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.