13a What on EARTH are we doing here? What on earth are we doing HERE? What on earth are we DOING here?

#1

These are two of the seven swans that appeared on the lake in town that I wrote about in my last post. We all know they might look serene, but are of course paddling like hell beneath the surface. No connection with me and our situation at all. None at all.

???
I’m not asking that question (those questions) as an existential investigation into ontology, into the nature of our being; though in fact, as Socrates so famously said ‘An unexamined life is not worth living.’ So yes, it is always worth asking, and asking over and over, my/your/our purpose here, on this plane of being.

I’m with ex-nun and great thinker Karen Armstrong: questions are more meaningful than answers. To question one’s existence, to reflect on life frequently, will take us deeper. We change, our circumstances change, the people in our life change, our relationship to everything changes, however minutely, as a result of time, personal history, collective events, and experience. Or at least one would hope: to know all the answers, all pat, all fixed, unchanging, gives us no impetus or opportunity to examine our lives, our beliefs, our values, our unique purpose and contribution to the great work of consciousness. To learn and grow in consciousness – that is arguably our task here.

Then there’s the question of what gives our lives meaning. The old ‘easy’ ways of finding meaning, like the organised religion of the ‘revealed’ variety, such as orthodox Christianity, which depends on belief, probably no longer work for most people.

For almost all of our history we’d have had deep connection with our community: our relationship with its human but also its other-than-human members; we’d have had a sense of belonging to that community, to a place and the land of that place, to the species of that place. We’d be kin. We’d know that others nearby knew us, that we had a place. We’d recognise the animals and birds in ‘our’ patch; a relationship that might be more reciprocal than we realise. We were deeply connected to that place. I suspect that without that deep and continuing relationship with land many people even now feel cast adrift, disconnected in significant ways from those others who share our planet.

‘Connection to the land doesn’t come from ownership, it’s not something you buy. It comes from time spent immersed in the smell of the earth, the feel of the rocks beneath your feet. It’s a physical feeling, an understanding that comes without thought or contemplation... [and] the loss of it has the power of a bereavement,’ says Raynor Winn in her book Landlines.

My own feeling is that some depressions are very much associated with this sense of being disconnected; a life that has no sense of rootedness in a place, in land and with our human and wild neighbours. We know from many studies that time spent outdoors with the other-than-human is healing; is a wonderful cure for depression.

There are potentially extremely serious repercussions to this disconnect.

Jan in her alchemical wonderings on Substack puts it like this: ‘I believe unprocessed grief’ [about this sense of alienation and all the loss of species – my addendum] ‘is a major element of our society’s paralysis in the face of ecological degradation on an unprecedented scale. We live in a culture that is not good at dealing with grief, a culture that often finds loss too much to handle and wants to by-pass it and sweep it aside.’

So for me, restoring this primal, utterly central relationship to the rest of the natural world is an essential step. It’s to that end that we are doing what we’re doing here in Brittany.

But that’s not where I’m going
But my asking that/those rhetorical question/s at the top of this post is more pragmatic; yes, to do with finding ourselves not living in a land (Devon, UK) to which we both had a sense of deep belonging; but also and more to do with the almighty tasks in the outer world that The Man and I have set ourselves by moving to Brittany and this smallholding at an age in our lives when (I fancy) some people would be taking it easy. It’s hard physical work; we don’t have much money; we don’t do holidays. We certainly don’t have a ‘bucket list’.

Plus ‘here’ is a foreign country; they do things differently here. And while we both love the Forest that features in my recent book, we are not within walking distance of it. The up side is that we could afford some land here, in a way that we had absolutely no chance of in the UK.

Sometimes this questioning of ours has a note of anxiety to it, especially in the middle of the night, or first thing on waking, as we remember what we have done, and what there is to do, and what with Brexit, what with TM’s only O level (GCE) French and my slightly more fluent but still so-so French, what with storms and electricity and phonelines still dragging on the ground or looped up in trees, and many trees down, what with the amount of land of which we’re guardians, and our setting ourselves the goal of trying to ‘live right’ by the planet, shifting from a human-centred viewpoint to one that takes into account the needs of the greater ecosystem and the many smaller ecosystems that make it up here in this patch…

And all to be done right now.

