Birth of the Nomadic Permanent Volunteer

I've never had much faith in conventional politics' ability to get us out of the current mess. Just as the money system hasn't really been fixed by papering over the cracks with more non-existent money, the climate problem isn't really going to be tackled with any business-as-usual measures, and as methane release starts to kick in we may already be past a tipping point into runaway warming. Not to mention any other problems...

I feel the only effective initiatives will come from individuals and small groups of people so I have decided to start living the eco way full time myself rather than trying to keep both ways of living going. I plan to put my main focus and energy into helping out on eco projects like the ones I've been visiting.

Moving On
Much as Debi and I love each other, we have both been finding it harder and harder to live together. Debi feels she has to stay here while I feel totally at odds with our present car-supermarket-school way of life. I feel there is no time to lose and I don't see any way we can do a gentle transition from the high energy way of life to low impact living. It's been a very sad few weeks but at the same time I'm excited at the prospect of living and working again with some of the fantastic people I've met, and I'll keep on spreading the word and letting people know about the good stuff that's happening

Ian's Own Eco Project
My idea is to help out on eco projects permanently. I want to live a low impact life, help others working that way and also to escape from the money system as much as possible, bartering for anything with my own therapy, woodworking skills etc. as needed.

Brighton to Perth Walk
I've wanted to walk from Brighton to Perth for years - I don't quite know why really, maybe I just like walking. Now it seems like it's possible and would be a great way of spreading the word and meeting people. So I'm planning to set off in May using as little money as possible, looking for board and lodging from the couchsurfing community and freecommunity (details below) in return for therapy and woodwork etc. Get in touch if you want to walk part of the way with me or have a couch free on the route or would like some treatment or whatever.

Lightworkers
I am delighted to have got this group up and running - we are exploring higher levels of consciousness and perception, further dimensions and higher frequencies and aim to bring our discoveries into practical everyday life, learning to LIVE LIGHTLY. This group is for healers and therapists but I also want to link up with eco-workers, artists, gardeners, creative writers, astrologers - and anyone else who wants to escape from conventional thought frameworks and GO EXPLORING!
I believe extraordinary abilities already exist for us in energy form with which we will be able to help all life to flourish. (See Spontaneous Evolution below.) Please join in with the group from a distance if you can - next meeting is 14th October, 7.30 pm to 9.30 pm. I'll be joining in wherever I am in the future.

The World's Slowest Yurt - Getting There!

Hurrrrrrrraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyy! At long last The World's Slowest Yurt has walls and windows!

I have to say it looks absolutely amazing with a light on inside at night-time, like a great big Chinese Lantern.

There's still a lot to do, insulation and bits and pieces to fix the canvas better to the frame, but it is basically there. YOOOOOO! I have wondered several times why I didn't try to make something a bit easier though - maybe a life-size model of the Taj Mahal out of empty beer tins and string or something...

SPONTANEOUS EVOLUTION!

A Cracking Book For You!!

Following on from my post Doom Gloom and Hope further down on this blog, I have been getting really excited reading "Spontaneous Evolution" by Bruce Lipton and Steve Bhaerman. You know when you read a book and you just go Yes Yes Yes! because it's saying what you've been thinking, feeling and trying to say for ages? Well, this is one of those books for me. Just a few ideas from Spontaneous Evolution:
- Evolution is not always a slow long drawn out process but can happen in jumps
- Cells respond to changes in their environment by generating many new possibilities
- We can learn a lot from cells: 50 trillion cells manage to co-operate within each of our bodies but 7 billion human beings haven't managed to do it on the Earth yet - why not?
- Humanity may be on the threshold of an evolutionary jump in response to challenges from our environment
- If humanity has a chance of surviving what is looking like the beginning of a phase of mass extinction brought about by us we had better evolve into something more co-operative, gentler and lighter on the Earth
- It's at least partly about the evolution of our consciousness and becoming aware of our collective consciousness
It's fantastic to see this stuff discussed by people with a scientific background as well as hippy-dreamer-therapists like me, the first of many reconciliations of opposites I hope.

Summer at Tombreck

One of the tasks at Tombreck this summer has been digging out the old steading floor to take the foundations for two homes.

The old cobble floor doesn't look too bad at first site but Perthshire bedrock is lurking not far below. The lads from Sweden gave it a good go, I gave it a good go, Debi gave it a good go and that's Tober and Jean giving it a good go by taking out a massive boulder almost as big as the Matterhorn.






Why not use a digger? Well apart from all the diesel, it just wouldn't do such a good job. We were able to separate out the stone that would be useful for building from the general hardcore and the rubbish. And it was such a feeling of bloomin achievment too!!

Clouds Mountains & Trees

A few shots from Scotland this summer: Ben Lawers through a group of ash trees, the last flashes of sunlight on the far side of Loch Tay, and some Miscellaneous Clouds Mountains & Trees. The last two shots are from Carie Woods, on the farm next door to Tombreck: magic, mystery and time slowed right down till you can hear it creaking.

