OLIVES AND OLIVE WOOD

Sorry, the inverter packed up a week or so ago so this video blog is a little short and a bit out of date. Got a new inverter now so the next video blog should bring us back up to speed. Anyway, here is the yurt as it was a couple of weeks ago...

OLIVES AND OLIVE WOOD

“Every man looks at his wood-pile with a kind of affection. I loved to have mine before my window … they warmed me twice, once while I was splitting them, and again when they were on the fire, so that no fuel could give out more heat.”
Thoreau, Walden

I am sitting in the yurt right now. It’s dark, except for candlelight. The wood-burning stove is crackling away beside me, filled with old olive branches just cut from a dead tree about 20 yards from the door of the yurt…

For the last two days I have been climbing trees. Olive trees. It is olive-picking season and two of my friends look after a whole bunch of olive trees. There is a man who lives in a shanty-style shack at the top end of the olive grove. Panoramic views of the mountains. He built the place himself out of bits of wood, old windows, and a ruined stone cabin. It is decorated out front with a tangle of functional oddments – a spare wheel, an old radio, and so on. He appears also to have satellite TV.

Apart from the satellite on the roof, the shack looks exactly like one of those places where the ‘old timer’ would live in a made-for-TV movie about an old timer who lives in the woods. He would hate strangers and be very grumpy. He would threaten schoolkids with a shot gun and a vicious dog or two, but when the kids persevered, he would turn out to have a heart of gold. And the dog would inevitably be a softy too.

I don’t know whether the man here has a shotgun or not, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
Climbing trees is great. Picking olives off a tree all day, moving from branch to branch, you get into a meditative rhythm. Your mind quietens, you notice the olives more easily, your body moves into position and holds it with the minimum of effort. You get to know how much you can bend a branch before it breaks, and how thin a branch can be while still being strong enough to support your weight.

It made me think about how a meditative state of mind is actually a natural state of mind. Though I sit in formal meditation in order to get mine most of the time, actually, much of one’s life could be (and perhaps would have been) quite meditative. Building and tending a fire, picking berries, hunting, fishing, weeding the vegetable patch, gathering honey, milking the cow, making cheese – so much of this kind of activity requires a certain amount of concentration and skill, and yet does not demand so much of you that you end up stressed. Neither hurrying, nor tarrying, as the Buddha once said of walking the path to awakening.

It is odd that today’s city-based life is so stressful really, since there is actually little real danger involved in it. If I fall out of a tree, I break my bones. If I lose concentration while cutting wood I lose a finger. But if I miss the train, I just wait for the next one. I’m home half an hour late. Big deal?

I think a lot of the stress of city life is due, firstly, to sensory overload. There is just so much to cope with that you can’t process it and are constantly in a state of agitation, so it doesn’t take much to get your back up. Your system is just not designed to deal with All That Stuff. Secondly I think it is about lack of autonomy. The bank can take your house, the boss can take your livelihood, the gas and electricity companies can take your heat and light. Deep down, you want them all to go fuck themselves, but you don’t even know who most of them are. And you never get to de-stress from that because it’s always there, waiting for you to miss a payment, or turn up late to work one too many times…

There were a whole bunch of us out there this weekend. They built a big fire and cooked food, drank wine and celebrated the beginning and the end of the working day like this. It was an all-round beautiful experience. I felt a bit like a giraffe – the glee at reaching those nimble shoots at the top of the tree. I wanted to eat them but didn’t. Giraffes are also rubbish at speaking Catalan…

We have electricity again. A new inverter (which converts the voltage from your DC 12v battery to an AC 220v current, so that you can plug in everyday items – the American-sized fridge freezer, the plasma flatscreen TV, the playstation, the dishwasher). Inverters have got LOTS cheaper since I bought the first one, and much quieter too…

The goatherder herded his goats past the top of our land a few days ago. El pastor. An incredible clatter of bells and the thudding of a thousand hoofed feet. I was feeling a bit romantic about it initially (remnant of a more gentle time when people were at peace and enjoyed their simple lives) but the way he shouted at his dogs snapped me out of it. He sounded like he wanted to jump back into his 4x4 and be back in town as soon as possible. Perhaps the football was on or something…

Wood is increasingly the subject of my ponderings. And chainsaws. Everyone around here has a heavy duty chainsaw. They wander out into the woods, spend half a day cutting up dead trees and throwing them into the back of a trailor, and they have enough wood for a month or more. Warmth is not an issue.

So far, I haven’t bought a chainsaw (I had a trailor but as you know it died en route and is buried somewhere near Toulouse). At first I thought I would have to get one, but reading Thoreau, I was reminded that chainsaws have not been around forever, and people used to cut their firewood by hand. So maybe I can do this too (though I am looking forward to some friends coming with a chainsaw to help us get ahead!)

Walden is increasingly becoming an instruction manual for me, rather than a window on an alien world. I read with interest the point in winter at which he decides to plaster his cabin – since insulation is becoming of great interest to me too, and we are always thinking of ways to hold the heat in the yurt for longer. We have tucked blankets around some of the wall, and taped up some of the gaps where there is a draft in the floor.

Mongolian nomads use felt to insulate their yurts, made from the hair of their own animals. I haven’t got any animals, although I was offered a dog the other day. It was an incredibly cute puppy, but I am trying to act with head not heart on this particular occasion. I will probably not shave it to make wall insulation even if my heart wins out. The dog is very small, and I have yet to learn the art of felt making…

I read also how Thoreau has to break the thick ice on the pond in order to get his water in the morning. The water here freezes every night now, and we have to keep a container in the yurt as it stays a little warmer in here, so we can have tea, brush our teeth and so on in the morning. In fact, when my neighbour offered us the dog, he was just heading down to the spring to get water, as his pipes had frozen up in the night…

And I read how Thoreau gets excited when he finds an old fallen log in the forest and drags it back. I know that excitement. But I have yet to do much splitting with an axe. And I haven’t got a wood pile yet. We are usually just cutting enough wood in the day to cover the evening. It’s tiring just to do half an hour of sawing up trees, so how you get a wood shed full of logs I have no idea. The other thing I note is that he tends to keep the fire going for most of the day. He lets it burn out in the afternoons, but the rest of the time (i.e. evening, through the night and into the morning) he has a fire going. That’s a lot of wood. And he cuts it all by hand! There must be some technique to this.

The nights after the fire has died and the mornings getting up are the worst here. It’s a totally different experience from the days and the evenings, which I love. It would be great to have a fire going all the way through the night, then to just stick a couple of logs on the embers in the morning and have it nice and cosy, and have the kettle boiling on the stove while you slowly come round – ahhhhhhh. Nice. Well. It would be. But how to do this without a chainsaw? Answers please!