THE MUD HOME
  • Home
  • Building
    • Earthbag
    • Earthquakes and earthbag
    • Rubble Trench Foundations
    • Off-grid how to >
      • Off-Grid Prep Course
    • Earth Plaster
    • Lime Wash
    • Mud as Mortar
    • Wattle and Daub
    • Mud Building Blog
  • Books
    • Dirt Witch
    • Mud Ball
    • Mud Mountain The Book
    • An Earthbag House in 7 Days?
  • About
    • Contact
  • Learn Mud
    • Courses
    • Mud Building PDF Package
    • Other Projects
  • Earth Whispering
    • Join the Earth Whispering Exploration
    • MUD MOUNTAIN

Earth Whispering

The Wall

25/6/2021

11 Comments

 
I’d been dreading the front wall of the barn. So enormous. So cracked. And much of it so high up, the top ridge quite broken and needing to be rebuilt. I’d had enough of ladders and wobbling and flirting with broken legs, which is why Jose Manuel had built me a “scaffold” before he’d left last month.
 
June arrived and the sun pulled overhead, ready to make up for lost time. The mountain peaks basked under an open sky. The days stretched into endless pools of light, all but banishing night from our world. The temperature climbed. And the hens looked for shade. I was out of excuses, it was wall time.
 
My first attempt at climbing the scaffold involved plenty of ungainly grunts and groans as I levered myself upwards onto a ladder which had been thrown horizontally across two struts as a walkway. This was level one of the scaffold. Over the course of the first day I foraged for rocks, split them, and faced them where necessary. Then I lifted them from level one, up to level two and finally up onto the top of the wall. That evening, my biceps and thighs let me know I had indeed used them. Even so, a bit of gumption had been released. The next morning I stared hard at that wall and vowed to complete it before the month ended, come rain, shine, or June’s usual disappointing offering of clinging, minging mist.
Picture
The scaffold.
So I mortared the rocks at the top in place and rebuilt the stone columns supporting the roof. Lest you forget, I don’t have a cement mixer. Every bucket of mortar is churned by hand. Finally I stood at the front of the barn, craned my neck back and crossed my arms in satisfaction. The worst bit was over. Just the repointing to do.
 
Just.
 
Repointing
I knew nothing about repointing before I reached Europe. And there’s a lot of it going on in these parts. Most European countries boast stacks of ancient stone buildings and people who like repairing them. I remember travelling in my van through the UK, France, Portugal and Spain, admiring the stone and mortar work at each stop, some of it even using lime. I expect I’ll ruffle some feathers now, but of all the stonework I’ve seen so far, the dry stone and mortar work in Spain (at least northern Spain) tops them all, at least in terms of aesthetic. It’s artwork. Which is why right back at the beginning of this adventure, I went and studied any local repointers I could see. I watched them mortaring and copied.
 
I remember my first attempts in what is now my kitchen. What a mess! But I kept at it, experimenting with different sands, and different trowels and guns, until finally I got it.
Picture
The three stages, bottom to top: old concrete, dug out mortar, and repointed.
So the day arrived. I stood before the front wall, hammer and chisel in hand. The weather gathered steam behind me, the thermometer mercury climbing to the fabulous late twenties. Perfect mortaring weather. Hoisting myself up to the top level of the scaffold, I remarked how it no longer scared the hell out of me. Then I sat down and set about digging out years of badly applied concrete.
 
There is something incredibly satisfying about digging out old mortar. The positioning of the chisel. The tap of the hammer. And the plop as another bit of crud hits the ground. It’s like cleaning fingernails or plucking eyebrows (if yer know what I mean). Even the barn itself seemed to revel in the process as I hacked the debris out of its epidermis.
 
How to Dislodge Old Mortar
There’s an art to digging out concrete. Here’s the thing: You can’t attack it front-on. Well, you can but it’s hard work and you waste a massive amount of effort because the mortar resists. To clear it out, you have to find the weak spot first. And the weak spot is the edges. This is where the elements have attacked it, and if the mortar is concrete this will be where it’s pulling a little from the wall. So, one places the chisel under one of those edges, taps it with a hammer, and slowly works one’s way in, chimbling away at it.
                                                                          ***
The days went by. And the weather decided to change tack. Storms drove in from the south like the four horsemen, kicking up dark clouds and throwing down lightning bolts. Then came the rain and the cold. They sat on our world until we lit fires. But I wasn’t in the mood to be put off. So I donned my wellies and raincoat, and set about that mortar. I tapped and chipped and dug away, raising a middle finger at the driving rain. In the moments when the precipitation receded, I refilled the gaps with a lovely new lime mortar. The barn seemed to gleam, the beauty of the old rocks now visible once more. It was at this point I just couldn’t help myself: Out came the sparkle. Thus I added a glass beads and shells and pretty stones too.
 
