It was evening when the plane approached the ancient city of Plovdiv. The sky was dramatic. Great tidal waves of coppery cloud rolled in front of us, and the plane dipped into them like a surfer dropping into a wave. Aeroplanes: love them or hate them, they’re an incredible feat of engineering, perhaps the most tangible proof that what seems impossible to the many can be realised by the few with faith and vision.

There was something portentous about that sky, as though the Gods had thrown the elements into it and lit the burners. I sensed doors of fate swinging open and shut.

Two days later, I was sitting in the forest behind RisingSoul Retreat centre, inhaling the fresh aroma of the Balkan mountains. The trees dropped a confetti of heart-shaped leaves over whoever dared to walk beneath. How far away the dimension of England – with all its made-up worries – seemed here.

I wandered down to the courtyard for a cup of tea, drawing up a chair with Marten the Swedish yoga teacher and Hannah, a course participant from Italy. Dusk filled the air as the day began its transition into night.

“I didn’t sleep much last night, but then I never sleep before a workshop,” I said, yawning.

“Yes, I always feel anxious before things like this too,” said Hannah. “And before a trip.”

“Yeah, I think it’s just part of doing new things, to be honest,” I said, supping my nettle tea.

Feeling anxious is normal when we’re at the threshold of the unknown, with no idea how things will turn out. Everything rests on faith and intention. But we have to have the conviction to push through a bit of fear. If I’d caved in to every flutter of anxiety I’d ever felt, and bought into every moronic horror story spouted at me, I’d have robbed myself of every incredible experience of my life.

Fear in itself isn’t a harbinger of doom. It’s simply a psycho-physical reaction to stepping out of the comfort zone.

“I love the life of the vagabond, and not knowing what’s coming,” said Marten. He peered at me through his metal rimmed glasses. I was a little surprised to still see him here. Competent, low-drama people are few and far between, and opportunities appear for them everywhere.

“This is the longest I’ve stayed anywhere,” he said, as if reading my mind. “But I’m enjoying learning something new. Building a house definitely wasn’t on my bingo card for 2026.”

“So what’s going on with that?” I said.

“We’re rebuilding the Pink House,” said Marten, grinning. “And I’m cobbing the walls.”

The Pink House

One person with almost zero propensity for fear of the unknown is Rowena, founder of RisingSoul Retreat centre. Three months ago, back in May, I’d shaken my head as she drove me around four different ruins she’d bought. Each was a crumbling monster lost in brambles and nettles and God knows what else.

“I had to buy them all to get the one I wanted,” she said, guffawing. “They were all part of the same company, and that was the only way to purchase them.”

Even one of these projects would have left most people jittery. Beams jutted from roofs like broken bones; rotten floorboards waited to swallow the unsuspecting. She’ll never manage all these, I thought.

The last property she showed me was the Pink House.

“I think I’m going to try and flip this one, to open up some cash for the eco village,” Row said – the eco village being the building site where I was running my cob workshop.

“Look at this lovely barn!” She pulled me through a meadow of thistles and dead grass towards a beautiful old wooden structure. “It would make a perfect yoga studio, or an art workshop. I’ll cut a door in the front, and then it’ll have an amazing view. See?”

I did see. It was a good idea.

“You’re right. Do the Pink House first,” I said. “It’s the least buggered of the lot. But you need to sort this bit out.” I pointed at the sagging front, where someone had knocked down a supporting wall and the whole structure now leaned on a few insubstantial poles. Most sane people would have run a mile. I didn’t even want to stand under it.

“Don’t you ever get scared?” I asked, chuckling. It was all utterly bonkers.

“Nah,” she laughed, pushing her sunglasses back over her red hair. “What’s the worst that can happen, eh?”

I shut my lips tight as a list of potential catastrophes unrolled in my mind’s eye. Flipping heck, the Pink House alone will take her at least 18 months, I thought. But Row had a few things in her favour: a team, an ability to listen to the land, decent vision and a seemingly endless pit of faith.

Fast forward three months. Late spring had rolled into late summer, and everything had changed. In a spectacular turn of providence, Rowena had found herself a new boyfriend who happened to be a roofer. Tim was now dealing with the structure and timbers, Marten was on the cob walls, and Hannah from my workshop was staying on to help.

It was my last day in the Balkan mountains when I finally saw the Pink House. As we pulled up, I blinked. For a start, it was no longer pink. The team had pulled off the concrete render, exposing walls of beautiful original clay plaster. What a transformation. There was still work to do, but it had come a long way since May: the sagging had been sorted out, the roof was coming together, the were being replastered in clay. It was clear they’d be finished in two or three months.

As I boarded my bus to Sofia to catch my flight out, I smiled. So much of what Rowena was doing reminded me of my own crazy exploits of times past, and it was good to be reminded of something I might have started to forget: When we take a punt on life, life tends to take a punt on us back. As the bus moved off and the Balkan mountains flicked past my window, I could feel myself leaving more than a workshop venue behind. The shimmer of another dimension was reflected in the glass. Something stirred within as I caught sight of the face of change.

Change is coming whether we fear it or not. But one thing is more certain. Fortune definitely favours the brave. So if we want to up our odds in the face of the great unknown, not falling prey to the spectres of our anxieties is a very good place to start.

