49> wishlist

Autumn clatters its leaves around me. 

As the stridency of growth draws back, I can see again. I found the exuberance of this magic summer overpowering. My bracken is now collapsing as dramatically as it grew.

 

I gave up on my garden a month ago, and am wondering if I'm really cut out for it. Maybe I'm a hunter gatherer, a trapper, a berry-picker. Maybe what I'm trying to make is a rich hunting ground, feeding rabbit and feral pheasant and snipe, bearing fruit and nuts. 

Why not.

Next year, next year. We are in the Season of reflection and forethought. Abundance too. 

I wish for a dry mouse proof storage space, a simple cluster of raised beds & covered grow pods, and a place to house a volunteer bracken-basher, tree planter, & gardener.

I wish for a thousand Sweet Chestnut, Wild Cherry, and Beech seedlings, and the help to ready the land and plant and mark them.

Most, I wish to allow the space in my heart for a sense of support and accord, and help, that is latent in this place.

I am realising more & more that we summon and invoke our own demons and adversaries. 

And can invite help and love and sharing of the magic equally

This hill is looking on with an amused, wise smile.

48> energy versus appearance

Hark Hark, The Park, the Dark!!

It's so easy to slip into patterns. Prejudices and antagonisms.

I suspect that the overall opinion amongst their peers, of how the Pembrokeshire Coast  National Park handled planning issues to do with Brithdir Mawr, and it's straw bale huts etc, was that it was unprofessional, verging on incompetence.

Here we again, it seems...

A story. 

So I hear, in the 1960s, a motley collection of creative folk descended on North Pembrokeshire. 

Artists, Sculptors, Writers, and Dreamers. Most seemingly knowing each other by chance, from meeting on a Suffolk beach. 

Wales has been the refuge of many such waves; of the 1950 war-weary and new homesteaders, of the 1970 hippies, and the organic growers. It seems to be a deep human impulse to head West. 

This group were a fine bunch.

John and Sally Seymour the visionaries of Self Sufficiency , John Brown the stick-chair maker, John Knapp-Fisher and Denys & Eirian Short the sculptor and artists. I am not a serious chronicler, no doubt they were many  more. 

They dreamed things, they made things. They were drawn to, and reacted to this amazing living landscape.

 A new world, often involving a mess. Mud, scrap metal, abandoned pots, failed or unfinished projects.

Magic in the Making is often Messy.

Hark hark, the Park.

If then was now, that 'creative bunch' wouldn't get a look in, as prices have spiralled, let alone the chance to spread stuff about and live and work and make a mess.

The Planning Authority here might as well seek funding from the Estate Agents, who are their main benefactors, rather than pretend to be protecting a vibrant, creative local economy.  We would at least know where we stand.

Buzz KnappFisher, John's son, has a Suburban Neighbour yapping at his heels about his piles of useful bits of metal, & the Park are back on their old default of seeing their core clientele as the property owning upper middle class, and are threatening Buzz with prosecution.

~ In that sweetsour reasoned voice that people adopt when they feel somewhere inside that they are talking total bollocks.

That whole motley 60s bunch of creative visionary incomers would be getting the same letters from the Park if it was around then. The Mud, The Mess, The Chaos. loads of it!

Prosecution Notices & Closure. 

And that sense of being watched, and criticised that goes with it. 

It's about time the Park just grew up. The  role we have given them in honouring this sacred landscape is crucial. It attracts creative, original  and innovative people, who add to its power.

We are all meant to be doing this together. 

47> Defaults

Its about time I blogged again.

So much has happened I won't even try to weave this into the previous one.

In few days the hut I'm sitting in will be declared legal, or not. I'm pretty dispassionate about it, mostly. I have put in for ' retention of a temporary work shelter, ancillary to the restoration of biodiversity at Allttabor' or words like that. 'Ancillary' is one of those key Planning coinages, part of their special code. Planners are an increasingly detached priesthood, who really only want to engage thus. 

I have tried to give the 'structure' a neutral title in the word 'shelter'.God forbid it should have any whiff of 'habitation'. And that it is in the 'open countryside' sets lights flashing.

We are of our Age, unconsciously adopting its values and sensibilities and neuroses as our defaults. 

Suburbia is Unreal. An intrinsic lie, a designed fantasy.

