Back to The Mud. This spring, I decided it was make or break time for www.themudhome.com. The site has germinated, it has pushed its virtual head through the soil, grown leaves and branches, and a fairly stout trunk. But it’s time for it to bear a little fruit too. Lord knows, I've watered it enough. So I took inspiration from the grapevine. Last month I decided to throw a little manure on. Flippin’ ‘eck! As we say back home.

The Mud website has burgeoned. And naturally, all sorts of other life is attracted. I’m blessed with flocks of happy emails, the buzzings of would-be natural builders and freedom seekers all greeting me from far and near. It’s a good feeling to see the fruit you planted enjoyed by others, to hear people say they had never considered building without cement until they saw your house, to have your books and posts devoured like succulent grapes, to connect with like-minded souls. I had no idea there were so many!

Quite naturally too, those in the vicinity would like to visit, to see The Mud in the flesh. And it pains me to turn Mud searchers down, it really does. I have been delving into nooks of my mind this month, trying to feel out just why I can’t have visitors. I then something happened. And I got it. I really got it.

I was clearing out my shed a few weeks ago when I came across a box full of books. I pulled apart the floppy cardboard flaps, and there on the top was the well-known children’s story, The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Pulling it out, I read the first page, and couldn't put it down. 

Just in case you haven’t read it, The Secret Garden concerns a contrary little girl (horrid even) called Mary Lennox who has been orphaned in India. Mary is shipped back to Yorkshire to live in a dark manor with a hunchback uncle, his sick child called Colin, and a locked secret garden. What more could she want, eh? To cut a long story short, Mary sniffs out the key to the secret garden and breaks in. She begins tending the crocuses and messing about in the earth which is full of Magic. Yet the garden remains a secret (shh!). Eventually she tells Dickon, a local boy who has a way with animals and is a bit Magic himself. The two children attempt to bring the garden back to life, and the therapeutic effect of the endeavour renders Mary much less horrid than she was. Eventually, she also lets sick Colin into the secret. Both of them are healed by The Secret Garden. Colin even begins walking.

Naturally, I was enthralled by the tale because it mirrored so closely my own experience here on the land; the healing properties of tending the Earth, the connection with animals, the Magic. Yet most significant of all, the story highlighted a point I’d unwittingly passed over in my own experience. The importance of the secret element in the garden. How primal it must be for each of us to have a space of our own, a place outside eyes can’t pierce, a corner of the earth we can be explore our souls, and damn it, do what the hell we like!

This need is incredibly universal. Even my dog doesn’t want to share her kennel, and sniffs at me irritably when I try to get in it. (Now, you may rightly ask why I was trying to get in my dog’s kennel in the first place. Honestly, I just wondered what she’d do.) Children make dens, husbands construct man caves, authors hide away in purpose-built writing rooms, Celal had his wooden hut, my granddad had a garden shed in which he’d sit upon an upturned bucket.

We all harbour this yearning for privacy, because society is officious, judgemental and staid. It’s like a nagging parent, or a bossy warden, incessantly restricting the expression our true selves. We all need a secret garden where we can play without the outside world interfering. For some it might be about the freedom to chuck motorbike parts all over the carpet, for others it could be about not having to make cup of tea for anyone, or not having to wax your legs, for others it might be about making love unabashed in the forest on a whim, or watering the plants naked, for others it could be a space where the phone never rings, or the boss can’t bother you, perhaps it’s a child's cubby hole in which you create a magic world, a safe place where the adult world can’t ridicule your imagination.

The Mud is no different. While I have willingly published a virtual window into my world, The Mud reality must remain in the dark, because this is my own private playground. And I get it. It’s the secrecy which allows my creativity to roam. It’s the intimacy of the place which brings me and it alive. If the Mud became public, it would kill it. I would run a mile, pull down my site, and probably never write another thing.

So Mud friends enjoy the fruits my secret garden pushes forth. Take what you want of them. I’m pretty generous with my free information, I think. But sorry, the garden will remain locked. Concealed. Unseen. It must. Or it will die.

Winter was long this year, and it dug cold, wet trenches into spring. Spring became water-logged and thus waded through the months in pursuit of warmer climes. Even in June nights slid down to a chilly 15 degrees rendering sleeping outside unpleasant. As a result, just like the reptiles, I was slow leaving my nest. The outside remained out. The wilderness seemed to retreat from me. I’ve been sensing it retreat further and further every year.

