Something weird happens when you follow your intuition, take the leap, and move onto the land. Things go wrong.
 
Two friends have recently bought land and moved onto their new spaces. One is in a tent. One is in a stone house. Both are essentially camping at the moment. Both have just been tested. A fire burned down the first friend’s fence within a week or two of him buying it. The other amiga is stuck in a mire of water and power issues. The solar power system isn’t working as it should, and the creek has dried up. Classic! I remember when I first arrived on my land here in northern Spain and was tested just the same way. I couldn’t get my van into the land at first, and then I couldn’t get it out. It’s still stuck there to this very day!
 
But why the hell does this happen? Did we all make a mistake? I mean we listened to the trees and rocks and rivers, we’ve come in with all the best intentions, we’ve acted on our hunches and taken a chance. Why are we now being slapped in the face?

​El Cimiento
 
It all came back to me this month as northern Spain entered a heatwave like no other I’ve seen since I arrived here. We are usually privy to a thick helping of mist in June and July, but not this year. The clouds have fled the skies as though they’re infected with something, giving the sun a free pass to scorch the earth.
 
I sheltered at the door of my barn and watched the sierra. It stretched brown and sharp like a rusty saw blade. And there in the middle of that view was Jose Manuel dressed in a bright pink t-shirt, scythe over his shoulder, surrounded by floored nettles. He was a portly, conspicuously un-grim reaper.
 
“Primero hacemos el cimiento.” Jose Manuel placed the scythe against the barn wall and grabbed the pick instead. He stood back and took a nice deep swing at the ground.  Cimiento is not cement as I first thought when I heard the word, ears pricking up in alarm. Cimiento is the foundations.
 
Pulling my hat down, I ran up onto the rocks. The limestone was already throwing the heat back at us aggressively. “Aqui aqui” I pointed to where I wanted my wall. “Con una curva!” Swinging my arm in an arc, I indicated where my curving wall would be.
 
“Una curva, ah si.” A soupçon of a smile slid into the far corners of Jose Manuel’s mouth as he bent down and hauled a boulder out of the way.
 
It was about midday, but the sun was only just limbering up in preparation for the serious mid-afternoon heat rally. Already I could feel my t-shirt gluing to my skin. How Jose Manuel could dig in this weather was beyond me. I knew this first day was going to be arduous. The foundation always is. The undergrowth is cleared. A trench is dug. And then the most enormous rocks are shunted into place. It’s difficult and slow. It’s a test. Because as Jose Manuel will tell you, if the foundation is right, the wall will stand for years and years. If not? It will fall.
 
The large frame of my stone mason vecino dripped in the heat. We both turned redder and redder. It was a flaying, and I wondered if I might simply burst into flames like a pine tree in a forest fire. As the land baked, I remembered back to the beginning of this adventure. I remembered The Test.

The Test
 
It was 2018, and I’d just purchased my land. My noodle was rammed full of hilarious schedules and plans of course. I’d concocted all sorts of visions of me living on my land in the summer in my camper, which was going to double up as a materials carrier, and a beach dwelling, and, and, and...
 
Then within about two weeks of completing the small driveway, my van blew up. It never recovered. And so I was transportless. Unable to move. Unable to carry materials. In order to buy anything I had to walk a mile to the now conspicuously shopless village, and then either hitch a lift or call a taxi to the town. If I wanted to go further, I had to catch a very infrequent bus from said town. A trip that would have taken me forty minutes in a car was taking about four hours. Before long, I was gnashing my teeth in frustration.
 
But why had this happened to me? I’d followed every hunch and listened to every frickin’ leaf and pebble. How ashamed I was to have to ask my dad if he could help me buy a car. How fortunate I was that he could and would. Even so, for a good two years I would glare at my nettle-throttled campervan and yell, “But why? Why did you do that?” I couldn’t see a single good reason for the betrayal even if I did enjoy driving my new car.
 
Roll on 2020 and the world suddenly stopped turning. Borders closed. Ferries drifted to a halt. No one was going anywhere. How glad I was I had a reliable car then! My old van always needed mechanics, and for about a year they were mostly closed. Deep snows came. We were cut off for a month. What a stroke of good fortune I’d stored my food supplies in that wretched campervan!
 
I learned. The Test is tough love. It arises because we’re being shown where the weak points in our structural setup are. And at some point in the future we’re going to be reminded of this test. If we deal with it well and solve the issue at hand, our future self is going to thank us.

Structural Issues
 
Nothing material exists without structure. Plants, bodies, roads, cells, websites, rivers, and dry stone walls all have structures. It’s the framework that supports life in the physical world. Structure often gets a bad rap in the floaty, energy-focussed realm of what was once the New Age. But without structure, there is nowhere for energy to flow, no platform for ideas to be expressed, no trellis for a vision to grow upon. Nothing manifests. It’s all just a blob of wishy washy blah blah blah that oozes about and clogs the drains.
 
Understanding structure is one of the things that makes the difference when you begin any kind of project. It’s the art of seeing what supports what, and how things develop and strengthen. There is an order things move in, and it’s there for a reason, because one part of a creation supports the next. You can’t tile your roof before you’ve installed the joists, so it makes no sense to spend hours measuring exactly how many tiles you will need before you’ve even bought your timbers.
 
Misunderstanding how structure develops is what causes so many problems for people when they first move to the country or try and build themselves a home. Folks spend far too long worrying about details in their project which are a long way from fundamental. Yes in theory you could plan everything down to the last detail. But do come back to me and let me know how you got on with that, because in my experience there are 101 factors we don’t see until we’re deeply within the process. Life isn’t static. All sorts of things are going to happen that we couldn’t ever imagine. Things we thought were vital prove not to be, and vice-versa. If the past two years didn’t teach the West that, nothing will.

