Rewilding the Dream
Our task today is not to recover lost knowledge, but to re-establish the mind-body-earth connections that makes the discovery of all knowledge required to live in alignment with Nature and ourselves, possible.
How can I describe my love for this land? I’m not from here, but I’ve never felt so at home anywhere in my life. From the first time we visited on holiday, I felt myself breathe and relax with that special feeling of coming home. I am wary of expats who claim to love their adopted home more than the locals and although my mother was Spanish, she was not from this part. I do not speak the local language, Galego, and my Castilian is merely functional. I’m a bit of a recluse.
When we first moved here, 11 years ago, all we wanted was to live in a beautiful place, in harmony with Nature and have friends old and new visit in the summer and leave us alone in winter. I wanted to make a garden. I had been working as a therapist in London and I fell into healing work within two weeks of arrival. That hadn’t been the plan, The ‘healing gifts’ came as part of the package with an NDE in 2005 and I always felt a bit conflicted about it, mainly because I know that everyone is innately self-healing – so what was I doing? People healed for sure, but they thought that it was because of something that I did. It didn’t matter what language I spoke, no one could see that it was their own healing that switched on.
We ran retreats for a while, with a healing focus that became increasingly shamanic. I am a life-long lucid dreamer with an active imagination and a strong affinity towards healing, but I feel more aligned with the ‘wise woman of the land’ tradition than modern-day shamanism. Yet…there is a resonance, a signal, something deep that moves me and through me.
As we left our city ways behind us, we learned how to be more self-reliant and we became stronger and clearer about ourselves and our own evolution. We wanted to be part of a community, but that hasn’t been possible. There is already a community here, with strong traditional values, but it is dying because it’s stuck in the past and young people do not want to live here. They see the hardship of their parents and grandparents and would rather go to the city and work anywhere but on the land – over 80% of the people of Spain now live in cities. Much the same as elsewhere in Europe and in the US too – it’s considered normal. But is it? The exodus from Galicia has been going on for a century or more and the countryside is abandoned to mossy-memories, forgotten in a dreamless sleep.
And yet, the Dreaming of the Earth moves through all of us, where ever we live – it doesn’t matter to Nature, she literally breaks through everywhere. Ancestral origins are only part of our story, as we have strayed very far from our roots over multiple lifetimes and we can lament that, or we can tilt our heads to real-eyes what that has given us; new ideas, a different flavour of resilience and a multi-faceted, complex need for co-operation that does not exist in rural areas. Now that we’ve been here more than a decade, we have seen the pattern of people moving out of the cities, setting up B&Bs, or retreats and looking for the farmers markets, the places to sell their produce and the hub of the community. Visitors come and go and we tend our gardens, there’s no one to sell to when everyone grows their own. Our curiosity for the unknown world and the burning need for discovery shoots out tendrils in the mind of the Earth, where they meet with the desire of like-minded folk – it doesn’t matter where you live. The old trade routes began this way, with the sharing of ideas and many different kinds of wealth – the shared dream of the Earth. Rewilding that dream within us and between us, where ever we are, is when the new era germinates.
It was never a goal for us to live off-grid. We just wanted to live in alignment with Nature and to witness to what Nature brings into our reality and that dream has informed our decisions. We went off-grid because we didn’t want to have a smart meter. I grew up in the city and I adapted, but it took me many years to recover my childhood dream, to live in harmony with animals and Nature. To imagine is to dream while you are awake and we all do it, without putting any value on this uniquely human function. An awful lot of effort goes into extinguishing imagination, so you can be useful to society. Well, society is broken, let’s dream up something better. For sure, the vision we had of rural life while in the comfort of suburbia, looks quite different in the wild. We wanted freedom, which doesn’t come cheap or without effort, but it’s well worth the price.
On the face of it, our off-grid life looks the same as anyone else’s. We have a solar system with batteries and a back-up generator for electricity; our water comes from a deep well, with a gravity well back-up. Our home is built of all natural materials, cob and stone from our land and chestnut wood from just over the hill. We have chickens for eggs and we grow most of our own vegetables. We collect deadwood from the woods for our heating and I cook outside as much as possible, inside we use butane for cooking and hot water. All standard off-grid ways. Yet, I know that Galicia is in me, as much as I am in Galicia – it is not a backdrop to my life, but part of the reality that flows through us. What does this land want us to bring to creative expression? It is an Arcadian dream, rivers and misty mountains, magic.
Every place needs dreamers. The rural folk here are subsistence farmers and, sad to say, most do not care about the land beyond what it produces. There are farming subsidies and loans for tractors. The preferred method of fire control is to cut everything down so there is nothing to burn – yet people still plant eucalyptus and pine for cash. This relentless exploitation is unbearable – where are the wild places? The natural range for lynx and wolves, bears and wild grazing animals? I’m not an activist. I am a dreamer. The dream and reality of regeneration for Galicia can only come from rewilding the dream itself, recovering our innocence and child-like sense of wonder. All of Nature comes alive in the dream and suddenly it’sall here, right in front of your eyes.
A lot of effort has gone into causing us to confuse imagination with fantasy. imagination is to see beneath the veil to the underlying potential, before it becomes fixed in form. Fantasy is the artificial copy of imagination, spawned and maintained by Hollywood, the media, technology and scientism. Fantasy is a binary sub-reality of zeros and ones that can only be maintained with a lot of electricity in an artificially controlled environment – like the fantasy of a smart city. What a sick and limited vision that is; necessary workers stacked in boxes, plugged into Netflix and eating home-delivery chemically laced cricket pizza – just being happy and owing nothing.
Off-gridders and everyone who makes lifestyle choices based on self-reliance and alignment with nature, to whatever extent we can is not part of that fantasy. We make careful choices about the technology we use, so that it works for us and not the other way around and we use imagination everyday, in a genuinely scientific way. Imagination has always been part of the scientific method, but you won’t find it in a science lab or an academic institution, as there’s no real science there. Regeneration needs imagination.
Rewilding ourselves switches on our innate self-healing ability, natural medicine and old-home remedies support us in this process. I’ve worked in kinesiology and transpersonal psychology, so I pay attention to how reality works, how it works through us. We are recovering our innate self-healing ability through interaction with Nature. Our biochemistry shapes our perception and experience, as much as our location and our behaviour. We are quite isolated here, so without much distraction I’ve had the opportunity to look closely at the patterns and cycles of Nature and how we interact with them, how I feel. I look at the night sky and have found that we are looking into the mind of the Earth, a rediscovery of ancient knowledge. I find this helps me understand what is going on in ordinary reality.
The nature of reality is oneiric, non-local and a dynamic mirror to our most intense feelings and inner-being. The Earth also has her dream for us and it doesn’t match up with how most of us live in the least bit. We are children of the Earth, made of the same materials in the same proportions and the Earth dreams through us. If she likes what you dream, it will show up everywhere else instantly in myriad forms, synchronicities in everyplace in which the conditions are ripe. The dreams and ideas that reach me could come from anyone: synchronicity is magic. To be away from the noise of civilization, the hum of technology, gives me the peace and space to explore these ideas.
We all imagine and we all dream and this is an extremely subversive and valuable activity, which is why so much effort goes into pummelling it out of us through childhood. By imagining a better world and bringing it into reality, we not only make our own lives healthier, more enjoyable and more satisfying, but we also strengthen the fibres that enable others to use these faculties too. I like to see how this works and how it plays out in our reality, which is much more dream-like and fluid than the Ill-Eats want us to know.
I am living my dream and I want that for all little bears, where ever you are!
