What do I believe?

It’s a question that’s been bobbing around my head for a couple of months now, and came into sharper focus after I read ‘Elizabeth Costello’ by J.M. Coetzee in which a celebrated writer at the end of her life is forced to petition a panel of old judges in a small literary Italian town square before she is allowed through to the afterlife. I have no idea if one day I will have to endure the same ordeal, but if ever I am, I thought it might be a good opportunity to prepare my answers in advance. So here we go. Heart on sleeve. Feeling as apprehensive about the task as Moses looks in this photo. Think of it as work in progress if you will.

The first thing to say, as only the West Wing’s Press department could have taught me, is it’s normally prudent in today’s politically sensitive environments, never to accept the premise of any question. And the premises behind this old chestnut run to a long list. In the last few years I have more or less come to the conclusion that the nature of stating one’s believes, moreover, even the nature of belief itself, has been such a conflict-ridden and troublesome affair for mankind since our inception, that at best it has served to separate brother from brother and at worst to rationalize and justify brother killing brother on such an horrendous disastrous magnitude that it surprises me how we still, en masse, knowing the probable consequences, continue to desire to classify each other simply by what we believe. You’d think we’d have learnt a thing or two by now.

Just pick any one of the multitude of regional or global conflicts taking place on planet earth at this very hour, and you will, without doubt, find their roots in some kind of historical difference, disagreement, dissimilarity over belief of one type or another. Often the most vicious, the most malignant of these disputes originate between people groups whose belief systems are actually quite similar, in the same relative ball park as it were, they’re merely now only a deviation from, or a variance of, exactly the same original shared philosophy. Often it is actually the same original guy and the problems arising from the interpretations, or as each side would have it, misinterpretations of what he was reported to have said or believed himself. Abraham, Gautam Buddha, Lao Tsu, Jesus, Mohammed, Elvis.

Throw in a few other ingredients such as current, or for that matter ancient, incidences of vast inequalities in power or wealth between people groups and you create the perfect conditions for vindicated, hideous, self-perpetuating and utterly destructive warfare. Yet, at its roots, all our wounded history appears to have arisen at some level or other from our differences in belief.

Consequently, the premise behind the question of “what do I believe?” is so inextricably linked to those notions of religious, socio-cultural delineations and differentiations leading ultimately and inevitably to various stages of separation, segregation, oppression and violence, that I have tended in recent years to avoid answering it at dinner parties, but more particularly, avoided answering it for myself. Until now, that is.

I suppose one could argue that my reluctance to be drawn into a statement of belief is in itself a belief. “I believe it would be best not to say what I believe.” But I couldn’t honestly sign my name to that one. A bit of a cop out. So what are the other options out there?

“I believe in fairies. (I do, I do).” And, as an unavoidable corollary, in their tales. Fairytales. I could sign up to that one I think. The world, well at least my world and that of my children’s, has been the better for the existence of fairies and their tales, proven or otherwise. The joint realms of religion and science have systematically robbed us of the right to believe in fairies and therefore, I feel quite predisposed to undersigning for that very reason alone. Or maybe because we just watched ‘Neverwas’ on DVD last week, which if you have not seen, is a must. Although I have to say, Eloise sporadically chastises me for telling her when she was “only 6 Dad!”, at a time when I had felt she should know the truth, that both Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy were, in fact, actually only her mother and I conspiring in secrecy to perpetuate their myths. Rightly, Eloise is letting me know in her own special perturbed way that, “I, not you Daddy, will be the one who decides when or if I want to be enlightened thank you very much!” She has a point. Fairies stay. I believe in fairies.

“I believe in man.” This is a statement that would need a deal of unpacking. After a few volumes, you might not even succeed in explaining it. So, for the blogness of it all, and because it’s more fun to be trite, I would have to sign a “Yes”, but with the postscript “Rarely”. As touched on above, man does not have a great track record overall. ‘Selfish oppressive polluting exterminators’ is probably how we will be remembered by the aliens (or the evolved ants or the artificial intelligent machines) who will browse through the summation of our annals in future. Although we do sometimes get it right. Eloise, Josh, Vonnie. They are 3 examples I would cite. I believe in them. That will do. That’s enough.

“I believe in love.” Yeah baby. No doubt. Makes the world go round. Unashamedly, I am a true believer in love. Not only the romantic stuff, but the full gritty real total acceptance of another, type of love. Love love love. I love love!

“I believe in God.” Now here’s the biggy, is it not? Who is this God to be believed in? Or whose God are you thinking of? Depending on what or who you think he or she is (or not as the case maybe), might influence my answer. Yet for the sake of this brief distillation of my own beliefs, it is who I think God is, which will have to suffice. Of my own limited understanding, of my own limited experience to date, I believe in God. I believe she made all that I see, all that I cannot see, and she made me. I believe she waited a mind boggling amount of time after initiating the entire universe (even though most eminent scientists concur that the majority of stuff in existence took form in a breathtakingly short space of time – measured in parts of one solitary second no less) before experimenting with creating living things on Earth, and then a vast more imaginable, yet still ginormous, length of time before facilitating the emergence of humans. Whether she used the processes of evolution to achieve this or took some dirt and made an Adam, I’m not that bothered, but the scant evidence that demonstrates we evolved from Apes let alone air breathing fish is hardly a compelling argument. As such, I also have to believe she had to have an intention for creating Man and one that is probably, because I love it so much, is bound up with the notion of love. Love for the whole of what exists, for ourselves, for our fellow human beings, and at varying degrees of blindness and intimacy, love for her herself. I will never know for certain all this mystery, but I have an inkling that it is indeed possible to believe and even to love the creative force behind the entire cosmos.