Where’s the glory?
 
The foundation is of course the first thing to be built in any structure. It’s the prep work, and it’s a long way from the sparkle and glory we expect when we’re building. It’s a bit tedious, it’s difficult, it’s time-consuming, and worst of all it will never even be seen. No one will ever come to your house and say, “ooh nice foundations!” They will never congratulate you on your plumbing or your waste water system either. These are the fundamentals I’m afraid the ignorant take for granted.
 
So get used to it if you’re creating anything. Before you start there’ll probably be a test, more likely a whole flock of them. It might be that nothing appears for a while. Things won’t go to plan. And you’ll have nothing to share on Instagram. If you’re doing it right, you’ll be digging the ground, straightening out a lot of issues, stabilising and solidifying. Hopefully you’ll be learning plenty too, especially that you are not in control, that your plans are a bit of a joke, that your head has never got it covered, and that building anything is a lot harder than it looks.
 
Nevertheless despite it all, I expect like me you’ll still wind up thinking the whole thing is a laugh, definitely a lot better than that other synthetic existence where you are never really tested in a positive developmental way. That dull grey expanse of doom where the learning curve has long flatlined, and your “excitement” is some riskless virtual pursuit cordoned off from the oxygen-replete heart of real life.

The sun finally began to pull behind my barn, giving the shadows space to stretch. They grew quickly now from stunted slithers into umbrageous towers. A stone wall was on the verge of existence now, the foundation stones lining the jaw of the earth like molars.
 
Jose Manuel dropped his stone chisel onto the dirt. “Marcho!” he said, which was how he always ended the day. Sometimes he said it after three hours, sometimes after five. But when marcho was uttered, the work day was done. That particular heat-lashed day, I was done too quite frankly. I felt as though I’d been in the ring with a fire monster. Even so, I was satisfied. The foundation was in and in well, which was a very good thing. Because hey, this was going to be quite a wall.

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“Eggs. Let’s see. Erm, I think these are fertilised.”
 
Julia’s hand hovered uncertainly over the egg holder. About a dozen eggs of varying sizes and hues hunkered there next to the aga. My neighbour arbitrarily picked out five as though pulling numbers out of a lucky dip. I placed them in cardboard box and shrugged.
 
“We’ll see,” I said, not particularly convinced they’d turn into anything.
 
Such was the blithe act of fate that separated those five eggs from a future in a frying pan. Yet this wasn’t the only random act in a succession of randomness that conspired to create life. I suppose it all started with the fox.

A brush with death
It was a soupy old day back in late May. My mountain was lost in a brume so cloying the rocks had come out in a cold sweat. I was pottering in the kitchen hut trying to avoid it all when I heard a terrible squawking from the chicken run. The last time I’d heard such a din was when the wildcat called by.
 
I reached the run to find a sleek, rust-grey fox pinning Priscilla hen to the floor. The coop was swirling with white feathers, and my other two hens were running around, well...like headless chickens, I suppose. Fox looked up. Then she looked down, undecided as to whether to attempt to eat Priscilla before escaping, or not.
 
Fight, flight, freeze. Priscilla chose the latter. She lay paralysed beneath her executioner, wing to brow, like a platinum victim in a tacky murder story. After some grappling, I wrenched open the wire and clambered into the run. Now it was fox’s turn to panic. Throwing herself repeatedly at the upper rim of the run, Fox somehow found a gap between the wire and the bird netting, and with an agility that awed me, she slid through. The last I saw of her was a bushy tail and her hind legs disappearing into the mist.
 
Incredibly, Priscilla stood up at this point and waddled over to me. I checked her over, amazed to find her unscathed, no doubt saved by her feathers. By the look of the coop she’d possessed enough to fill a duvet. But the event had etched a deep impression on her chicken mind. She spent the evening standing about looking very thoughtful. Do hens consider things like the fleeting gift of life? Do they have life missions they want to complete? I’m not a hen, so I can’t say anything for sure. All I know is the very next day Priscilla turned broody.

I didn’t want any more chickens, which is why when my neighbours passed by I asked Julia, “Would you like some chicks if she sits on the eggs?”
 
Julia scratched her ponytail absently. “Hmm. Yes, all right, why not?”
 
You see, no one was particularly invested here. It was a “whatever” kind of an act. Hence that evening five random eggs were picked from the egg holder like Countdown numbers (I’ll have two from the top and three from the bottom please Carol). I hustled them away to my land. As darkness engulfed the hen coop, I pushed the eggs under Priscilla. Her chicken eyes widened in joy.
 
Death and life
We usually say life and death because we see ourselves as living before we pop our clogs. But I think it’s the other way round, we have to die before we live. Only when something is lost, can something new be born.
 
The following week I went away and left my hens with my neighbours. During that time Frida (Priscilla’s mum) died – or rather disappeared into the woods never to be seen again – which is an appropriate ending for my most adventurous chicken. As always when one of the roost departs, there’s an eerie chicken-shaped gap. Hilde hen, bottom of the pack yet ironically the longest survivor, wandered forlornly around my land on my return. Frida her playmate was missing and Priscilla was currently useless as a friend. Despite moving coop twice, my snowy Queen of the Picos was still sitting resolutely on her eggs squawking at all those who dared approach.
 
Without dear Frida, a bird vacuum opened up. Suddenly there was a lack in our strange community. Something missing. The winds of destiny were swirling, drawing new life into the space...