I’ll be talking more about the Pink House, and other examples of pushing through fear in this month’s Nature of Freedom podcast.

As a thank you, each month paid subscribers get:

1. The Nature of Freedom Podcast.

2. A chapter a month of my next book The Green. You can read the first chapter here.

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I had six willing victims for clay plastering, and we had plenty to render. But there was one recurring issue that persistently slowed us down. The sieve.

“You know Atulya, this mesh isn’t holding up. Maybe we can make another dirt sieve.” Alex was sitting on a bucket pushing soil around our freshly made dirt screen. Instead of a raincoat, he now donned a baseball cap pulled over his black hair to give him some shade. I took a closer look at the sieve. Already there was a hole in it.

“Agh, so annoying. Plastic mesh isn’t the right material. But hey, it’s what we’ve got, so I had to use it.”

I remembered making the offending sieve with a RisingSoul volunteer ten days prior. The volunteer had lovingly stapled all the edges flat and made the thing look beautiful. Sadly, neatness was of little use when it came to sieving dirt.

Nearby, a tarp was stretched out on the flagstones, and the indefatigable Sage stood barefoot in the middle of it, ankle-deep in muddy stodge. Gone was the yellow beanie. Out of her otherwise shaven head sprouted two small pink bunches of hair. She was joined in the mud pit by Jen, a travel writer from Greece more used to hiking the backwoods of the Dodecanese than negotiating mud pits.

“It’s like squeezing grapes,” said Jen. Her silver-blonde hair was tied back, and as she stamped through the mixture, I noted that her calf muscles looked useful.

Both Sage and Alex, alumni from the cob course, had remained for the plastering. In addition to film making, Alex was a bamboo expert and keen to build a bamboo-mud hybrid structure on a plot of land he’d bought in Portugal. Sage, as far as I could tell, was here for the ride. But here’s the thing: It’s the ride, not the map, that actually gets you to the destination, isn’t it?

“I should be taking some photos of my feet. A lot of people have feet fetishes, you know,” she said, and her grin reached from ear to ear, lighting up the mud pit as she squished the fresh plaster mix through her toes.

The sun beat down. Beads of perspiration appeared on Alex’s brow. The hole in the dirt screen was growing faster than the weeds after the last rain, but the man at the mesh kept at it.

At this juncture, Irina, a Bulgarian woman of my own age with a large rural project in the north of the country, walked over. She was a practical woman, well used to the reality of construction and getting things done. The type of person I give a little sigh of relief at when they arrive. She took one look at the sieve.

“Where’s the drill?” she growled. “Let’s sort that thing out and make it work.” And off she strode to the tool shed with intent.

Sieving dirt is a great metaphor for what happens with any kind of creation. You’re refining, keeping what works and throwing away what doesn’t. This is how anything, from houses to lightbulbs, turns from an idea into a reality. There is a peculiar fantasy floating about in the minds of many people that things arrive in the world perfect first time. They never do.

So it was that Alex and Irina joined forces to sort the damn sieve out. It was a dream team really, as both were self-starters and, dare I say it, veering on the more perfectionist edge of the quality control scale. I saw Irina ripping the plastic mesh off the wooden frame with gusto, while Alex measured a fresh piece of mesh. Chicken wire appeared, along with screws and other tools. I salivated at the idea of a decent screen.

While Alex and Irina embroiled themselves in Operation Dirt Screen, the rest of the team set about creating a fine finishing plaster. Some were softening the remaining clay. To do this, they waded into a bucket full of clay and water, usually getting rather stuck in the process and staggering about like mud zombies. Jen was particularly efficient at this job, but then she had those hiker’s calves.

“I mean it’s fun, isn’t it?” she giggled.

Some folk, however, were less keen on getting dirty. Latcho, a neat and tidy young coder from Sofia, peered at the clay slop dubiously and did his utmost to avoid the brown scourge. I was almost certain he’d been dragged along by his girlfriend Nona, an architect who was deeply fascinated by natural building. But you never know with mud who will come out with what. No one who enters it emerges quite the same.

Nona dipped her hands in one of the buckets of clay and began kneading it. She was a petite young woman in a little cloth dress who looked in danger of being swallowed up by her wellington boots. But what she lacked in size, she made up for in questions.

“So how would you normally make a sieve, because this one is no good? What size would you make it?” She tried to keep her long hair out of the mud as she wrestled the clay into liquid form.

“Normally I’d get a bit of 4mm weldmesh and screw it onto a wooden frame that fits nicely over a wheelbarrow,” I said. “But there’s no weldmesh.”

Alex and Irina worked hard. Mesh was cut. Chicken wire was laid above the mesh to protect it, and the sieve was screwed together in the most professional fashion. Soon Alex brandished the creation proudly. It looked amazing, and the clay softeners grabbed it hungrily, ready to sieve the clay.

Jen and Nona, who were both by now looking decidedly muddified, held the new screen over a bucket. Jen poured the clay through the mesh, and Nona began trying to press through a few stodgy clay lumps.

“It’s not working,” she said, her long hair now dotted with mud lumps.

I peered over. The problem was immediately obvious. The chicken wire, which had been laid over the top to protect the mesh, was tight, but the mesh slackened beneath. This meant the clay became trapped between the two layers. Alex and Irina ran over, shoulders sinking, clearly disappointed.