In the miniscule chapter of life on earth that includes mankind, I tend to believe, probably because I feel the same as well, that God became and becomes utterly frustrated with us. And that a couple of thousand years ago she sent herself in our own form, in the miracle moment of a life that is Jesus. He had some pretty awesome things to share (as have a very few precious others from other cultures and other histories), but it was in his life, death and resurrection that I see the ultimate vision of love that grips me today as firmly as it did the first time I properly saw it, understood it, felt it in my teens. What an example. What an inspiration. What a magical, compelling, irresistible fairy tale. It is enough to sustain me until the end of my days and in all probability for a good while longer than that. Jesus is enough. His father is enough. His spirit is enough. For me. For you? Well, that’s your question, not mine.

So there you have it. I have my answer. I believe in fairies. I believe in man, rarely. I believe in love, always. I believe in Vonetta, Joshua and Eloise (and Moses, sorry me ol' china, almost forgot you there). I believe in God and in her son Jesus.

Hardly an original or imaginative response to that incommodious question but one that must be, as far as it possible to be, a true reflection and one under which I would be more than happy to pen my autograph one day, if it is ever required, in that Italian purgatory town square. Whether it would be enough to let me through the old Pearly Gates, would be to completely miss the point of what it enables me to appreciate this side of them. As the evangelicals like to say “Cake on the plate while you wait rather than pie in the sky when you die.” Or as John Banville in ‘The Sea’ more eloquently writes, “Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it.”

It is the Easter holidays at the moment and the kids are ever present with us once again. We popped over to the coast the day before yesterday to discover a completely deserted beach just south of Figaro de Foz and savoured the refreshing power of the Atlantic surf for a couple of days, camping overnight 300 metres behind the dunes. The vid below provides a sneaky peak of the uninhabited bliss of it all.

On the beach near Figaro de Foz...

Today, back at Moses, on the terrace in front of the bathroom, Von built a little stone wall to border a flat patioesque area under a white rose and another white flowering bush (an Easter something) growing in the slate walls, and on which we have placed a garden table and chairs for our forthcoming al fresco delights. Eli duly responded by baking another fabulous lemon sponge for the occasion, we supped gratefully on real English tea sent Airmail by Arlene and Sally, then before sharing this blog aloud with them, I undertook a quick vox pop family poll. “Fill in the following sentence for yourself.” I said. “I believe in….?”

“Cake”, declared Eloise instantly.

“Life”, proposed Joshua definitively.

“Blossoms”, giggled Vonetta cheekily.

“Walkies”, thought Moses hopefully.

Me too, folks. Me too.

Green for Grey - by Josh

Olá, it’s been a while, but I'm finally writing another blog. I don’t really remember the last time I wrote a blog so I won’t write about everything but at least some of the many highlights.

I'm going to start where anyone reading this will have most questions. School. School is going really well for me (actually now I think about it I should probably say really, really, really well). I'm “classified” by my friends as one of the top three students depending on the lesson: maths 1st; sciences 1st; and of course, Portuguese 3rd (although I got the equivalent of an “A” in my grammar test which was the best mark in the class). The other top two students are Anatoly and Andreia.

My three best friends Anatoly, Fábio & Rodrigo are really cool. Anatoly (or Anatoli as he likes to write it) is from the Ukraine and he’s the only other person in my class apart from me that has authorization to leave the school during school hours, so we tend to do a lot together like walk around the town or go to the Internet Café. Fábio, who is Portuguese is literally like my Portuguese double, he loves taking photos (yay!!!), loves graffiti (not those stupid little squiggles but the really big designs that take like 4 hours to do and 5 people so I said that he should go to London just to admire the “art” of the city), and thinks that bikes, computers and cameras are the best things invented so far. My other friend is Rodrigo who is French, and won’t let me stop thinking about it. He talks about Cristiano Ronaldo so much that I almost think he’s got a crush on him. He also thinks that the world revolves around football and that he’s a “babe-magnet”. He makes me laugh at him more than with him and I'm not the only one.

I’ve got 11 subjects at school and I participate in two clubs: ICT and football it would be nice if I could get a Cricket club going and the student will be teaching the teachers this time.

