It must have been midnight. But the nights were still warm. The flap of my "front door" was peeled back, so that I could survey the speckled face of the night sky and the winking lights of the seaside village in the distance. Not that I was looking at anything at that particular juncture; my eyes were shut fast, and I was probably snoring with the peace of mind of an earth-lover who believes their land is watching over them. Until something smashed through my open-air slumber . . .

Bee boo bee boo wah wah wah. Bee boo bee boo wah wah wah.

It was a car alarm. Now, had I been living in New York, Istanbul, or any given suburb of Essex, this might not even have roused me. But halfway up a Turkish mountain without asphalt? It didn’t make sense to my ever-watchful subconscious, and I awoke with a jolt. Grumbling and rubbing my eyes, I hoisted myself up in my sleeping bag and gawped through the mosquito net. I squinted in confusion. Careering along the winding lane just below my land was a vehicle, lights flashing wildly as though on its way to Casualty. I pulled my hair back, frowned and looked closer. Then my own inner alarms began ringing.

The car appeared to have drawn to a halt at the land below mine in front of a couple of greenhouses full of capsicum. The lights ceased their flashing. The racket of the car alarm cut out. All was once again silent, save the trilling of the crickets. The pale glow of a full moon illuminated the tips of the olive trees and bathed the slope of my land in an eerie silver light. There were shadows where normally there aren’t. Things were both visible and invisible at the same time.

It was then that the drumming started. Rat a tat tat. A rat a tat tat. It sounded like a large metal tin being hit with a pair of wooden spoons. One by one, the hairs on my head stood up on end. Everything was in the wrong place at the wrong time. There are no drums up here at midnight, no nightlife, no parades. What was going on? I felt my heart begin to thud. I had no idea what the noise was. It fitted into no mental framework, evoked nothing familiar. All I could think was, "why would anyone roar up in a car to the base of my land at midnight and begin banging a drum?" And the only explanation I could find was they were either drunk or mad.

I’d no sooner reached this conclusion than things deteriorated. The drumming began to beat closer, and now it was accompanied by wild human shouting. It was a terrible wailing and it echoed round the hills. I sat without moving a muscle and listened in terror as rat a tat tat reached the border of my land. I turned off my torch and froze. Then something peculiar happened to me. It always happens when I’m scared out of my wits. I cruised out of normality and clicked straight into survival mode.

Extreme stress is well documented for pushing us out of our more analytical frontal lobes and into our "old brain". Suddenly there is no larger picture, no reasoning or weighing up of possibilities. It’s just us and life and death. And how determined we are to survive! In a second, everything had changed. My senses, in particular my hearing, became incredibly acute. I could clearly discern the crazed drummer was moving along the lower border of my land. Obviously he was coming for me, of that I had no doubt. The possibility that he could have been doing anything else was never so much as entertained because I was now reasoning with the brain of an iguana. A mad drunken drummer was coming for me, and I was going to live to tell the tale, come hell or high water. Without turning on the torch, I quietly slid out of my sleeping bag and pulled out the machete.

There is no creature on Earth more dangerous, destructive, or stupid than a frightened human being.  Just watch the mind-bogglingly irrational decisions you make when panic sets in. This is why policy-making on "the war on terror" has been so catastrophically incompetent, time after time. It is driven by nothing but fear, and fear is a dullard.

Back in my Turkish mountain, I began my own war on terror. Slowly, oh so slowly, I pulled up the zipper of the front door and slid commando-style onto the ground. I crawled behind my tent. The full moon had transformed the top of my property into a white floodlit wonderland. If I walked across it, I’d be as easy to spot as a snow leopard wandering over tar sands. So, I crouched behind bushes and made for the only shaded spot: under the olive trees where my hammock was hitched.

After a nerve-wracking bush crawl worthy of the Special Forces, scratched and dirt-smudged I reached the inky darkness of the hammock. The drumming continued. Rat a tat tat was now inching up the right side of my land, walking in the small gap between my border and Dudu’s. I flexed my fingers round the hand-forged iron handle of the machete and waited. I wondered how to maim the attacker without giving him chance to grab my weapon, because he could well be stronger than I. I’d have to hit him from behind. Perhaps the best ploy was to climb a little way up the tree and then launch myself onto the brute. I held my breath.

But before I could so much as leap into a Bagua Zhang stance, for no apparent reason the drumming changed course. Rat a tat tat began to move up the slope, braying madly as he went. From the hammock, I saw the light of Dudu’s house flash on in the distance. I watched the feeble flicker of the drummer’s torch winding toward her house. ‘Good God!’ I thought. ‘Is he going for a little old lady? Has the world deteriorated to that extent?’

I heard Dudu call out over her pomegranates. The drummer stopped. I could make out the pair of them chatting. Apo the dog began howling into the night. After a minute or two, the drummer shouted, ‘Come on Apo boy, bark, bark! Chase those damn pigs out of the valley!’

Wham! The truth hit me. I all but fell out of the hammock in relief. Of course! The pomegranates were ripe. They were delicious targets for wild boar who ploughed through the orchards this time of year, wrecking the trees. I dawned on me, the crazed drunken drummer was none other than the owner of the greenhouses below. He had a few pomegranates of his own littered about. Later, in a more rational daylight discussion, I’d learn the men of the village would take it in turns to go on pig duty during the months of September and October. They would wander the orchards banging drums, shouting,  or firing blanks to scare away the boar-pests.
 
Feeling ashamed, I slouched back to my tent, the fear sliding off me like useless prehistoric gunk. As I stretched out on my sleeping bag and watched the moon slink below the mountains, I sighed. I closed my eyes and thanked both my and the drummer’s lucky stars. I thanked them that I didn’t own a gun.

[In memory of my friend and neighbour Celal, without whom The Mud wouldn't exist.]

When I pick up a seed and study it, I remain baffled. No amount of theory from the field of biology ever satisfies my understanding of the seed. I invite you to study one. Really. They are often not much more than motes of dust. If you break them apart there’s not much to them. From the outside or the inside, they don’t really look to be secret vaults stuffed with reams of genetic data. Then you plant one. Or perhaps you didn’t plant it at all, it just happened to be hunkering down in a bit of dirt. Soon, from what looks to be nothing, life sprouts. Life. Great writhing creations push forth; trees, flowers, thorn bushes, aubergine plants, bull rushes. How? Where did they come from? They came from Nowhere.

Yet just as new life burgeons, old life recoils. Again, as if into nothing. As if to Nowhere. I know it. We all know it. Earth is a restless place. Nothing upon it is still. Everything is either in a state of growth or decay. Things are bursting into creation, or they are dying. And sorry Mother Nature, sometimes I don’t like it. Not at all. 