“We thought that would stop the mesh breaking,” said Alex.

“It seemed like a good idea,” said Irina.

“Doesn’t it always?” I chuckled. So it goes with construction. One of the most fundamental lessons of creation was quietly writing itself: nobody nails it on the first attempt. As I’m oft wont to say. If you haven’t made a mistake, it’s because you haven’t built anything.

“The bottom line is we needed a metal mesh, and we didn’t have one,” I said. Then I shrugged. “Ah, just turn the thing upside down and try and sieve a bit gently. We’ll have to fudge along with it until we’re done.”

The classic strategy when all else fails. Fudge along we did. It was tedious. It was cumbersome. And the team had to keep holding different parts of the screen over the bucket. But sometimes, to get the job done, you just have to make the best of what you’ve got. Nevertheless, Irina sighed long and hard. She looked exasperated. If I could have read her mind, it might well have said something along the lines of, “Why don’t things just work?”

Alex might have done the same the previous week, but he was a cob course ahead, and getting used to the way of it. Thus he adopted a facial expression that loitered somewhere between Zeno of Citium and Yoda.

The final day arrived, as it always does. And suddenly it all came together. Our finishing plaster coated the walls like smooth brown silk. The team got into carving. And then the surprises began to materialise. Jen turned out to be a natural dab hand with the trowel. Sage climbed out of the mud pit and turned her hand very competently to compressing the plaster. Nona designed a gorgeous tree carving. And Latcho defied my every expectation by suddenly becoming a master of finishing plaster. He was obsessed.

“It’s such a nice material to work with,” he gushed as he gently worked a palette knife over the surface. Two hours later he was still there.

“I’ve got an old house here in Bulgaria,” he said. “Now I know how I can restore it.”

Finally, everyone left. And as always, I felt rather sad. What a productive two weeks it had been! Cob walls, windows, plastered walls and carvings. As I walked to the courtyard, heavy grey clouds bulged ominously overhead once more like a gang of water thugs. I quickened my step. Then I saw it. It was slumped against the side of the fence like a boxer sagging on the ropes. The fated sieve. The mesh was by now ripped to shreds, and the whole thing resembled a shark-gnawed fishing net. I paused in front of this workshop remnant and saluted. Best teacher we had, and it never said a word.

LAST CHANCE FOR EARLY BIRD TICKETS!

Want to be part of a team and participate in something like this? Join me for a hands-on 3-day Cob Building Workshop at RisingSoul Retreat Centre in the gorgeous Bulgarian countryside.

27–30 August 2026. RisingSoul Retreat Centre, Tryavna, Bulgaria

You’ll learn to:

• Test your soil & mix your own cob

• Build real walls, foundations & stem walls

• Install windows, doors, plumbing & wiring

• Sculpt and repair cob like a pro

• Meet and have fun with other mudsters.

No experience needed, just curiosity and a willingness to get your hands dirty. You’ll work on a real restoration project on-site, with daily Q&A to help with your own building dreams.

“In a small group I was able to make connections to like-minded people who I will stay in touch with... Everyone worked together and we enjoyed as we learned how to make our natural living dreams come true.” — Sara F., 2026 participant

£260 Early Bird price, just two early bird tickets left.

Book your spot: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/atulyakbingham/2261669

Accommodation booked separately with RisingSoul, camping from 152 EUR/week (breakfast & dinner included).

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I thought you might like this video update from my last workshop in Bulgaria. Seven people, three substrates, and plenty of laughter. You can watch this summary of the whole workshop from base coat to clay paint.

In other news: Please note, The Mud Home email address has changed. The new address is as follows:

contact@themudhome.uk

You can us…

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1. My next book, The Green: How writing this book is different.

2. The ridiculous variety of people who want to build with mud.

3. Having a team and finding the right people for the right job.

4. Our natural design and motivation.

5. Look before you leap, or jump right in? Which is best for creation?

6. How do…

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Learning is incredibly important. It’s the road to freedom and empowerment. But the only real way to learn anything is to get off our butts and immerse ourselves in whatever it is we wish to master. Unfortunately, most of us have been so thoroughly schooled out of that truth that it takes a ball of wet mud to remind us.

A Cob Workshop in Bulgaria

It was late May, but Tryavna hadn’t caught on to the fact. Rain descended over the Balkan Mountains, and the beech trees and spruces dripped constantly. Yet it was so beautiful and alive, a spongy secret niche in the backwoods of Bulgaria where the usual rules don’t apply.

As we climbed the track to the building site, the rain drove down. Wellies squelched and waterproofs rustled. It was the least conducive cobbing weather I could imagine. How would my band of merry cobbing students fare?

“I want to build with bamboo in Portugal. Do you think I can use cob?” asked Alex, his black hair glistening in the damp. He was a Swiss-Filipino ex-filmmaker and he pushed a GoPro ahead of him as he strode up the hill.

Just behind him trudged Sara. “I want to make something in Turkey. I don’t know where to start,” she said. Her dark curls bobbed under the hood of her mackintosh. She was a microbiologist from the States now living in Germany, and her face was one all-consuming question mark.