Right now I'm on Easter holidays but I can’t manage to sleep past 7am at the latest. School really gets you into a rhythm and I think I’ll go mad if I don’t get out of it so I tend to lie in bed until 10am just because I can. But waking up at 6 in the morning has its upsides (they are few but there are some), but before I get to them here are some funny sides leading up to the up ones. Every morning I fall out of bed and whack my head on the ground. Then I stand up straight and whack my head on the central beam. I then pull on my clothes while holding my throbbing head and afterwards I tumble down my super steep stairs but as I look out the window to see the morning world, I forget about my head (maybe that’s half because my ankle’s hurting now). At 6:30 in the morning you can see the first rays of the morning sun shining on the facing hill and the undergrowth makes the world look all fuzzy (or maybe that’s the tears falling down my face from my hurting head, ankle and now leg because Slinky is using it as a scratch pole). Seeing this dawn marvel, I remember my concrete birth place. Looking out your window in New Cross you see the sun rays shining on a drunk by the side of the estate begging for money because his wife has kicked him out the house at 3 in the morning without letting him get any breakfast (don’t worry, that wasn’t you Keith). If you could combine these two views, London and Amieira, you might get green flats (aka: eco-flats, which apparently exist according to Dad) and concrete trees (that I’ve seen in front of the Tate Modern and said “wow”). Just thinking about the dramatic change that we have made makes me shiver with shock.

Life here is different in many ways in comparison with the city in which I was born and grew up in (mummy says that I give London a hard time which is a little true considering the people, memories and places that are good there). At school in the big cities the teachers say that everything comes in different seasons of the year at different dates but you can never see it. Here suddenly 50 flocks of mallards fly in on the same day or 15 lines of processional pine caterpillars each 2 meters long march in. One day the pumpkins are still tiny vulnerable little things then suddenly they are the size of a couple of bowling balls. The Portuguese culture isn’t much different either. I’ll give an example: last weekend I went to stay over at Fábio’s house and in the morning they had killed the pig (to give him a name he will be called Bert). The whole day while Fábio and I were playing his family was working. In the evening we ate pork. I said that the meat was very sweet for pork and Fábio’s mum said that was because the pig was killed that day aka: Bert. I asked if they had already sorted out all the eatable bits (which in Portugal is everything) and she said no, all that was left was the right front leg. So they had basically killed, gutted, cut up and sorted out Berty in less than 12 hours which is quite an accomplishment. Sadly it’s the same with the forests. One day they’re here the next they could be gone.

So as not to leave you on that sad note I shall write my about my hilarious school trip. We went to Lisbon last Thursday to go see the planetarium and the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos. We left our little town at 9am and set off on a 3 hour journey. We got to Lisbon with time to spare so we ate lunch and another of my friends Paulo & I took a bath in the sprinklers (when it’s 30 degrees and you’ve got nothing else to do what would you do?). We then walked to the planetarium and after a 20 minute talk about what we were going to see we saw exactly what I see every evening out my front door basically whole constellations and galaxies. We then proceeded to the monastery that I had already seen when we still had the MosieMobile. With time to spare we went to a café that is the only place in the world that sells pasteis de Belém which are little tarts with cream, cinnamon and sugar. While we were eating them Anatoly & I saw a Ferrari, a Lamborghini, 5 Porches of which two were Locusts and a Formula1. Seeing the last we both looked at each other and then at the sports car with our mouths open and saliva hanging from them. Maybe the trip was worth it after all.

This is my last paragraph. Everything is rushing through my head so fast that I can’t actually focus on any one thing and most of my thoughts are in Portuguese so now I'm going to get my well earned beauty sleep and I shall do my homework in the morning (when dad reads this he will say “ha” and frown and mummy will tell me to go and do it there and then to which I will complain).

Tchau. Josh.

Ice creams in Sertã...

As still as a small weed dancing in the breeze - by Von

It’s a year and a day since we moved here. To be honest I really can’t believe it and yet so much has happened. Every day some part of this land is transformed by us being here and working here. Sometimes I am worried about the impact of our actions because romantic fool that I am I really like the falling down bits: the ‘weeds’ that grow through the house walls, terraces that have long collapsed, overgrown olives, perilous walkways and such like. On the one hand nothing has gone to plan. We are still waiting to put the roof on our house and our intention was to be living there within the first year of being here. Instead we are living in the house that was originally going to be Indie Michelley’s house and we have not really had any communication with Moonbeam and Sunshine since we left Bacelo. Yet these things are never really the plan. The plan perhaps goes deeper and further than we can ever see with our physical eyes. The plan has its own rhythm and impetus once it gets moving. This means that we have to learn to dance with the changing winds yet remain still, quiet, action within non-action.

Our patch of land is mirrored by a fairly steep, wild plant inhabited hillside, populated by a few pine trees, some small oaks, cistus, strawberry fruit trees and an impenetrable thicket of what the Portuguese call ‘mato’, and of course wild boar. It amuses me that this is our reflection so to speak. It is utterly satisfying to turn our backs on our side of the hillside and gaze on nature’s capacity to ferociously replicate herself. It reminds me that no matter what we do she will always reclaim her space as soon as us humans leave her earth alone. Often in the process of playing in the soil I stop take a break and lose my thoughts looking at that hillside and am calmed by its abundance of green. It is frustrating at times too as I wish I could be like the wild boar, or perhaps more poetically like the butterflies, happy to take rest in one of the abandoned cottages, needing neither roof, nor floor, nor clear pathway nor electricity, nor clothing, free from the constraints of attainment or desire. But most of the time I find it amusing, amusing that so much time, effort, energy must be spent making a home for ourselves, and I wonder who is the better adorned for life, certainly not me. This hillside always makes me smile at myself. It makes me feel like God is watching me impenetrable, unmoving and saying ‘relax it really isn’t that hard and there really isn’t that much to do I will look after things, I always do and I always have, let go’.