Three weeks. That’s all it takes. It’s an absurdly short amount of time to turn an omelette candidate into a living, breathing, sentient creature. And when you observe it, it sort of blows your mind. I’m a big egg eater, usually munching two a day, so I’m intimate with these perfectly eco-packaged nutrient bombs; the richness of the yolks, the strange gloopiness of the albumin, soft boiled, hard boiled, over-easy or scrambled, I love an egg. When I hold one of these calcium capsules in my hand it always feels a little magical, a little fairy tale.
 
Three weeks. 21 days. Priscilla sat calm and happy while Hilde moped in sorrow. I began to pray that something would come out of them just to give Hilde some friends.

The Great Hatch
On the eve of day 21 I peered into the coop, pushing Priscilla off the eggs to see if anything was happening. Nothing. No noise. No crack. I groaned and shut the coop door. I won’t lie, I wasn’t exactly looking forward to the Great Hatch. The last time I’d found myself embroiled in this business one poor chick couldn’t break out of the egg, and the late Frida hen had pecked it to death. Such harrowing atrocity wasn’t what I’d expected in a cutesy chick birth. Then again, these eggs could be duds like with my first broody hen. Perhaps nothing would happen? A part of me began to hope so.
 
But life doesn’t hinge around our gumptionless hopes, or what part of us feels. What manifests as our lives derives from a responsive web of clear intention, willpower, and sheer luck, which we share with many other beings. I wasn’t the only one with a horse in this race, and definitely not the most invested. My intention and willpower were nothing compared to Priscilla’s or indeed the life forces currently awakening inside the eggs.
 
The next morning I returned. Then I heard it. A distinct tapping sound. I bit my lip. Breaking out of an egg is a slow old process fraught with hazard and difficulty. For your information (should you find yourself in an egg one day) it takes a good 24 hours to hack your way out of an eggshell. So prepare yourself for a marathon, not a sprint.
 
By evening I saw the top of one of the eggs on the floor of the coop. That meant the hatchling was half in half out...Gulp. Later I returned with bated breath. Gently I pushed Priscilla up. She squawked but didn’t peck. Then I saw it! A golden fluffball hiding beneath her. I could hear more tapping too.
 
Over the course of the next three days the eggs hatched one by one. Unlike the previous batch, this lot seemed to have read the instruction manual before embarking on their great escape, each one scissoring off the egg top smoothly, then step by step demolishing the rest. By day 23 we had four little chicks tweeting and buzzing round the coop. What a motley crew they were! Every single one was a different colour: gold, yellow, brown, and black. The smallest one looked like a baby penguin.

Random Flukes
What this haphazard jumble of fluffballs will turn into, I dread to think. Last time it was Priscilla the brahma after all. But one thing I do know is that life can be very random at times. Each of those chicks is here only thanks to a succession of flukes, and could easily have turned into a tortilla instead. Had the fox not broken into the coop, had Julia’s hand swayed a little to the left or right, had Priscilla not sat so patiently and determinedly in a time of great upheaval, had the shell been too hard or too brittle, had the cockerel fired blanks, had I simply said no, and had no doubt a million other factors that merged and met and twisted into the thread of life not happened, then those chicks wouldn’t exist.
 
Creation Spaces
Napoleon Bonaparte allegedly said something along the lines of, “I’d rather have a lucky general than a skilful one.” Whether or not he really said that, I know what he means. Most of us understand that without the oil of good fortune greasing the wheels of our effort, we'd be grinding to an ignominious standstill. So sometimes in times of chaos it can seem our intention or resolution is of little value. What’s the point in trying if it’s all down to luck, after all?
 
But what is luck exactly? A certain serendipity may be the happy link in a chain of reactions that makes a dream appear, yet in truth it’s more often our foggy intentions, our wishy-washy focus, and our lack of gumption or belief that ruptures the process. Sometimes life does say no. Sometimes it crashes our worlds to force us out of a rut. Sometimes road blocks appear and divert us onto a new path. But just as often life waits and watches. Do we know what we want? Are we willing to go the distance for it? Do we believe in ourselves and value ourselves enough to go for it? Life is sentient and interconnected. In some ways I think life is our Gaian self. It’s the natural field of our existence which merges with that of all the humans and creatures we come into contact with. Other beings are a part of us just as we are a part of them, and whoever holds the most resolute intention makes it happen, no matter how small or feathered they are. Yes, we share our creation spaces, which is why it’s important who exactly we’re sharing them with.
 
So kudos to Priscilla Queen of the Picos this month, for knowing what she wanted, committing to it, and winning hands down in the reality creation space of our home. Not that she’s the only winner, mind you. Look at those cutesters bringing a ray of chick sunshine into my day!

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My blog, and the entire Mud Home website is possible only due to the ongoing support of everyone on Patreon. If you’d like to chip in to keep this website going so that everyone can read it, head over to my newsfeed. All patrons get a free monthly video of my progress (or not) from my land. It’s where I share my ups and downs, and what’s happening in real time.

“People hid here in the civil war,” Farmer Quilo had told me one sun-gilded autumn day the year I moved onto my land. The leaves on the ash trees were starting to shrivel and the landscape was going to seed. “All these barns and huts,” he swept his arm around the yellowing vista like a Wellington boot-wearing emcee. “People ran up here from the town to escape.”
 
I stared at the barns scattered over the hillsides, all in differing states of disrepair, and imagined them harbouring frightened families. None of them contained fireplaces or chimneys, so how did folk survive?
 
“They just lit the fire straight in the hut. Terrible smoke of course. That’s why the wall is black in this one,” he said, pointing at the soot-covered stones in what was to become my temporary kitchen. “Negro, muy negro.” He shook his head.
 