We reached the gate. Sage, the youngest of us all, opened it. She sported a yellow woollen hat atop a crew cut, and brandished an enormous smile, which was pretty astounding seeing as she’d just flown in from Perth. “Would cob work in Australia?” she said as we all assembled on site. “I was set on earthbag but you’re not running an earthbag course, so I came to this one instead.”

Questions. Questions. All with wordy answers. But would the answers really make a difference? Because it’s in the mud doing that the real learning happens.

We entered the forecourt. Everyone’s eyes bulged as they took in the worksite. I’ll be frank, mine had bulged too when I’d first laid eyes on it a week earlier. UK Health and Safety would have closed the whole thing down before we’d even opened the gate. It was pure jeopardy.

To say Rowena had bought a ruin was an understatement. Once upon a time the building would have been a magnificent farmhouse. But those days were long gone. The roof had caved in spectacularly and large beams poked ominously into the sky as though piercing the rain clouds. Walls were half standing, half falling, and the floors hid large and indiscriminate holes. All in all it felt like one push and the whole thing would collapse in on itself.

“I’d feel so overwhelmed if this was mine.” It was Saskia who spoke. She was peering in a window wide-eyed. She was a COP events organiser from Switzerland, so she was no stranger to managing a project. But this was very different.

I chuckled. It’s a rare day I see someone more bonkers than myself, and I had to take my hat off to Rowena, she’d outdone me. Yet I know a manifester when I see one. She’d make it happen.

The team huddled under the one sliver of stable roof at the front of the house. Grabbing a bucket full of wet mud, I thrust it on the table. Everyone gathered round.

“Now stick your hand in and grab some dirt. Tell me what you feel,” I said.

Our job was to build up one cob wall and insert a window into it. It was a superb project in terms of education because the students would see most of the fundamentals required in creating cob structures. But first we had to make the mixture. And that meant getting dirty.

Alex and Saskia grabbed spades and headed into the mud pit. Sage jumped into the tarp, her yellow beanie pulled jauntily to one side. Sara adjusted her glasses and gingerly began throwing straw into the tarp, a soupçon of alarm creeping into her features. We were a long long way from agar plates and microscopes now.

Mud squelched and burped, sucking everyone into it. The brown climbed steadily up our bodies from our feet to our heads like some strange new facts-and-assumptions-eating contagion. Meanwhile the rain continued to fall. Cob won’t set in the wet, and that meant we’d have trouble reaching the next layer of the wall without the whole lot slumping.

I hardly needed to say it. “You don’t want to cob in this kind of weather normally.”

Day one it rained and rained. Day two, the precipitation continued, and I began mentally scrambling. I was seriously wondering if we would manage to build up the cob piers enough to insert the window. Not only was the weather playing havoc, but we’d had a lot of last-minute cancellations which meant fewer hands on deck. If we couldn’t get enough wall built, we wouldn’t be able to insert the window frame.

This was the day I thought we might not make it. The site was now caked in slippery clay, and the cob was wet and heavy. It was slow to make, heavy to lift, and refused to set. The team were also flagging now. I could see Sara and Saskia were tired. Alex, GoPro ever at the ready, was putting his all into it, but even he looked rather less fresh than yesterday. Sage on the other hand was a machine, and a happy one at that. My God she had some power!

“Sage, what do you do?” I asked, chucking some straw beneath her busy feet. We had a pretty eclectic team. I love the randomness of cob building and who it attracts. There’s freedom to be who you actually are when there’s no monoculture you have to conform to.

Sage looked at me and grinned. She had beautiful blue eyes and was such a confident young woman. “I’m a sex worker,” she replied, and carried on stomping as though she’d just told me she worked at Tesco.

I paused. Then I guffawed. I think over the next three days Sage broke every assumption I had about what a sex worker’s life might be like. Empowered, high-earning, shaven head, not skinny, travelling the world, in full control of her life, building mud houses, not in any way trafficked.

“I love my job,” she added, standing up. Then she winked before scooping up a bunch of mixed cob and throwing it in a bucket. A wall of brittle stereotypes shattered under the pressure of an unexpected reality.

Back on the ground, our cob wall was starting to rise. The other blessing that day was Marten the Swedish yoga teacher who had valiantly come to our rescue. This tall, thoughtful fellow, more at home in downward dog, sank himself into the mud pit and began steadily shovelling dirt for us. This is the quiet miracle of mud building. It pulls the right people to it like flies to a cow pat.

Already everyone was getting a feel for which part of the build they were drawn to. Sara wanted to understand the science and the structure of things, Saskia was into detail, Sage wallowed in the mud slog of it, and Alex was a very useful all-rounder, fit in his fifties, and willing to try his hand at everything.

By some miracle, by the end of day two we’d got somewhere. It looked a total mess, the wall was wonky, but it was up.

It was day three that the magic happened. Quietly, in the background, Lubo, our Bulgarian participant, had been building us a window frame. I’d found it rather amusing that he’d joined a cob course when he clearly didn’t like mud. He was in it for the window, and now was his moment.

“Did you finish it, Lubo?”

“Yes.” He was a man of few words.

It was a fantastic frame made with the kind of attention to detail that sails way over my big visions.