So, last week I woke up and my darling Memphis, (who always seems to hear my inner thoughts) decided I needed a fresh perspective and that we would take a trip to the other side of the hills. When we first moved here there was a fire or logging access road made along the very top of the hillside, but it is rarely used and we had never been on it. So off we went, with great excitement as soon as the kids were off to school, and after several stops to move fallen trees, some very heavy, out of the road we finally made it to the side immediately facing our patch.

It is hard to describe the experience of standing on the other side looking at our Moses (the place). You see when you are there working or walking or sitting it seems vast, too big for four hands and four feet, two heads and two hearts. The rocks are huge, the fallen trees are heavy, everything we do every impact we make seems small and insignificant on the huge landscape. But from the other side, it well, shrank. It’s tiny, gloriously wonderfully tiny. I couldn’t believe it. It is a speck on this landscape, a mere backyard to all the wild uninhabited landscape that surrounds. From there we could see that nature was eager to swallow every scar that we had made and that boulders to us were mere pebbles to her. I could see myself, watch myself from that side of the hill, a mere ant, or little weed just trying to etch out a life for herself and I could see that though we may be just two, with four hands, four legs, two heads and two hearts that we were not alone, my Memphis and I, that we could paint out a life for ourselves here with time and patience.

So now that I am back on my side of the hill I feel I have a true friend on the other side, one that I can just sit and look at to help calm my quivering mind and body and one that I can also climb (or drive) to the top too and take a fresh perspective, feeling comforted wherever I am of just how small I am, how small my efforts are and that no matter how much I f..k up here, nature with time and patience will always close the gap.

Times of a quivering come to us all and while lying in bed this afternoon I felt that some of my friends might be quivering just now. So whether you feel like you are living in the Babylon of attainment or the Paradise of acceptance I have a story of comfort to tell you. It’s a true story as true as any story can be once it is being told…

In the land of giants...

There was once a young woman who grew up on a very small Rock. She lived on this Rock for many years and while she was there she was told stories of giants. She was told that these giants knew many many things of great importance. These giants had done some horrible and terrible deeds but they were also creators of great beauty. She was told that these giants housed their treasures in enormous buildings unlike anything she could imagine and that in their land you could wear beautiful robes, see all that you could ever hope to see about the world of man and learn great secrets of how the universe and how all things in it worked. But in order to get there you needed loads of paper with special symbols on it and this paper wasn’t easy to make on the Rock. This young woman, audacious, as she was decided, that she would find a way to get to the land of the giants, even if she couldn’t make the special paper. So she worked and worked and read and read and found out the secret way to get to the land of the giants without the paper money.

She got there and it was just as was told. The streets were lined with so many lights it seemed as if the giants had captured the stars and used them to light their way as they strolled down wide avenues and spent many hours sitting and laughing just drinking this stuff called coffee which only seemed to make them laugh even wilder and become more excited. They had huge beautiful buildings, where not even the sun it seemed dared to peel the paint from the walls. Huge green spaces were carved out of their landscape and not even a carrot grew there just plants for looking at and smelling, a setting for giant mothers to walk with their giant babies and for giant fathers to have lunch or a beer with other giant fathers. Huge fat giant ladies sang in buildings painted with gold and lined with red velvet, small tiny giant ladies danced on tippy toes and captured her heart. She decided to try and learn some of the secrets of the giant world and spent many delicious hours in the vast libraries and museums, parks, art galleries and theatres. And in time she too could drink coffee and laugh with her mates and spend endless hours doing nothing but growing flowers and learning and finding ways to make more of the symbolic paper that the giant world seemed to love so much.

By the last day of the first year of her time in the land of giants she knew she was beaten, she had no place to sleep that night and had eaten nothing but beans for several months. She grew tired of all the knowledge and all the talking and longed for a piece of fresh fruit picked from a tree or a cuddle from a grandma or a walk in the Temple yard listening to the old Rastas who lived on the Rock. Tired and beaten she heard one of her favourite Rastas warning as she left, “Be careful daughter you can really lose yourself in that place, remember you are a princess growing into a queen.” At her wits end she opened a book that her Grandma had slipped into her bag as she was leaving the Rock. She opened the book and read these words,

"For this reason I say to you, do not be worried about your life, as to what you will eat or what you will drink; nor for your body, as to what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they? And who of you by being worried can add a single hour to his life? And why are you worried about clothing? Observe how the lilies of the field grow; they do not toil nor do they spin, yet I say to you that not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will He not much more clothe you? You of little faith!"

