​Every day I close the doorway to my old barn with a line of rickety posts that are supposed to act as a gate. And every frickin’ day my hens find a way in. At some indeterminate point I’ll hear one of them chattering to her feathery compatriots, or the clang of a tool they’ve dislodged, upon which I charge down, huffing and growling and yelling at them, before turfing them out. The hens then run up the hill, bottoms waggling, gossiping amongst themselves like primary school kids caught pilfering from the stock cupboard.
 
My birds know very well the barn is out of bounds. I’m sure of this because a) their eyes roll guiltily when I catch them, and b) I hide and watch. When they think I’m out of sight, they’ll scuttle straight back down to the doorway, study the wooden slats, peering this way and that to find a gap. Then as soon as I show up to throw them a faceload of glower and reprimand, they stop in their tracks and gulp. Grrr.
 
But here’s the thing. In truth while all this bugs the hell out of me, it also makes me grin. Nature is shamelessly non-compliant. It’s a total scallywag, and I love it.

The great biorascal
It’s not simply the hens that are thoroughly mischief-making. I found a nettle growing into my camper van this week, and an arm of ivy burrowing merrily through my earth plaster. The mouse in the kitchen has just eaten the gas stove warranty, a wren is building nests in my brand new roof, and the vole has gobbled up every one of my broad beans. This onslaught of biospheric anarchy should irritate me. Others would lay traps or poison. But what’s the point? This is nature. And in five minutes there’ll be another mouse or vole to replace this one, because Gaia isn’t compliant and doesn’t bend under authority. Heck, nature doesn’t even recognise authority in the first place. This is why when I pull up a half-gnawed onion, I find myself chuckling. These miscreants inspire me.
 
Too bad humans have lost touch with their wild side. We could do with a bit more natural non-compliance in the human world, if you ask me. Apparently a lot of people like being led, though. They like being told what to think by billionaires, and reneging responsibility for their lives.

Rude Nature
Nature doesn’t do politeness. She is raw, and often rude. She is the great boat-rocker. Yet she is also fair and holds a deep loyalty to her own. We’re going to see that soon, as some sell out and others don’t. History shows well, social acquiescence and “common courtesy” are often the conduits of abuse and horror. Good little girls have been told to comply when sleazy old men kiss them. If they say they don’t want to be molested or have their body violated they are apparently rude or bad. Good little boys have been told to be tough and emotionless and murder the “enemy”. When they say they don’t want to, they are apparently cowardly villains.
 
But what is this good and bad that society is so sure it has a hold on? Following rules like Nazi officers (and good ol' general public) did back in 1940? Following the letter of the law as many environmental protectors haven’t been doing since the ’80s? Following social norms in a bid to out do our peers, or from fear of becoming outcast?
 
Natural patterns
I watch the sunlight grace the thousands of wriggling hazel arms in my copse, each one stretching and winding in its own way and yet respecting all the others in the ecosystem. This wood is now brimming with birds. The tree tops twitter and squawk and sing with such exuberance, I find myself laughing.  Nests have blossomed without even considering a building permit. There is no single authority in that wood. No top-down leadership. No committees making the rules. Despite this, it's a mutually supportive yet striving community, with a balance between the individual and the group. This is because each tree and bird is plugged into the planet’s intelligence, so doesn’t need government press conferences or police officers to tell it where to go.
 
Human rules are different. They’re neither organic nor responsive. They doubt our innate wisdom, assume we are all out for ourselves, and keep us towing a certain uncreative line. Personally I prefer nature’s pathways. I prefer the freedom to be wild and mischievous and alive. We’ve been told mayhem will ensue if there are no laws, but who’s doing the telling here? Could it be those same people who are merrily trashing forests, selling us back our drinking water, and hiding the devastating effects of their pesticides?

Thank you Turkey (again)
I haven’t been compliant for a long long while. Perhaps in some ways I never was. When a good friend of mine told my dad recently he’d lost a power battle with me, he roared with laughter and said, “oh I lost that when she was about five.” So it was apt that I moved to Turkey, a country full of non-compliants like myself, where you routinely see people heartily puffing on a Marlboro under no-smoking signs, or cars parked brazenly beneath no parking signs. I remember when the government banned ashtrays from restaurant tables in a bid to stop smoking. In the blink of an eye restaurant owners had made ashtrays on legs which stood by the side of the table instead.
 
Ah Turkey. I’m grateful to you for showing me with wit and humour the art of non-compliance.