Having attached some anchors to the sides, Alex and Lubo carried the box to the wall. Now, I’d explained the theory of how to insert the window in the lunch break. But as we all know, reality never quite works the same way as the plan, which is why theory is half useless. When the window box arrived at the cob wall, it didn’t fit flush into the gap. Agh! So we yanked it back out. and did what any builder has to do on a regular basis. We had to problem solve and fudge about a bit. This is what pen and paper or Youtube videos just can’t teach you.

We fiddled and pushed. I hacked out a bit of the wall. Then I found a saw and cut away even more cob. We shoved the box back in. I hit it with a mallet. Eventually the window frame was just about in the wall. So next we hoisted the lintels on top and attached everything to everything.

It was done! There before us rose our cob monolith complete with a window. I scanned the team. The lights were flicking on in each person’s head. Suddenly everyone understood the potential of this stuff.

Marten’s eyes grew wide. “Wow. I’ve been thinking of buying one of those cheap properties in Spain. A ruin. I now see I could actually do it. I could use cob!” He began packing our mud mixture into the window frame with gusto.

“You can do anything with this stuff, can’t you?” said Saskia. She was now avidly sculpting a window sill on the inside wall.

Yup. You can do anything with cob. It is one of the most liberating building materials I can think of. You can create a tough, load-bearing wall just from the earth under your feet. It’s a material that is hugely forgiving. It can hold up your roof beams, infill around windows, you can insert your wiring and pipes straight into it, sculpt an interior out of it, and it costs very little to maintain. It’s not technical. You don’t need to be an expert.

The modern world can’t get its over-educated head around any of this. It’s taught people that building a house requires architects, engineers and a stack of money. It’s only when you actually start cobbing and build something that you suddenly realise this is all nonsense. That’s why I wanted the window to go in. I wanted them all to feel it.

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The day had drawn to a close, and it was time to return for dinner. The sun, having gone AWOL for almost three days, decided now was the time to put in an appearance. It shone through the blue tarps we’d erected for shelter, and highlighted the contours of our window.

“This window is not going anywhere. It’s well and truly wedged,” said Alex, as he walked up and down the wall, his camera on its stick seeking out every detail.

Lubo studied the cob wall and raised an eyebrow. He gave the window box a bit of push.

“Very good,” he said with some surprise.

I’ve been a teacher for much of my life, and I’ve taught everything from French to yoga to mud building. I can tell you, it’s always the same story. Learning doesn’t happen in the head. In fact much of the time the head gets in the way.

Mastery and real learning involves action, practice and a certain amount of bravery. What good is it to know a bunch of theory if you don’t have the confidence to do anything with it? Courage, manual dexterity, adaptability, plan adjustment, thinking on your feet, managing your physical energy, accessing muscle memory, all these are only learned in the doing.

Why does this matter? Because freedom and learning are inextricably linked. You can lose all your money, your house, your car, but learning is one of the few things that cannot be taken from you, so it pays to know how learn.

It was the final day of the workshop. The sun burst onto the scene like a fire-clad rock star. In a jiffy it had dried our walls and turned our cob as hard as stone.

“Oh I wish I was staying for the clay plaster,” said Saskia. She was sculpting a snake into the side of the window, and had learned something fundamental, namely that the finishing was her thing.

Sara the microbiologist pushed a dark curl out of her eyes and adjusted her glasses. “I’m not sure I’ve understood everything,” she said. “I still have so many questions.” Her notebook was stuffed with words and diagrams, and even now her face was crumpled with confusion.

We were both kneeling in front of our window making cob balls. I looked up and guffawed. “Well Sara, all I can say is you know a shedload more than I did when I built my mud hut.”

Suddenly a mental video clip of Celal and me digging that first circle in the dirt arose in my mind. I remembered the piece of string tied amateurishly to a stick in the centre, and how neither of us had any clue what we were doing.

“Ha! If it makes you feel better, I didn’t even know the foundations had to be level when I first built my earthbag house. My dad brought the Earthbag Bible to Turkey a week after we’d started, and I read the first chapter and said, Oh shit! We sorted it out of course. And I still managed to build a house. It’s standing to this day, so it just goes to show...”

Sara stopped and thought about that for a moment. Then she shook her head. The team gathered at the gate. We patted ourselves on the back and admired our work. And then we filed down the hill one last time for lunch.

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Chapter 20: The Motorbike

We slid over the threshold of the month of May far too quickly. Spring was drifting away from us faster than a lilo in a current, and the hot fat tanker of summer had appeared ominously on the horizon. May was the great transition. It was the last real window of action before the valley would be rendered useless.

I now possessed a Turkish motorbike license which in and of itself was extraordinarily cool. But I was missing the wheels. Having very little money left, I needed something stupidly cheap. So once again, down I drove into the valley on a research mission. My sturdy old Tofaş Fiat growled as it took the sharp bends, and as the pomegranates and pines flicked past the windows, I wondered how it would feel to make this journey on two wheels.

It was early afternoon by the time I rumbled into the magical chasm of Olympos. First along the road was Cafe Cactus, so I pulled over ready to undertake my great motorbike fact finding mission. In those days, there was no Google. No Chat GPT. People asked humans. This had its limitations of course, but the advantage was that humans have real life experience. Humans you know personally should be even more trustworthy because they will see you regularly from here on in which ostensibly makes their reviews a lot more believable. Ostensibly. Sigh. In the long and bumpy course of my life however, I’ve concluded that advice from humans is fairly unreliable.