"Do not worry then, saying, 'What will we eat?' or 'What will we drink?' or 'What will we wear for clothing?' For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. So do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will care for itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own."

She went onto one of the forbidden rooftops and looked out at another rooftop, one with no apparent windows or doors and saw the most hopeful site she ever saw: a bird eating, feasting on some food that had arrived to his benefit. “How did it get there?” she wondered and “how did he know to go there to eat it”.

Still tired and hungry and scared she made a promise to herself. “I don’t know how I will eat tonight or how I will finish this thing that I came to learn but I do know that I need to write some words to feed the giants and I do know that I need to go and learn to use one of their writing machines and I do have a little of that giant paper money captured on this plastic card I am holding in my hand so I will go to the place where they keep their machines and their many books of learning I will do this next thing I have to do. I will do it gladly I will do it with joy I will do it as best as I can and be as kind as I can in the doing of it. I will not take what is not mine and I will share anything that I have even if that is just a kind word”.

So off she went and in she went and on to the machine she went, tired, broken and lonely but with a little more faith and a little more hope. She fed her plastic card into one of the machines to see just how little she had left, but instead of the card showing digits it flashed three times (just to make sure her dull mind was awake and her shuttered eyes were watching) and it said five letters, letters, not numbers. These letters spelt the word…

"HELLO"

Immediately after, the screen came up with an impossible number of digits (these digits represented what the giants called a sum of money). This money would continue to exist on her card for the entire duration of her time in the giants’ hall of learning until the very last page she needed to photocopy or print and at that very last page the card went blank and never worked again.

And so it came to pass that she finished her time in land of giants and in many ways became a giant herself, she found giants to love and to call family and friends, but in time she grew tired of the land of the giants and went to a new land, a vast land of small people and became a small person herself to see what miracles could happen there.

Wherever we are and whoever we are hard times come to us all, but take heart have hope and faith. The next time you are in a place where you can see the horizon, go outside, find the furthest point you can see and try to pick out the details of the furthest thing on that horizon. Chances are all you can see is sky, earth and indistinguishable shapes somewhere in the space between. If it is a tree, all you can tell is that it is a tree, you can not tell what kind of tree or what its leaves are like or whether it has been planted or just grown up there all random like. If it is a building you can tell it is a building but not what kind of building it is or what is going on inside. If it is a person you can not tell the shape of the face or whether that person is friend or foe. In other words we do not know, we never know what is on the horizon for us in our lives, it is a mystery until we reach it and then there is another horizon just waiting for us to reach if we so desire.

So relax and let go be supported by your little patch like a tough little weed, roots dug deep into an apparently impenetrable mountainside. Still in the knowledge that you are rooted in the earth but prepared to dance and move to the slightest breeze. Who knows there just might be something positive on the horizon that you just can’t see, miracles do happen they happened to the girl from the Rock and they have more than likely happened to you.

River.

Later that night...

A Foolish, Unlearned, Nobody in Peasantville.

Hey ho. Hope all is well in the lands across the seas and beyond or from wherever you maybe reading this today. Welcome.

Here in the land called Moses, deep in the heart of the forgotten Portuguese interior, it has been a most fascinating season. After the rush and madness that was the end of 2008, the joy of Arlene and Annie’s Christmas visit, the reflections that followed in the stillness of those long cold, wet, winter evenings, Spring is now emerging all around us. Bright pink cherry blossoms nudging through here and there, white and yellow daisies devouring the roadside verges, heathers under the pine and eucalyptus forests bursting into purpleness, warm sunny afternoons, all revealing the promise of much much hotter and longer days ahead and the full glory of nature that we know is about to explode just round the corner.

It should now, you’d think, be the perfect temperate weather and, after our long winter’s rest, the perfect moment in time for Von and I to now be in top gear with the restoration of our other 2 houses. But au contraire.

I am not exactly sure why, but we’re not too concerned. It feels like we are riding the flow of natural rhythms in this most enchanted of places and consequently we’re in no hurry to push things along at the hectic pace of 2008. Slowly, slowly and all things shall come to pass. Não é, Shanti? We have though, managed to clear both the other houses ready to start the first part of renovation – raising the old stone walls by a metre or so in height (in stone, not straw bales, cos we’ve found an old local guy who can do it brilliantly and quickly, prepared to also teach us how in the process, and we haven’t been able to find a decent straw baler near here for love nor money) and then installing new wooden roofs on top with a carpenter roofer who happens to be the boss of Michelle’s gorgeous young Brazilian boyfriend, Warley (captured here squatting down by one of the granite pools in the river that flows round Moses).

