Winter is here once more. We’ve had snow on and off for the last week, and steadily for the last 2 or 3 days. I love this time of year. We get to rest up a bit and so does the land. The fields are sleeping, leaves have fallen, critters are staying warm as best they can. But my goodness, how dirty and untidy everything looks until covered with snow. If you didn’t know better, one might think that everything was dead! I am, of course, being somewhat sarcastic. Below the surface, the soil teems with life. The tons and tons of organic matter that we’ve added over the years, the mycorrhizae that we’ve encouraged to grow, all below the surface, hidden, only discernible from above if you know your “weeds” well enough. Personally, I love the smell of decay, the heavy distribution of “browns”. In death I see life and I rejoice!
I reflect on all this as a result of a strange thing that happened to us recently. It was a sad way to end what has been yet another hard but fulfilling year.
I’ve never felt the need to make explicit our desire for privacy as I thought it was a given and no one has disrespected it until now. Guibi is a place where, to be frank, I have felt comfortable enough to walk about naked when the weather permits. We are screened from public roads, have no prying neighbours, and the only reason we saw the need for fences around our growing areas was to keep the deer and boar out.
We also love having people visit, and have had a stream of volunteers, helpers, and “fellow travellers”, many of whom have become good friends.
Maybe you can imagine my surprise when I received notifications that there were comments on our FB page and photos with a disparaging review on google. These were made by a person I had never met or even talked with. A person who had turned up unannounced one day in the midst of winter, wandered around taking photos of a landscape that he didn’t understand while we weren’t there, and dissed us publicly on our own SNS pages for the state of the place (which is at this time of year admittedly “scruffy”). Later he had the temerity to call K and continue his entitled rant on the phone. Anyone who knows K can imagine the effect this had on her. Too polite by far, she took it quietly, but the depth of her incredulity was immense. E came home from school and on hearing what had been said about the place she has grown up in, could barely contain her anger. I, of course, couldn’t contain mine and he’s now suffering no illusions regarding how I feel about him.
A number of things about this person and his actions come to mind:
His sense of entitlement (that I can only assume stems from his belief in his superiority). Firstly, in assuming that he could just turn up. Secondly, that he felt free to take photos while we weren’t there, and thirdly, that he felt his opinions were informed enough to make public.
His obvious lack of experience with/empathy for/observation of nature and its functions and systems. Apparently, our land is 98~99% dead! He obviously knows not what he talks about.
The fact that this man is a so-called “man of God”. A missionary. But maybe, on second thoughts, that actually explains a lot.
And finally, to top it off, the man grows and sells food (he sold his first bag of rice this year!!) and is ostensibly on a similar path to mine.
Way to go, man. F__k you very much.
I think we just ran into one of those people known online as a “Karen”, in real life! Wow! I’ve never encountered one in the flesh before, well, technically I still haven’t but one certainly came into our lives! What an incredible surfeit of entitlement to do as they please! What a complete abundance of confidence in their ability to correctly judge things. What a supreme arrogance and inflated sense of self-importance to publicly spew their bile!
Nonetheless! As is my want, I have found this whole experience kind of invigorating. How? You may ask. Well, our erstwhile interloper brought to my attention the importance to some of what to me, someone with an intimate familiarity with the place and the myriad functions of its parts, is mere surface appearance. We often say not to judge a book by its cover, but it’s surprising just how many people do exactly that!
So! To work! The bushes and trees that we planted in the expectation that they would take over the role of the 400 odd fence posts that we got as off cuts from the shinrin kumiai, debarked by hand charred the ends of and erected 10 years ago, have grown patchily leaving gaps and “ugly” uneven spaces. We need to rethink the fence line. It’s still perfectly functional, but as “Karen” has pointed out, gives an impression of abandondedness.
The yurt, which, as you know, has been unused since the ‘rona put an end to our hosting of volunteers, needs some love and attention. It is scruffy. The electric and water systems have been “wintered” and the water cistern probably needs a scrub.
As for the beds, well, we always grow amongst the “weeds”, and as per our custom, there’s not much growing at this time of year. Beans and peas are in and happily waiting for warmer weather, wheat is doing what it does, our elder have shed their leaves and they too are waiting for spring. Basically once the snow melts we’re all set for the pre-spring cleanup.
The long and the short of it all is, we’re carrying on as we always have and this rude interruption has reminded me of the main reason I left the west. Too many judgmental people who think that just having an opinion gives them the right to be heard and that opinion respected regardless of how stupid the opinion actually is.
And with that, I’ll sign off with a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to the rest of you, our friends and supporters.
Peace, love, and solidarity! No God! No Masters!
Comments