Recently, two people dear to me died. Death is guaranteed to shake the rugs on mind’s floor, and send the dust of the taken-for-granted flying. First my beautiful gran left at 94 years of age. At her funeral, and my dad said, ‘We are all the poorer for her loss. The world is poorer.’ And the truth of that drove home. There is often an attempt to make death palatable by talking of regeneration, of people living on in our hearts and our minds, of heavens and passing into other rooms. Yet, for those of us left here in the mud of the planet, when someone dies, something of immense value has disappeared. Into Nowhere. It is a great loss. Things have changed irrevocably. That being will never again exist, which is precisely what makes every one of us so precious. 

This week another hole opened in humanity’s flimsy veil of existence. The Nowhere pushed a hand through and yanked away my dear neighbour Celal. One minute he was scampering past my land calling his band of goats and sheep and dogs and cats to follow, the next he was gone. Disappeared. Yok oldu*. Just as with the seed and the sprout, I can’t understand it. Where did he go? Perhaps this is what this post is attempting to do, understand this relentless wheel of change. It won’t succeed of course. How could it?

I really can’t talk about The Mud, or my land, or my house without including Celal. The first time I met him was at my neighbour Dudu’s house. I had been on my mountain about a week. It was back in those early, dusty days of 2011 when I had no water. I was hunched over Dudu’s garden tap filling a couple of bottles up and admiring her plum tree. Suddenly, an enormous Anatolian shepherd sidled round the side of her small cottage. I gulped at it. I gulped harder when it bounded over to sniff me. The dog-beast easily reached my waist. It was like being hungrily nosed by Shere Khan. On the heels of the dog, a walnut-faced little stick of a man appeared.

‘Apo! Down boy, down, down! C’mon now here’s a good boy. Gel, Gel**!’

I looked dubiously at the man, far from convinced he had control over his hound. Apo was probably the larger, if not in height then certainly in circumference.

‘Kerry, this is Celal!’ Dudu crowed. She pulled her headscarf back a little and pushed Apo out of the way. ‘Now this is the man you’re looking for. You want to cut all that grass pronto! No messing about. Get rid of it all. There’ll be snakes and all sorts in there. Celal’ll sort that out in a jiffy. Helps the English down the road, he does. Very trustworthy. You can leave your keys with him and never have to worry about a thing.’ 

Celal stretched out a sinewy hand and grinned. As with many villagers the smile was littered with brown teeth and gaps. His face was a wrinkled brown nut and topped with a tousle of grey hair. I wondered just how this curious little fellow would fare over on my camp. 

I’ve have been lucky over and over again on this piece of earth. So lucky, I can’t quite believe it at times. What did I do to deserve it? Celal was one of those strokes of immense good fortune. I understood it the first day he came to cut my grass. I am always wary about who I allow on my land, because I have tried my utmost to preserve it as a space of peace, kindness and respect for wildlife. I won’t allow any sort of violence or pollution within the boundaries; including abusive language, smoking, killing or negative speaking. And I am famous for sending people off it. So it was with some trepidation I watched Celal that first morning as he sharpened the blade of his scythe.

‘Please don’t kill any animals,’ I said as I balanced my blackened two-pot Turkish kettle on the small camping stove.

‘Aye, I never kill anything if I can help it. Everything has a right to live,’ replied Celal. He bent over to slice through the grass, He was dressed in a pair of navy beach shorts. His legs jutted from the bottoms like two thin leather straps.

After an hour or so, Celal called me over. ‘I only cut what’s thorny and prickly. If it looked like a green plant, I left it. Did I do right?’ 

I stared around at the newly shorn top of my land. It was now decorated with wild green shrubs that had previously been hidden or throttled under the rampant thistle bushes. That he had meticulously saved each plant was something of a miracle in a time and place where folk are better known for jumping in a digger and ripping up anything in their path. I knew there and then; Celal was going to be my right-hand man. In the afternoon we worked side by side. He severed stalks, while I collected them into haystacks.

Of course, for all our good intention, we were still killing the grass. One being's creation is another's destruction. Nature has her rules. When the time comes, all things are sucked down into the Nowhere so that the new can rise up in their place. No one and no thing escapes. Even the lush smell of freshly cut grass is apparently a distress signal as the plant dies. No doubt Celal and I unwittingly killed ants and small bugs underfoot, too. But we tried. We did our best. 

Celal possessed a sixth sense for the land and its inhabitants. In that way, he was special, and far more patient and selfless than I. I watched him carefully pick up scorpions the size of a fist with a piece of wood, and relocate them before digging. He would point out praying mantis, crickets, squirrels, birds and new plants. When he worked, he brought his troupe of animal friends with him; Apo and Ciko the dogs, Yagmur and Sahin the cats. He was the pied piper of the animal world with a goat and a sheep that trailed after him every day as he urged them along with ‘Gel. Gel.’ The first winter when we were building my house, I would sometimes eat with him and his grown up children in their cottage in the village. It was surrounded by ducks and chickens twittering in the yard. Celal opened the door and showed me where he slept. There was a rabbit under his bed and a bunch of kittens snuggling in it. Later he moved from the village into his wooden hut next to Dudu and I. Someone from the city or the Western world would have called it a slum or a shack. People in apartments would have pitied him. But Celal loved his handmade home and was incredibly proud of it. He built it out of old building cast-offs and parts he’d found in rubbish dumps. A new-ager might have labelled it an earthship. Sometimes the goat he named Kecibullah would clamber inside and stamp on his bed. Sometimes it climbed over the car leaving hoof marks on the bonnet. One time I saw it wander in the greenhouse and gamely nibble away all the peas. Celal’s daughter-in-law shook her head in defeat. I said, ‘why don’t you shoo it out?’

‘Ah. It’s Dad. He won’t have a bad word said about that goat.’

Celal spent far more time and energy feeding his menagerie than he ever did himself. The day before he died, I saw him dragging two large olive branches over to the sheep pen before sitting down heavily and wheezing.

Nature’s rules are nature’s rules. Either today or tomorrow we will make way for the new. It was a sunny morning this week. Too sunny. Almost frivolously so. Dudu called me at seven am in the
morning.

‘Don’t be afraid. Don’t be sad. I have some bad news,’ she stuttered.

Celal had died in his sleep of a heart attack. 