We’ve also been able to do a few cool odd jobs around the place: like carving a drain out of the lime floors to transport the sudden emergence of an underground stream that ran through the house after all that rain fell in January (the most for 20 years in Portugal); pruning a dozen or so of our 40 silver leafed olive trees (like this one in the photo); building a neat tri-chamber compost structure from old floorboards; making the house feel even more like a home with simple bookshelves of long sweet chestnut planks on red fire brick pillars and some much needed kitchen storage space; a chimney in the bathroom so we could fire up the elegant old wood burning stove that we’d found abandoned in the ironmonger’s car park in Oleiros; new fascias for the bath and toilet from sawn off pieces of old broken wine barrels; vegetable beds edged with boulders fallen when the new terraces were carved out last Autumn; and new graduated steps along the path that connects the houses at the top (Cabeco) with the house at the bottom (Moses) heaving chunky trunks of felled pine trees up the hill and then back filling them with rubble and clay. That actually sounds like quite a lot of work now I have written it, but it really has only taken us a couple of hours a day and nothing approaching the generally accepted notion of ‘strenuous’.

Meanwhile, the kids have both had their birthdays, Eli’s 10th & Joshua’s 12th, and continue to fly at their lovely school in Oleiros, making great grades and even better friends. They are fantastic little creatures and we love them lots. The very sweet little Brazilian lass in the photo is Ju Ju, Eloise’s best mate here, (Hatti will forever be her bestest mate in the whole wide world) and she’s spending the weekend with us at the mo’ making cookies and cakes every few hours. Josh will be entering another photo competition this week called Splash Flash 09 featuring the best of the waters in Oleiros. He won the prize for the most original photo in the council’s last competition, so he’s keen to do well again this year. Here’s just one of his amazing shots. If he ever finds the time between his full-on studies to write another blog, you might get to see some more of his talent. Last weekend we nipped over to Coimbra to buy them new clothes and shoes cos they were looking a tad dishevelled. The clips below are from that trip to Portugal’s University City.


Coffee and bike rides alongside the Montego river in Coimbra…







Anyway, enough of the catch-up, let me explain the title of this blog entry as well as the reference to peasantville in the skits above.

Our closest neighbours are old. Joao and Eugenia (not the ones in the village but the other ones round the corner in Vale da Figueira) and José & Eugenia (whose Father built our houses over 80 years ago) have lived in these parts, in their current houses in fact, all their lives. They, like so many people round here, are kind, generous and expert stewards of their lands. We can’t help but admire the way they live, so simply yet enjoying the rich abundance of the fruit and cultivation of their toils. Not much cash and as such, together with their rustic lifestyles would be thought of by townsfolk and city folk as mere peasants. In the next 20 years or so, if we are able to learn even half of what they know how to do, we will be gloriously content.

In contrast, the so called civilised learned sophistication of the London we left behind and in the shopping malls and universities of Lisbon or Coimbra, doesn’t really seem to make much sense to us out here in the sticks. On so many levels, we have been unlearning, deconstructing, dropping much of what we thought we knew and in response are in the process of seeking the authenticity of a more firsthand physical and, in particular, spiritual existence. We have no idea if anyone will ever pay to stay here and therefore whether we will have ‘enough’ cash to live. But, strangely, we’re really not that bothered, most of the time. This place, the potential of the land, in itself, in ourselves, is more than enough. To some we know this will appear like pure irresponsible foolishness. Maybe it is.

Moreover, we were previously surrounded by a world where people, including us, were seeking, often with all our might, to become important, or at the very least useful to our employers and/or to society at large. Here, however, we’re slowly recognising that we’re moving towards a lifestyle where most of those people would consider us useless nobodies. And boy, let me tell you, it feels just great.

When I grow up, I want to be a foolish, unlearned, nobody.

Ironically, this label for my new found self awareness makes for quite an apt acronym. F.U.N. So much fun in fact, that if ever our kids tell us one day they are off to the mountains to renounce the world and become foolish, useless, nobodies like us, it will be a delight. (As would be the case if they said they’re off to become doctors or actors, scientists or artists – just in case the grandparents get too worried by all this new fangled babble.)

I went fishing early this morning with Josh by the Rio Zezere (not in the pretty little stream in the photo which runs at the bottom of our place, but the big river just over the hill). Didn’t catch a thing. Obviously, hapless fisherman that I am. But to spend a couple of hours with my boy, appreciating the awesome tranquil beauty of a thick cold March mist being dispelled by the heat of a rising Springtime sun, chitchatting philosophical nonsense together about life’s existential quirky dilemmas, while waiting with not so rock solid faith for the trout to bite, is one treasure I would not swap for all the treasures of this world. Well, maybe I would to land an actual fish one day. (Just for the record I should note that what we were doing probably shouldn't be called fishing until I catch a fish, so if you wouldn't mind please re-read that para to begin 'I went sitting this morning...)

I will leave you with this video clip of Von and Slinky sharing a quiet moment on the yoga terrace yesterday. For the more discerning of you, you will note that Slinky begins to move into a very familiar yoga position, which I, unsurprisingly, misname, and which Von, the yoga teacher, even more surprisingly, can’t remember. Correct answers on a postcard to Moses, Amieira, Oleiros, Portugal, 6160-052. Previous experience of yoga, or of anything else for that matter, is not a requirement for entry. Prize winners will be chosen next month. By Moses the dog. Of course.

Cheerio.

Everybody loves the Sunshine

Only time to post up a few videos today. Will update you on renovation works on the houses and gardens next month.

