Sitting in bed with a scalding hotwater bottle at the base of my back, and @vincentnijman tap-tapping away beside me on the Hive, we’re doing our best to stay cosy of an evening, whilst our miniature stove (from my 5m bell tent) blazes but doesn’t quite make us toasty.

We are getting slightly hardened to the cold, possibly… But it still feels frigid getting up in the morning, getting dressed (into very cold clothes), and sitting down when we come back in from working or walking outside. We have a make-shift bed ‘constructed’ from our tent futon mattresses, our self-inflating mats, and four palettes from lovely new friends who are our hillside neighbours. Plus tons of lovely blankets and heavy pyjamas, of course. We can just handle an evening, if we snuggle in like this soon after dark, and make sure that our hotwater bottles are topped up!

Living back on our land waaay before we expected to, is certainly not easy, nor simple, nor comfortable. And we are sure that many folks would question the logic of our doing this: why wouldn’t you stay in a rental home – try and find another one which is more cosy, or even return to our house in Guardia Sanframondi, which as least has a proper-sized stove.

We don’t want to be somewhere else. We want – and need – to be here. The hardship of it is part of the experience and part of the learning: how do we prioritise what is going to make this situation even survive-able?? What can we do, and what will be have to eventually get help with? What can we use from our own land, and our own meagre resources???

There is almost always a way, even when it appears like there is no solution; there’s almost always some kind of simple, natural and present way to resolve any given situation. I’ve tested this fact of living law so many many times, and moments like these, where we have what others might consider to be “very little” are some of the best situations in which to prove the benevolence of the Universe.

It often takes a good while to find a solution, especially if it is something unusual, new to our mind and hands. Like this building we’re now (attempting to be) living in: it is quite an inadequate construction, with brick and cement on top of beautiful-but-basic old stone stables. The roof is also in brick and cement (!) held together by rusting metal rods (!!!!). The whole thing is somewhat shoogly; there are deep, wide cracks in a few places, and it’s hard to not imagine them growing daily!

This is not the building that we planned to live in, and it really is not what would be called ‘habitable’ according to convention. It is more of a ‘diposito’ or a set of storage rooms: bare gray concrete surfaces top-to-bottom, in a very wide range of textures. The floor is somewhat smooth, apart from several places where there seem to be puddles of lumpy cement which have fallen down from works above. Then there are the make-shift windows, which have been botched together many decades ago, and which have broken glass and partially-dissolved metal frames.

And the completely improvised windows – one of which is a hole that we burst through the wall (to semi-remove a very-much-unwanted smartmeter), currently blocked by a metal plate and sackcloth - and the other way up high, which has a kind of metal mesh on it. All this and the biggest crack, which extends from the top window right down to the floor beside our mini stove, and through which we can see the outside at some points. Plenty of draft-sources, for sure. The external walls are not finished: open spaces between many bricks, and no proper edge seals below the eaves.

Plus the terazzo; it has a craaaazy mess of painted plastic-rubber, very worn away, but half-melded with the surface cement in places, and the pebbley cement is all kinds of textures, peaks and troughs, perfect for storing huge puddles of water, which quickly leach into the old stable below, when it rains. This is particularly problematic: we’ve done a great deal of cleaning of the terazzo, but it is also functioning as a living space whilst we have dry weather; it is laden with washing rack, buckets of rubble, and a new recycling area to keep the bags of stuffs out of the kitchen.

It may rain later in the week, and so we have some efforts to channel into sealing the house before then. And still we can’t do it all: the roof also has some kind of major leaks in the middle and to the edges, which will likely have to be caught in buckets, with plastic sheeting draped all over our possessions...

We are not brave (nor foolish!) enough yet to venture onto the roof – we don’t know enough about it, and cannot vision stepping onto it, without images of falling immediately through! We’ll start at the edges, and see what we can do without putting weight on it. And we are proud owners of an extremely large heavy plastic sheet, which we bought with the idea of literally draping it over the whole building. We used it to sort-of protect the terazzo during heavy rains, before.

The terazzo also has some missing brickwork underneath it, which is held up by some not very solid beams that have been rammed in under it with a soggy amalgamted wood panel above and a plank or two below. Highly insufficient to hold up the terazzo long-term. So there’s that, too.

All in all, this ‘house’ it is not particularly safe or secure. But it is ours. And this is the most important thing for us. Why? Because anything else is bound in others’ energies, contractions, vision – and the wider vision of the mainstream. Whereas being on our own land in our own building – no matter what – is a vastly easier and more energising space to be in. Though many of us have not noticed, mainstream humanity is on a very rapid downwards spiral: the quality of life, value of benefits and privileges, the very health of nations, the mental health especially, is all descending. It is more noticable every day, to folks like us - who avoid cities in general and groups of humans in particular – that ‘conventional’ life is becoming more restrictive, toxic, and degraded/ degrading.

Returning to Nature on the other hand, everything comes back to a truer Normal. We are motivated here; this is our task: this is the space we have been drawn into, and which is ours to transform and to make right. Each and every aspect will be resolved, improved, made good, in right timing. This gets more clear and more obvious every hour, as we settle into more natural rhythms and structures. Using what is around us, we make a functional bed, kitchen cabinets, storage spaces. Outsourcing is less and less necessary, as we enrich our capacity to invent and make things, to form new things from natural things. A holly wreath graces the front of the building, and reminds us of this point of midwinter we are reaching, in which we are blessed with life, warmth, shelter, food, even in this time of relative lack.

Stripping life back to its very bare bones is an incredibly liberating exercise.

We have MUCH further to go: our egos are still pushing us to behave how we used to behave, culturally. So we flare up old habits and then let them fly off into the aether, free to go. There is so much s p a c e in letting go, and in stripping away our inferior and superior egoic constructs, which here seem kind of psychotic, truth be told. The process of remaking ourselves is significant, alongside this bizarre challenge of finding sanctuary in the wilds, in this mostly-ridiculous building. We have the sense of being the first of what will be many, many, many, who seek refuge in the Natural, as the world crumbles – and we anticipate being able to share what we’ve learned and grown, with others...

Looking forward to sharing more about our progress, and thank you for your witness of our growth and learning!

With Love!

www.claregaiasophia.com