Perhaps it was me. Probably it was, projecting my own pride onto my barn. Yet it seemed to stand a little higher now, a little grander. The old forgotten outhouse, ignored for so many years, was being reborn as royalty.
Picture
The barn before I got my hands on it.
Another Brick in the Wall
Walls are often used as metaphors for oppression. Pink Floyd made a whole film on the subject, which looks as appropriate now as it was when it was first released. The Wall has become sleeker of course, tech-powered and glossy. It’s guarded by AI, controlling what we see and literally hacking our brains, mining us for data gold. But as a friend of mine said: “There’s no point attacking it head-on. You have to be like water. You have to squeeze through the cracks.” How true this is. And by squeezing through them you widen them, gnawing away at that suffocating concrete mortar until it cracks and is pushed out for good.
 
This has been my approach for the past ten years, simply ignoring The Wall and its ridiculous, ecocidal, and inhumane dictates, slipping through the gaps, weaving my way like a cord of spring water. But what if the wall starts closing in on you? What if it threatens to encroach on your very life force, and all that you hold sacred? Isn’t that time to find the sledgehammer?
Picture
Nature making light work of the new wall.
Naaaa…
 
Don’t fall into The Wall’s favourite trap. The rules of nature govern this planet despite what most humans think. The Wall is banking on sledgehammers. They’re so easy to deal with and make an example of. Call them terrorists or conspiracy theorists,  discredit the few with integrity who question anything at all*, ruin their careers, threaten their families, set up fake Twitter accounts, and away you go. The protester unwittingly just becomes another brick in The Wall, nay even a buttress, because The Wall supports itself by using opposing forces and polarity. I’ve been a wall-soldier, remember? I was a teacher with dark sarcasm, light sarcasm, and British sarcasm to boot. I know exactly how it works. Competition and peer pressure are the most powerful tools any tyrant has. No, you don’t want a sledgehammer to most effectively deal with a wall. You waste too much energy attacking the parts of the structure that are most resistant. What you need is a chisel instead.
 
Chisels
Those that for any given reason can’t buckle, those on the fringes, those who simply can’t fit into that wall no matter how hard they try, and yet have retained enough of their spirit not to hate themselves for it, these are the chisels because they have to be. They chip chip chip away at the edges of society, digging out niches for their freedom. They’re doing it now whether the centres of society are aware of it or not, whether they are called quacks or hippies or weirdos or not, whether they are visible or not. Whether ‘respectable’ people roll their eyes at them or not. It’s going on. Whole new sub-societies are being born all over the net and the planet, flourishing in the myriad cracks. And there’s nothing The Wall can do about it.
 
You may think The Wall is holding up just fine right now, but from here in nicheland it’s like the Emperors’ clothes, only existing because enough people believe in it. There’s mortar falling out all over the place, and the seismographs are getting excited. Looks like we’re about to see where the actual integrity lies.
 
How can I be so sure The Wall won’t last? Because it’s unsustainable. It's in the very word itself. The Wall can't sustain itself in its present form at its present rate into the future, because it's out of balance. This is one of nature's most fundamental laws. You know it. I know it. But apparently a lot of people like living in a kind of desperate denial instead of staring the truth in the eye and coming up with a game plan.
Picture
A breathable, more sustainable mortar.
Walls of the Future
Walls are not always there to control. They are important parts of structure which protect, delineate, and filter. Cell membranes, river banks, and hedgerows are a few examples of how nature goes about walls. They are permeable, allow growth and change, and live in balance with their surroundings. The offer shelter rather than a prison.
 
From here in my magical, self-chiselled nook on a Pico half-in half-out of reality, I prefer to spend my time dreaming of new structures than rage endlessly against the ones so obviously already crumbling. When I close my eyes, The Wall has lost its concrete mortar and has become a breathing structure instead. Vines and moss climb all over it, creating new life upon and within it. Then from out of the crevices, new humans emerge who see wider and further than those that went before. Humans who can access Earth’s power and forge miracles from it. They take the old wall rocks and clean them until they shine in their original natural glory. Then drinking the sunlight and whispering with the divine, they form those stones into kinder, more inspiring structures that support the many instead of the few.
 