Living without money

A couple of quick links for you - in case you didn't know, there is a whole worldwide network of people letting complete strangers sleep on their sofas, brilliant! Check it out:

http://www.couchsurfing.org/

and here is a link to a blog by Mark Boyle who is seven months into a personal experiment on living without money and fossil fuel for a year - this guy makes so much sense!

http://www.justfortheloveofit.org/blog-1264~life-in-an-intentional-community#

Living without money - I like what someone once said about writer and playwright, Samuel Beckett, "He would give you the shirt off his back if you asked him." That's the spirit that will get us into a new and happier future.

Eco Living - One Horse Power

This is Millie, a recent arrival at Tombreck. She is being trained to pull timber up from the woods for fuel etc. And here is Jean who has worked with horses before and has been helping to train her.
Apparently, in times of yore, horses would have trained each other. A young learner horse would just have been harnessed up alongside an old expert. All this stuff we are re-learning...

Horse-power is a lot different to tractor-power, you can't just stick a key in the thing and off you go. (Mind you horses don't need diesel and tractors can't breed.) The eco-way does generally seem to involve a lot more work and skill.

Eco living - Gay Pride for Montrose?

Here are a few photos from Gay Pride here in Brighton earlier this year. I know it's got nothing obvious to do with sustainable living but it's so much fun! Can we have both please - sustainable fun? And if the going gets really tough lets all just strip off, get drunk and PARTY!!


Yo! And lets not take life toooo seriously...


(Spot the very mystified straight looking guy centre stage above). Having spent a fair bit of time on the East coast of Scotland I am very familiar with the grey, cheerless, inhospitable, straight-laced feeling about some of those towns up there. Wouldn't it be fun to have a Gay Pride Parade in Montrose? Some of these boys and girls would get hypothermia though I guess...



Beach bums anyone? And it was just so nice not to have CARS and TRAFFIC in the streets!

Eco living - More about Ducks

The duck house I made at Tombreck during the winter is now in full use. The ducks seem to be perfectly happy there (they have their own bath and a big pond not far away) and they usually produce an egg each a day. They are some eggs too! Rich and with a beautiful golden yolk. They usually lay them in a handy little clutch too...

They are good fun to watch waddling and quacking about in their compound. They eat lots of pests and, as they have webbed feet, they don't scratch up the ground like chickens. Their big treat of the day is when they are let out in the morning and get the slugs collected from the polytunnel the night before. They come charging down the ramp when hatch is opened and chomp up their slugs like gourmands at a banquet. If they feel threatened at all they hide in the undergrowth and stay still - ha ha! no one can see us now...

Eco Living - Polytunnel vs Supermarket

Here is the inside of a polytunnel in case you've not seen one before. It's a good example of the difference between high-impact and lower-impact living. Its a cheap alternative to a greenhouse and lets you grow a greater variety of stuff through more of the year than you could just planting stuff outside. Getting food this way is a lot different to getting it from the supermarket:

Downside
- growing it all takes a fair bit of time, weeding sowing etc etc
- food takes a lot more preparation
- it may have been nibbled by bugs etc
- the energy it took to make the polytunnel
- you have a reduced range of food available - especially in winter

Upside
- it tastes much better
- it's fresh
- it hasn't been packaged, repackaged and repacked
- waste goes into the compost and directly back to the soil
- its free of pesticides and other chemicals
- you spend more time with nature and the seasons
- your food has been grown with a fraction of the energy of supermarket food (there may have been 400 plus fossil energy calories used up for every single supermarket food calorie - and then we waste 40% of that...)
- hopefully its more or less on your doorstep
- and I don't know about you but I prefer to spend time in a garden than in a bloomin supermarket

So get cracking! if you haven't got space for a polytunnel at least start a patch or a window box so that you can grow some stuff. Try something easy like potatoes and experiment with easy no dig growing - and check out "Square Foot Gardening" - lots of food in a little space with minimum effort. One day before terribly long you may be very glad of any food growing skill you've picked up and who knows, you'll maybe live somewhere with a polytunnel.

Sewing the Yurt Cover - so far verrry goooood

Our 90 year old neighbour just happened to have an old industrial sewing machine in his shed. Pat managed to get the machine going again with help from Debi, who has done some sewing too. (Although the last thing she sewed was a bit different to a yurt cover - latex clubbing gear in fact. Maybe we'll start making canvas clubbing gear...or maybe not.)

It really is battleship grade machinery. The thread goes up here and down there through this bit and that bit - those are two tensioning wheels.

And this is the intricate casing that holds the lower bobbin.

Here's the bobbin winding mechanism in action.