Initially, I mourned the loss of my Eden; the first grazes of the wild, the first breaking apart of my ‘civilised’ shell, and those early conversations with my land. This year a cooler wave of acceptance began to slosh over me. Change is inevitable, I sighed. Perhaps the loss of the intimacy I first experienced here was to be replaced by growth and experience.

And then again perhaps not.

It couldn’t have been more than a month ago. The sun finally struck a decent ray over my hill. A pair of agama lizards raised their dragon heads on my rock garden, and I could hear tortoises rustling in leaves. Summer was timorously making her move. So I stepped out of my mud home. For the umpteenth time I ignored the heap of rubble that is still my back step, and walked toward Grandmother Olive. Rotty the Dog lazily poked her head out of her kennel eyeing my direction. I was holding a tablet and headphones in one hand and a cushion in the other. For the first time this season I had decided to indulge in a bit of hammock swinging.

My hammock is tethered to Orandmother Olive. This is where I recline, usually at dusk, with the express intention of listening to my land. It was only 11 am, and the area was still draped in a leaf-dappled shade. I said I was clutching headphones. Now, I listen to music in my house. I’ll listen to it in my gazebo too. But I never listen to music in that hammock. Ever. That area has always been special for me; a magical point of exchange between me and nature.

As I said, the wilderness was receding. Things were changing. I was changing. I slung the cushion onto the web of rope. Then I slid on my headphones and lowered myself into the mesh cocoon. Fiddling with the settings of the tablet, I glanced up at Grandmother Olive. The thought loomed in my mind. I never do this. This is my place to listen to my land. I wonder if this is OK? Batting the question from my mind, I gamely pressed the play button.

I was a little over a minute into the first song. Just one minute. One minute into the first time I had ever brought technology onto that hammock. One minute since posing the question. I had just shut out my home and the wildlife around it and was lost in another electronic world, when Rotty began barking wildly. I turned to face her, irritated that she was disrupting my reverie. What now? I fumed. My vexation turned to perturbation. Rotty was barking at me. And it was the type of barking she reserved for wild boar, cats and rather irrationally tall, blonde females.

I yanked off my headphones and stared at my hysterical dog, hackles raised on her shoulders like a row of furry spikes. “Rotty, what the hell is up with you?” I shouted. And then I noticed she wasn’t actually barking at me, but a little below me, just under my hammock. I turned and looked down, half-expecting to see a Swedish long jumper.

It was my turn to feel my hackles rise.

There curled into the crux of Grandmother Olive’s trunk, fangs glistening, head raised and ready to lunge was a one-and-a-half metre long, five-centimetre-thick black snake. It was squiggled up about 70 centimetres from the back of where my neck had been. We were now facing each other off with nowt but the hammock strings between us.

I’m used to snakes. Once upon a time I was terrified of them, but through familiarity my fear has evaporated. Snakes look disconcerting, but are basically shy harmless creatures that will slope away at the first opportunity. I’ve seen plenty of them, and they are always moving in the opposite direction, as fast as they can muster. I have never in all my 18 years of living in Turkey seen a snake raise itself up ready to lunge. I had never until that moment seen a snake’s fangs close up. I’ve never before felt the visceral and powerful life force they represent as they coil up like springs, open their huge mouths and hiss.

Did I mention it was about 70 centimetres from the back of my neck?

Adrenalin is amazing stuff. I vaulted out of that hammock and found myself at least three metres from it. Then I dragged back my heroic Rotty, who was waging an impressively loyal ‘one for all’ barking attack upon Snake. Snake, seeing a window of escape, slid out from Grandmother Olive’s trunk. The last I saw of it was a thick, black cable burning a trail to Dudu’s land.

Heart pounding, I ran to the house. I opened the door and hurled the tablet onto my sofa. The close up image of Snake rearing, fangs bared, ready to kill, seared an impression on my mind like a psychic branding iron. It was terrifying, and it took me a good half an hour to calm down.

But calm down I did. Soon, I stepped out of the house again, and tentatively made my way over to Grandmother Olive. Shuddering, I looked up and down her thick sinewy trunk. Her strong sculpted arms bore the magnificent designs of mature bark. Grandmother Olive must be at least 60, but she’s in great shape. She stood there like empress of the whole damn world. She bristled. I lowered my head guiltily.

“Ok Ok I get the message!’ I muttered.

A light breeze picked up. She rustled her leaves.