Turkish rural folk deal with death very differently than those in the Western world. Death is something real and tangible, be it goats or chickens or people. It isn’t locked away in old people’s homes or filed out of sight by undertakers. It is a part of life. It is touched and smelt. The family carry the body of their loved one out of his home in their own hands. And they cry unabashed as they do so. I watched with stinging eyes as the village men pulled Celal out of his beloved hut in a blanket, his animals staring blankly on. I think it was the first time I’d seen him look so at ease. I couldn’t help noticing that he looked larger in death than in life – almost gigantic – while we shrunk into helpless huddles.

Ah Celal, you look so peaceful now that the concerns of the world are no longer yours. Your death is not your loss, it’s ours. But let me tell you, this corner of Gaia feels the lack. An emptiness steals through the neighbourhood, gaps yawning apart where your presence once glued things together. The land creaks underfoot. She’s crying your name to the sky, asking the Nowhere for answers. Something is missing. The bugs and the birds all feel it, and the trees are groaning softly in confusion. Your goat and your sheep look lost. Apo slumps in the dust. Ciko is curled in dejection. It’s very quiet over here. Too quiet. 

Yes, we know; the new is coming. It will blossom in the vacuum the old has left. We know; it is natural. The wild horses of change are forever charging, trampling the old underfoot to feed the seeds of the new. Yet I hope. I only hope. Will those seeds be as decent and sweet as those who at one time planted them? 

Yes. Tell me. Will they?


Note: The Turkish letter 'c' is pronounced like an English 'j', so Celal is Jelal. 

* Yok oldu = Disappeared
** Gel = Come, or come here

The view rolls away from my house like a pine green double-knot, hand-woven runner. It slides over the mountain sides, into valleys, over hillocks. Its green edge frays at the sea. All around, crickets chirp deliriously, and the forest throbs with their mantra. Beyond that is the tap tap tap of a woodpecker as it digs into the great pine over-head. A light breeze pushes up the land. It plays with the marigolds and the basil turning their leaves like windmills. I inhale. It’s pine sap that I smell.

I pull on a rope. The hammock swings to and fro over my small natural pool. I close my eyes. The thoughts uncoil in the space. ​

Heaven. This is heaven. I have everything I could ever want. All many people want.This is heaven on Earth, and I created it. With my mind. With my hands. With my heart and soul. With my land. And with a little help from something else I really don’t understand, something I will perhaps erroneously term the light of inspired action.

Humankind is so powerful. We have the power within us to create almost anything: Heaven, hell, mediocrity, beauty, castles, mud palaces, concrete boxes, slums. We are wellsprings of such infinite potential, oceans of wonder and mystery. How is it that we have allowed ourselves to be taken in by the superficial and the addictive, the gross and the empty, the negative and the ugly? And if we are really this powerful, how is it so many humans are not creating what they want? Are they flawed? Are they unlucky? Are they simply the bottom of the positive thinking class?

Positive thinking evangelists will have us believe that to create anything we want, all we have to do is imagine it, affirm it, believe it. And to a certain extent it's true. But in my personal experience, it's not enough. And I rate my personal experience highly, because it’s the only window to reality I have. Yes, I’ve seen that our perception of the world transforms it. And I can attest that a positive, can-do attitude goes a long way to creating amazing things. But it’s only half of the story. What’s the other half?

There is a skew in worldview particularly prevalent in the West that we are in control. This control 'freakism' has pervaded all manner of new age dogmas, despite their protests against it. In the philosophy of positive thinking, we have ideas and then ‘imprint’ them on reality – as if reality were a lifeless object with nothing better to do than entertain our arrogance. But life isn’t a territory to be conquered. It’s a dance. And as any tango teacher will tell you, in that dance, the leader follows, while the follower leads.

This is perhaps the most fascinating lesson my time on this land has taught me. It isn’t creation, it’s co-creation.

My imagination whirs. Ideas bloom. I feel excited and passionate. I want to build something; a nice gazebo to sit in, for example. I believe I can. But before I so much as open the tool shed, I’ve learned the most crucial step in the process. I wait. I walk about the land. I listen. 

We are so busy speaking and trying to etch our plans and ideas on the world at large, we have forgotten to listen. We have forgotten that life and the Earth and other people are not objects, but subjects in their own right. I listen while I’m watering the vegetables. I listen when I walk aimlessly around my property. I listen in the morning and as the sun goes down. I listen at night. One of the most valuable aspects of meditation is the creation of a space in which to listen. One listens to oneself, to thoughts, to feelings, to the birds, to the wind, to that mysterious ground from where it all seems to come. One becomes sensitive and open. Synchronistic events are also a type of listening. Life is communicating with us, are we hearing her? We may return to the ways of the Shaman with animals, feathers, shells, flowers - all signs marking our path.

I engage in this process of listening throughout anything I do. Is the task easy? Is it flowing? Or am I battling non-stop? Am I getting scratched or hurt or pushed away? Or am I beckoned to come closer? Is life helping or hindering me?

If the light of inspired action is behind an idea, it’s the easiest most fulfilling thing in the world. If it’s not? You may as well stop right now. I have learned, to my own cost and that of others, that while drive and self-belief can indeed create impressive structures, they are generally miserable and unrewarding. These are the ideologies of utopia that wreck the heaven of now. They are what most wars are being fought over, internal and external. 

Want to create paradise here on Earth? Yes, think positively. If you don’t believe it’s even possible, it’s never going to happen. Imagine it. Feel it. Have faith in it. This is crucial to manifesting anything.

And then press pause. Look around. And sense whether the hand of reality is coming to meet you. Because that hand is your link to the universe. Without it you’re nothing but a random blip stabbing vaguely in the direction of future pleasure. With it you’re a God or Goddess forging paradise right here and now.

Alone, just like so many words, has become clichéd to such an extent, most of us have long lost the essence of its truth. It’s all hearsay and horror stories. If you close your eyes and say the word "alone", which image do you see? A small child excluded at the corner of the room? Cold nights with no one to hold? No one there when you need help? No one caring about you? No one understanding you?

When I walked onto this land alone, one woman, one tent, one wheelbarrow, I felt the cold hand of isolation. I was becoming quite the misanthropist. Human beings were self-serving hypocrites; a waste of space on this beautiful planet, a scourge, parasitic and useless. I couldn’t understand how no one seemed able to face up to the fact that they were, despite their partners and children and parents and friends, alone. Completely alone. No one is ever going to be 100% on our side, because first and foremost they’re on their own side. No one understands another, either. It’s impossible. No one can climb into someone else’s head and body and experience them. We are the one and only who can do that. We are unique. And that uniqueness makes us both incredibly valuable, and alone.

