Hello! Welcome to The Beautiful Chaos - my personal journal of smallholding and renovating adventures as an unschooling family of six. I write about things that feel important to me at this stage in my life - Nature, Naturopathy, self-sustained living, health and homes, organic gardening and raising animals. Plus other things that make my heart sing and that I want to share with you. As a free subscriber you can read the first part of this essay. To read it in its entirety, and access my full archive, back story plus all additional resources available here (which you can read about in the about page) please consider becoming a paid subscriber. For less than the cost of a coffee and fancy pastry you will have access to so much extra content and will be supporting my work so I can keep creating MORE of this for you. Thank you x
Gardening situates you in a different kind of time, the antithesis of the agitating present of social media. Time becomes circular, not chronological; minutes stretch into hours; some actions don’t bear fruit for decades. The gardener is not immune to attrition and loss, but is daily confronted by the ongoing good news of fecundity. A peony returns, alien pink shoots thrusting from bare soil. The fennel self-seeds; there is an abundance of cosmos out of nowhere….
Is art resistance? Can you plant a garden to stop a war? It depends how you think about time. It depends what you think a seed does, if it’s tossed into fertile soil. But it seems to me that whatever else you do, it’s worth tending to paradise, however you define it and wherever it arises.”
~Olivia Lang
I love these words and immediately felt in resonance to the concept of seeing time as an altogether different construct - to the one we abide by - when I am in my garden.
Every time I am in this place I feel it’s not enough. Even if I have had the luxury of being there several hours at a stretch.
It feels unbelievably abundant to even say there is a patch of land where I can create wildly and lose myself in the beauty of Nature. Nick and I lived in small homes in London and then in the ‘burbs and then in a semi-rural town with a modest garden. Planting flowers, herbs and if space permitted, vegetables was confined to pots or lined apple crates. It made for a charming though hardly generous scene.
When we first came to visit the cottage….