“Hacian queso tambien. Queso ahumado,” he said, pointing to the stone shelves at the top of the wall and explaining how they’d smoked cheeses on them.
 
Unlike many around here, Quilo loves talking about the history of the landscape. He was a miner for much of his life, so he has a penchant for digging below the surface. There are so many stories related to my land, I’ll save the rest for other writings. But suffice to say, the threads of human history run back a fair way with these barns, which are somewhere around 200 years old according to the locals.

I’d wanted to renovate an old building since my mud home days in Turkey. I could see it had the potential to be a nature-sensitive way to build. It’s recycle-reuse-repair on a house-size scale after all. A virgin habitat is not being destroyed to make way for yet another human property. The structure already exists. It’s simply unused. Unloved. And in need of some TLC. Right?
 
Yeees. That was my high-minded opinion from the sun-thrashed windows of my mud hut in hot dry southern Turkey. It was a time and place where very little of the old was being salvaged. Indeed one often felt it was deliberately buried. The old was where dark secrets, hardship, and poverty lurked. It was often deemed better to submerge it under a ton of concrete, rather than unearth Allah only knew what. In many ways this is the story of Spain’s lost villages too. Painful histories lurk in the stones and under the terracotta tiles. Though rather than sink them under a dam(n) project or a motorway, the pueblos of Spain’s interior are largely just abandoned. The past is left to rot*.

Be Careful What You Wish For:
Sooner than I could have ever imagined, my high-minded renovation idea turned into a reality. I left my mud hut in Turkey and moved to the north of Spain. A piece of land drew me to her. It held three ancient huts. The larger structure was an old barn with stone walls wavier than a winter sea. It was a rickety nobbly old thing, stuffed full of musty sheep’s wool, rotting straw, and wolf spiders. The roof was hanging on by the skin of its rotting rafters, tied into existence by a thick bit of wire round an ash tree trunk.
 
I will never forget sitting under one of those ash trees back in 2018, the day before I put in an offer. The moon was exactly half full and half empty, and it rose from the east like a distant ship. As the light drained out of the sky, I stared and stared at the front of the barn. There was a significant crack from top almost to bottom. The walls were splaying outwards. The thing was only surviving out of habit, and the task of repairing it looked utterly impossible.
 
I remember saying to the tree, “I don’t have the money or expertise to do this. It’s a massive job.”
 
I remember the tree replying, “It will all work out, you’ll see.”
 
Thus I bought the land and became the new guardian.
 
But trees aren’t the only ones that talk. Buildings whisper too. They hold the stories of the past just as the land does. Spirits linger in the nooks and corners, while old energies reverberate about the spaces. Did my barn even want to be renovated? Or did he prefer to crumble into the dirt in peace, taking his secrets with him?

Once I’d moved onto the land, I sat with my barn. I ran my hands over the old stones. They were choking under the yoke of some of the most poorly applied cement mortar you are likely to see. I sniffed the air and studied the wattled mezzanine where the sheep’s wool was stored. I listened to more stories, and heard more secrets. But my barn never felt creepy to me. What he felt was excited, as though he were looking forward to a bit of razzmatazz and glory.
 
“Ha! I’m your woman!” I said to Barn. “Razzmatazz is my middle name.”
 
Had Barn possessed hands, he would have punched the air.
 
Restoration, Conversion, or Transmutation?
It was September 2020 when the roof was ripped off. I had a dream I’d co-formed with my aging stable. He was going to retain his character and still be unabashedly barn-like, yet with majesty and…razzmatazz. But once the roof was off, it became clear Barn was neither straight nor square. At all. He was a trapezium. Some walls were bowing out. Some had no mortar at all and were just resting on the limestone rock of the land. Some still sported the earthen mortars of old.
 
“Is it safe?” I’d asked Brian, who was doing the roof and happened to be an engineer.

“It’s been sitting here for two hundred years,” he said. “And if the roof is on, it will no doubt sit a hundred-odd more at the very least.”
 
We scoured the walls and the cracks. It was all sound even if it didn’t look that way at first sight. I breathed a sigh of relief. There would be no need to take walls down and rebuild them. Barn could stay intact, just with a new hat on.
 
There were issues with this of course. Adding a roof to a trapezium meant that somewhere it wouldn’t sit straight. In the end we decided to tilt the roof, so that the east-facing most visible side lined up, but the other side didn’t. Naturally whenever anyone sees it, the first almost parrot-like comment is, “But it’s not straight.” I feel Barn glower. I try not to glower along. Because some things are a lot more important than a straight line. Things like personalities, characters and souls. I don’t want to live in a box. Barn doesn’t want to be a box either! Those stones have been sitting there for two hundred years. They deserve some respect.
 
Nonetheless I worried. Was I doing Barn justice? There were things that didn’t quite go how I wanted, and that I’ll later no doubt change. The plastic drainpipe is sacrilege, but I couldn’t source or transport metal ones, and it was simply too urgent to mess about with rainwater seeping into the interior. Despite these bungles though, when I look at my stonework and mortar work, I feel pride. It took months and months for me to dig out all the old concrete by hand, then mix tons of fresh lime mortar by hand too, and repoint adding bling and sparkle here and there.