​Life on the edge of The System
I’ve been hanging on (and sometimes falling off) the edge of the system for years and years. Turkey was mostly unsystemised when I first arrived there back in the late eighties, with well over half the economy “black” and untaxed. I left when that began to change, and I saw it was driving down the same mindless concrete highway that I had run away from. I know where that road leads to.

According to the world at large, I’ve been doing everything “wrong” since I was 26 and abandoned my state education career in London. I was told by older colleagues I’d never be able to “catch up” if I left, though no one could really explain what or who I was catching up with, or why that was so important. Within three years, I was working four days a week in the then eyeball-achingly beautiful city of Antalya, calling the shots on my hours, living a stone’s throw from the beach, and earning about three times what I would have done back in the UK education system. Agh! Don’t listen to these fools. They know nothing.
 
To be free, or on the margins of the system, is a beautiful thing. I will never return to that defunct, destructive, soul-and-body-crushing machine whatever they threaten me with, because I know they have no power over me. I know the natural intelligence within me has it covered. The zombie administration is going to have to run to keep up with those of us scampering down the natural paths. I haven’t seen it do much running though since I’ve been back here in Europe. It’s about as nimble as a sauropod in quicksand. Meat Loaf could sprint faster in a wet suit and flippers.

​What is non-compliance?
One thing it took me a long time to understand is that non-compliance isn’t the same as rebellion. It isn’t the same as protest, as dear Maxim in Taiwan showed me about ten years ago now. Non-compliance comes from a very different place. It’s a psychological space where you know the other has no power over you. You know you are in the driving seat, and simply don’t do what they suggest or imply you should. You just don’t comply. It’s not noisy or aggressive or demanding everyone else does the same. Why should anyone be compliant to my non-compliance? They shouldn’t, and they won’t be. I don’t need the rest of the world to be like me to experience my truth. Good job, all things considered.

So if you can’t swallow the many uninspiring narratives of the day without a touch of indigestion, and don't feel particularly enthusiastic about everything to go back to ecocidal, slavery-condoning, war-mongering normal (230 000 dead in Yemen alone for example, but may be they don't matter because they're not first world, right?) don’t waste your energy trying to convince the mainstream world to “see”. We are all creating our own realities here. Some people didn’t like that idea for some reason, so decided to let other people create their reality for them. Absolutely their call. But that doesn’t change the fundamentals. We’re Gaia’s children, literally forged from her substance and intelligence, and when we’re aligned with that very non-compliant planetary power, when we hear and act not on the fear created by those with vested interests, or the pressure of the herd, but on the intuitive hunches within our very bodies, we birth our own brand new enchanting worlds. Those two realities are like oil and water. The greasy hand of fear and obedience just can’t get a firm grip on self-belief and intuitive action. It slides straight off into the great machine to lubricate the pistons and cogs of the productivity engine. Meanwhile Gaia’s streams flow where they want to, the grass grows no matter how much it is strimmed, and my hens continue to ferret out new ways into the coveted domain of the barn.

Yes it's a beautiful moment to be alive.

***Many thanks to my dear dad for accepting me for the non-compliant creative that I am. I am lucky. Many people are cajoled and coerced by their parents to tow a certain socially acceptable line which is in direct conflict with their mental or physical well being. I was never pushed to do anything other than what I wanted to in this life, and that is a great blessing.***

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.

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​Dreams come from the sky. However wide we can expand our vision is how vast and breath-taking our dreams can be. Because the sky is endless. It’s the potion of the Divine. We humans are the alchemists, whether we know it and embody it or not.
 
As the magicians we are, we draw these Skydreams through our minds, where we sift and filter and sort until we see a vision we love. The potential of a dream is limited only by the openness of the mind. Cynicism, cleverness, over-education, and arrogance are the mental bars of many a human head. Those who think they are smart and belittle those of us who see visions and breathe life into them, seem to be the least able to create of us all. I’ll not mince my words here, because we’re at a temporal crossroads. Either we are going to make inspiring miracles appear in our world and impact it, or we're not and we make ourselves irrelevant. However beautiful or ugly our seed ideas and intentions, if they never reach fruition in the material plane, their energy and light remain un-embodied here on Earth.

Winter flirts with spring up here on my hill right now. The primroses prick through the dirt along the verges; their sweet aroma is a gift to me in the twilight hours. Clouds cluster and percolate above the crowns of the mountains, their shadows falling onto random pastures like the footprints of the Gods. Earth is so powerful now, so beautiful and alive. She is poised, potency rippling under her grassy skin, as she gathers her unstoppable life force, ready to pump it through the dirt with such force that even tractors and strimmers and mowers will be beaten into submission.
 