And the mortar to hold it all together? Ah that would be love and beauty, because what have you got without those? It’s how you understand whether a structure is of the future or the past, for without love it’s just a replica of the old. That new mortar will be covered in shells and beads and colourful jewels that sparkle and spangle and refract light over and over again. It will be whimsical, capricious, and joyful, and make people feel glad to be alive. But as you know when it comes to building, that’s kind of the way I roll:) Of course, many will say it's impossible, and that such things can't exist, that you can't build from love or mud or sparkle. Yeah yeah, whatever. I've heard all that so many times before. Never once did transpire to be true.
Picture
Another bead in the wall.
*People often make assumptions about my political beliefs, on both sides of the divide. It ought to be clear to anyone who has followed me for a while that I have no interest in a political system that offers two shoddy, corrupt candidates and asks me to give my mandate to one them. I don't. My work is about empowering people to live freely if they want to, and to respect nature. So just for the record: the press conference I linked to above has nothing to do with some sort of moronic political allegiance, and I daresay the politician who created it is as self-serving as the rest of them. It is about freedom of information and speech, which I already lost in Turkey once thanks very much, and which the majority of the West has voluntarily given away in front of my very eyes.
The full version of that press conference, featuring other doctors and some pretty shocking information on the suppression of alternative therapies is (of course) nowhere to be found on mainstream channels. You can watch it here. https://www.bitchute.com/video/yI1hrC2kX2uS/

Do you enjoy these posts?
If you enjoy my stories and would like to express that you want them to continue, please consider contributing. A big thank you to all 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.

Want to see the video of the barn progress so far? Plus horses and a chick? Have a closer look inside my world: 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 lone woman off-grid mud and stone world in Spain.
Join us on Patreon
11 Comments
Priscilla
30/6/2021 04:06:57 pm

According to other sources, Dr. Bridle's claims that the spike protein used in vaccines is a toxin is false:
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/jun/07/facebook-posts/no-proof-researcher-claim-covid-19-vaccines-spike-/

https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-canada-technology-gun-politics-religion-a7dd90823ca346534f1087ba0b1071b1

https://fullfact.org/online/conservative-woman-vaccine-scientist-spike-protein/

Please don't spread misinformation that could lead to people's deaths.

Reply
Hannah Sadar
30/6/2021 11:01:26 pm

Back in the 1800s doctors went from the dissection table to delivery ward without washing their hands. The doctor who tried to pioneer basic hygiene was ridiculed by the prevailing medical hierarchy, and his ideas of germs were condemned and mocked by the consensus medical experts of his time.
https://www.grunge.com/247211/the-tragic-story-of-the-doctor-who-pioneered-hand-washing/
Why transparency in testing & free speech (especially in medical science!) Is so important.
Consensus is not infallible

Reply
Atulya
30/6/2021 05:41:27 pm

The man is a professor in immunology and biology, more qualified than you or I or Facebook censors. He has as a right to express his view. I have no interest in societies where any expert on any view is censored, especially where children's health is concerned. I am not anti vax or pro vax. I am pro freedom. End of.

Reply
Priscilla
30/6/2021 05:45:28 pm

Experts can be wrong. They can also have an agenda. He is one expert to have this view, and there are many experts who say that he is incorrect. When asked for evidence for his position, he has posted 1 document, whereas his opposition is continuously monitoring and studying their positions.

If an expert told you that the moon was made of cheese, and only provided one document to back up his claim, you'd ask for more proof and also look at the proof of his contemporaries before believing his story.

Reply
Atulya
30/6/2021 05:57:53 pm

Yes you're right I'd ask for proof, not censor him or harass his family, which is why he has a right to speak. And why any decent scientist shouldn't be afraid of an opposing view. Comparing his concerns with the moon being made of cheese is a straw man argument. Neither you or I are qualified to unpick his article. Nor is Turnbridge of the Huff Post nor FB fact checkers. Since when do journalists get to decide which medical articles are deemed worthy for publication? Sorry, I believe in democracy. If the truth can't weather an opposing view then it isn't up to much.

Atulya
30/6/2021 11:19:48 pm

*virology not biology. Autocorrect error.

Reply
Hannah Sadar
30/6/2021 10:54:10 pm

Thank you for this post.
I too, have been amazed how quickly we (in america) went from tolerance/freespeech , to the idea that scientists should be silenced if they don't hold to the (currently) "right" idea. We went from praising the liners, to basically a complete herd mindset.
Ideas should be discussed, argued, tested, defeated, not pull the plug.
Because sometimes the experts and prevailing scientific consensus turn out not to be infallible. The history of science and medicine are littered with it.

