Free-Range Living

' Wising Up ---- ? '  

It's the time of year the woodash and the compost go on the ground, here at the micro-holding (small smallholding) in the UK midlands, traditionally on half the growing area but this time,  and with a favourable wind, there is hopefully enough ('slow made', two years old) compost to give the whole area a good covering, following the couple visited in the summer's advice - 'you can never have enough compost', they said, and it'd be a long way to go to see better organic vegetables than those they grew - stand out. So far, with one week of February to go, all the woodash has gone out and half the compost  - 44 bucketfulls to be precise, with about as many still to do - at a steady pace, 10 - 12 a day and after a few days, hey presto, job done, good job jobbed. The ash and compost is just shaken on top of the ground, nature does the rest, it's just like rich soil, and apart from crops getting occasional doses of nettle juice, and some digging in of 'green manure' (eg. self-set grass, green crops) that's the fertility side sorted - seems to grow reasonably abundant and healthy crops. Talking of which - eurleeka! - the leeks hit late by the alium fly pest and rendered 'un-upstanding' have been in the process of recovering, with about 75% of them now upright and most of the rest in recovery mode. They'd had a couple of doses of precautionary nettle juice which has no doubt helped their recovery - excellente.

'Into stride ----- '

Seed potatoes, mainly of the Pentland Javelin variety, were duly bought at the potato fayre, now seemingly a national event, with over 120 varieties to choose from -the choice in fact was mildly bewildering. They are now on the bench in the paddock glasshouse covered by bubblewrap plastic to encourage 'chitting' to form sprouts before they're put in the ground around mid  March - the plastic sheet to keep out the rain and warm the ground up already being in place. Home-grown broad bean seed has been in the ground since mid Feruary, covered by glass and then the plants will be put out mid March onwards to get a reasonably early crop that'll hopefully beat the blackfly menace - they could be planted in autumn but then there's a risk of losing some in severer winter weather. Broad bean plants don't seem to check too much on planting out.

'Logs - statistics ----- '

 The woodstack in the woodstore in the 'logs-istics' centre is dwindling as to be expected at this time of year. It's a sizable store and the thinking was that it held around 3 - 4 tonnes, only then to be proved wrong by doing some spot weighings. The wood comes indoors courtesy of a well-filled metal meshed basket ( on long-term loan from a supermarket --- ). It was discovered that the daily use weight of wood (stove's on from 3pm to 10pm or so - the air-source heat pump does the earlier stint), averaged 12.5 lbs ( approx 5.5 kgs), which mean't then that the weekly consumption was 90 lbs, and the monthly usage around 3.5 cwt's (approx just under a sixth of a tonne), which then puts the winter's usage at just over a tonne , which doesn't seem an awful lot  -? Crikey though, the full woodstore (2m*3m*2.5m) is still used up, so it means that a tonne of wood is a heck of a lot in terms of volume, particularly as much of this wood is in the form of heavier hardwood logs. It may not be quite as economic a fuel as previously thought -? It as a renewable fuel though, and has the advantage of being at times acquired for free from here and there - it's one too that is currently being partly blamed here in the UK for poor air quality in cities and big towns, there having been quite a large increase in the use of woodstoves for heating over the last few years. Recent reported average house heating costs confirm that the heating strategy here is working out eco-nomically at under half average cost, and mainly renewable at that.

'Blissful walking ------ '

The countryside hereabouts in the UK midlands was looking amazingly green for the time of year at late winter the other day , on a walk firstly through a nature reserve and then returning via country lanes. Birds, especially gulls, were fighting a wind against them, zig-zagging their way to their night quarters, a good size mere (lake), all except one recidivist that is, which scooted off at speed in the opposite direction - ? A couple of buzzards too were battling the wind, as well as each other, which made interesting watching, as did the crows who were also having quite a battle to make it back to base. Snowdrops, daffodils, gorse and one rare azalia flower were all in flower at various stages along the way, with bluebell plants about a third grown, to then make a bluebell carpet come May time. This area of the countryside is particularly pleasant, and in spite of the fact that there's a hide overlooking the lake in the nature reserve, it's still rare to bump into anyone else - an untrammelled part of the country, pleasant and peaceful, with its own sense of permanence ----- .  'Time out' in such surroundings and in the space they offer, can be time well spent.