I used to find this abhorrent. What a miserable species we are, I mused. So I took up a pick and a shovel, and hacked myself a space on the earth. My tent pushed up from the dust like a blue blister in a desert of meaninglessness. Days went by. The digging ate my bitterness. The earth sucked in my anger. And I started slowly to shelve the notions I’d learned from books or schools or spiritual philosophies, and opened my eyes to what actually is.

Issues of aloneness are really issues of self. Because there’s a core of us that’s so very precious, and it cries out to be taken care of. I was angry because humans were selfish, but I soon noticed in nature everything is selfish too. Forget this nonsense of saintly trees giving their fruit freely and expecting nothing in return. Presumably, on a mental level a tree doesn’t "expect" in the way a human does, but it is obvious to anyone who works and lives with plants that if you don’t water them or nourish them, a tree will bear you no fruit.  A tree takes care of itself first. It makes sure its roots are nice and deep. In fact, no plant will bear you anything unless it has enough for itself. The fruit is a surplus. Animals are the same. With the exception of mothers and their infants, animals feed themselves first, unless they are part of a pack with a hierarchy, in which case they allow the alpha first pick in return for his or her protection. 
 
The problem is not selfishness. Selfishness is natural. The problem is our attitude to it. And the way we attempt to conceal it, because we’ve been told it’s wrong. Some stuff it in a cupboard and bolt the hatch nice and tight. They help everyone and everything else in the hope that they will be liked, or loved, or approved of, or good and not evil. They become thwarted and undernourished. Suddenly, they are starving. And that starvation moves in two ways; excessive greed or oozing resentment. I have been both greedy and resentful at various times in my life. And then there are the others, the sociopaths, who have found the moral high ground of the anti-selfish brigade so hopelessly lofty, they turn the other way, shut off their empathy and go for the capitalist kill. These folk will also tell you selfishness is natural. Yet, they confuse natural self-preservation with exploitation, and there’s nothing natural about that, as a cursory camp in the wilds will soon tell.  

Nature is steeped so deep in wisdom, I wonder why I didn’t see it years before. Why did I just listen to the prescribed laws of human culture? Why not just open my eyes? It always seems to take a disaster. Something in our oh-so-fallible human plan has to go dramatically wrong. And then we pause, and ask, ‘Is this really the way?’ My nice little idea of philanthropy had gone wrong. It just didn’t seem to work. So I pulled out of the world and onto my land to think about that for a while.

I have written a lot about nature’s magic, but it has a ‘dark’ side too.  I watched aphids rip off baby orange leaves, agama lizards fight for territory, owls pick off rodents, trees I’d planted and watered give nothing in return. One day, Apo the Kangal stole the food out of my little Rotty’s bowl. I wondered briefly if mob rule was our lot. If it’s destiny for the powerful to pulverise the weak. But that’s not how it works in nature. No. Because nature hasn’t vilified selfishness.

Nature is selfish, but up to a point, and that point is the point of surplus. Once there’s enough, be it territory or food, then nature shares around. Agama lizards don’t attempt to expand their territories endlessly. Trees don’t hang onto apricots once they’ve ripened. Owls don’t gorge on rats to the extent they become so obese they can’t fly. That’s the kind of folly humans become embroiled in. And it is because we’ve forgotten the art of being naturally selfish that we have also lost the sense of when enough is enough. 

When, after a few weeks, I decided to embrace total selfishness, and do whatever I wanted, I remember an initial shiver of terror. I think it was the anticipation of being shunned by others. Being selfish brings it home. If we are looking after number one, it implies everyone’s looking after number one, which implies, shock horror, that we are all alone. And we are. Whether we tie each other up in marriages, or move into friendships with an underlying expectation of something coming back, it makes no difference. We are alone. And sooner or later we’re reminded.. Perhaps there’s a limit of money or time. Perhaps two friends are both going through a difficult patch simultaneously, and neither can be there for the other. Perhaps we just can’t understand the person we’re living with, or they can’t understand us.

Yet selfishness didn’t work out how I expected, at all. Because three years on, never have I experienced such community! I was inflexible in setting my boundaries. I gave firm instructions that I was not to be disturbed in the morning, and sent people off if they broke the rule. I designated ‘me’ days, and spent plenty of time by myself. The more I did, the more I loved it. Now I enjoy a strong, varied and stimulating network of friends who all know what I’m like, and accept me for it. 

So instead of running full pelt away from solitude, and viewing loners like myself as freaks or anti-social or jaded, why not get to the crux of the issue? Have another look at that phantom of aloneness. Because nowadays, for me, when I hear the word ‘alone’ I see a silent star-filled night above me with no one interrupting it. I see a home of mud filled with love. I see space to grow on and on without end. I see zero compromise and boundless freedom. I see utter spontaneity with no need to justify or explain. I see the real me. Not the one who performs. Not the one that fits in to any given social environment. The me that loves peace and mystery and beauty. The well of me I want to sink deeper and deeper into. The sky of me that I want to fly in. And the more I get to know me, the more I love me. Because when I move beyond the voices in my head, the internalised opinions of other people, I find something else deeply wonderful. A light. A warmth. A joy. Call me selfish, but I’m my own best friend.

And then I wake up one day and find I’m full. I’m satisfied. Nourished. There’s a surplus of energy, or ideas or time; a desire to share. So I write a blog, or a book. Perhaps you will pick it off the web, perhaps you won’t. It doesn’t matter. I didn’t sell my soul to create it. This wasn’t an agreement we made prior. It’s just there, hanging like the first apricot on my tree. And if you like the taste, you are welcome to it.

[Many thanks to Brian Crocker for his discussions on the concept of surplus in exchange.]

Nature is what it is. It doesn’t have a self-image to protect, nor a living to earn. It doesn’t need followers, nor praise, nor a curriculum. It doesn’t care a hoot about concepts like good or bad. It just is.

​I remember one of my first "awakenings" up here in this small square of Eden. It was the time I suddenly began to see everything the other way up. It was as though I’d been wearing my life inside out for the past 40 years. It happened under my grandmother olive tree. It’s a wonderful tree with a peculiarly stout, straight trunk. Olives normally possess gnarled old branches that coil like dry-bark snakes. But for reasons best known to nature, my grandmother olive has a pine’s trunk. She’s proud and upright holding bundles of leaves in her rich branch hands. Naturally, with all that foliage she is the best sunshade on the land. One of the first things I had done once my camp was established was to sling a hammock between her and another olive up the bank.