Non-Aligned
So those hoping for a strict restoration will be disappointed. The past doesn’t want to be resurrected here, not even with a bombastic gloss over it. But it doesn’t want to be buried either. Nor forgotten and discarded like a geriatric uncle in a home. It definitely doesn’t want cement thrown all over it. The ghosts need to move on to better futures, and the energies be free to transmute. In fact I don’t think there’s such a thing as a restoration really. All history and all memory is reconstructed every time we think about it. Our pasts are in permanent flux.**
 
However, those hoping for some slick Grand Designs barn conversion thing with modern fads dictating, and the past all painted over, will be disappointed too. This isn’t slick. Or straight. And definitely not fashionable (thank God!). I wouldn’t call it a barn conversion. I’m not into converting anyone to anything, even if people project that onto me. I’m into empowerment and freedom and people standing on their own feet and in their own hearts and connecting with the amazing environment they live in. So you see, this is something else. It’s a barn transmutation. Because barns are beautiful, fundamental, crucial structures in our world. They are earthy and grainy animal places that underpin our very survival. This is a Barn transmutation because Barn has changed me just as much as I’ve changed him, and I see now we are both the better for it.

So here we are. I haven’t done it yet. The interior holds more work than I dare contemplate right now, and knowing me I’ll fart-arse around with the exterior plenty more once that’s done. Even so, we narrator-builders must celebrate the completion of an episode. Because that’s what these projects are: long sagas filled with chapters.
 
As I turn this month's page Barn is finally glowing. The non-aligned roof is testimony to the incongruity between modern standards and organic growth. The new windows framed in the old oak roof timbers depict clearly what supports what. And those ancient stone walls built to no code nowhere, without foundations or cement or drainage or damp courses, well...after two hundred years we see. It took a year of repointing by a hag on a hill, but they’re basically as good as the day they were made, supporting a new roof, a new interior floor, and so much more.
 
So Barn is having the last laugh here, with a brand new future ahead that no one ever expected. He isn’t a sad story that’s been run away from, or a shameful secret to be whitewashed. He’s a distinguished outbuilding that has sheltered animals and people and food in hard times, that has survived two world wars, a civil war, Franco, and now even modernity and hyper-capitalism. He has bucked the system and lived to tell the tale. For a while there it looked pretty desperate with the roof all but collapsing on him and no one taking care. But hey, it can all change in an instant in this life of wonders. True he has wonks and bulges and wrinkles and faults, as do I and you. We have lived through many adventures after all. But we are not simply the result of our pasts and definitely not just the victims or perpetrators of them. We are something far wider and broader than our histories, with the possibility to transmute at any minute.
 
Anything can happen. At any time. Turn the page my friends, it’s another chapter. And no, a handful of billionaires are not writing it. Or building it. We are. Every minute. Every day. With everything we do and say. And it looks like we’re neither into restoration nor renovation thank you very much. We’re into transmutation.

​* This is not a criticism of the coping strategies of largely traumatised populations. None of us wants to scratch off the scab of an old wound. All nations deal with their inevitably uncomfortable pasts in different ways: whitewashing, forgetting, burying, abandoning, or rewriting with pomp and glory and exporting wholesale (like good old England, for example). And all are hyper-sensitive about that fact:)

**Oliver Sacks has made plenty of studies on the rather fluid nature of memory, as mentioned in his books, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, or An Anthropologist on Mars, or as outlined in brief in the article below.
http://www.fmsfonline.org/?news2013update=Oliver%20Sacks%20on%20Memory
 
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​In this Earth Whispering exploration I share with you my own experiences and means of hearing the land around me, plus how I follow her nudges. This project is on a tiered funding basis, so you can choose what you pay. Just like all my courses it will be updated and added to as time goes by, so hop on now to get full benefit.

"This really assures me that I’m on the right path and not alone in this way of thinking." -Vin

“Ouch!” The carpenter bangs his head on my door.
 
“It’s a very low ceiling," he looks up, marginally horrified.
 
Here we go again. I’ve heard it all before. I roll my eyes hither and feel my diaphragm sink with weary. There are many reasons I just don’t like visitors, so many in fact I could stack them all up on top of each other and create a spiky, impenetrable rampart. But the self-appointed design consultancy has got to come close to the top. Sigh. My house is designed for me. Not you. Not him. Not them. Thus it’s perfectly adapted for anyone around the 1 metre 65 mark, which incidentally is above the average for women worldwide, and depending on which country, men too. In fact the only people it’s not very suitable for is tall Northern Europeans. Why this is considered my problem, I’ve no idea.

I suffered the same disparagement about my Mud Home in Turkey of course. I love low ceilings. They provide a wonderful womb-like feel. They are cosy and cutesy and engender happy sensations within me. Sure not everyone likes them, but they can build their own house how they want, can’t they?
 
As I stand and view the raised hackles of the sierra through my new windows, my old mud home rises before me like an earthen genie. I remember throwing down the last row of earthbags all those years ago, when someone had asked, “but what will you do if you get a tall boyfriend?”
 
Slapping the butt of the earthbag, I’d furrowed my brow before piercing them with a long sharp stare. “So I’m supposed to design my 6-metre diameter mud house for an ethereal boyfriend who may or may not be tall, and who will presumably spend the greater part of his time in this house horizontal?”
 
The reply sank into the earthbags and reverberated there. The house snickered to itself while the humans shook their heads at the contrary mud-chitect of round.

Of course, this is just how it is when you dare to step over the loveless ruler line gouged into the concrete foundation of modern architecture. Reams of useless opinion are rolled out over and over again like a tired old IKEA carpet. As with everything else, there’s a kind of mass brainwashing regarding architecture’s one-size-fits-all conveyor belt standard. Doors have to be 200 centimetres high. Ceilings have to be 210 centimetres. Bedrooms have to be up, and kitchens have to be down. Windows have to be this or that shape. Stairs have to have steps 18 centimetres apart. And so it goes on in tedious, magnolia monotony. I can hardly keep typing I’m so bored.
 