I won’t be listening to music in that hammock again. I’ll be listening to Grandmother Olive. Hume could be right of course*. Perhaps it was simply one event following another, and me perceiving causality between the two. But these things happen so often, it beggars belief. At some point you have to be sceptical about scepticism.

I’m sceptical. Very sceptical.

Following Grandmother Olive’s clip round the ear, I have made a concerted effort to reconnect with the outside this summer. I completed my gazebo and sleep once more within an Aladdin’s Cave of stars. I’ve recreated my outside bathroom, so I now shower upon an open-air rock feeling like Eve in the Garden again. My forest reading room has been refurbished with the pines, oaks and crickets weaving it into a hive of creative thought. The spirits of the wild are creeping out once more. And they’re whispering new secrets I want to hear.

(If you want to see the pictures of my outside spaces, look here.)

*NB. Hume, one of my favourite philosophers, was a true sceptic (as opposed to the posses of pseudo sceptics about today who pick and choose when to be sceptical). He argued that just because you've seen B follow A a thousand times, doesn't prove that B will follow A on the 1001st occasion. He would have made the same claim of gravity, and indeed his philosophy basically created a dead-end in purist empirical theory. The point of his philosophy was to show that we don't actually know anything, and all claim to knowing is little more than belief. "When I am convinced  of any principle, 'tis only an idea, which strikes more strongly upon me. When I give preference to one set of arguments above another, I do nothing but decide from my feeling concerning the superiority of their influence." 

It was exactly four years ago. May 2011, I moved on to this modest square of Turkish mountainside. I staggered down the sun-flogged track lugging a tent, a sleeping bag and a pick-axe. Hacking a square out of the thistles, I set up camp. There was no power and no running water. I didn’t have much of plan, not that that’s anything new. I was about to hit 40, and I’d woken up one day to find rather disconcertingly that I’d lost the will to teach. I had $6000 left in my account, a twenty-year-old car and my plot of land. That was it.

Little did I know on that early summer day, that in eight months I’d be building a house. I couldn’t even bang a nail in straight at the time. But it happened. And in the process we all had a ball— a big, round face-splattering mud ball. I can’t really say my mud home is finished. I doubt it will ever be. The back step still languishes in state of ankle-wrecking incompletion. I have mosaics to craft into the walls, the kitchen to overhaul. But the little roundhouse is a circle of sweet mud happiness, and it is from there that I finally finished the story. So if you have followed my earthbag adventure and wonder what exactly went on in those frantic six weeks at the end of 2011 while I raced against time and money to create a shelter, here it is: Mud Ball.

The Beginning
“Kerry! I keep telling you, but you just won’t listen. You need to build a house now! Winter is coming. A storm’s coming. It says so on the telly.” My neighbour Dudu had appeared at my fence only the day before, wisps of hair darting out of her headscarf. “And don’t forget. You can always stay on my sofa... oh but you won’t. I know!” She was wringing her hands. “You’re so stubborn. It’s English stubbornness, that’s what it is. God knows it’ll be the death of you!” She huffed and puffed, popped her false teeth in and out, and shook her fist at me.

From the other side of the fence I looked down at her, not due to superciliousness but because she only reached my shoulder.

“I’ll be fine, Dudu. The tent is raised off the ground now. Anyway I’m into storms, they’re exciting.”

Dudu screwed up her eyes and turned away in disgust. But she wasn’t the only one to fret over my houseless predicament. Celal, my wiry garden help, wandered up to the fence. He leaned on a large pickaxe and looked me up and down quizzically, his face a brown web of wrinkles.

“Aye, you wanna be building yourself a hut to park your bum in before winter, look at mine – didn’t cost me a ha’penny but it does the job, eh?”

Celal always spoke using little or no punctuation and I was left squinting as I tried to work out what he said. Once the meaning dawned on me, I swallowed a reply. Well, I could see quite clearly his house hadn’t cost a half-penny. It was something of a wonder that shack was still standing. My tent appeared by far the safer option.

“That weather’s a comin’ in, yer know and it’s not all sunshine and cherries after that. Your arse’ll be in the mud and you’ll be swimmin’ in it I tell yer, it’ll be a swampahogshit that’s what it’ll be.”

“A swamp of what?”

“Hogshit.”

I remembered that conversation now, and I slid deeper into my sleeping bag. Celal’s warning echoed through the sleepless vale of my mind as I listened to sheets of rain break over my tent. I couldn’t see it, but knew there was indeed a swampahogshit occurring on the other side of my canvas. As soon as I put a foot out of the tent, I’d step into it.