That day I was swinging in the hammock watching the pomegranates ripening in the field next door, and feeling glum. Nothing had worked out how I wanted it to. My plans had gone up in flames. I didn’t want to teach any more but had no idea what else to do to keep the coppers rolling in. I was living in a tent. The mayor had just refused me water. My life felt like a mess. As I rocked, I looked at the other olive the hammock was tied to. Unlike the grandmother tree, this one has nowhere near the strength or classic aesthetic appeal of her sister. She’s a twisted old crone by comparison. Her branches are weak and full of knots, her trunk has split into three and she’s hanging onto a poor display of leaves. I closed my eyes feeling more than a little empathy.

But when, a few seconds later, I opened my eyes again, I began to see it all a little differently. From my rope bed, I scanned the vista of trees on the upper part of the land, and behind there into the forest. Bent pines sent branches jutting off asymmetrically this way and that. Olive trees were stunted. Prickly holly-like bushes exploded in the gaps like a mess of hag’s hair. Nothing followed any sense of decorum, nor any human preconceptions of orderliness. The word ‘mess’ turned over and over in my head. I realised my life, and nature had quite a lot in common.

I blinked again. And then that wise old gal, Gaia started talking. You see, nature is beautiful. Intoxicatingly, uncontrollably, irrationally, unreasonably beautiful. The greens, the browns, the ochres, the burnt siennas, the patterns, the non-patterns, the clutter, the spaces, the hollows, the glades, the carpets of pine needles, the dust, the speckles of flowers, the dried up stalks. It’s magical and enlivening and transformative.

I’ve learned so many things from nature, it will take me a lifetime to whisper her secrets. But one of them was that about mess. Mess isn’t a bad thing at all. In fact, mess is where the truth happens, the stuff that tests your mettle, the stuff that makes you shriek in wonder and jump up and down in delight. So if your life is a mess, I say wallow in it. Yes, drink in the unruly chaos of it all. Tidiness is for robots not humans. 

For me, it’s taking a while for that little nugget of nature wisdom to sink in. In truth, I have issues with mess. I like things to look just right. Everything has its place. But I am slowly starting to get it. That everything already looks just right, and is already in its place. Because nature just is. It’s not a climber. It’s not a wannabe. It’s an evolver. And now I see. They are not the same thing at all.

Feeling desperate? Join the club. I’ve been feeling more than a little despair myself, despair mixed with contempt, to be honest. How is it that so much of the world still refuses to even face the issue at hand, I’ve been wondering, never mind act on it? How can people possibly still be bleating about cellulite or the price of petrol or who George Clooney will marry, when their entire existence is in the balance? Is this a type of mass lunacy?

Yet, if I can set my anger aside, the truth is not a question of intelligence. It’s obvious. Humanity is in denial. And that is, in fact, quite normal. In fact, despite living in a mudhut, I'm probably just as much involved in it. Anyone who has lost someone close knows, the first reaction to a terminal prognosis is to pretend it just isn’t happening, because the truth is simply too devastating to contemplate. Everyone simply focuses on the hope that there will be a miracle, or some sudden technological innovation, or perhaps the doctors were wrong. Unfortunately, as I myself have witnessed, denial doesn’t prevent truth from dawning. Terminal patients still die, as we all do, be it today, tomorrow, or in 15 years. 

And it is here that I’d like to pause. Because, although this is all true, it is also, as I see it, one of the gravest strategic errors the environmental movement has made since the beginning. With an unwavering fascination in the end of the world, environmentalism has attempted to scare humanity into acting, and we are now seeing just how spectacularly scare tactics have failed. Not that the scare isn’t based on solid foundations, it's more that apparently, scared people are not particularly effective at mobilising. Humanity has been plunged into despair, and so it has buried its head even deeper in the sand of any one of our expanding deserts. 

I’ve often thought that environmentalism, for all its railing against consumerism and the materialism that fuels it, is in fact over-obsessed with the material and under-obsessed with the soul, and that the fate of our planet simply cannot be altered without a deeper understanding of why we are sabotaging it. Environmentalism should have taken a leaf out of the book of its far more successful sibling in the ‘ism’ family, capitalism. How did capitalism beat environmentalism? It perused a bit of Freud and worked out what made us tick. It offered a carrot, where the environmentalists, who’ve been all hellfire and brimstone, have offered none. Either we fight off the forces of massive earth-devouring corporations with nothing more than a yaks wool jumper and a couple of placards, or we face certain death. Well thanks for that inspiring choice. Don’t mind me if I ship in a case of Chateauneuf-du-Pape and drink myself into oblivion. 

I have blabbered before on the two drives that the human mind finds itself caught between; desire and fear (prodded by the carrot or stick mentioned above). The mind, despite its façade of sophistication, is a primitive, largely reptilian beast. When desire seems easier to attain than fear is to dispel, then the mind weighs up the odds. “What I fear is coming regardless, I may as well grab some of what I want,” it bargains. Environmentalism and its use of the media has unwittingly created a bottomless pit of angst within the human spirit, and I’m sorry, but you can’t save the world on that. To really be able to achieve a miracle (and seeing as I’ve witnessed a few, I view them as entirely possible, though not inevitable) the mind needs to be in a very different place. It needs to feel confident. It needs to be saturated in realistic rather than foundationless hope. And it helps one hell of a lot, if somewhere along the line a nice fat desire is fulfilled. If people will slave away for weeks in miserable jobs merely to possess an iphone, the satisfaction of which lasts less than a month, what might they do for a greater prize? But if there is no prize? Then what are they striving for?

Environmentalism has offered a prize of sorts, but it’s been fairly puritanical about it. The prize is an abstract salvation, which to the average human feels as remote as the Delta Quadrant and as likely as Eldorado. Environmentalism is just like any religion in its complete inability to curb the desires of humanity with a heaven and hell scenario, merely producing a state of guilt among its followers instead.

Now, this isn’t supposed to be a diatribe on the ills of environmentalism, because without the environmental movement our awareness of the issue at hand would be zilch. It is the brave and devoted ecologists in the green movement who have collected the data. It is their protests that have protected the remaining 20% of old natural forests we’re still breathing thanks to. It’s just that if anything at all is to be done, we have to recognise the old way of blame and protest isn’t working.

If this blog has a purpose or a hope or a vision at all, it’s this. I’d like to paint an alternative, and to show the real carrot that capitalism has usurped, the carrot that environmentalism ought to be grabbing back and waving in front of us for all its worth. For me, abandoning consumerism and loving the Earth has nothing to do with virtue.There is no moral highground to be attained, and no point in burdening oneself with guilt for buying a plastic bag or leaving a light on. Every human being, just like every living thing on the planet uses resources, and if humanity can sense the connection it has with the Earth, then the using of resources can be a beautiful exchange. 