I stare at this incredible place and the dreams that are blooming here. I see my barn taking shape, walls being rebuilt and repaired, window frames and shutters and more. I am managing it despite the slag heaps of doubt that tried so hard to block my vision. I watch the limitations of my old mind fall away in the face of what has already been brought to life, mental impediments inflicted by the stunted outlook of the media, the caged cleverness of the academics, and the mediocrity of the herd vision. The veiled slights, prejudices and judgements of my fellow humans are all losing their grip now.
 
“You're building very square these days, aren't you?” Said someone not so long ago. Another remark to grapple with. I’ll return to it in a couple of paragraphs. In the meantime, as I stare at the ridged beauty of the sierra and the improbable miracle of its very existence, the grilles tumble from my eyes. The Skydreams I’m now privy to leave me breathless.
 
Earth is power. The sky is infinite. And we are unstoppable (if we dare to be).

Farmer Quilo says my barn is probably 200 years old. May be 150, but could well be two centuries. How I admire that old forgotten outbuilding! Like so many of us as we age, it has been ignored, laughed at, and deemed useless. I feel as though it waited there years with its nobbles and wobbles and ruts and cracks, for someone who saw Skydreams to arrive. But its a big job even for a Dirt Witch, and I'm continually catching my breath, hanging onto the hand rails of my to-do list, climbing it rung by rung. Don't look down. Don't look down.

In many ways the immensity of the task in front of me is, to the conditioned mind, an impossibility. Happily I rarely listen to that idiot, because frankly it hasn’t got a clue. What does the conditioned brain know about creation? What does it understand about how things blossom and grow in this world? Nada.
 
The great wilderness of our minds has been turned into a tightly manicured urban garden. It has tidy verges, a lifeless lawn, and cares what the neighbours think. I’ve spent the past twenty years digging up that mental lawn. I’ve rewilded my head to the extent that I rarely see the limits and obstacles other people do. A fair bit of that rewilding happened in Turkey, where many people simply can’t afford not to take a chance or give themselves over to defeatism.
 
I often wonder why I was called back to the West just as it looks on the edge of collapse. But it’s becoming clearer and clearer to me the more time I spend with Westerners; their minds are the ones locked down far more than their bodies. The overthinkers. They are everywhere. Hampered and controlled by fears of improbable disaster, and an education that says you can plan for everything, which is so obviously ludicrous now it hurts.

How things happen
I wrote an article a couple of years ago on making dreams happen, so I won’t repeat what I said there. But let me just say this: Nothing happens because you planned it down to the last detail. Nothing happens because you just sat and thought about it (and no doubt bored your friends to tears about it too). Nothing happens because you watched YouTube for three hours, or spent all day trying to change someone’s mind on Facebook. Nothing happens because you made 241 contingency plans. Nothing happens if you’re too chicken to jump, if you have no faith in yourself and life.
 
The thing is though, our old reality has fractured. There are holes and rips all over the place. Now is the very time to make something happen, so it might pay to remember how.
 
For a dream to appear in the physical world it has to move from the sky of possibilities into our heads. But then it has to move on. It shifts from our heads to our hearts, where we find the joy and verve to act on it. Our emotions breathe life into our visions and dictate the very flavour of their being. This is what enthusiasm is all about. Thus the dream moves from our hearts to our fingers and our feet, and into the Earth herself. Sky, head, heart, body, earth. Miss any of these steps and the dream aborts, or is stillborn, or just rots in your head.
 
But that’s not all.
 
Once the dream meets the earth, then a conversation has to take place. It’s a dance. A relationship. The sky doesn’t stamp its vision onto the ground like some bureaucrat validating a scrap of paper, or a printer etching words on a blank piece of paper. The tabula rasa idea should have disintegrated a hundred years ago, but somehow it still survives, rolling around the conduits of the human brain like a lost ball bearing.
 
So you see, this is why my barn is not a copy of my roundhouse. This is why the windows aren’t circles, and things look a little rectangular. Because this piece of land isn’t Mud Mountain. It has its own character, energy, spirits, and geology, and I’m listening to them all. I’m not here to simply copy and paste one house onto another, or stamp one old vision onto this beautiful new landscape, as though it had no vision or desire of its own. Sorry if that’s what you thought would happen and are disappointed, or think I’ve sold out to the square or something.