'Blues bliss -----'

 'D', the travelling bluesplayer mentioned briefly in last month's piece duly came hereabouts and gave his performance, and a pretty exuberant show it was - his energy and love for his music was contagious - a man who certainly gives full value for money. He visits UK shores two/three times a year playing about a ten week stint, and giving a show most nights, living 'al fresco' along the way to keep costs down - a real 'freerange' lifestyle. His music is obviously his passion, his fees not being outrageously high , as is his love  for playing live to a live audience, keeping the 'travelling blues' tradition and lifstyle going. Was there, though, a downside at all to such a lifestyle? D reckoned that it maybe wasn't the best for maintaing domestic relationships and that there was a cost in terms of sacrificing to some extent his love of growing things and for keeping animals. 'You can't have everything' as the old saying has it, but it looked pretty much for this freeranger that the benefits of his freerange lifestyle outweighed the costs by a country mile -----

'Bliss beckons ----- ?'

Researching for a further contribution to the FR site books page ( Freerangin' on --- Wising Up, or Dumbing Down - ?' 'coming soon') , it's surprising how much material there is under the umbrella heading of 'higher awareness states', and how many routes there appear to be to access these, from spending years suppressing 'base' instincts, to 'walking through the door - it's always open', to transcendent experiences via art and/or music. One 'route' perhaps a little more surprising is that of following breakdown, but maybe then not necessarily so, in that a breakdown involves a 'collapse'' of a person's operating processes (due to, say, stress build-up), so that any 're-build' starts then from a 'clean 'de-conditioned' sheet' ( 'H''s case-study in the 'Wising Up ---' upcoming book is a good example - his 're-build' with the help of a knowledgable mentor, culminated in him experiencing a 'transcendent' type of state).

The process of 'self-actualisation' in which a person develops 'naturally' (and 'un-barriered' - see Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs work)  through stages to reach their fullest potential, then offers seemingly a further route to higher awareness states, in that 'advanced self-acceptance', which seems to be a key factor for transcendent type of experiences, will likely be high at the point of 'full potential' - ?  Such a level in people may well be relatively rare, although there is apparently a school of thought that suggests there may be more at this level than is first thought. Modern cultures, with their strong emphasis on wealth and power, fame and fortune and hence 'external' validation of the individual, though, may not necessarily be generally that conducive to 'fuller human development' ('wising up'), being more 'having' than 'being' orientated, and in fact having been criticised in some quarters for producing the opposite effect ('dumbing down'). The potential benefits to the ('freerange' - ?) individual of living in a 'higher awareness' 'enlightened' state represent a formidable package - energy, joy, health, bliss, 'knowing and seeing' and suchlike - crikey, not too bad at all, and seemingly not necessarily always totally linked to money - ? 'A load of old hooey', might say the money men, but who says they're necessarily, erm, 'on the money' - ?

 'No bliss 'running on a 'wrong road' - ?'

          'All of creation is in bliss -- except man'  (Eastern mystic)

  There's a bit of a thought, a bit of a possibility ------ ? There's long been an idea that 'man' has to 'find his way home', and that 'wrong roads' may have been taken by 'collective man'. One writer, Kunihiro Yamate, ( The Way of No-Mind) considered that man's chase for 'fame and fortune', for instance, was an essentially doomed attempt to assuage 'existential fear', and that real longer-term security could only be found within - man had to face (warts and all) and explore and accept his/her own 'self reality', to then be able to connect to 'larger reality'. Such a 'facing the fear' process ( not necessarily always fear inducing in itself, especially after a bit of practice - ? Good 'freeranging' territory - ?)  can be what the 'higher awareness' stuff can be all about, although it may be a possibility that at least some of it in practice - it can be quite big business, for instance -  is more of the 'palliative' style - ? There's even, for instance, modern religious movements that appear to espouse the causes of wealth accumulation and 'power over people'; man creating her/his own religion, which could be dodgy ground (?), and as Socrates might have pointed out :

 'A life unexamined is a life wasted'

With the western culture-style pursuit of wealth and power, collective man could be said to be on 'another road'. Will it, though, prove to be a 'wrong road' - there could certainly be plenty of signs, for instance, that it's a 'troubled road' - ?

Whilst 'bliss' may not quite have hit here at the micro holding just yet, there's plenty of satisfactions to be had in actively participating in nature and in life's processes - more geared perhaps to 'longer-term fulfillment' than shorter-term 'instant happiness' - ?   And then of course there's those blissful little blighters - the 'Wild Bunch' hens,  mysteriously escaping from their pen for a pastime - the little varmints -  not exactly creating too much bliss for their keepers -------