill still lingering at the back of my neck though, as I climb the long, steep mountain sides. But with each twist and turn the “normal” world becomes more ethereal, while my world of myth and magic solidifies. I pass through the last village at the top of the hill, the final outpost before the tarmac disintegrates. Everyone is out in the street, music is playing, and the locals are beaming. Spain’s rural folk and villages have long been downtrodden and forgotten in a world which is obsessed with “modernising”. They too are now having their moment. Suddenly the village is the place to be. The town is for ghosts.

Return to the fairy tale
Rumbling on, I press for home. Jolting over the hilltops, I pass the usual rabble of cows wandering nonchalantly around as though they own the place. The great snow-encrusted Picos rise out of the clouds like the Mountains of Lune. A falcon swoops in front of my windshield. Fay primroses twirl along the track. Eminent rock councils push through the grass now, posturing in huddles. In a month or two they will disappear behind the emerald veil, when the verdure unfurls once more.
 
This fairy tale has been my reality for a while now. A reality that has been relegated to the forgotten backrooms of the mainstream human mind for a long, long while. First the religions stamped on it. Then the philosophers. Then the scientists. Until the only place you could slip out from the suffocating throttle of the manufactured modern age was far off into the forests, or high up in the mountains, anywhere where humans and their noise and tech weren’t.
 
Yet we were hungering for it. The popularity of the fantasy genre in the 21st century and the gospels of the new age were indicative of the people’s thirst for magic and wonder in an arrogant, unimaginative, and frankly boring society. A civilisation built on outdated assumptions that are now crumbling faster than icebergs in the Arctic. “We are in control. The economy must always grow. Tech and machines will solve all the problems. The only reality is material reality. If you follow the rules and be good, Father Establishment will take care of you.” How frail and hollow the bragging authorities sound now.
 
The Levelling is here. The Gods have thrown the game pieces aloft, and who knows where they will land? In weeks the system that was so impossible for us to dismantle, is shuddering. The hologram is flickering. Doors have opened all over the fabric of consciousness, and each of us will walk through one of them. The impoverished ghosts who still believe happiness lies in attempting to dominate others will no doubt hold shady doors to shiny new cages ajar. The frightened and addicted will no doubt gamely enter them, wanting to trust – as they always do (sigh) – anyone but themselves. Ultimately it will come down to how much faith we have in ourselves, our planet, and our intuition, as to where we move next and which kind of reality we create. Because that’s what it’s about.

For too long humans have wandered lost around realities as though they were beyond their control. For too long they have believed the scammy insurance brokers of the established order, and sold their real power for a lie. But it’s all up for grabs now, eh? So are we going back into the fold? Or are we treading into the forest? No doubt there’ll be a different reality for each of us. There always is.
 
A message from behind the door of enchantment
Yes the doors are many. This is a message from behind mine. It’s a bit of a rickety old thing, gnarled, handmade, and possibly a little under-engineered, but with plenty of character nonetheless. I invite you to have a look for that door, because it’s the enchanted one. The soul door. The door behind which the currency isn’t banknotes, but energy, vision, and truth. No one is going to promise to save you behind this door, because no one who walks through it needs saving. It’s the gateway of the witches and wizards, the mages and the sorcerers, and it’s out there in the woods, by the sides of streams, in the mountains and the sea caves. Any human can locate this portal and we all hold enough power to walk through it, because this door, and the world behind it are Gaian.
 
Yes the Levelling is here. Now that the smoke of the great industrial engine has dissipated, we have the time and clarity to find our own way to another more enchanted reality, the one we are sovereign of. Better to leave the meaningless tat and false promises of security, and take what’s truly ours. For those of us who suffered under the old ways, whose more imaginative heads have been held under the surface by the boot of materialism, we are blessed to be here and now. It really is our time.

Become a More Intimate Part of The Mud Home
Thank you so much to our wonderful community of sustainers and supporters funding The Mud Home and the Earth Whispering Blog on Patreon. You are so appreciated, and I very much value each contribution. It’s now time for me to support you back. Over the next few weeks for all Mud Patrons I’ll be sharing some special whisperings and ideas to support and encourage in these unusual times. The current Covid-19 situation is actually an extraordinary opportunity. I hope everyone takes it.

It costs a lot to run The Mud Home, and it takes up many hours a week. If you enjoy these posts and would like to express that you want them to continue, please consider contributing to the running costs. All our lovely patrons can watch my private land report videos, ask more questions, and get the inside story on this one-woman, off-grid build.