A word from the hobbit realm
The tyranny of the tall in architecture started with Le Corbusier, the French Swiss architect of the 1930s responsible for so many of the unusable urban spaces in the world today. Unusable by the majority I should say, because contrary to the prevailing world view most of us aren’t six feet tall. By a long shot. But lucky you if you happen not to be vertically (or physically) challenged in any way, because with the exception of air travel, the modern world has been designed for you. The rest of us hobbits simply have to suck it up, pull out the ladders, climb this, hang on that, strain here, and risk injury there. That top kitchen cupboard holding the blender is inaccessible. The “simple” act of changing a light bulb is an endeavour involving a rickety kitchen stool, a gymnast’s balance, and a cricked neck. Even a trip to the supermarket leaves many of us giving up on that top shelf entirely.
 
Door handles, sinks and taps, mirrors, windows, car seat belts, staircases, banisters, kitchen cupboards, curtain rails. The whole lot was designed for a six-footer. And most people don’t think anything of this. It’s perfectly acceptable in the World-At-Large mind that most of us have to climb many times a day to reach things. Yet, if someone has to duck just once in a house visit, it’s the end of the frigging world!
 
I like tall people, honest!
Please hear me out though. I’m not tall-ist. I like tall people as much as short people. Gandalf is as good as Frodo. I don’t think all houses should be designed for elves or that we must cancel Le Corbusier and ban him posthumously from Twitter. I expect the chap had a good idea or two lurking somewhere on his bookshelf, even if most of us have to stand on a beer crate to reach it. No, tall is fine. And the exceptionally tall, the basketball players and seven-footers, have their own height-ist crosses to bear. Mirrors at waist height. Sinks by their knees. Backache replaces knee ache.
 
My point is merely that the overriding joy of building your own house is that you make it how you darn well like. It’s the one space especially for you on this entire planet and thus can cater to your every quirk. It saddens me a little though that this doesn’t prevent many of us owner-builders from submitting to the tenets of the bog standard. Or from feeling inadequate in the face of raised eyebrows. Even a mud queen of truculence like myself will spend a night or two worrying before throwing a comment out of the window.

“It’s so much warmer at the top of my house, so I want to put my living room upstairs,” said a friend of mine who is as introvert as myself.
 
“Yes, I’m doing that. It makes no sense how they do it, sitting in what is essentially a cellar.”
 
“But the architect said no one would step in my house if I did!”
 
We both rolled our eyes in unison. “Oh no, that would be a shame now, wouldn’t it?” I said. We fell about laughing. Not everyone wants to entertain guests. Not everyone is a family with 2.4 kids either. Or a couple. Or mobile. In fact not one human on this planet is standard. Most people have simply learned to adapt to a world not designed for them.
 
Individutecture
So folks! Why not reclaim our world from the standardised, creatively impaired, moronically dysfunctional functionality of the 20th century? We can’t buy everything we read in House and Garden wholesale at the expense of our inner yearning, our instinct, and our inspiration. All those beautiful words start with ‘in’. This is what so much of the Western way has got wrong. The inner is as important and rich as the outer, and it holds the keys to why we even came to planet Earth in the first place.
 
These days I start to realise that one of the “reasons” I came to Earth was to make quirky natural living spaces hand-in-hand with the land. It’s not what I was taught to do. It’s not what anyone told me I should do. Some people even say I do it all wrong. Yet I love it. It makes my heart sing.

As I jigsaw my bed platform into strange shapes and build a split level kitchen (“What? You can’t do that!”), I feel the life force inside me rushing to my fingers. My heart flutters. My mind whirrs. It feels so good. I see mud walls and curling couches, and I can touch my ceiling by standing on tiptoe. Everyone except children would have to duck to enter my home, because I left the cow entrance in place. Good. Be present if you enter my world my friend. This is the barn of broken rules.
 
Le Corbusier would turn in his grave of course. My olde worlde restoration is everything he wanted to banish from the face of modern design. But I’m afraid that’s just too bad because you are below ground Le Corbusier, and I am still above. My kitchen is up. My bathroom is down. I’m doing my best to eradicate every straight line I can find. Because the idea there can be a right or wrong in home design needs to die a swift, conclusive death.

Incomparable
People wonder what my name means sometimes. Atulya. It was given to me by a wise swami in Tamil Nadu many moons ago. Atulya, as my Indian readers will know, is Sanskrit for "incomparable". Naturally I love it:)) But these ancient Sanskrit names aren't there for our egos. They refer to basic elements of the human being. We are all incomparable. Thus one person’s home creation can never be compared to anyone else’s. This is individutecture. I mean what’s the point of a home if it doesn’t mirror the needs and loves of its unique inhabitants? Book lovers will have reading niches, gamers will have tech basements, dog owners create whole hound-realms, while film lovers enjoy a movie cave. Some people like hot tubs. Others want a cob oven. Some like hammock swinging, others work online and need a decent chair and a table near a plug socket. Some desire big dining tables, others can’t think of anything worse. And so it goes on. And on.
 
The mistaken resale theory
One reason people shy from indulging in their dream design is this absurd myth they’ve picked up somewhere on the road between Homebase and the estate agent regarding resale value. Personally I can’t think of anything worse than designing my home just to “flip” it to a stranger. I’d lose the will to build. But even if that were a consideration…
 
I gaze out of my new windows. The fat orb of the sun moves higher and the clouds bunch hesitantly behind the hills. The skies may be Atlantic but the rays are Mediterranean this spring. My mind returns to that first mud creation back in Turkey. To a mud home on a hill that was generally met with disdain and disbelief.
 
“What will you do if you want to sell your house?” They had asked. “It’s so small!”
 