Nature doesn’t do repeats. And neither do I. Repetition and copying are part of the machine world, not the sacred act of creation. I’m simply doing what we’re all here to do: taking Skydreams into my mind, heart, and body, and breathing life into them. Then I offer them to the dirt, and work with her to bring them forth here on planet Earth.

It's time
There are a lot of brand new Skydreams available to us right now, and there’s a shedload of power pumping through the planet too. If you haven’t already, I’d urge you to step into it. True, being active doesn’t necessarily mean we’re doing anything useful if its mindless busyness disconnected from inspiration. But timing is everything. It’s not the time to just sit on inspired dreams anymore. It’s the time to embody them. Bring your precious light into the world. Don't think your idea is too small to matter, because everything matters. Every square inch of this planet is sentient, stuffed full of millions of beings. For the tiniest and in many ways most fundamental lifeforms, a compost heap, a pool, an old log, or a tree can be an entire world. Know your value. Know your power. Use it.

The Armchair Philosophers
We've been suffering under the unearthed theories of elitist armchair philosophers for too long. They're the very reason we're at the place we are now, floating as they do a convenient metre or so above the ground of action. They believe they do the important job of thinking, while some other pleb struggles with the dirty work of trying to bring the grand idea into the world, and then receives zero credit for it. It's a typically colonial mindset, actually. Wisdom doesn't come from simply thinking. It is born out of this incredible alchemical practice, where a human brings a dream from heaven down to earth. I can always tell who has actually tried to realize their dreams (whether they succeed or fail is irrelevant), and who is simply waffling, because true wisdom can only ever sprout from the dirt. All the rest is disembodied cleverness. It's a train on a circular track, going absolutely nowhere. Impotent. Divorced from physical reality. Unable to affect anything.
-------------------

These words are a gift, and come to you thanks to my land, the sky, 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 stories and would like to express that you want them 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.

And it happened. On the first day of a new year, which many were looking forward to because it signalled the end of 2020 (cue black comedy moment), an Arctic depression rampaging under the moniker Filomena descended from on high and buried us all alive. Snow fell. And fell. And fell over most of Spain. Sometimes it dropped in great white flakes, sometimes in smaller icy globules, sometimes in a fine sleet. But however it chose to dress, the snow stuck. And how! It settled faster than a colony of Brits on the Costa del Sol.
 
Some days the cold white abated and the sun ripped the sky apart, turning everything eyeball-achingly luminous. Yes, before you ask, it was beautiful. And yes, it does look better from the inside of a warm house, too. On those bright days the temperatures sank to historic lows. Indeed the weather station on the peaks behind me recorded -35 degrees, which sounds more like Nunavut than Spain. From one minute to the next, my outside sink was covered in a splintery layer of ice. I couldn’t lift the mugs up. They were iced on.

​My car was back in the village, which was a blessing in one way. I’d been in the city on New Years’ Day when the white drama began, and by the time I returned the snow was already down to the village. Having asked a farmer if he thought I could make it to my house, and not quite gauging the extent of the iffiness inherent in the phrase “igualmente si”, I’d gamely attempted the track to my hutland. I did pretty well actually, keeping the car on the road for a good two kilometres before a hill of powdery catastrophe rose like a yeti before me. I saw the curve and the ascent, took a deep breath, and hammered it up the slope, hoping to work up enough momentum. But alas. The car skidded and slid, almost falling in the ditch. But not quite.
 
I burned a bit of rubber to realign my wheels with the track again. Then I had the brow-dampening thrill of reversing two kilometres through a thickening blizzard back into the village. That was day one of Snow World, after which I didn’t see a single vehicle on my road for about three weeks. This was a state of affairs I’d been asking my Power Ash to manifest for me. Clearly my ash tree has a sense of humour.
 
Things only turned more exciting from there on in.

I didn’t know anything about snow before this month. I do now. I know everything about it. Snow. There has been literally nothing else to study these past weeks.
 
Each morning during the Spanish Ice Age, I would wake and look at my skylight. Depending on how much snow had fallen, and how hard I’d burned my wood stove, I’d either be in darkness, or see a hole. Each day I was never entirely sure until I opened the curtain on my bedroom window, whether I was buried inside or not. I never did become entirely submerged, but I can assure you pretty much everything else did. Even my barn threatened to vanish asunder at one point, because the snow just kept on falling.
 