“Honda or Suzuki, you need something Japanese,” said Evren. He was sitting at a table in the cafe, puffing away on a roll up.

“Yeah but I can’t afford it!”

“Get a second hand one,” he said, the rollie drooping from his lips.

I groaned. Second hand anything in Turkey is pure jeopardy. Few and far between are those who take care of their machines. I knew any motorbike I might look at would have been driven full pelt off road for a few years. I also knew how many times Evren’s second hand van broke down. No. I really didn’t want a used vehicle if I could help it. Yet at the same time a new bike looked financially out of the question.

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2. Why challenge is so important in a workshop.

3. Land, community and enterprise at RisingSoul, a place that connects to the whole.

4. How natural building becomes a massive personal development exercise.

5. Mental strength, a couple of ideas.

6. The trouble with cobbing in the rain.

7. Miracles, gifts and creativity .

8. Going beyond as practice of freedom.

9. How natural building challenges perfectionists.

10. Clay plaster work as a cure for perfectionism.

11. Research only gets you so far.

12. Moving from 2D to 3D. It should work, right?

13. What happens when we make mistakes.

14. The incredible connection of teamwork and how different personalities contribute to creation.

15. The freedom of mud. When the lights go on and people realise what they can do.

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The cause was a workshop. I was teaching cob building to a eclectic crowd of hopefuls who had come from all corners of the planet. I think most of those participants would agree: over the coming days, time expanded like clay in the rain. A week felt like a month, two weeks felt like a season. We bonded, we changed, we learned and we grew. Mostly though we roared with laughter. What a blessing it is to be a part of these things!

A Secret World

I will report on the workshops themselves later. Today it’s all about the venues, the gardens and buildings that held us. Sometimes we enter a landscape and feel tension or darkness. Sometimes we feel unwelcome. Sometimes we can’t wait to get away.

Other times however, we walk into a space and feel immense joy, peace or enchantment. RisingSoul Retreat Centre is one such space, or should I say a multitude of spaces, because there are so many nooks to turn into and be quiet, and equally many areas to chat and connect.

RisingSoul sports some beautiful old natural buildings and features: the courtyard is encircled by stone walls with the original mud mortar still intact. There’s a limewashed old mud brick meditation room where ancient clay plaster still clings to the walls. An old but majestic wooden barn now doubles as a yoga space. Amazingly, Rowena has had the wisdom to leave all of this well enough alone.

Rowena’s Story

How did any of this even begin? Well, Rowena’s father died when she was in her early twenties and she inherited some money. She came across a listing for a Bulgarian property online in the early 2000s and fell in love with it on sight. At just 23 years old, going on nothing more than an online listing, Rowena travelled to Bulgaria to buy her dream house. Despite looking at tens of other properties at the same time, she kept returning to the original property. Eventually she bought it and restored it. That property is now RisingSoul Retreat Centre. Thus the story begins.

Rowena’s place is so beautiful and blooms with such spirit, it’s hard not to be affected. Her land backs onto a beech forest with a stream running through it and birds chirping and twittering non stop. It’s also incredibly well placed, with the attractive ancient town of Tryavna next door, and the cultural fortress town of Veliko Tarnovo about 25 minutes away.

Naturally, just like many a visionary before her, Rowena isn’t standing still. As if she doesn’t have enough to do, she’s decided to get her teeth into something new. Recently she bought yet another acreage with a massive ruin just up the road. The idea is that one day it will become an eco community.

That property was to be the site for our cob workshop. And let’s just say, the whole thing needs a bit of work…he he he. Ah what a workshop that was!

So for paid subscribers, the first part of my latest muddy adventure in Bulgaria is in the video above. Come and have a look round. And for everyone else, more on the workshop story is coming before too long.

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Last week I landed in the ancient city of Plovdiv. As the wheels hit the runway, the surrounding mountains stood drenched in the coppery stains of evening. Plovdiv cuts an elegant figure against a rural backdrop of softly flowing fields and thickly forested mountains. The veins of its history run twelve meters deep, with everyone from neolit…

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1. Books, and sustaining authors.

2. Off to Bulgaria. Travel uncertainty?

3. Being called to a place.

4. Place holders and land ambassadors

5. People’s reaction to AI and all new technologies.

6. The technological revolutions since the 1970s.

7. Turkiye, the milkman and mobile phones.

8. Are we using the tech or is it using us?

9. The incredible responsiv…

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Everyone’s yabbering about AI these days. I’ve been holding my fire because I like to sit with stuff a while and see how it’s unfolding before launching into the orbit of a wild conclusion. As I stare at the happy throng of pansies on my balcony and lose myself in the organic perfection of their soft, sun-touched petals, I have, however begun to conclude.

It might seem strange for someone so nature-enthralled to investigate AI. I started exploring the Great Bot a while back, because hey I like to know my enemies. If you hate AI or are frightened of it, let me break it to you. AI is not going to go away just because you refuse to engage with it. Punching “I hate AI” onto your Facebook status a hundred times will have no bearing on its existence. Remember when people did that with the internet? Now those same people are lapping up Youtube videos and flogging their trainers on Vinted.