“Yeah and it’s made of mud. Who wants a mud house?”
 
“Urgh composting toilet. No one would buy it with that!”
 
Hmm. When the fateful day came that I put my mud home up for sale, it didn’t turn out how anyone had thought. The advert garnered 40,000 views in a week. I sold my house that same week to the first beautiful people to visit. And yes incidentally, they were quite small – did I mention that most of the world is? There was no bargaining or messing around. Five other people were waiting to view it that week. Someone was even coming from Germany.
 
You see it doesn’t work the way they’ve told us. We can't copy a lifestyle, or a house, and expect it to work like someone else's. It won't, because there’s only one right way. It's unique. It's heart-filled. And it’s ours.

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If you enjoy my stories consider joining us on Patreon. Your support pays for the running of this website, my virtual help, and my sustenance. A big thank you to all The Mud Sustainers, and everyone chipping in and keeping these posts and articles coming.

​The time to hear the planet is now. Are you in the right place? Are you moving in the best direction for you? In this unusual exploration I share with you my own experiences and means of hearing the land around me, plus how I follow her nudges. This project is on a tiered funding basis, so you can choose what you pay. Just like all my courses it will be updated and added to as time goes by, so hop on now to get full benefit.

"This really assures me that I’m on the right path and not alone in this way of thinking." -Vin

​I was sitting in my bedroom typing into a screen, just like now, when it happened. A shaft of sunlight stretched through the window and onto my feet. It was a cosmic photon corridor that had shimmied 93 million miles, all the way from the sun. I saw small motes rise and fall as they absorbed and reflected the light. Galactic light. Powerful stuff.
 
Suddenly there was a squawk outside, multiple blood-curdling squawks in fact. After that it was all instinct. Throwing my laptop on my bed, I hurled myself out of the door. Seconds expanded into minutes as I absorbed the scene. Red feathers were flying, and my three chickens were running and flapping for dear life. I saw the wildcat. So close. Perhaps four metres from me. He stared directly into me, reading the extent of my authority, green eyes flashing like a pair of feline traffic lights. The anger poured off the creature like sweat. I’d ruined lunch.
 
Cat and human faced each other off for two or three seconds. How sure of himself this animal was! How unwilling to run, and how ready to challenge. Who moved first? Me or Wildcat? I lunged along the path to protect my hens. Wildcat leapt ahead. All of us pelted down past the barn, past the huerta to the power ash tree. The hens (wisely) veered left. I stayed central. Wildcat trotted to the bottom of the land. It was hardly a dash. Certainly not an escape. There, just before the stone wall, the cat turned and hovered. Those eyes. They were steel.
 
I knew Wildcat was hoping the hens would separate. I could see Hilde standing stock-still under a bramble. Priscilla, always last, was loitering by the huerta. Then I spotted Frida gasping at the stone wall...

Earlier this year...
 
“Did you ever see that wildcat again?” a friend had asked me one day back in December.
 
“No. No, I think he’s gone,” I'd replied, suddenly remembering the majestic moggy of the hills.
 
The wildcat of northern Spain is a beautiful creature, with mottled long fur, and a distinctive black ridge that runs along its spine, culminating in a black ringed tail. At a glance it’s not much different from an overfed house cat. But a second glance soon highlights the difference. The gato de montaña is significantly bigger. And those paws are not house cat feet, they’re the matted paws of miniature lion.
 
I first saw Wildcat soon after I bought this land. As I sat and drank in my new world, I would spot the black rings of his tail snaking through the rocks and brambles. Sometimes I’d find huge ‘cat’ poop in the barn too, and assumed he was sleeping there. But of course I’ve now sequestered the barn, turning it into something else. So for two years I haven’t seen him.
 
When my friend had inquired back in December, I’d felt a pang. Was I another one of these wretched habitat stealing humans? So I sat by the power ash tree and asked the hills, “what became of Wildcat? Is he okay?”
 
Did the tom hear me as he snuck over the peaks yonder? Did the trees convey my question? Because three weeks ago who should come prancing out of the creek, but the mountain moggy himself. He raised his wide head when he saw me, eyeing me somewhat scathingly, before strutting over to a rock in the centre of my land. There he basked in feline magnificence, owning the place. I watched and watched, awed by the unshakeable confidence of this animal.
 
“Hello my friend, so good to see you!” I said as I peered at him from my kitchen hut. I never considered Wildcat would attack my hens. Why? Because they’re born under the stars of ridiculous fortune. Nothing has attacked them in the two years they’ve been here. Until this week…

​Last week
The February sun was hammering down that morning. It was hot. T-shirt and shorts hot. The hens were scattered. Wildcat was still loitering at the edge of my land. Waiting. Waiting for a chance. I rushed over to Frida hen. It was obvious she was injured and she collapsed into the grass as I approached. Oh so gently I picked her up to move her out of harm’s way. Wildcat surveyed it all from the rocky perimeter of my land, the black line on his spine rippling.
 
“Hilde, Priscilla, come! Come on! This way!” I yelled as I cradled Frida in my arms and ran up to the kitchen hut. But Hilde and Priscilla were paralysed with terror, their limbic systems dragging them back to the Cretaceous era, when humans didn’t save chickens from anything.
 
Placing Frida by the water bowl, I left her and ran back down to pick up my other two hens. Stomping up the hill, a bird under each arm, I shoved them in the coop before returning to poor Frida. Her beak was opening and closing, searching for air. Her yellow eyes rolled back in her head, the pupils expanding and contracting like dark matter engulfing a world. She convulsed. Her chest heaved. I guessed she was having a heart attack.
 
