Blogging the stories of our family life on a yoga retreat in the magical village and valleys of Amieira, Central Portugal. Everyday we are tending this beautiful land and its stone dwellings in our journey towards self sufficiency. Moses is the Portuguese name of this place, meaning many mill stones. And, providently, is also the name of our beloved golden retriever, without whom, we'd never have found it. We love you Moses.
Thanks to those who commented on the last post. Lovely to start some new conversations with people contemplating similar things at this time. Continuing on a similar note, there seems to be a central theme recurring in our reflections and dreams at the moment. That is the nature of energy itself. At the smallest level of what we consider to be the material universe, energy just keeps spinning to keep matter in form. At the largest view, the galactic view, the whole thing is spinning interrelatedly in ways we can't fully comprehend. Doesn't really matter which lens you care to look through, the microscope or the telescope, the data is telling us the same thing. It's all spinning in the same way: vortexually.
According to the Websters online dictionary, the word 'vortexual' doesn't actually exist, although 'vortical' does. However, given the prevalence of the phenomena on so many levels, the omission rather surprised me. Or maybe not. Maybe in fact it's a new way of not just how we are currently describing what we see in relation to the interconnectivity of all things, but also, just possibly, how we are seeing it. More simply, how we feel about seeing things move, including us, more spirally towards an unspecified moment in time.
Now, this all might be some random playback of influences, and I am happy to concede that the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy read in my teens, might just be affecting this.
The Total Perspective Vortex is allegedly the most horrible torture device to which a sentient being can be subjected.
When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little mark, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, "You are here."
But I doubt it. Our new view of the entirety of it all I suspect is arising from what we are actually seeing with our own eyes at this present point in time, rather than through an inculcated lens. If that makes sense. Our eyes on the material world interlaced with images from our dreamscape, both in our sleep, and more interestingly, while fully awake.
What if, we all are spinning vortexually. Always have been, granted, but what if we are on the place in the vortex, (obviously in all the vortexes on every level all at the same time), where the spinning is getting closer to the centre, with exponentially increasing speed. The reason we might be more aware of the interconnection of things, more able to see past, present and future events with increasing clarity, is in fact that it's all getting much 'closer' together. Maybe this singularity at the centre of the universal whirlpool, feels a little more inevitably possible, because it might, of course, truly exist. If so, the notion of vortexualisation (OK stretching it here a bit but bare with me), of which as stated we are becoming more aware of and affected by, is indeed a developmental process leading to a moment in time evidently hurtling towards us with all its accompanying chain reactions, really rather quickly. At which point I assume, everything, including us, will have been vortexualised.
Alright enough. You get my point. "Vortexual" is, whether we like it or not, already here in our cultural vernacular at Moses. Arrived a week ago. But as you can tell, already pretty forefront. What I really want to know, is if this little word is resonating with anyone else out there.
Let me know.
Memphis.
p.s. found an online definition for vortextual, which ironically, is a fair description of my piece, but not in a way I would have imagined. suggests verbosity and annoyance for friends subjected to listening. so i have, obviously suggested the urban dictionary publish an alternative version for vortexual. once published, i feel a fair balance will have been made to the info cloud. but you can decide for yourself.
What a time we are in. Today is the 10th of the 10th of the 2010. Those dates don’t come around so very often so I hope you will allow me the moment to share something of what drives us to do what we’re doing here, in the middle of the forests of central Portugal. I wrote the following script for a video I was intending to submit for the “Life in a day” project earlier this year. Too much was happening back then with our restoration work for me to do the job justice, but re reading these words this morning, I felt I’d like to still put it out there and see if we can start a conversation through it. Feel free to submit your thoughts and/or links to cool articles around these issues that you have found helpful. Somehow I feel the time to get ready to wage peace is close at hand. I don’t have much of an idea what this will look like. Just that it’s time to get ready.
Mankind finds itself on the cusp of an extraordinary time of change. No one really knows what the change that’s coming is going to look like. Just that it’s coming. Most of us, in fact, are completely unaware that things have already begun to shift. We are, if you like, asleep. Collectively asleep.
Busy, really really busy, but sleeping nonetheless.
Our beautiful home of planet earth seems to be going through one of its regular (for Earth we’re talking every few thousands of years) seismic shifts. Weather patterns are going crazy, polar caps melting, sea levels rising, ocean currents altering, ferocious flooding, city destroying hurricans, island crushing earthquakes, continental wide ash cloud volcanoes, deep sea oil volcanoes. None of which are new. Just right now are happening all so very very fast, in Earth clock time.
