halo of kittens, as they warm up in the sunrise

Dearest Hive Friends and Homesteaders,

This post begins on a beautiful fresh afternoon, as we’re just back from a rather circuitous route to a market in a nearby town – not far at all ‘as the crow flies’, but half a day by Italian rural roads! Neverthless, we (@vincentnijman and I) had a gorgeous time, from Agnone mercato, to splendid cornetti, to hilltop midgie-raking/ dumpster-diving and scavenging some really nice big, tiles.

We return home refreshed in our perspective, and sit down to write respective Hive posts… My writing is coming back to vision, and to the nurturing of a higher vision for our new land.

Holding a vision has always been very important to me; I suppose that being a visionary artist, I was perpetually trying to keep my inner perspective wide - to allow a larger vision to flow through my imagination-intuition-arm-and-brush. I also worked on multiple large-scale projects as an artist and social entrepreneur in my earlier years, whilst endeavouring to keep my Life and Work focussed on the biggest picture possible: to genuinely envision the world changing, and asking the Universe always – what can I do to best utilise my skills and knowledge, to effect positive transformation of All Things?

That feels a tad contrived now, in all honesty, as we get gnarly – down and dirty – on our land. ‘Treading the mystical path with practical feet’ feels like a particularly theoretical, or mental, enterprise, in our current context. It feels like rather a big transition from wanting a thing to actually creating it.

I have a lot of (essentially, conceptual) tools in my head and hands, awaiting some kind of a signal to get started, and a strongly upwelling sense of the paradise that I know this land was divinely created for. And yet I’m/ we’re reluctant to put any pressure on our process. It feels best, most right, to simply observe, and to hold quietly, gently, humbly in our core and in our highest intention, the wish that a subtle dream might come to unfold around us.

This dream – or vision! - is both primal and evolutionary; it comes from my past (from my own parents’ messy attempts at The Good Life on the Scottish island that I grew up on) – from both traditional crofting ways and permaculture training, and from my LifeWork’s calling – which has been to step out of the system and to Be on the land, acting as beacon to others who want to live in the Now and In Gift. We do want to tread practically forward, and we also want to lean in on our memories, our heritage and cultures, and the new-old ways that our human collective is evolving into.

Finally having this piece of earth to serve as the canvas, there feels to be a central set of themes that want to manifest through us here:

true sustainability

sovereignty

health-full potentiality

inspiring others (rather than ‘educating’ per se)

building energy and consciousness locally and collectively (globally)

Each area touches the other and weaves through it organically: there are so many ways in which we can inspire, and heal, and become more in our power/ sovereignty. There is so much meaning and symbolism in anything (and everything) we are doing and that we will do, on this piece of the Earth. We do not want to organise, plan, map or document – and yet all of these aspects might/ will come into our work here.

More to the point: there are so very many variables in these times, such extremely volatile economic-political-environmental-ethical realities that are unfolding around us... At the least we intend to found an island of sorts, amongst the stormy seas of chaotic birthing/ berthing that humanity is (in places) attempting.

Our haven will be a place of refuge and rejuvenation, but how this centre radiates its effects outwards will depend very much on what humanity chooses, as our current systems free-fall into collapse.

In the last community I lived in, at the end of my 15 yrs there, I had a strong sense of needing to be very far away from all and every kind of community, and yet now that we are emboldened by our groundedness on the land, even being the instigators of a kind of collective hub is an option. But not based on the old ways. Only folks who truly comprehend what Autonomy is, what it is to stand in Truth and Freedom rather than kowtow to those who are feeding off of us: we will be focussed on building more horizontal ways of living together, more cocreative and cooperative methods and systems.

At least initially, this means stripping everything back to basics: and it does feel primitive! But this is a necessary phase of returning to our roots. If we can get the foundations right, we can build something enduring. We have to look again, and muse over at length, what ALL our relationships with the world are: taking apart all contracts, rapports, agreements that we previously thought essential (even mandatory!) - we are looking at precisely how much water, energy, transport, goods and services and comforts, are absolutely necessary – at what we can easily live without, because it might have too high a cost to it further down the road. And we’re finding what alternative, natural aspects might take the place of the usual things we had interaction with every day, back in our old lives.

It is a delicious process, taking a life apart! Dissembling our previous routines, habits, presumptions, approaches. It is a gloriously fun practise, making everything new, taking nothing for granted, and assuming only that All Is Change.

Our new ways are not random, though, nor are they indulgent or purely selfish. Every choice is weighed up and selected because it is felt rightly, or because it might help tip the scales in the bigger scheme of things; we endeavour to make the kinds of scelte that align with a symbiotic, respect-ful, very-long-term rapport with – not just Nature, but – all of reality, with all that needs correcting.

What is the best use of our attention-resources-energy? Who should benefit from our labour? How can we best radiate influence to the world: should we focus on the very subtle/ the prayer-based, or should we make efforts to further story-tell and inseminate influence face-to-face and virtually? What will be the effects of our actions - what will remain of our creative outpourings - once we are gone?

Once we free ourselves from conventional restrictions on our time, our attention, our creative upwelling, there feel to be genuinely limitless options. And with that can come dizzying overwhelm! But moving slowly into living slowly, things do appear to present themselves in ease-full symbiosis: and in the end it feels like there are not really a million choices – only one: the most Right – or the least wrong, to begin with, whilst we still are thinking reductionist thoughts. In a Life of Gift, there is only the easiest choice, which aligns with the very-long-term hope that every element, plant and being can be harmoniously interwoven for the Great Good Of All.

The higher vision helps clean out all the messy ego stuff, the presumptions and the contractions that have been offered to us by the system. Instead there is only Right Choice, the right choice in each and every thing, which moves us smoothly to the next choice. Anything that jars or sticks out as less symbiotic, can be rejected… or talked over some more.

It might turn out in the end that our majority collective vision is completely self-destructive, as our current situation globally both illustrates and suggests: we will not be participating in or co-creating that one.

Our (positive!) collective vision might be the kind of life-raft that carries a very few of us into a better future. This might even be into an extended period of extremely simple living – even hiding out from the rest of the world, as they implode into the abyss of their unconscious. It might require even generations of making-do-and-mending, as we await the full dissolving of the Old – so that we can rebuild and regrow more appropriate ways.

As the weeks pass on our beautiful hillside, we are beginning to shape small corners of our space. We have a clear sense of where a building might grow. We even have a sense of the kinds of materials that we might use, many of which are already in proliferation on our land…. though we may require more training as to how to use them! 😋 We’ll be creating more robust spaces for Vincent and I to work-rest-play in, which will then free up the other spaces – perhaps for workshops, or visitors, or interesting meetings….

As we walk the land, we are gently cutting paths and making it easier to move around. As we prepare food in the makeshift kitchen, we are throwing scraps out to nourish the soil near the house, and daily we plop seeds where they might land and sprout, and we gather clippings and wild seeds into our arms from wherever we explore in the region, taking heed of what is already flourishing. This week we noted apple varieties, mulberry, and myriad flowers on our journeys, which we know now will also grow well here.

In a way, there is very little to ‘do’. We just Be.

With much love to all of you, and extra virtual hugs to those who are homesteading or harbouring a want to!

Vision