Reply
Hannah Sadar
30/6/2021 11:11:14 pm

*loners, not liners.
As a society we at least pretended to praise those willing to stick up against the tide, the freethinkers, the rebels.
Even when we thought they were wrong,
we recognized their chutzpah. There was respect for that.

And now, it's like we're a bunch of herd animals, shaming and harassing anyone who thinks differently, about the tiniest things.

Reply
Atulya
30/6/2021 11:14:34 pm

Thank you Hannah. I appreciate this a lot. I felt afraid before posting that link, and noticed I felt censored and coerced. So I took a stand for my own right to freedom of speech knowing it will no doubt invite ire. If we can't even share a professor in the field's hesitancy for a new treatment, then where exactly are we?

Reply
Dianne
1/7/2021 12:47:13 pm

What a fabulous piece of writing from the queen of metaphors.
I am trying to fathom what is wrong with a scientist giving his or her expert opinion that may differ from his peers. Do doctors always agree the diagnosis/treatment. There is a huge difference between expert opinion and propaganda. Facts can differ but as free thinkers we can make up our own individual minds. Hounding this scientist is the one form of terror. Look what happened to Dr Kelly because he couldn’t find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Reply
Atulya
1/7/2021 01:05:43 pm

Ah thank you. Yes, that's why I specifically chose that link. It's not some mad random noodle spouting on Youtube, it's someone very well qualified. And yes there are others in the field who disagree, which is entirely normal. But the others aren't being cancelled. There is a peer review process for a reason, and none of the 'fact checkers' are actually part of that process. They aren't qualified to be gatekeepers or to simply cancel the debate and call it fake news. Beatrice Dupuy who contributed the APNews piece is in the dept of linguistics not virology. And yes there are so many examples of this having already happened. As soon as no debate is allowed, or we're censoring information, alarm bells start ringing for me big time.

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    Atulya K Bingham

    Author, Lone Off-Gridder, and Natural Builder.

    Books: Ayse's Trail (OBBL winner 2014) Mud Ball and Mud Mountain, Dirt Witch.

    Sign up to The Mud Home
    Many thanks to the patrons sustaining this site on Patreon.
    List of Sustainers
    Picture

    Dirt Witch

    "Reality meets fantasy, myth, dirt and poetry. I'm hooked!" Jodie Harburt, Multitude of Ones.
    Picture

    Archives

    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    June 2018

    Categories

    All
    Aloneness
    Animals
    Belonging
    Bucking The System
    Building
    Climate
    Community
    Control
    Death
    Earth Energies
    Grief
    Hearing Voices
    Independence
    Life Path
    Manifesting Worlds
    Meaning
    Money
    Neighbours
    Off Grid Living
    Off-Grid Living
    Overwhelm And Burnout
    Power
    Rewilding
    Vision
    Wildlife
    Will Power

    RSS Feed

Disclaimer: All the content in The Mud Home website is provided for informational purposes only. The author undertakes no responsibility for any person or entity who chooses to use the information on this website. It is not intended to be a standard and should not substitute for the exercise of good engineering judgment by engineers. It is the user’s obligation to make sure that he/she uses the appropriate practices and consults the appropriate experts when building. It is the user's obligation to make sure they are following health and safety guidelines. The author is not responsible for any accidents, injuries or damages to persons or property incurred while using the information presented in this website.

Some blog articles refer to the use of lime. Please note, lime is caustic and can cause burns. Read The Mud Home guide to using lime safely here.

EARTHBAG BUILDING PDF
EARTH PLASTER GUIDE
BOOKS
Newsletter
About Atulya
Privacy Policy

SUPPORT

Picture
Picture
The Mud Home takes many hours a week to run, and costs a lot to sustain. If you find this site useful or inspiring, please consider supporting it so that it can continue.
Picture

Many thanks to all those who've already become Mud Sustainers.

The Mud Home  Copyright © 2013  Atulya Kerry Bingham
  • Home
  • Building
    • Earthbag
    • Earthquakes and earthbag
    • Rubble Trench Foundations
    • Off-grid how to >
      • Off-Grid Prep Course
    • Earth Plaster
    • Lime Wash
    • Mud as Mortar
    • Wattle and Daub
    • Mud Building Blog
  • Books
    • Dirt Witch
    • Mud Ball
    • Mud Mountain The Book
    • An Earthbag House in 7 Days?
  • About
    • Contact
  • Learn Mud
    • Courses
    • Mud Building PDF Package
    • Other Projects
  • Earth Whispering
    • Join the Earth Whispering Exploration
    • MUD MOUNTAIN