The old machine works really well and ploughs its way through the layers and layers of canvas folded up for the seams. The biggest problem is just handling the volume and weight of all the cloth that goes into the top cover.

I'm getting excited now - trying out the first part of the cover for fit. So far so good and...

...YES YES YES !! A triumphant moment - the top cover goes on for the first time AND IT FITS!!

And here we have the outer cover on top of that with its clear plastic window, you can see the shadow of its scalloped/hexagonal shape.

So I've just got the walls to do now but they'll have to wait for a bit because I'm up in Scotland again for a few weeks.

MORE SOON!

New Earth Energy Images site

I've not been doing much on the eco blog so far this year because I've been busy with my new photo site, Earth Energy Images. Friends have given me lots of encouragement with my stuff and its spurred me on to get get a much better website going. I've just had my first exhibition too. Many thanks to everyone for their support.

Earth Energy Images links up with this eco-blog and with my therapy work. One of my main themes is to make these eco/creativity/healing connections, it's all part of my hope for the future. More below on that.

the continuing saga of the World's Slowest Yurt

At last I've got my yurt frame finished...

Our friend Jamie gave me some crucial help with block foundations and joists for the floor and with putting up the walls and first few roof poles.

Thanks Jamie! I think you've found a new niche there...

The frame was much easier to put up on this 18mm spruce ply floor, it is easier to get it laid out in a circle and the whole thing is just much more solid.

A big moment - Jamie and I get the crown and first 4 roof poles up and it stays there.

And there it is sitting in the garden. No need to cut the grass now...well there isn't any left...

First mug of tea in the yurt. Next job is making the canvas cover - steep learning curve coming up again as I've never used a sewing machine before.

DOOM GLOOM AND HOPE

We're sitting on a time bomb and nothing much is really being done about it!
How long do we have before the effects of climate change, peak oil and loss of resources really start to hit us? My guess is that we are going to see some events in the next ten or twenty years that will really shake us and make all this financial stuff look completely trivial.

At least it's all a bit more mainstream these days, here's the Met Office on climate change:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climatechange/guide/effects/security.html
Note their chilling line, "Climate change may already be a contributory factor in conflicts in Africa".

HOPE
In the therapy world we talk about the development of human consciousness a lot. Debi and I work with an amazing guy, Gary Mannion, who does Psychic Surgery. He works with energies from a different realm or dimension and my hope is that we will similarly develop new ways of working with materials, plants and with each other that will help Mankind to survive. Far fetched? Well maybe, but I think it's actually the best hope we have.

CULDEES ECOVILLAGE

Happy pigs!

The extraordinary vision of Maryse Anand for her farm on Loch Tay includes an eco-village, a Scottish Centre for Alternative Technology, a healing centre and a space for children to develop in the spirit of the Anastasia writings. This is all while Maryse continues to run her Bunkhouse accommodation business, keeps busy giving distant healing treatments and has just recently become a host for the Academy of Agricultural Philosophy from Japan.

I share all of Maryse's enthusiasm and vision for the work and believe it's vital we start building a sustainable, resilient world now. Why can't we swing a couple of billion Maryse's way instead of shoring up the crumbling towers of fear and greed? I think she'd achieve a bloomin' sight more than certain politicians I can think of. As it is, much of the work at Culdees is done by volunteers like myself. While I was there, there were also visitors from France, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, the US and the UK as well as two monks from Japan.

(And in that vein look at the hassle the Lammas ecovillage project in Wales is being given by the planning authorities - these people need support not endless stupid obstacles ... rant rant rant ...)

My contribution: the raised beds in the polytunnel were getting very wobbley so I used a bit of acoustic guitar making technology in the form of X-bracing to firm them up. (Plus I was able to help a bit with a translation of the Academy of Agricultural Philosophy's manifesto - very interesting in itself, all to do with reviving natural systems of agriculture which respect the Earth. More soon about that I hope, there is even a plan to start growing rice at Culdees.)

Good luck Maryse! Thanks for all the delicious food, fascinating talks and hope to see you again very soon.

Duck delivery service

Here are four ducks en route from a breeder in Kent to a home in the highlands with Sue and Tober at Tombreck. These are Super Ducks, sorry, I've forgotten the name of the breed, which lay an egg a day as well as chomping up slugs and other pests without destroying plants. Chickens tend to scratch up plants but, having webbed feet, ducks don't.

The journey took two days - it must be a long time to be kept inside a cardboard box.

Handing the ducks over to Sue...

...and here are the ducks a week later safely in their new home inside Sue and Tober's poly-tunnel, complete with mini pond and all the duck food you could ask for. They were still very shy, the journey seemed to have been a bit traumatic for them. Maybe they take a while to adjust to being 500 miles further North as much as anything else; if anyone knows any tips towards happy duck transportation please let me know. Hopefully they will be up to full duck power before too long.

Website and book to check out ...