This would of course be interesting enough in a normal house where the kitchen is attached to the  living space. As you know, I’m holed up in my temporary shelter (renovated chicken coop), and reaching my kitchen is something of an extreme sport requiring wellies, extra jumpers, thermal socks, hat, weatherproof jacket. A dogsled, that’s what I needed. I can’t tell you how many times I wished I’d had a couple of huskies this month.
 
My world was white. And cold. Sometimes wade-y, sometimes slippery, and eventually after three weeks, slushy and muddy. Each day was like being in a Buddhist monastery where you are assigned a number of ‘karma’ tasks to teach you that all in life is but transient and impermanent. I definitely grasped that by the end of Snow World. Anicca. Impermanence. You clear a path. It fills up with snow again in five minutes. You clean your solar panels hoping against the odds to grab a scrap of power, but even as you are wiping, the things are filling up with snowflakes. You replenish the hens’ water bowl knowing as you do it that it will have turned solid within the hour. Sigh.
 
Oh and then you realise you need to dig your way out of your land. But where is the shovel? Erm...good question. Come to think of it, where is the garden? And the plants to forage? Oh dear, what are you going to eat?

Why Preppers Might Not Survive
 
No matter how well prepared you are in life, you can rest assured it won’t be sufficient. It is a quirk of human reality that even if you have three backup systems, all three will break down at the same time. This is why I’m a little sceptical about contingency plans. They are hideously unreliable and curiously unable to insulate against things like fate and sheer bad luck.
 
I’ve always felt confident regarding food, for example, because I have a great veggie garden, and I chose my climate well, so it produces nearly all year. Even when the garden is bare, the land is rich with edible greens and nuts and other goodies, all waiting to be foraged. I have hens for eggs, and a good three months’ supply of flour and oil. I was ready for lockdowns before I’d even heard the term. But then all of a sudden my world turned white. Everything was buried under about 70 cm of snow. It was hard to even find a blade or two of grass for my hens. My birds hated it. They eyed me suspiciously as though I’d made the white happen. Then they sulked and stopped laying eggs. I ran out of vegetables. I was running out of power, too. My car is usually my last backup for charging my phone in times of woe. Alas! It was stranded a good two kilometres away, wasn’t it? Was it even still visible at this point? I had no idea.
 
Yeees, there’s a higher authority out there than future planning or strategic stockpiling. This is what moderns in their arrogance have forgotten. When Mother Nature goes on the rampage, no amount of prepping, or tech, or mad pharma solutions are going to help you, take it from me. There are only two things to pin your hopes on: 1) your community; 2) Gaia herself. Both are part of the same thing really, because it’s about having the humility to understand we can’t control nature. We think we can. We’re about to learn the hard way I fear, that the planet isn’t passive, but alive and kicking.
 
What a large cohort of moderns fail to grasp with their plans and agendas and insurance policies, is that we are only ever scanning our landscape from the most limited viewpoint. We are like ants on a broken tree trunk in a river, desperately making complex infrastructures which, if they were sitting on an agar plate on a sturdy lab desk, might work. But they are not. They are floating on the elements, utterly at their mercy. And there’s a cascade ahead. Can’t you see it yet?
 
So, contrary to what most off-grid advisors tell you, I say survival is not so much about stocking up on tins of beans. It’s about collaboration and relationships, not just with people, but with the planet, our intuition, and with other dimensions too. It always has been.

Neighbours
 
“Come for lunch and power your phone,” the text message read. “I’ve put a veggie cottage pie in the oven. Our generator’s on.”
 
One of the most unexpected blessings about this piece of land, something I never asked for nor even really wanted, are the neighbours, every single one of whom is kind and helpful. Since the pandemic began, more people have hidden themselves away up here to avoid the masked and curfewed tediousness of life in the towns, but only the hardest of the hardcore remain in the winter.  Farmer Quilo took his cows down a few weeks ago. But Julia and Brian are still here, plus Segundo and Maribel up the hill.
 
After my feast at the almost apocalypse-proof fortress of the Brits (goats for milk and cheese, hens for eggs, greenhouse with veg, three kilowatts of power at the ready, freezer full of food), I waded gratefully home under a darkening sky with two full power packs in my pocket. “It’s not good to be without a phone in this weather,” Brian had said earlier. Wise words indeed. I turned the last corner to home. My land reclined below me like the Snow Queen. All three huts were sinking deeper and deeper into the white. The hen coop now resembled a Christmas cake with far too much icing.
 