Instability, that some say, begins to take place on Earth before momentous change – ice age scale change – stuff that wipes out species like dinasours. Maybe it’s humans next. Maybe not. Maybe it’s just happening as it always has happened and always meant to have happened. Maybe we’re not helping matters.
There are a lot of us humans. Billions. We’re polluting and destroying our planet’s resources and each other with such relentless vigour, that it is a little tricky to see how things can carry on for much longer. Our life on earth, our way of life on earth, doesn’t look to be that sustainable.
Let’s talk oil. Our civilizations right now are based on the black stuff. We use oil to drive our cars, trucks, trains and aeroplanes. We use oil to make the cars, trucks, trains and aeroplanes. We use oil to power the electricity supply. Oil to manifacture a vast array of products and clothes and foods. And we know, oh yes we do, that oil is running out. We just don’t know when. Sooner than we collectively think, probably. So we’re tinkering around here and there with alternative sources of energy, with bio fuels, with wind, wave and solar power. With nuclear power. Not a thing that responds well, I imagine, to tinkering.
Ironically we will consume vast quantities of oil just to make the machines and infrastructure required to harness the energy from these alternative sources. Will there be enough? What if there’s not?
The other big unstable foundation of our civilisations today is money. We’re busy busy busy making money. Working to earn bits of paper or numbers on screens, to pay institutions for food and services that we are more than capable of growing and providing for our very own selves.
3 years ago, sensing that ‘times they are a changing’ our little family of 4 plus dog set out on a journey to find a life less ordinary, a place in which we could quickly acquire the skills we had never learnt which enabling us the chance to live a little more self sufficiently. We found it here in the forgotten mountains of central Portugal. In some old abandoned stone houses on some terraced land with rivers running through it.
In the midst of all the talk of cataclysmic planetary change, we’re tending our garden. Growing our veggies, vines and fruit orchards and hoping we can survive in nature’s abundance after the oil and the money run out. Maybe we will. Maybe we won’t. Either way we’ll be looking after this little piece of land and the people we find ourselves with, until the storm that is closing in passes or consumes us in its wake.
(The brief for the video project was also to answer the following 3 questions.)
What do I fear?
I fear that my children grow up in a world where humanity continues choosing to destroy itself and their days will not be filled with the peace and safety and beauty of this day.
What do I love?
My queen of a wife River, my 2 gorgeous children Josh and Eli, good music, tasty home grown food. I love sunrises, sunsets and the stars that follow. I love watching the wind make the trees dance in the forest. I love picking grapes with old people who have spent their lifetimes living in their landscape in a culture that is not my own but is quickly becoming so.
I love love.
What do I have in my pocket?
Pen knife. Pencil. Mobile. Lighter. Fags.
What a time capsule this film is for those that follow. If you’re watching this years into our future, maybe post some kind of apocalyptic change, wanting to find out what life was like for man on earth back in the days of 2010, know this. There was hope. And there always will be.
There’s hope in every seed you plant. While there is a sun in the sky, pure water falling from the clouds and earthy soil at our feet, everything is possible. Living off the land in harmony with the seasons is a good life. You really should have been here to see it.
I have a sneaky suspicion based on the arrival of a new wind today (and on hard evidence from online weather sites) that tomorrow the autumn rains will commence. We've felt and known that for a week or so now and like little mice scurrying around before a storm, we have been gathering firewood and pine cones, staining the last bits of wood around the house which are exposed to the elements, and daily harvesting and preparing more of the delicious fruits of River's labour of love, her 'horta bonita'.
Tarpaulins are on, covering a number of stacks of wood dotted around the houses on all sides, under which now reside a variety of tree trunks, branches, old floorboards and beams too rotten to salvage for building into other things and mounds of off cuts from all the new wood we used to build 2 roofs, a veranda, a green roof and 4 floors this year, all of which we will burn in the stove to keep ourselves warm and heat our water this winter. We've not gathered it all in, but enough for us not to have to worry about dry fire wood probably at least til Christmas.
Now the rains can come and wash this land anew with its autumnal promise of a new season away from the harsh scorching heat of the summer sun. Warm, wet and windy. Boy, will the forest love it.