River on the road to Cambas...

The snow covered mountains of Serra de Estrella...

Joshua's 12th birthday pancake picnic with a rare cameo appearance on film of the elusive Shanti B...

Right after, we took Moses (!) for a swim in the Rio Zezere...

Contemplations

Thoughts. Ponderings. Musings. Cogitations. Considerations. Reflections. Observations. Meditations. Deliberations. Ruminations.

But first, white waters from this morning you gotta see...

Cos it’s been a tad wet here of late, Von and I have been feeling like the characters ‘Sally and me’ in The Cat in the Hat book, with outside being all too wet to go out to play, simply sitting, staring out through our windows at the torrents of cold rain showering the landscape with their blessing, whitening the docile streams into turbulent rivers and saturating the soil into colossal underground reservoirs. We’ve managed a few hours of work here and there taking down another wall in our house at the top, throwing out huge piles of stones and wheel barrowing mountains of clay for reuse later in plastering and building with cob. And, a bit more urgently this week, we had to cut out a canal drain in the ground floor of the house we’ve just renovated to channel an underground stream that’s emerged and forced its way through the bedrock flooding into the house. Now we have a cute internal water feature that will run dry as the waters subside over the next fortnight but inevitably will reappear again with the next unusually high rains maybe in a year or 2.

Most afternoons we’ve had the time to rest, to read, to think. Lovely. Pondering on what we are doing, how we are doing it and why. It’s a big deal for me to think. No kidding. Most of my life is experienced in the outside, external realm. I’ve never really forged any consistent internal personal meditative practice that could be described as anything close to being a spiritual discipline. Although I’ve always been intrigued and fascinated by those disciplines inherently found in the more mystical wings of Christianity, Islam and Buddhism as well as some of the aesthetic rituals of African, Native American, Aboriginal and South American tribes. Yet here, in the middle of rural Portugal, surrounded by thousands of hectares of pine and eucalyptus forests, snow covered mountain ranges and endless skies, I’ve been able to recognise a few things.

First, we are in the midst of timeless story. Since the beginning of the universe, creation has been constantly happening. The matter that surrounds us, like the stones we’ve been daily handling, might have been formed millions of years ago, yet it was also quarried from these hills only a few centuries or even decades ago by Portuguese men and their families who built the phenomenal houses that we are now in the process of crafting into being our homes. A continuous story of creation right from the beginning of time until now. Our shared human history is of course littered with global conflicts and crises, but as I’ve written about previously, this part of Portugal has been largely unaffected, or at least a long way away from, much of that turmoil. Almost Shire-esque in its location and characteristics. However, even with our remoteness, I still feel undeniably connected to that human history as well as our earth’s physical history.

Second, there’s been some clarification, in the context of that universal story, of what I believe about the future. I’ve just finished reading a great philosophical book called “The story we find ourselves in” which is an attempt to distil the narrative of the Bible from a post modern perspective. In it, there’s a wonderful description of the future which calls into existence the present. A description that resonated with my own musings on the subject over the last few years. Here’s a short extract from a chapter I read to the kids last night.

“[Since the scientific revolution] we’ve been trained to see history being pushed from behind. Causes launch effects, which become causes of new effects, creating a chain of events that started at the big bang and leads to this moment right now. Even [Western] religious people tend to see things this way, with the added proviso that God sometimes can intervene in the mechanism and change outcomes that would have otherwise unfolded. I guess you could say for most people, God hovers over the present moment and intervenes as the chain of events that he started long ago kind of rolls on beneath him. Let’s assume there’s a lot of truth to this model of things being driven from behind. But let’s say there’s a completely different way of seeing things that’s no less true. Let’s say that instead of the present being pushed into the future by the past, that the past is being pushed out of the present by the future that is constantly rushing in. Instead of history being driven by the past, what if history is constantly being invited to receive the gift of the future?

An image that comes to mind is of a mother holding her little baby, who is just learning to walk and the father goes across the room and calls the baby to come to him, and the baby takes some steps. The baby isn’t trying to walk. The baby just wants to come and receive the gift of the father’s presence that is being offered across the room. [In this view] history is not just being pushed from the past or even engineered in the present, it is pulled, invited, called into the future, which keeps coming to us as a gift. God is waiting to give himself to us across the room and so we are pulled toward him by hope and desire.”

Taking on such a gigantic and imaginative restoration project like we have, is regularly quite daunting. We talk of it being 40 years before we will see this place in the way we have envisaged it. For the trees we will plant in the next couple of years will require, like us, this length of time span to grow into their full maturity. What has been sustaining me through the times of doubt over our capability and capacity to do this thing, is the notion that the beautiful future we can see in our minds’ eye, is no less real than the past or the present. It exists in concept because we have seen it, because we have actually imagined it. How and why we have seen it is another matter, but I have to tell you how wonderfully freeing it feels to realize that God might just be standing in that future calling us into it every day. With this future perspective, hope and desire and faith do flood in like tides and replace my fear and self-doubt with overwhelming gratitude at being given the chance to participate in this story of life on earth. It’s a chance to contribute to the continual creation process, a chance to paint my own unique impression, an artistic and cultural signature as it were, on this glorious cosmic and inextricably human canvas, until the day my body finally returns to being ashes and soil and my soul and life are judged by the One who started the whole thing off all those years ago.