I said almost apocalypse-proof. Almost. Nothing and no one is bulletproof. You see, generators need fuel. And in this type of weather when the grass has disappeared, animals need feed. This all has to be brought in somehow. Yet the roads were undriveable even with a four-by-four. Good job we have neighbours with tractors, and good job my car was still in the village.

Mission Almost Impossible
Our supply run was a collaborative effort. I needed hen food and clean laundry, my neighbours needed diesel and goat food. It was an endeavour involving Brian driving his tractor through knee-high snow to my semi-submerged car, digging my car out, a band of hikers to help push the vehicle back onto the road, and a hair-raising car sledge through the village past the crashed municipal dustcart, and down into the town.
 
We looked a little incongruous down there in our wellies and snow pants, what with the small iceberg sitting on my car roof and all. But we loaded up regardless of the stares. By the time we drove back up the mountain, my car was so full it was plodding up almost as slowly as the cows. I parked lower this time and waited for Brian to bring the tractor down. Our supplies filled the link box, so Julia and I trekked behind with rucksacks feeling fairly Sherpa-ish. By the time we reached my house, dusk was eating into everything. As I waded back to my land with my laundry, I watched Julia board the link box as Brian guided his motorised steed down and up the hill.
 
I won’t lie. I was kind of over it by then.

In the Zone
 
Then after about a week it happened. Just like that. The snow was somewhere between knee and thigh height. The roofs were all holding up. I had made little paths to walk through, and I had shelved all my barn building plans. An otherworldly peace had drifted down upon everything, and I had reached that glorious place in any adjustment, be it a Camino hike or barn renovation: I was in what is often referred to as The Zone.
 
I love The Zone. It’s this beautiful space of surrender where everything suddenly becomes easy (basically because we’ve stopped fighting against reality). The body-mind system has absorbed a new set of parameters, and miraculously (as is its way) developed new strength and stamina. It calibrates to feel the heat and the cold differently (I never thought I’d say 0 degrees is warm, but hey I did this month). Suddenly we see all the benefits of our new situation, and a divine calm descends.
 
I began to love sitting by the fire and writing in my hut. And the glorious snowy walks. The sunrises and sunsets were the stuff of fantasy movies. Then there was the tranquillity. It fell over everything, a soft white magical cloak of silence. I talked to the trees and the stars and the mountains, and lost myself there. The human world was now buried deep below and I missed it not one single bit. It was bliss. By day ten I didn’t want Snow World to end.

Adjustment
I suppose we could say another kind of snowstorm has descended over the West right now, with ‘normality’ now long buried, be it dead or alive. It’s been a year, give or take, since this all began. Some folk are thriving. Others are not. It looks like there’s a fair bit of adjustment failure going on, though.
 
Modern fingertips are bleeding as they slide down the icy precipice of the known and into the drifts of the unknown, clutching at what seem to me to be the most precarious experimental solutions, with no heed of the potential consequences. There’s a desperate clinging to the old ways, a refusal to adapt or even change the smallest part of a lifestyle. Perhaps more importantly it’s the psychological ruts that few seem to want to get out of. The West still seems stuck in its 20th century problem-versus-solution mindset, its war mentality, and its long-proven-disastrous attempt to try and annihilate anything inconvenient that it doesn’t understand. Surrender isn’t something I’ve heard much talk about regarding the pandemic. Most would think that means giving up.
 
Yet you ask anyone who has returned victorious from a huge physical challenge, be they Olympic medallists, mountaineers, or round-the-world sailors, ask how they know they’ve turned the corner, how they kept going, how they made it, or why they even do it in the first place, and they’ll always mention surrender and getting into The Zone.
 
***
 
Today the snow has melted. I’m about to get my car. But oh, the irony! It is the very day we go into lockdown again. Something tells me we’re being asked to sit with ourselves for a while. To stop and think a lot more than we have. To contemplate and envision something more beautiful, more loving, more trust-filled and sacred than that which went before. There are a million other more inspiring futures out there than the stale excuse for life being peddled by the old brains. All that frantic busy-ness, all that superficial crap, all the frivolousness and waste, all that flying from A to B and plundering a stack of resources in the process...
 
People are uncomfortable with stillness because they can’t run away from themselves. And yet, if they could just sit with the storm a while, sink into the white of their being, and dig a little deeper, they might find a far more valuable treasure buried down there. They might find they very thing they were looking for in all the wrong places. They might even get into The Zone.

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 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 words and would like to express that you want them 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.

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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