AI is here to stay. This is the clear cut truth of the matter. It’s too useful not to stay. If you are lucky enough to be retired or not have to work with a computer at all, you may be unaware of this. But for anyone who does any sort of office drudge, it’s pretty obvious that it’s a game changer.

But…that, in my humble, cob-lobbing opinion, is where the excitement ends. If you’re concerned that AI is going suck out your brain through its LLM tentacles or turn you into a flesh and blood battery, you need to have a good long chat with Claude. By the end of it, you’ll feel like a flipping genius. Techies and mathematicians are bewitched by this stuff because theirs are the fields that AI excels in. For an earth whispering mud hag however, it’s all much less incredible. Stick (a rather unwilling) Claude in a mud-splashed wheelbarrow and trundle it round a cob house for five minutes and it loses the thread of things pretty quickly.

I think the drama around AI has been largely created by podcast interviews. Some digi-eyed tech dude who has spent far too long squashed with a rabble of coders in a screen-lined box on Planet Silicon, is suddenly the guy (and it’s always a guy) to speak to. The more alarming his message, the more views the podcast gets and the more the podcaster is paid. So don’t be surprised that he’s given the moniker “The Godfather of AI” and staring wide-eyed at the camera telling us all humanity could end. That’s what gets the advertising algorithm twitching.

Yeah yeah. We’re all going to die. I’m kind of bored of the continuous annihilation narrative, aren’t you? From what I can see we’ve got more chance of being taken over by cockroaches.

We’re entering a new age. A shiny, new-fangled tool has appeared in the workshop of humanity. I’m not dissing it (completely), indeed I’m mighty impressed by some of it. But the impressiveness makes its underwhelming contours even more apparent.

Yes, I am impressed that AI can generate code, create apps on the back of a few paragraphs of prompt, and take over a library of very tedious tech chores. As someone who shares a lot of information on the internet, it’s saving me hours of time doing the boring stuff that kills my soul, and enabling me to be a lot more useful in the process.

Projects (like books) which take years to produce in analogue and have very little ROI worth speaking of, are now once more within the realm of reasonable endeavours for me. I love writing books. So thank you Chat and Claude and Gemini for returning me to my soul calling. For years I’ve been praying for an answer to the hell that is book publishing (edits, proof reading, book covers, text alignment) and here it is. For getting the drudge work done, it’s revolutionary.

Underwhelming

Where AI falls rather ungainly apart is when we move from the dimension of words and numbers and into the real world, or when we want to push beyond the boundaries of the internet into continents of brand new ideas, or when we shift from analytical problem solving to creative holistic thinking, or when we deal with surprises or coincidences. Even diagrams are incredibly painful to create with AI. It doesn’t seem to know up from down half the time. Leave it to Gemini and you’ll have your underfloor heating in the walls and Lord knows where it will send your rocket stove flue.

But this is only the conventional tip of the melting AI supremacy iceberg. I haven’t even touched upon the mystical and magical. For those of us who live our lives through six senses, who prefer to move (and live quite successfully) in accordance with the flutter of our heart as opposed to processing a billion gigawatts of data, for those who haven’t bought into logic and information as the mainstay of their raison d’etre, and those who make decisions intuitively, or by listening to the nudges of the Earth, AI is, and always will be, completely at sea.

Mass Unemployment?

There is an idea being floated, a sort of dystopian teaser, that 90% of the population will be unemployed in ten years. This is the kind of reasoning you get from those who sit in front of screens all day and manipulate the digital world. Such a hypothesis presupposes a completely inert and unresponsive population that just sits waiting for jobs to be handed to them. That’s not how humans (or any living creature) behaves if they’ve got some serious skin in the game. If you think humanity is going to simply lay down and quit because a bot took its job, you haven’t seen people sell ice creams to tourists via rowing boats to avoid paying the beach entry fee.

This is the thing we humans should always remember. It’s the biggest difference between ourselves and a robot. AI cannot compete with human imagination and resourcefulness because it does not and cannot care about its survival in the same way that any living being does. That desire to survive is hardwired into us Gaians. It’s a rocket fuel of energy, drive and emotion that propels us over all manner of limitations.

Those of us in the real world – you know, the folk who actually construct the offices the techies and coders work in – the builders, the plumbers, the sparkies. We all know: To make a structure appear in the physical world, you need a lot more than information and tools. Without drive, belief, vision, and the emotional juice to push through and make a miracle appear, it’s all just words and numbers.

The Marketing Scam

The reason people are overestimating AI is because as David Silva pointed out in his illuminating and for me very validating article on the matter, the loudest voices on the internet on the subject are the same people selling the thing. The more hype – positive or negative – around AI, the more investment it rakes in. It’s simple marketing.

The more I’ve tried to get AI to create, however, the clearer it’s become to me. Despite what Sam Altman, Anthropic, or the MetaLords would like you to believe, AI isn’t a human brain. It can’t think. It doesn’t conceptualise like we do. It’s basically a souped up calculator of language, computing probabilities very very fast, and making a shed load of blinding errors in the process because it can’t stand back and take an overview, or ‘sense’ what’s right and wrong.

