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.
8 Comments
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. Are you dreaming of the free life? If so, climb aboard my popular free sustainable off-grid preparation course. http://www.themudhome.com/off-grid-prep-course.html
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: 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. “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. |
Atulya K Bingham
Author, Lone Off-Gridder, and Natural Builder. Dirt Witch
"Reality meets fantasy, myth, dirt and poetry. I'm hooked!" Jodie Harburt, Multitude of Ones.
Archives
November 2022
Categories
All
|