Truthfully, I didn’t build a mudhut and grow my own beans to save the world, I did it to save myself. Certainly, living simply and in harmony with nature benefits everyone, but no one more than me. And my prize hasn’t been some vague whiff of planetary survival eons from today, it is immediate gratification, something I wasn't actually expecting. If you allow it, the wilderness will grant you the deepest sense of happiness you are ever likely to experience. It's even better than sex, actually. Ah, now I’ve got your attention, haven’t I? Well, it certainly makes your toes tingle, your heart flutter, and lasts significantly longer. And there’s no awkward conversation at breakfast the next day, either. Yes. I will say it again. And again. And again. I have lived here with no partner, no car, no road, at times no power and no water, and they were the most exquisite days of my life. Nothing has bettered it. Not drink, not drugs, not the hallowed ‘relationship’. Job titles, possessions and bank balances are just trash by comparison. The magic that pours out of the dirt can heal anything. The smell of the grass, the winking of any variety of flowers, the chatter of the leaves, the secrets the animals tell, the protection your special space bestows upon you and the peace of mind it brings you, are incomparable. You will witness miracles and sorcery and beauty. You will feel valuable and safe. Anxiety recedes. Confidence grows. Without the petty distractions of the media and retail, your soul blooms into something magnificent and indestructible. You begin to manifest exactly what you want and need, because your mind becomes a vessel of clarity rather than a cloudy swamp of befuddlement. You are alive and you are life. Every single thing that a corporation is trying to sell you is nothing but a fake version of what is out here in the forest, and it’s free. Absolutely free. You need never do a job you hate again.

So if I were you, I’d waste no time. Because if you haven’t felt this, you haven’t lived. Forget the Top Ten places you have to visit and the Top Ten films you have to watch, there’s one thing you should do before you die, and that’s sense the wonder of our planet. Sense who you really are. Sense where you came from and what you are truly capable of. Find the wildman or woman within. Go and camp for a night under the stars. Grow endangered plants on your balcony. Ride your bike through the forest and inhale a little unpolluted air. Because you might die tomorrow. Or maybe in 15 years. And until enough people experience this, there can be no environmentalism, and no one can save anything, because the truth is, most of us have no idea what we’re saving.


All photos were taken in and around the Olympos valley, and courtesy of Hagop at Lost Olympos.

If the comfort zone is a circle, or even an ellipse shape like the orbit of the Earth round the sun, then life up here in The Mud started far outside it. The moment I brought my tent up here and cleared my 2 x 3 metres of space into the brambles, I had hacked a hole into another world. That world was just about inside the solar system of my experience. I was still in Turkey after all, but it was definitely on the outer edge, somewhere just past Pluto. 

When I first slept outside and grappled with washing up racks and wheelbarrows of water, comfort, both spiritual and physical, was a distant speck on a horizon I was walking in the other direction of. Everything was for the first time. It was pristine yet wild. My world was a dew drop at five am, and I was a newborn mite perched on it; shocked, enchanted, bewildered, touched. The land touched me because I had no walls erected against it. No expectations. No great vision of what it "should" be. Those first months were magical. Trees muttered in crackles and rustles. Mysterious plants snuck out of the dust to feed me, or heal me. Butterflies, lizards and bugs crawled from the rocks with secret messages. The night sky was alive with other worlds. I was Alice in Wonderland.

But what is it with us humans and our preoccupation for "the rut"? I know very well, routines are the orderly assassins of magic, yet now, with the house of my dreams, running water and solar power, I find myself unconsciously retreating from ‘the new’ and sliding back into the dull predictability of the organised. Now that I’m all comfy in my earth-womb, like a marine in a dugout, or a one of those reptiles in their holes, Eden gradually withdraws. It's now down to my outside kitchen and bathroom keep me on my toes. While it’s uncomfortable to cook in a raging storm, it’s also incredibly visceral. I love that I have to face storms for a cup of tea, or grab my brolly to take a leak. Apparently we need to face the elements just to remember we're connected to them and enlivened by them. But even so. I feel those old days of wonder sliding from under my fingertips, and I miss them. Yes, the comfort zone is coming for me, loping and slobbering with couch-potato dissatisfaction. 

Which was why I sent a wish out into the valley not so long back. "Don’t let me become complacent Gaia, whatever you do," I said. Be careful what you wish for, they say. Because life, the ol' trickster, is always waiting . . . right over the edge of your comfort zone.

Two weeks ago, something happened that blew complacency all the way to kingdom come. My novel Ayşe’s Trail took off, and I have to leave here temporarily for London. Despite this being a childhood dream come true, for the first few days after receiving the news, I was beset by deep melancholy. As I wandered about my queendom of olives and home-grown veg and lizards, I began to fret about where all this book lark was leading me. I don’t want to leave the forest, and I feel an irrational and fearful urge to cling on. This place has brought me such happiness. It has healed me. And the thought of hitting the big city, having to dress up and possibly participate, even temporarily, in a lifestyle I’ve long left behind, leaves me panic-stricken and morose.

But when fear decides a course of action, nothing good follows. Just as my garden and the forest about me changes with every year, so do I. Am I really going to hide in a cave forever and refuse to grow or put my hand out into the light. Because nothing around me accepts such self-imposed stifling. So last week I took a deep breath. I kissed the earth and hugged my home. And then I let my expectations of it go. Because that’s the only proper thing to do when you’re in love with something. Free it. And as I did, I heard the comfort zone growl, before it withdrew reluctantly back into its lair. At that moment, the wind of life was in my hair again, and adventure howled down from the hills. The moon was eclipsed, the stars swung into new patterns, and the pines curled and twisted on their roots. I have no idea where I’m going, or what will happen next. But I expect it’ll be worth writing about. 

An hour later, I left the store in a huff, because it doesn’t matter whether it’s Hollywood or books, there just doesn’t seem to be room for the thinking woman in the world of marketing. I was a soul-searcher approaching middle-age who harboured no calling to settle down in domestic bliss, nor any interest in Louis Vuitton, who I might have thought was a French centre-back. I was looking for a snippet of direction. I wasn’t about to draw it from the world of literature, though. Bugger it! I said, feeling far too dauntless for my own good. I’m going to write my own book, then. It was back in 2009, I started Ayşe’s Trail. 

Five years later.
 
