I don't think I have ever felt so engaged with life before. Not with life so much as with the earth. A particular piece of land. So so much engaged as married.
Since my twenties I have been a hunter-gatherer. Looking for good reason to be in wilderness. The shore, the sea, the boglands, the forests and woodlands. I got to know all these places intimately, and they rewarded me with a living. But I took my harvest and left.
This year I am working, sleeping, breathing; in love with a piece of land, a rocky hill overlooking the sea, covered in bracken and bramble.
I planted two thousand trees this winter, well nearly, an orchard, and have dug and planted a garden. The summer before I made a hut as a flatpack in the forest, and put that up on the land, so I have a base to cook and rest in.
As I explore it, the land gets bigger and more interesting. It is a wild,untamed place, with special hollows and outcrops. I have been recognising these in how I have been planting trees. Celebrating it's hereness, it's myriad specialness. As I love and tend to this place, I am restoring aspects of myself. There is an old track that cuts down to the foot of the slope and the corner of the land, where it passes under a great hawthorn tree, over the polished earth of a badger sett.
I feel it viscerally as the spine of the land . As my spine .At the centre of the hill, an abutment of large, huge rocks stick out like megaliths, laced delicately with ivy strands and lichens as if they have been gardened lovingly.
I share that task. Similarly, the paths that I make follow badger paths for the most part, that is until they dive off like a bobsleigh run, down a slope. They adopt my paths too, and keep them clear.
I feel that I am in the midst of this project, so awkward about starting to narrate it so late, but its lessons are so relevant now, when every other person seems to wish to live in a yurt and grow their own food, that I will try.
here goes...
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