Grabbing a plastic syringe, I knelt beside her. Oh Frida, the Zen hen, you can’t die now. Not now! Squirting water gently into her gaping beak, I blinked as she swallowed a bit. Then a bit more. The seconds passed. Her eye rolled again, the pupil eating the iris. I squirted more water. She swallowed it. The life inside my bird was fighting, hanging on to its body, staying present. Time inched by. She stayed. For now.
 
I carried Frida to the coop. Her eyes were heavy, the bottom lids white with shock. Yet she stood, as chickens are wont to, even on their last legs. Everything in me said, “don’t call the vet.” So I let go. Time for nature’s intelligence to step in.

Do hens possess empathy and kindness? Most think not, including many of those who rear or treat them. Normally, when a bird in a flock is down like this they will be pecked and attacked by the others. My three hens must be different though, especially Hilde Hen who doesn’t seem to hold a mean bone in her body.
 
Hilde watched the unfolding of events as she always does, like a wise child considering it all deeply. Seemingly understanding her friend’s plight, she perched in the doorway, protecting. When I closed the door that night, torch light checking the status quo, I saw Hilde had given up her spot on the balcony to allow Frida the room to sit comfortably. She never does this. None of them do. But she did that night. Honestly I was moved. This is a hen, yet she has more heart than most people in government.
 
But as I closed the door, I sighed. I could hear Frida rasping. It was all in someone else’s hands now.

Resilience
The next day I opened the coop door, dreading what may or may not come out. Hilde jumped out. Then Priscilla waddled through the door, fat butt struggling to get through. Then I saw her. Frida. She peered out at me. She was still clinging to life, albeit by the skin of her beak.
 
She lived through that day, and ate a little. But she refused to go outside. The world was no longer the safe place it had been. It was now inhabited by awful hairy monsters with claws and teeth. However, fear or no fear, the following morning the will to live took over. Frida stepped gingerly out of the coop, because heck, a hen can’t stay inside forever! I held her gently and checked her belly. It was then I noticed the squashed yellow plum of a bruise spreading over her chest. That she’d not suffered a fatal internal injury was beyond miraculous.
 
On the third day, Frida joined her friends down in the compost heap scratching up bugs. On the fourth she laid an egg. I won’t lie, I was dumbfounded. How can anything recover from such an injury so fast? If I’d had a heart attack four days ago, I wouldn’t be laying anything, I can tell you. Birds are fragile creatures in so many ways, designed for the air more than the land. Yet as with everything Gaia breathes life into, they are designed to recover and regenerate. By day five, Frida had pushed her bad experience to the hinterlands of her focus. Life is there to be lived if you’re a hen.
 
The Time of the Wild
And here we are in 2022, none of us the same people we were two years ago. Just as for Frida, our world is no longer the same place either. The ground is shifting beneath our feet daily, the lines between good and bad, safe and dangerous flickering like fluorescent strips in a power shortage. Friends have come and gone. Institutions are warping, rights and laws bending and buckling like an old car chassis under a crusher. Left is now right, up is down, and the fringe is as large as the centre. Borders are broken and treaties scrapped. This isn’t the time for rigid agendas. The days of pension plans and insurance schemes are disappearing faster than the white rhino. Who knows what’s coming next?
 
So...welcome to the jungle folks, to much of my life since 1997 when I moved to Turkey and was paid millions of lira in plastic bags because inflation was so high. Welcome to the lives of the other half of the world. Welcome to the time of the wild. No diplomas are going to help you here. No title or career or fashionable home decor. Even your bank account is looking insecure. Face facts, the system isn’t going to save you. Your wits, ingenuity, and wild side on the other hand just might.
 
***
Gaia’s Ambassador
As I sat yesterday at the edge of the woodland, the fingers of the hazel branches catching the light and throwing it back at the sky, I closed my eyes and reached out for Wildcat. It was so peaceful in that space. So solid. I sensed the velvety undulations of the hills holding us, and the limestone rock-knuckles protecting. The trees were friends. The birds ecstatic. Then there he was...Wildcat stalking through the meadows, being oh so very wild. Fearless. Sure. An ambassador of Gaia.

Barns may come and go. As do humans and their societies. Land can change hands. Pandemics can have more waves than the Bay of Biscay. And armies may invade. But the Wildcat strolls on regardless. As do the chickens. All of them out there roaming, more sure-footed than the humans right now, so many of whom seem to have forgotten what freedom or living even is.
 
And then it dawns on me. I finally understand as I watch the sun arc ever lower and the shadows stretch ever longer. Maybe they never knew.

My wildcat on a visit three years ago.

For a much more impressive video and some beautiful photos of the northern Spanish wildcat in action head to:
​https://wildwatchingspain.wordpress.com/2014/03/11/wildcat-observation-in-picos-de-europa-spain/
 
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If you enjoy my stories and would like a closer look inside my world, consider joining us on Patreon. My world is precious to me and therefore I don’t share it on social media, it’s all on my private Patreon newsfeed. No matter how much you contribute you’ll have access to a video a month, plus thoughts and musings I don’t wish to share publicly. Your support pays for the running of this website, my virtual help, and my sustenance. A big thank you to all The Mud Sustainers, and everyone chipping in and keeping these posts and articles coming.

The time to hear the planet is now. Are you in the right place? Are you moving in the best direction for you? In this unusual exploration I share with you my own experiences and means of hearing the land around me, plus how I follow her nudges. This project is on a tiered funding basis, so you can choose what you pay. Just like all my courses it will be updated and added to as time goes by, so hop on now to get full benefit.
 
"This really assures me that I’m on the right path and not alone in this way of thinking." -Vin