Many people have heard about the house of mud. But not so many know of the other journey I was on at the same time, the infinitely more excruciating inner expedition that was my book. Yes, the earthbag house was a breeze in comparison, I can tell you. Contrary to what I had believed, writing a novel isn’t simply a case of scribbling your imagination down on paper and mailing it to the printer. Oh if only! Novel writing is a mission to the nethermost corner of the dark side and back again, naked, walking on a tightrope, carrying a sack of vipers over one shoulder and a satchel of hand grenades over the other. Once you’ve embarked on book writing, every submerged demon whose head you’ve been quietly stamping upon, will surge up to haunt you. Your every insecurity will drop from the rafters, stick its fingers in the corners of its mouth and waggle its tongue at you. You will pull out the contents of your soul only to be tortured by the opinions of others. You will read over what you’ve written. Some days that’s a glorious process and you’ll be certain you’re the reincarnation of Proust. The next day you’ll reread the manuscript, bite all your nails off, and promptly use chapters as stove kindling or fold the pages slowly and deliberately into origami swans. Weeks go by. Your laptop gloats at you from table. You inhale, flex your fingers, and dare to take another peek. Slender strands of hope slip out from among the morass of words. You write. You dream. Inspiration floats through the windows in golden clouds. Then one day (did I mention it took five years) the novel is ready, and for at least six minutes, you’re convinced it’s the best thing to grace a page since Goethe wrote Faust. That’s when, arms outstretched like one of the three wise men offering frankincense or myrrh, you hand your precious new-born child over to A Reader.

Readers have little notion of their significance in a writer’s world, until the day, that is, they write. In the hyper-sensitive mind of the writer, Readers are Titans. It doesn’t matter how old a friend or how positive A Reader might be, at the moment you hand over the fragile body of your writing, they appear to you as the divine hammer of judgement itself. How many times have I written blog articles, flinchingly pressed the ‘PUBLISH’ button and felt compelled to run and hide behind the sofa. For the next week I'll be bracing myself for the barrage of comments. Or worse still, the lack of comments.

Articles are one thing. But the novel it’s taken you five years to write? It feels like literary life and death. Sometimes A Reader says nothing to you for weeks and, like a desperate lover waiting for a phone call, you’ll feel irrational and violent urges to beat down their door, hold their head over the gas hob and yell, ‘Well wasn’t there anything you liked about it?’

If you are lucky, The Reader will bother to summon you for feedback. They will inform you politely and earnestly that your story has some potential, but you’ll have to rewrite it. Or delete your
main character. Or change the voice. Because as it stands, it doesn’t quite work. You walk home shoulders rounded, head bowed, realising you are a useless, incompetent cretin worthy only of the crumbs discarded from the round table of great authors. You slide your manuscript under the leg of a wobbling table. And there it remains for a few months.

Yes. Novel writing is a risky gauntlet to run. It’s sobering. It's terrifying.

Thus, it is with heart palpitating slightly that I place before you, Oh Reader, Ayse’s Trail. As always with creative writing, it started out as one thing, and ended up as another. Stories have a life of their own, and often one wonders who is narrating. So, if you like hiking, or soul-searching, or the wilderness, or perhaps you want to know more about the gateway between worlds that is my beloved Turkey, or you have a penchant for the philosophy of time, here you go; Ayse’s Trail. Contemporary biography meets historical fiction. And a bit more besides.

After ‘Don’t you get lonely?’ the next most frequently voiced question to me is ‘Don’t you get scared?’ And yes, sometimes quite frankly, I do. On a moonless winter night, a night so dark that even the shadows are in hiding, my road turns from a scenic strip of nobbled, red earth into the gulf of Hades. Occasionally, I’ll walk up that road to a friend’s house. Sporadic blips of orange poke through the rucks of the hillside opposite; lights from the hamlet nearby. They give the valley the appearance of something from Lord of the Rings, and for some reason I can’t quite put my finger on, I find that rather comforting. But it’s when I reach the top that the background music changes. There, at the triangular junction where my dirt track and a tarmac road meet, is the cemetery. By day it’s the quaintest village cemetery you are ever likely to see; a random clutter of small graves nestled in a mountainside olive grove. The dead occupy a glorious vista with the Mediterranean in the distance. But by night? There’s no sea view, no olive trees, only the vague outline of gravestones poking up from the inky soil. I always stride past that graveyard doing my utmost not to search out shadows moving beyond the stone wall. Then, I hear the dog, or rather the local Hound from Hell. It belongs to the shepherd who lives in the web of wooden struts and plastic up the bank. The dog has smelt my fear and is now burning a trail of snarling carnage in my direction. I start running. I reach the turn-off to my friend’s house, the barking growing closer by the minute. I flick my torch back and see the dog’s eyes; two soulless glass buttons flashing in a cloak of endless black. I can’t see the teeth. But it doesn’t matter. I know what they’re like; huge flesh-ripping, saliva-coated fangs rasping to get stuck into my leg. The torch becomes a weapon. I flick the beam towards the eyes and dazzle the dog for a few seconds. I use those moments to back as quickly as I can down the track.

Scared? I'm so mortally petrified it will take a good half hour before I utter a sentence without a swear word.

And yet, nothing at all has really happened. The dog hasn't killed me. It didn’t even reach me. There were no zombies in the graveyard, and no cold hands stretching out from the graves. If I draw the dark half of my mind to one side and peer beyond it, I see the night is an open face spattered with freckles of starlight. The darkness is a mystery that the pine trees are now pumping life into. And the sky is wise and profound. I am part of that dark, profound mystery. I am breathing it. 

Alone in the wilds these things will happen. Boar may come cantering out of the forest and nose round your tent for a midnight snack. You may be faced with winds rushing at 60 kilometres an hour, and all you have over your head is a sliver of flapping canvas, or perhaps the track into your land has
morphed into a mud slick and you realise you might not be able to leave for three days. In such situations, bravado and a few positive affirmations just aren’t going to cut the mustard. Nor is a gun, a torch, or a dog. You need other sturdier tools in your psychological toolbox if you want to mitigate the panic.

Personally speaking, to truly derive the immense pleasure available from the natural world, and to be able to reconnect with it without dissolving into a blubbering wreck, I have needed a practice. And for me, that practice is meditation in general, Vipassana more specifically. Though sometimes a few yoga asanas will do the trick as well. Now, I’m not a meditation or yoga evangelist (been there, done that). The meditation malarkey is simply one of many ways to deal with the fog of fear and worry that can quickly blanket the human spirit when things don’t appear to be as they should. Other people have other techniques; walking barefoot on the earth, Tai Chi, hiking. 

