I was privileged during the week to visit the land and the buildings that a friend calls home. It is a beautiful, private and protected space, and my heart could envy them their place there. It could. It doesn't. Because my head reminds me, that I would be less comfortable with the insecurity of tenure and tenuousness of the structures. I admire their ability to pay that price for peace. I wish I had that much trust in my ability to survive come what may; I'm not wired that way.
Seeing it made me smile that they wander around my garden and point out its shoddiness, its shabbiness, is wabi-sabi-ness, for in comparison it is pristine. Still, we are agreed that gardens and homes are not meant to be show-pieces. They are meant to grow and fall apart and evolve and get fixed up, a bit at a time as time and love and resources allow.
Mine got blitzed and re-started. That will not happen here again. Not in my lifetime. What happens from here on out is me and the place growing into and around each other. Rescuing each other (with help), protecting each other, soothing,creating, recreating, stimulating. Surge and resurgence, and rest and recovery and regrowth. My place and me.
Time was not on my side. I could not afford to waste the years it might have taken, and I didn't need to. I cheated and got a head start…created a clean slate…and overlaid the dream plan, and made compromises along the way. We came to an agreement the house and I and we're both happy with where we've wound up.
As for me and the garden…negotiations are on-going. We are only just beginning to grow into each other. It takes longer with gardens. They are more wayward.
I had seen pictures of my friend's home and had heard them talk. I thought I knew what to expect. I was wrong. They had down-played it. I once said that the whole site could be unbelievably amazing with some serious money thrown at it. That's not going to happen. Or at least, I hope it's not, because if someone comes in who can afford to do that, they'll try to do it quickly and they will rip the soul out of the place.
So let me change my mind. I think what it needs is more time and more love, and as little money as realistically possible.
That's not a criticism of how much love and time and effort have gone in already – only just that more is needed. And – though it's not my place to say it – I would love to see a slight shift of that time and love and effort being devoted to the buildings. I'd love to know what the history of the homestead is. The only map I've found of the area pre-1900 doesn't show anything, if I'm readingit right, but the building looks and feels older than that. I wonder how much is known, and will be nosy enough to ask.
I understand the mindset of the owner: let mother nature have her way. The problem is that mother nature has just about given up on her human children and she will wipe out our presence without a thought. The whole site could return to the wild in a very few years. And I would find thatsad. I would find the loss of the embedded humanity and history in the structures and the artwork and the creation of gardens and spaces, a tragedy.
There is memory in the place, in the walls, in the artefacts, in the ground. I have no idea whose memory, and oh! how I would wish to know more of the story. Who built you? When and why? And how did they prosper or fail. I would that your walls would talk to me.
But more than that, I would that they be allowed to stand. I would that the collapsing parts be re-built. I would that you continue to be loved and cherished.
I have a tendency to touch buildings, physically, place my hand upon them to feel a small part of what they have absorbed. One of these was telling me what it wanted to be, and how it could be. It wasn't asking to be lavished upon, quite the reverse, it was asking for frugality – but it was asking for love. It sits there in the landscape and sees how the land is loved, and worked with, and respected, and it calls out for its share of the same.
I don't know how old the buildings are but when anything sits in the land for a time, it becomes part of it. Buildings too put down roots, and when they are felled or allowed to fall, the land also feels the poorer for it. What comes after will never be as beautiful again.
The land has memory. Earth remembers those who have walked upon it. The grass holds our footprints after we have walked away. How much more, then, does it remember if we have come again and again. How much more does it feel our passing if we have made a home, a life, a story, upon its singular aspect and let all of that, even the stories, fall away?
We grieve for the land; do we ever stop to think that maybe it grieves for us?
Someone once wrote that there are no un-sacred spaces.There are only sacred spaces and desecrated spaces. A place that has been loved is by definition sacred. To allow that love to fall to fallow ground, when the ground could still be fertile, aches my soul.
There is this small space weeping to be loved. And being loved, being cared for, being showna little gratitude for what it provides, would very quickly smile and welcome the dweller and encourage them to be more of who they know they are.
I did not stay long. But I want to go again.
It reminded me of farms I'd visited in northern Europe decades ago, family places, where living was simple and kind. It reminded me of aspects of my grandmother's home and made me wonder what I've lost of my own heritage. And part of me thinks that is why these places need to be protected and preserved and loved… the buildings as well as the land… because they are part of our common heritage. I am not one to put the human above the animal, we are animal, we are part of the system. I do feel however that the things of the human that get preserved are too often the works of the rich or the (in)famous. The humbler buildings are allowed to return to the earth. The sorrow of that, is that they take their stories with them, and those stories are the stories oftrue humanity and we are the poorer for the loss of understanding, of empathy, of magic and mystery that is contained within them.
