Dearest Homesteading & Hive Communities,

ginormous snail shells: looking forward to pasta alle lumache one day!

What to write about, having been on our New Land for a handful of days, and then having made the long (2.5 hrs?) drive back to Guardia – to our now ‘second home’ – what to express about the first almost-week of roughing it, whilst we get our legs accustomed to walking our property, listening to our trees, watching what is growing and dying?

Firstly, the heat has been excruciating this past month, but the past days in particular – high 30s, peaking almost at 40 Celsius, in the open exposed fields. We’ve been equal parts lethargic and grumpy as much as anyone else, and despite our overjoy at our investment. The burning sun has allowed only brief spells of activity, between grossly-sweating moments of barely-coping.

Plus the water at our beautiful community fountain was closed off! We had assumed that this would be our main source of glorious spring well water, as we began to get our feet here – but day two found it inexplicably dry – we fussed around it for a few days, alongside bees and wasps, butterflies and thirsty dogs – but to no avail. The word on the strada is that it has been rerouted down to a lower village in the valley, who have no water at all…. That, and/ or the tubes needed cleaning out (?) - and it’ll be closed for either a few weeks over the dry period, or longer into autumn.

Our initial panic was unwarranted: we have a car and are willing to travel. But the convenience certainly is removed from this core need, and it hit us a wee bit, as we were all set for ease and comfort: the short walk to the Fontana Vecchia had been our image of the day being punctuated in our new, very slow life.

The talks we had around this issue, and around landing on the land in general, helped us kind of spin the woven fabric around us into a better form: we took the threads of our expectations, our dreams, our hopes, simply wove a better fabric of reality with them. We need water, but we can also do without a lot of the excess of it that we’ve had in previous realities. We no longer need to flush our poos and pees away in lovely natural water, for example! And washing things becomes a tad more reined-in with less flowing.

We are SUPER blessed to have a container already – an 80 litre black rubbery-plastic beast, which we foolishly thought to load up in the car – quite easy when it’s near empty, hehehe! - but it almost broke the ancient wheelbarrow that we’ve inherited, when we tried to move the full one! We opted for several runs to the next communal tap, with smaller recepticals. And bought a second one which we can then decant into both the largest barrel and the solar shower. Maria & Pino at our new local shop (sells everything!) even filled it up for us from their house below the store 😍🙏🤗💝

view from the solar shower!

And what a treat the shower has been!! Once we got used to it heating so quickly in the raging rays of our star! We had to put some colder water in it, at various points…. But the glory of hosing ourselves down every hour or so in the hottest parts around midday (to avoid feeling like we’re being cooked alive!), or rinsing off the previous sweaty hours before bedding down for the night. It has been a godsend, and a really worthwhile investment at under 50 Euros.

As the temperatures have calmed to a frenzy, we have come back to Guardia S. to take stock - and to pick up a ton more things….

nomnom; (Scottish) mince & tatties with a Mediterranean twist

And to use taps and a cooker for a couple of days! We are positively itching to get our hands dirty, and to MAKE THINGS, GROW THINGS, connect with the earth and the many things that live on and in it!! But we have to pace ourselves, breathe deeply, rest a lot, plan priorities and necessities – before loading up with stuff like my sewing machines and anything that spoils in high temperatures. We have to adapt to the season, and to – impatiently or not! - just listen.

There definitively is no rushing a return to Nature and to Natural Law. Any unecessary force used againt Nature or without her express calling and permission, will be absorbed so completely effortlessly; we might burn every calorie of our life force, on trying to get our land to submit to our infantile concepts. But listening quietly, chatting intimately, we feel our visions rise up unprompted by any mischievous monkey-mind.

wild boar footpath

A holistic vision rises up and outwards from the felt-known – bypassing the self-important ego-dictator quite without controversy. So long as we take care of ourselves, eating and sleeping, laying down and stretching alternately – going for a walk, or a poop, just when needed – we will be rewarded with a regular intuitive sense of just doing something*; you know – the kind of action that comes without mental intervention or coercion? A kind of rising up of activity that is so natural and needed, that nothing can really derail it?

This kind of action is very similar to the inner drive of expression that comes through us in our art, our craft, our cooking or our writing; a want to let something out rather than a striving to make something happen how we want it to happen. It requires much self-work. And humility. A great willingness to wait until Right Timing tells us, and a lovely settling-into of moment, hour, season, elements, rapport-with-all-things…

Meanwhile we just potter, clean, remove old junk from our funky diposito which is a makeshift house until we create one out of the ground – chopping wood and carrying water. Observing plantlife and animals. On Thursday we came up the back road, having gone out in the scorching midday sun to get petrol (so we could then get water), and came across a whole herd of cinghiali (wild boar)!! It was an astonishing and heart-rousing sight!! A large troop: at least 15 adults plus babies – the latter of which I’d had a tantalising glimpse of in the gloaming, the evening before.

We stopped in awe, exclaiming our delight for some minutes, then recognising that the field they were in… was right below our land! They were chomping at the edges of the cut hay, just a few metres from our lower woodlands. Wow. That night in the tent, we were alert to possible visits by a whole bunch of them, feeling quite vulnerable in our cotton-canvas shelter… Apart from some light snuffling around in the leaf litter above us, and a couple of piggy snorts at a safe distance, we didn’t (yet!) get disturbed proper.

Talking of the tent; this has been another great investment; a 3m bell tent, very similar to my last (5m) one which we gifted to a friend in Portugal – though we have to vacate it rather early in the morning, it certainly provides the perfect snugglefest for the night. We just have to organise a better ‘mattress’, as the current folded-up blankies is not working well for backs and necks – I have my heart set on some futon mattresses from futonitaly.com, but we did find two ‘autogonfiabile’ mats for sleeping on which should – with the added softness of some clean leaf litter under the tent base – function to protect us from the rather hard, dry soil that is currently below us. The basics now seem like quite luxurious aspects to life!!

Our humility brings us the gifts of this time: of the hot and dry time before the abundance, the unknowing time before the mastery, the empty time before the crops and woods give forth their bounty… We track about the land, looking at new corners, finding – O, wow! - a couple of peach trees with fruit on (somewhat overrun by brambles, but we’ll soon clear them!), a large hazelnut tree, wild boar poop (they let loose directly on the path, whereas we tend to cover ours, heheheh!), some olive trees with a lot more fruit than we expected… Trees that need to be cut back, trees that need heavy ivy cut off them, trees that need some serious pruning….

My creative mind runs rampant: all my permaculture and eco-building training, my experiences of living in communities with natural houses and art-full landscaping, my years in Findhorn (a big eco-spiritual community in northeast Scotland) and in rural Cyprus, my allotment projects and managing community gardens in cities, my studies around food plants and my upbringing immersed in wild foraging, my making dens from a young age (turf roofs and all!)…. All coming together in happy upwelling of excitement and overwhelm, as we begin this new life.