So what ARE we doing here?
Well. We want silence and space, tranquillity. We want green around us. We want as little light pollution as possible, and no immediate neighbours. We want to be as removed as possible from the spraying of pesticides, herbicides and artificial fertilisers. Finistère is one of the worst departments for pesticides. Especially we want trees, birds, wild animals, insects. We have all of those things and beings in abundance. (And I have to say I have almost always lived like that, or similarly; but as a tenant. It’s quite different when you have a long term commitment and sense of responsibility to some specific land. And there are big questions here around the whole idea of ‘ownership’, as if everything else on the planet is in thrall to humans, as if it’s our right.)

We want to learn ever more about the land: in general, and the land here we’re learning to belong to. We want to work it in harmony with natural processes. We both like solitude, though we do also have good friends here now.

I want a lot more slowness, and watching and listening time.

We want specifically a fruitful but non-exploitative relationship with the other-than-human.

We are here for a degree of self-sufficiency, organic; ‘future-proofing’ in that trendy and urban phrase. There will be more and more climate and food crises, more and more water stress. The world cannot feed its current population on our established meat-and-dairy diets. If we all ate plant-based and used more perennial plantings, we could feed the world (given distribution and fair governments), greatly reduce animal exploitation (and sheer cruelty), greatly reduce the land, water, pollution and toxic chemicals used in existing agricultural practices, help the hydrological cycle and associated erosion, flooding, topsoil loss, and rewild/reforest the planet too.

So here we’re challenging, in a tiny way, of course, current diets and methods of growing. We are making something small and beautiful and wildlife friendly to offset, minuscule gesture though it might be, against the vast intensive pig/veal/chicken farms, the hunting (far too close for comfort where we live), and the pesticides.

We can feed others here in the future, if needed, largely ecologically. We can turn some of the land free, wild, back to what it would be without us.

The ‘how’ of that
We’re doing what we’re doing via a microfarm blend that we are making up as we go along: to the extent that we can, we’re employing both dig and no-dig annual and perennial vegetable growing, permaculture, orcharding, coppicing, scything and hoe-gardening, forest gardening, active and passive rewilding. We are also leaving alone the woodland that tumbles down to the stream. To some extent I plant biodynamically, that is by phases of the moon, and I employ companion planting, species that aid and encourage each other.

I’ll write about each of those in bold in future posts. And yes, there are compromises and throughout dilemmas and quandaries: we have a strimmer and a mower, a chipper and a chainsaw. At the same time, we’re trying to minimise fossil fuel use. I would love to be free of such things, but there is too much land here to manage without, at least as we have set it up so far, given there are only two of us and we’re no longer young. (Keeping animals, though I’ve spent my whole life alongside them and they’re family, is another of our ethical dilemmas. More anon.) Hopefully, using more perennial growing systems, we will need to do less maintenance into the future.

The key for us
I’d like to think we’re establishing a reciprocal arrangement with the land, where we are giving as well as taking. It is a strong and healthy flow – or has the potential to be, as we are at the beginning and feeling our way forward – as far as I can tell, so far.

One key principle is from permaculture. This is about a circular dynamic. (Sometimes known as a ‘closed loop’ system.) The principle of this applies to networks of energy on all levels, not just on the physical; as does permaculture in general. A healthy ecosystem depends on a process that in itself depends on an output of ‘waste’ being an input of nourishment to another part of the same ecosystem. Already we are managing this to some extent, which means bringing in little from outside, while contributing our own healthy ecosystem to the larger picture.

So for example the fallen trees and branches from the storm are going to provide:
a) firewood, as that is entirely how we heat the house and to some extent how we cook;
b) the ash from those fires goes back to feed the vegetables and trees;
c) woodchip from the brash or brushwood that is too small to burn in turn works to suppress weeds and feed the soil, especially when composted.

We have been very inspired by the book Miraculous Abundance and the farm in Normandy, Bec Hellouin, that in turn inspired the book, and its vision keeps us going. I now have all three huge and beautiful volumes, in French, that followed on from that: La Vie en Terre (happily I also have volume 1 in English!).

More on all this coming, of course.

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