a cabbage stump pyramid - potentially propogating...
We just got through a(nother) tough few days, and I'd be worried about dwelling on the drama and milking attention from the audience, if we hadn't risen out of our scraping-of-the-barrel moment, like the proverbial phoenix from the flames! Freezing temperatures again, wet wood, a spell of extreme vertigo (!) and some domestic frictions rooted in possible cabin fever.....
visual pun intended: "rising like a partial chicken carcass out of the steam(ing lentil dahl)"
Homesteading on a shoestring isn't meant to be straightforward, anyways - and as 
We invece are slowing down rather than seeking shortcuts, getting more primal rather than looking for life hacks, and most importantly FEELING EVERYTHING rather than stuffing it down or distracting ourselves. Living on the land, learning exponentially and communing directly with nature - without having the 'safety net' of either conventional 'jobs' and/ or contractual relationships with the local council and government - can be equally liberating and confronting...
It is up to us to regulate our rhythms, find our resources, create solutions and harvest riches: to get our lives in Natural Symmetry- Symbiosis. We are not leaning back into benefits and privileges, nor into the structures, formats and hierarchies that the state and society provide 'so kindly' for us.
In the absence of such paraphernalia, there are two extremes that we can orient towards: the first is to try and mimic what we were conditioned into - i.e. an aggressive, reductionist approach to Nature - machinery, lines, hard graft and a master-versus-servant rapport.
The opposite extreme of this example spectrum might be to be overly passive/ hippy-ish, using magical thinking and folklore as our alternative to the mainstream model - probably plagiarising other cultures' rituals and/ or plant medicine traditions, and generally being unrealistic about the actual perils of being immersed in the wildness.
Vincent and I ruminate at length (every day!) as to where we sit on this scale, and how we can bring a living harmony into our property - and into our relationship with the Divine. As we delve deeper, live further into the cycles, and get to know the living landscape more intimately... We don't just have to release our egoic conditioning of separation; in this freedom and challenge, we also have all kinds of 'the unmanifest' that wants expressed!
All the fears, all the embodied trauma, all the stuff that society is intolerant of, all the stuff that was stuffed down and which subsequently became more problematic as time marched forward: all the fodder that, if we were not here now (letting it out), most likely would fester and grow darkly, until we were consumed by it, or turned inside-out by disease.
Instead, The Wild One becomes visible, which shocks us at times out of our happy-jolly excitement at Homesteading 101! The Wild One is a more vital state, and a more spontaneous, uncompromising Being. A healthy place on the spectrum, but quite averse to domestication!
(Meanwhile, we do still have to (if occasionally) dip our presence into the main stream. So we have to brush our hair, put on clean, non-work garments - and 'act normal' - whatever that means.)
Our wild, true-er Self is always unpredictable. And expressive and elemental - in fact, it seems to dance with the elements, in a way that can take some getting used to, having been sedated by a semi-urban lifestyle. The Wild Self is the True and the Whole Self: it is home, or the gravitational centre of our Universe, which magnetises all the disparate aspects of self back home to roost.
This 'flock of identitification' is like a large city tree full of starlings at dusk: a mass of chattering, a cacophany of twittering and settling down. Our beings similarly have this drama of coming togetherness, as our neuroses return to the heart and are reintegrated, assimilated.
Every crisis seems impossible to endure... And yet we have chosen to live through this, and so we do. There is nothing to be done but feeling, everything: all things rise up in us, express, and are freed. And then we have free-dom. We have the space and the ease of our shadows having been gathered together with our light aspects - perhaps they are spiralling in yinyang balance and illumination, into their right place in our inalienable, Right, Whole, Newness.
Every challenge rises up like an impossible wave - it brings a certain nausea and vertigo, blurry eyes and drunken feet, then it calms like the storm always does, and there's a sense of rebirth, rejuvenation - if riches returned to rightful owner. Every problem seems harder than the last, because we are feeling it more and more fully - and so every hardship brings us new, repaired sentience. A wider spectrum of emotion, a more integrated rapport with Self, with each other, and with The Universe.
progress on my painting commission
The dynamism of a Natural life is truly disorienting at first. There is little to compare it to in modern living. It feels foreign and clunky... until it is perfectly, wonderfully Normal. As we integrate, we feel more and more Normal - not the white-bread, medicated, sugar-caffeine-alcohol addicted 'normal'. Not the certificated, 'authorised', conformed 'normal' 'citizen'. Nothing like that...
progress on my painting commission number 2 (it's a pair of paintings) - this one is in a drying phase, protected from cat proximity, by big bottles of shampoo and shower gel