Along with this assured reaffirmed sense of my place in the bigger scheme of things, has grown an indisputable nagging in the depths of my spirit and mind, that it would be good to cultivate, sometime soon, a practice of prayer. The nagging emanates from the recognition that if my future is being called into closer and closer proximity to a mysterious and loving God, who is as present in this present moment as he is in the stories of our collective pasts and in all the potential futures imaginable, why put off engaging whole heartedly with the Master Creator any longer than right now? Cultivate something Memphis, anything. Open the doors more regularly than you’ve done before. You have a plethora of inspiration of how to do it, formed through the ages by your fellow truth searchers. Pick one. Pick them all. But get yourself into a space where you can listen to what the Alpha and the Omega wants to share with you.

All very exciting, which is what I am really trying to explain in this blog today. I am learning to listen to what might be driving me internally. It is a quiet, softer drum beat than the usual external motivators but nonetheless the music is audible. And it’s time for me to explore that rhythm and learn to play along too with a bit more awareness and sensitivity, energy and passion, thankfulness and joy than I’ve done to date.

Each dawn of each new day is bringing this same exhilarating, albeit gentle and unobtrusive invitation to join in. What you gonna hear today Memphis? What you gonna create today? You’ll never have the chance to live this exact day again. So make the very most of it.

Yes Master. I hear you.

When it rains, it pours!

I’m lying down surrounded by a horde of cushions on the huge floor level sofa in our newly restored house at Moses, in front of a roaring wood burning stove fire, writing this blog while I wait optimistically for the incessant rains outside to stop. And boy, when it rains here, it really pours.

Over the last month we’ve had a couple of days of beautiful sun, which we’ve taken advantage of to start picking olives from 5 of our 30 olive trees. But for the rest of the time it’s been raining. A few times, even snowing. We had arranged over the course of a couple of weekends in December, for a team of neighbours to pick our trees with us and then do another 70 or so trees at our friends Ian and Merle’s place over the hill. Not surprisingly our neighbours weren’t keen to do so in the rain and the bitter cold so we had to put it on hold. We think the local olive press down the road closes at the end of January so if the weather clears up over the next few weekends we’ll still hopefully be able to gather a few more sacks. As much as Von and I can with our wee hand held olive rakes. If we miss the press, we’ll store the olives in barrels of brine and orange peel to eat rather than use for olive oil. It will be an enormous amount of olives, yet I reckon Von will get through ours before next year’s harvest time and hopefully we can pick and save some for Ian and Merle to sample from their place when they return again in the Spring. Come back soon peeps, we miss you.

On the 6th January, we said our farewells to Von’s Mum and sister, Arlene and Antoinette, sending them off with a delightful day shopping and moseying around in Lisbon before their flight back to London in the evening. Check out their cameos on the vids below. We miss them loads already and are indebted to them for filling our new place with laughter and above all magnificent memories of our first Christmas at Moses.

Arlene and Annie reflect on their first trip to Portugal…

Since they left us, the only real drama here has been that our highly independent princess of a cat, Angel, almost broke our hearts by taking herself off into the wilderness for a week, the coldest week in Portugal for 20 years with temperatures at night dropping to minus 8 and below. Thankfully Angel returned, unscathed and a little on the hungry side. Apparently, our friends tell us, January is the month that cats tend to disappear like that here in Portugal so I suspect she’ll be off on another wandering expedition shortly. Next time though, we won’t be having kittens about it.

Kids are back at school and Von and I have taken the first fortnight of January to recharge our seriously depleted end of 2008 batteries. Pottering about the house creating some resemblance of order, cooking, cleaning, tidying up the surrounding land, and as I mentioned above, picking and pruning a handful of olive trees. Nothing major. Nothing strenuous. We now feel ready to go for all that is in store for us in 2009, the year we want to build what we came to Portugal to build: our own houses at the top of the hill that we bought in September 07 with the intention of restoring them to live in for the rest of our lives. We’ve written our annual plan and budget, sat with our architect for a day to revise the drawings reflecting all the changes we’ve made in our ideas since the first plans were completed a year ago, and already have a roofing company in place to start the timber framing at the end of January. All set. Ready for action. So although we’re most thankful for the substantial soaking of the land (and us) at the moment, we’re also praying for a break in the daily deluges so we can begin to build once more.

It’s midday and Josh has just returned unexpectedly early from school. Another teachers’ strike he says. He’s drenched from head to toe after his walk down from the village, although behind him outside, I can see the dark rain clouds dissipating a fraction. Yep, there’s even some blue up there in the skies along the valley. Might even be able to get out this afternoon, se Deus quiser. Von’s already spotted the sun and is putting on her boots in front of me. “Right, I'm off.” she says, “It’s sunny at the top. I'm gonna move some stones. You coming?”

Right behind you dear. I'm right behind you.