Once the fog clears, I can reconnect, not just with the Earth, but with the thing that underpins it all. I’d call that thing the spiritual world for want of a better phrase. The trouble with words is they drag so many connotations behind them. A word is never just a word. It’s a story. What I’m trying to allude to when I use the word ‘spiritual world’, is not a belief system, nor a religion, nor angels and devils, nor pixies and woodsprites. For me, the word 'spiritual' refers to everything that is not physical. Things you can’t see, hear, feel, touch or smell. I could use the term ‘non physical’ world, but that implies a ‘non’ event, or an absence of something. The Other world that lies beyond the senses is not a nothing, it’s a whopping great something, and without it, whether you live in a tent in the hills or in a basement flat in a honking city, there’s not much difference. Sorry, scratch that. There’s light-years of difference! Nonetheless, it’s the spiritual element that defines the quality of the experience.

The most obvious element of the spiritual world is thought; ideas, concepts and images in the human mind. Thoughts hold no physical space. They can’t be touched, smelt or seen by others. Yet they are the most powerful element of the human being and shape the very fabric of our lives. For most of us, thought is based on two drives; fear and desire. Freud called it the pleasure principle, the endless psychological struggle to seek out pleasure and avoid pain. Vipassana meditation talks about craving and aversion. Watch your thoughts for any given moment and it’s easy to see; either the mind is galloping down a track of worry and strategizing how to avoid trouble, or it’s chasing after a dream and fantasizing. And if there isn’t a memory of a real experience for the mind to grasp onto, it will use those plied to it by the media and advertisers instead.

So when you arrive in your wilderness paradise, nature will be there waiting for you with her well of magic and nourishing secrets. But will you see her? When a gale force wind begins to crush your dome tent, will you feel awe, or simply terror? Will you trust your instincts, and the movement of
the land around you? Or will you be overtaken by the images generated by any number of horror films? For me, it is often a very fine line. And the only way I can cross that line is to sit each morning, breathe, watch my mind spouting its gibberish, see through it and sense the vast benevolent power of the spiritual realm within. Without that, I know I wouldn’t be here. I would have packed my bags two-and-a-half years ago and run away as fast as I could.

Long before The Mud, long before earthbag houses and composting toilets, when I was teaching in the Turkish city of Antalya and spending absurd amounts on Penne all’Arrabbiatta and chocolate souffle, a friend invited me over to watch a Lars von Trier movie. I buckled up and braced myself for two hours of marginally pretentious wallow into the dark side of the human spirit. But I was in for a surprise. Not necessarily about the pretentiousness, but because the film profoundly changed the way I view creativity. OK, all well and good, but what’s all this got to do with the mountain blog and earthbag houses, and alternative living? Well, because if there’s one film you should watch before embarking on a building project, I’d say The Five Obstructions is it. ​

The Five Obstructions is a documentary starring von Trier’s mentor, filmmaker Jørgen Leth. To summarize the film very briefly, Von Trier sets Leth the task of making five short remakes of Leth’s 1967 film The Perfect Human. The snag is, each time he issues the suffering filmmaker with an obstruction. One obstruction is that Leth has to remake the film in Cuba and with a maximum shot-length of 12 frames, another is that the film should be a cartoon. It quickly emerges just how crucial the obstruction is to stimulating and guiding Leth’s creativity. When, as a punishment for failing to complete an obstruction properly, von Trier tells filmmaker Leth to redo the movie with no obstruction at all. Leth all but throws a fit, blurting something along the lines of ‘you can’t do that! That’s the cruellest thing to do to an artist, give them absolute freedom.’

In the years that followed, I pondered many an hour on Leth’s outburst. Because we so often hear the opposite, that artists need to be unfettered in order to create. I, for one, had long entertained the notion that to write, paint or make things, I required a vast open landscape devoid of
boundaries and impediments. There were to be no financial limitations, no side job to sequester large portions of my attention, ample time, endless resources, and an ever-supportive, all-positive audience. I thought those were the factors necessary for cultivating the most original ideas. Without obstructions, inspiration could float in like an exotic, vibrant-winged butterfly and then manifest on the page, or the canvas, or in The Mud. But I was wrong. That's not how it works at all. Time has shown me over and over again that it is the obstruction that pushes the creativity gas pedal, not freedom.

So, to return to The Mud. When I first moved onto my beloved 2000 metres square of land back in 2011, it looked just like the undefiled canvas I had coveted. Everything was in abundance: earth, rocks, daylight hours. The sky stretched open and blue like a cloudless door to the God of Great Ideas. The view rolled on and away from me in an unobstructed green tumble. The mountains were so ridiculously steep and bold, they seemed to laugh at the mere suggestion of limitation. I wondered whether it was unethical to lay down rules in such a happy circle of unconstraint. But I loved my spot deeply, and I wanted to protect it. So I made Mud Laws or Mud Obstructions.
The 5 Obstructions of The Mud.

1. No concrete is permitted anywhere on the land.
2. No smoking within the borders
3. No squares and straight lines.
4. No killing of animals.
5. No major expense.

I’m not going to spend time defending the whys and wherefores of each obstruction. None of them exist as moral condemnations. They are my preferences. And the beauty of owning your own land is that you’re entitled to a little caprice. What is more exciting is the creativity each obstruction has fostered. Not being able to use concrete, for example, generated a wealth of bright ideas regarding mortar, mosaic grouting and house foundations. The banning of corners, though not always successfully obeyed (I’m eons from the architect Hundertwasser) resulted in a house that makes me sing when I sit in it, and simultaneously strong enough to withstand earthquakes. My budget was instrumental in producing some of the most inspired parts of the home, as either the natural resources on my land or other people’s rubbish became my materials. Broken tiles, grass, bottles, branches, reeds, thrown-away cupboards, broken windows, cracked crockery and reject furniture all turned into an enchanting game of ‘now what can we make out of that’. Banning smoking (and in a country like Turkey an outdoor smoking ban is none too easy to implement) changed the entire dynamic of the land. It affected something beyond the physical, and my space became a place of creation or peaceful contemplation, rather than busy socialisation. 

I write all this because normally, when problems and limitations arise, we are so apt to feel stymied. In fact, one of the attractions of writing over building is that ideas can remain just that; perfect bubbles of non-matter, before they are subject to the humiliating degradations of the physical world.
But Gaia (and von Trier come to mention it) have changed my perspective on the art of creation. In construction, time, money, available materials, energy and the weather are the big 5 obstructions everyone has to face. Sometimes rain calls off play. Other times it’s just too hot to lift a rock. Sometimes you simply can’t find the power to bang in another nail. It gets dark and you haven’t managed to finish the plastering. The roof beams cost three times more than you’d hoped. These are all construction classics and so often result in frustration. But I now look at those obstructions as my friends rather than my enemies. Who knows? Perhaps God stuck them onto the canvas of the Earth just to prod our otherwise lethargic imaginations. And perhaps von Trier has a right to a little pretention, as well.