It was founded on nostalgia for lost pastoral origins, and as refuge from our often crowded and dirty and ugly workplaces. 

A conscious displacement.

We have mile after mile of pocket rural 'dormitory' for nuclear families. Clusters of houses and gardens were built, tailored to house an aspiring middle class . A culture intrinsically selfish and isolated and aspiration.

 From this place, no wonder we learn a view of the world based on confused guilt and whimsy. On occasional escape and dreams of retirement.

Most driveways harbour boats, camper vans & caravans. The substance of dreams of adventures into wilder places. 

I came across reprints of the first Ordnance Survey maps recently. They are a treasure, showing a landscape that is pre-industrial, pre-suburban sprawl, pre-oil, and pre-forestry. So much has changed and so fast in two hundred years. I feel a great healing in gazing at them, and realising how fast transformation can be. We can mend things as well as break them. Nature always treats our disturbances as an opportunity , so we should too.

This blog has gone epic mode,

That is, it's gone on too long.

I'm going to coil it in. 

Tie up the threads.

Since I started this, the decision has been made. I will wait for a brown envelope to john spikes in the postbox. I am ready to meet it either way...

I think

46>Virtuality

'We have ceased to recognise Space as a sacred Part of the Earth. Places emanate Space, which has a flavour and viscosity that is particular. A local air.
The remnant of this knowledge is seen in that old currency of shrines, places of power, extremities. These were only approached appropriately by walking through true space to them, through the ordeal of walking through earth-space.
We have cut this Space and our sense of it to ribbons with our effortless transports; so we never arrive. We take images of our non-arrival away, as totems. As if the currency of collected totems and the splendour of our transports recompense for the fact that we never arrived'. 
 
I wrote that on a fruitless quest I made to Spain in 2001, looking for peasants, as people maybe still living in working harmony with the Earth. I found two bachelors both lonely in their coastal paradises.
 Since then, land care has got more and more chemical and mechanised, and so erases the particularities of location. Tractors are bigger,and farmwork is increasingly done by teams of contractors. Land management agencies devise future operations on computer maps, rather than as interractions with actual places.
 80% of us are reared in the strange whimsical netherland of the suburbs, and live unconsciously thereafter to its values. Gardens reflect fashions portrayed on television and supplied by global suppliers. Our houses are virtual bunkers, heated, lit, and informed by a central grid. A few dry steps from the front door is the car, and effortless access to a vast social network of retail, civic and workplaces.

 We need have no necessary knowledge of, or relationship to ANY scrap of native soil, ever, in our lives.

 I find this deeply sad. 
      Devastating.

 For us, and for the Earth.     
  

45>Gimme Shelter

Its been a long time since I posted a blog.
Much has happened in all our lives.

My garden is somewhat neglected.
It needs manure, now my heap of bracken compost has been used.
I lost heart last summer, when

a dancing airforce of white angels made love over my cabbages, and left their  pulsing green babies to chew them to skeletons.

The winter was a blast of wind and horizontal rain. It shredded hollies and gorse that I had imagined were bombproof. The garden sat like an abandoned tea party until well beyond normal dream-time, when we pore over seed catalogues and do our deep planning and digging.

The final nail, or spanner or whatever jamming, closing metaphor is most toxic to our creative gestures, was the news that someone had reported my huts to the National Park Planning Authority.

That was at the end of February.
Since then there has been a weekly exchange of emails.
I have submitted many various scale plans and descriptions of my activities and intentions.
It is good to be challenged. To check out your values.
I have had to voice my dream and what I have achieved and it is good.

I haven't been served with an Enforcement Notice, but then I have dismantled and removed my first hut, and applied to retain the new one as a temporary work shelter.

I can't technically sleep there. I can sleep in my van, and go down there to wash and clean my teeth and have breakfast, then work as I did on my garden, or weeding my trees etc.
I make my midday coffee there, and lie down and read my gardening book, before setting off out to start again.
I shelter from the sun, and have lunch. I have supper there too, and work late into the dusk afterwards, as the day cools and the dew helps the scythe cut sweeter.
But if I am staying over to work the next day, I have to sleep in my van.

Otherwise I am deemed to be inhabiting the hut.

A strange system.
It's like living in the tangle of someone elses' neurotic fears.

Except this particular mad aunt is our Planning system.