A few videos below from the last week or so. Guest starring Carline's brother Steven and his beautiful and expecting wife Sophie who flew in for an action packed weekend mostly involving the harvesting, making and consumption of quite a fair quantity of wine. Come back for olive harvest soon guys. You were great.
Hope all your encounters are full of lovely vibrations this week. It's much easier to feel less afraid if you turn off the TV and don't open a newspaper. Seriously.
Sitting this morning with coffee as sun rises over the mountains listening to the woman who brought Vonnie and I together. Stop, listen and let your soul fly to another far higher place. Eska...we love you.
On the eve of returning for the 3rd year to their lovely local school in Oleiros, Josh and Ellie found out last week that they both won prizes for being "O melhor aluno" (The Best Pupil) in their year group. A tremendous effort on both their parts. Moving to another country, learning a completely new language from scratch, adapting to a new culture so far removed from the one they grew up with in London, is an achievement in itself. But to do so with such ease and grace, making some really lovely new friends along the way, and topping it off with the best grades in their classes resulting in winning a prize at the school diploma day? I could not have written a better script for them myself. Done us proud, didn't they just?
Our old friends John and Caroline and adorable girls Maya and Violet arrived 2 weeks ago to spend a year's arts residency with us here at Moses. John is a painter and Caroline a photographer. River and I spent 3 weeks in August finishing the restoration work on the Xisto cottage that we had ourselves been living in for a year and a half. The house looks gorgeous and the Purdays have quickly made it into a home.
Summer break is ended. Tomorrow kids return to school and we start the routine of long school days (kids leave for bus at top of the hill at 8am returning 6.30pm) and continuing work on the land and our own house at Cabeço. This has been a pretty full on year for us. Restoring 3 houses in stone, clay, lime and wood, planting and watering over 300 trees up and down the land, starting and establishing 2 beautiful and productive vegetable terraces, installing irrigation systems from the bore hole and the water mine, all of which were governed by some pretty tight timescales based on the seasons and the arrival of people at various points. My Mum and Dad in June, Helen, Anthony and Cleo in July, Nathan and Annie in August and then the Purdays, all of whom needed accommodation ready. Feels like the season of deadlines has now finally passed and we are moving into a new, calmer, less pressurised way of working.
The list of jobs and projects to start is still fairly huge - decorating the houses, building storehouses for all these potatoes and beans harvested and jars of jams we are about to make, building barns and a workshop for me to make all the shutters, flyscreens and cupboard doors required, a new greenhouse and potting sheds, restoring the Adega by the newly planted orchards to be a fruit storehouse, cider press and studio space for John to paint, possibly houses for chickens, sheep and a pig, pergolas for the roses, grafting of all the old grape vines, river damns to create cascading natural swimming pools, forest clearing, more terrace clearing and more, much much more.
Yet River and I are sure in the knowledge that this will all get done. Sometime. Probably sometime fairly soon as well. It is, after all, why we are here. To expend the energy of our thirties and probably some of our forties, on creating a more sustainable life for us and our children. We are getting there. The food from River's 'horta' this year has been outstanding. Plentiful potatoes, phallic courgettes, the sweetest tomatoes, yard long beans, corn right off the cob, peppers, onions, cucumbers, carrots, beetroots, herbs, squashes and my days, those pumpkins. The 'sweat hours' as the Americans say, are so worth it.
And all this comes with such an incredible feeling of accomplishment, in particular because we came out here from London fairly ill equipped for this way of life. I never would have imagined when we first found Moses 3 years ago, that in 2010 I would be able to build houses and terrace walls in stone and clay, put on wooden tiled roofs from scratch, plaster, plumb, be proficient in the use of a wide range of power tools including chainsaws, pneumatic drills, band saws, grinders, cement mixers and tractors, while at the same time teaching over hundred children to speak English in 3 local primary schools, properly becoming a part of our wider community. Awesome, simply awesome.
Autumn is approaching. Even though it's still hot and blue blue skies, we know when the rains come, they come to stay. All our lovely old neighbours have already begun, ney some already finished, bringing in their fire wood for the winter. We're already late. The grape harvest is round the corner and we want to help our neighbours make their wine again this year where we can. Then it's October and our dear friends Ian and Merle and tribe arrive over the hill at Eiro de Miguel. Then it's olives, picking sorting bagging pressing into oil. Then its Christmas and the long awaited season of rest, reading and reflection that we already know to be a Portuguese mountain winter on the edge of wilderness.