This book is ace! I've never felt that evolution, genetics and all that stuff was the complete story, "A New Science of Life" explores the idea that our development may be influenced by "Morphic Fields" existing outside the conventional understanding of space and time. It just all makes tremendous sense to me. Also, it seems to tie in with some of the stranger ideas of quantum mechanics and string theory, for example, the idea that the reality we perceive is just a shallow projection from a realm with many more dimensions. Rupert Sheldrake has ruffled a few feathers amongst the scientific establishment - oh dear what a pity he he! One editor has even suggested that this book should be burned! Well I think that alone is a good reason to read it...

Check out Rupert Sheldrake's website too: http://www.sheldrake.org/homepage.html.

Janet and Clive's Olive Harvest - A Colheita 2008

It was very satisfying to see these photos of olives harvested from trees I helped to prune and renovate almost a year ago. Here is Janet and Clive's own description:

"The traditional hand-picking method requires a ripador, a small hand-held rake to comb the olives from the branches of the tree onto a net spread on the ground. After I returned from a visit to England in mid-November, we sought one each. None were available at the market, one shop had sold out, a second was out of stock, a third hadn’t had any for ages and as they were hand-made by oldsters they didn’t have a source. We abandoned the search and looked instead into pneumatic palmetas, mechanical clappers to shake the olives (drupes) from the twigs. We bought a good-sized net (Ecocampo recommended eight metres by eight) to spread under the tree, for catching the olives, and crates to carry them in. A week later we were “mooching” in the old town and found two little shops which merit the appellation of Emporium or Aladdin’s Cave; we bought some sacks and when we asked about ripadores, they had them! The first time we opened out the net it was obviously far too big, so we swapped it for a 6x6m (20ft square), which was manageable for two of us.

"Although it was cold in the morning, the sun always came out and warmed the day to a comfortable 13°-20°C. We were in the olival just after 9am, stripping the drupes then lifting the net to pour them into a crate. At the end of the day we put the olives through a winnowing machine to clean the leaves from the fruit - when we bought the quinta we paid an extra €500 for farm equipment; the only piece that was of any use or value turns out to be the winnowing machine. The Portuguese have no word for this important machine; to them all machines are “maquina”, which covers anything with moving parts. A hand drill, electric drill, pneumatic drill, cement sprayer, car engine, JCB digger, all are “maquina”. To name each, you have to say what the maquina is for.

"Now, once the olives are cleaned and bagged, you take them to a lagar to be pressed for the oil. Our nearest mill, Orca, is closed again this year, and JJ the digger man suggested one in Vale de Prazeres (Valley of Pleasures). We visited, and found a grim-looking old warehouse mounded six feet deep in tons of bagged olives, lying sullen and forlorn in a thin river of black juice which trickled into the ground outside. No sound of action. A bored bloke shuffled out to “greet” us, fag in mouth and wearing a beret and boiler suit, waiting for us to speak first. Disheartened, it wasn’t worth the effort so we hardly bothered, deciding that any other lagar would probably be better.

"We were told that 200kg is the minimum acceptable weight for pressing, so we needed to gather more olives and weigh them. Back to Ecocampo for more sacks and crates. They had sold out of our size and the rest would not stack on ours – typical. However, they did have a weighing machine on sale, so we bought that. And in a typical serendipitous conversation we met Julio the olive farmer, who suggested a lagar called Loca, beyond Fundão, 40mins drive from the quinta.

"Two days later, on the way back to our villa, we went to find Loca. There was a queue of fifteen trucks and tractors with trailers right along the access road and onto the main road. Good news though, we stopped to look around the place and met Julio again, a mutual pleasure. Working most of each day, we harvested 201kg in one week. We took our olives to lagar Loca where we were sixth in line, and only had to wait two hours for our turn – we felt sorry for the farmers who were in the long queue a few days ago!

"There we emptied them through what looked like a cattle grid in the floor. They were washed, weighed as 201kg (yeah!), and pressed; we were looking forward to having our own oil but discovered that we were in fact adding to the stocks of “Português” oil and would get one tenth of the weight of our olives as communal oil, fresh from the pump! Twenty litres of our very own oil – we were SO proud, taking it home. After a few days back at the villa to wash us and our clothes, at the beginning of December we returned to pick a second harvest. Five days and a further 106kg in crates we returned to Loca, and took eleven litres more of freshly-pressed olive oil home. Delicious! But the weather was turning cold and the better drupes were falling to the ground, so we decided the end of the harvest had arrived for this year. Now we have met the second of our targets; we are now genuine producteurs, with our own registered number at the lagar. Our oil sells for €4 a litre wholesale. Next year when the trees I pruned in January 2008 come into full production, we should be able to get nearer to 600kilos, if we can cope with so much picking. Ah well, a farmer’s life . . . !"

Fantastic you two - hope to see you out there again one day...