But today is Sunday. And I plan on doing nothing. Except this blog of course. And cooking up a lunch of freshly harvested roasted veggies. And maybe a game of chess with Josh while I can still beat him and scrabble with the Purdays. Maybe just a wander down to the adega with River and Moses to imagine what we will do to the place. We recently decided that is where we will retire to one day, tending the orchards, living even more simply and let the kids have everything else. They deserve it. We will diminish, and go into the west, and remain Memphis and River.
Thanks for tuning into the blog. Videos up below in a bit...
Peace and all good things.
Memphis.
Ellie gives her first interview with Moses TV since her return from London.
The Purday family give their thoughts on their arrival at Moses and show off the new improved cottage they will be staying in for a year.
Ellie and Josh pick up their Best Student medals at school.
Oh my days what a summer! Sooo much happening all at the same time. Still in the process of moving into our new houses, boxes everywhere, building cupboards and storage as fast as I can. My cousins Helen, Anthony and Cleo came for a delightful and entertaining week’s stay (come back soon guys you were great!) River’s sister Annie and her boyfriend Nathan arrived this week and will go back to London, with Josh and Eli as companions for the journey, next week. River and I have started the final phase of restoration on the house down at Moses in readiness for the Purdays arrival at the end of August after their camping trip round France, Spain and northern Portugal. It’s all go.
And then there’s the heat! 45 degrees plus on some days with no decent rains since early June. That means a whole lot of watering every day in various parts of the land. Watering the veggies on the kitchen terrace, watering the trees up and down the roads, watering the orchards down by the stream, watering ourselves drinking 4 or 5 litres a day.
With this level of heat, inevitably comes fire. As I write, Portugal is suffering in many parts with forest fires. Some huge. And some also not too far from us. 2500 hectares burnt just this week in the Serra da Estrella National Park. The smoke that lies down the valley here some nights is a somber spectacle. I will write more on fire once the summer has passed.
In the midst of all of that, as you will see on the videos below, River’s garden has exploded and we dug up our first potato harvest. There seems to be some innate sense, as River says, that a harvest is best shared. What a pleasure it was then to have had Helen Ant and Cleo to dig together in the earth for potatoes then devour the chips that followed. I hope we can share the grape and olive harvests similarly with others this year. Any volunteers for November and December olive picking, bagging and taking to the press?
I’ll sign off with this photo of River holding her first courgette of the year. A young one apparently. Of the Italian climbing variety I understand. Tricky to find in shops as it doesn’t journey well. Which is a shame cos they’re rather sweet and tasty, especially when roasted.
Memphis
My cousin Helen, partner Anthony and goddaughter Cleo pull up the year's first main potato harvest for storage. Great work guys.
Helen brings in the potato harvest on our tractor, expertly driven round the hairpin terraced roads.
River takes up the first potatoes from the kitchen terrace. And Nathan & Josh clear another bed for more veggies.
One month ago the kids moved into their newly restored stone cottage. Yesterday River and I finally moved in to our house and spent the first of what we hope will be thousands of nights in our new bedroom.
We have one house for Josh and Ellie. One for us. Our children have therefore, in effect, suddenly become our closest neighbours and what lovely ones they are too. I do hope they pop over for a cup of tea every now and again.
Grandparents have come and gone and left us lots of joy, some expertly pruned roses and quite a few soft fluffy veggie beds that River has already filled with more delicious things to eat.
Everything is chaos, obviously. Yet there is an unmistakable stillness flowing that comes from the knowledge that we have finally arrived in the home that will be ours to love for the rest of our lives, God willing. It's been a trip to get here. Travelling then moving from one temporary dwelling to the next 8 times in the last 2.5 years has taken its toll. Now, at last, we feel like we are breathing out. One long sigh.
After months of imagining, planning, procuring and building, I can't tell you how great it feels to be actually cooking in that kitchen, sleeping in those bedrooms, eating in the courtyard and living altogether just as we dreamt it might possibly be. Lists of lists of tasks await us. Unending work. Oh the sweat and the toil and the blisters. But folks, I wouldn't swap this for all the riches in China.
Enjoy the videos. Memphis.
Eloise and her friend cook up a chocolate storm in the new kitchen and demonstrate how to chop a bar in two.
The kids secretly film their late night chat with my Dad and get caught on camera themselves murdering an innocent fly.
A peak at Vonetta's new kitchen 'horta'. My, how does her garden grow!