Fear and Enslavement

Reality and the world are in a constant state of flux. Throughout history, revolutions and inventions have slapped good old General Public in the face like cold rain on the West Coast of Ireland. Life on Earth is all about things happening and living entities responding to them. We (and every other Gaian) are inherently excellent at response and experimentation (try keeping the squirrels off your bird feeder and you’ll see what I mean). Unlike AI we’re designed to deal with the unexpected. The trouble is, rather than respond, a lot of people choose to react to everything with fear.

When we are paralysed in the fear zone, lacking confidence and swallowing a complete lie that a machine is better than we are, then we become enslaved to whatever we are afraid of. The enslavement isn’t brought about by something external like AI, it’s coming from within.

Knowing Our Value

I watch a large swan glide on the rippling waters of the river below. It’s wings are impossibly white and splayed over its back in a glorious feathered canopy. Its downy serpentine neck is a miracle, almost other-worldly. To watch such beauty lights up the human heart. This is our planet. Astounding. Show-stopping. Genius. Often unfathomable. The swan sees my open window and glides over. She’s learned there’s opportunity in the human.

Have a little humility tech bros. Your machine is not running on the brilliant spark of life. It can’t dream, envisage or cope with the wildly unpredictable. Comparing AI intelligence to natural intelligence is to compare a B2 stealth bomber with a peregrine falcon. The falcon inspired the plane, but the jet can never possess the magic, beauty, flexibility and intuitive aeronautical prowess of the falcon. The B2 is always lagging behind, a Frankenstein limping in the shadow of a tiny but wondrous bird.

This kind of truly wild and unexpected manoeuvre arises from the drive to protect a nest.

Human Superpowers

Most of us are only living a tiny fraction of our potential. Like robots we’ve been running on a kind of automatic program, punching in, punching out, shunting numbers and words about on screens. Now, suddenly, all the robotic stuff is about to be outsourced. Far from the end of the world, I think things are going to turn rather interesting, because what will remain for us humans is the earthy truth that many have forgotten even exists.

The Great Bot will force humans to drill down into their unique Gaian intelligence and skills, and to unearth a range of abilities many have long lost. Some will succeed. Some will fail. But human intelligence is always evolving. And fast, especially under pressure. Curiosity, resourcefulness, healing touch, inspiration, true creation and intuitive adaptation, these are but a few of our human superpowers.

I’m only a mud building, nature-loving Luddite, nonetheless I’ll stick my neck out and say that while people are overestimating what an LLM can do right now, they are massively underestimating us humans.

One thing we fleshy bipeds need to write on a Post-it note and stick on the fridge door, however, is this: One of the tricks of Gaian power is that you have to believe in it. Never forget, we are the ones who create our destinies. This is where our attention should be. What vision do we have of the future? And what are actually doing about it? Because in all this tech ramble and podcast prattle people are forgetting themselves and their inner authority, and being sucked into tech bro fantasy land.

So, my blood-filled earthen friends – mud mavericks, creatives and freedom lovers alike – don’t fall for the Wizard of Oz routine, it’s all levers and pulleys, albeit with a fantastic light show. We on the other hand are true natural magic in biological form, along with the rest of this extraordinary planet.

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The Earth Whispering Circle

If what you've been reading here is stirring something in you, there's a rare opportunity to take it much further. In September 2026, I'm running an Earth Whispering Circle — an intimate two-day retreat for just four people at the breathtaking Hideaway Under the Stars, a handcrafted mud and straw bale house nestled in Moray, Scotland.

Over a weekend of stillness, carefully held practices, and deep time in a living landscape of permaculture gardens, faerie glens and dipping pools, you'll begin to genuinely hear what the Earth has been saying all along.

This isn't a course or a technique — it's a shift in perception that stays with you long after you leave. Early bird tickets start at £315. Grab one of the four places here.

See the full details

Each month, paid subscribers get:

1. The Nature of Freedom Podcast.

2. A chapter a month of my next book The Green. You can read the first chapter here:

The Green is the final part of the Mud trilogy (Dirt Witch and Mud Ball being the other two), and this particular volume is all about money. I had a dream of becoming the Moneyless Woman, you see, of living cash free on my hill in Turkey. I wanted the freedom to write and create, and to never have to work in the system again. The Green is the story of that journey, the questions it threw up, and the unexpected conclusions I came to.

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1. Personal update: Wild public spaces and foraging wild garlic.

2. What’s sea beet?

3. Why are foraged plants special?

4. My favourite edible weed.

5. Where did I learn to forage?

6. When you return to your homeland and you don’t quite get what’s goin…

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There’s definitely a lot of declinism around, isn’t there? Almost daily I hear someone blurt something along the lines of, “We’re all headed for disaster.” What they really mean is, they can’t look along the highway of the future and see clearly what’s coming. The road is no longer a linear strip of flawless tarmac stretching endlessly forward to the horizon of their retirement. Hairpin bends have appeared, the hard shoulder has vanished and the council has long stopped repairing the potholes.

Yet for many many people on the planet life has always been like this. It definitely was (and still is) in Turkiye. I spent twenty incredible years in the lands of Anatolia, and in all that time no one was ever under any illusion that there was stability. How grateful I am that I’ve experienced that, because there can be no freedom without a measure of unpredictability.

In Turkey people knew how to roll with the unknown. On the rare occasions that things did happen to be gliding smoothly, it was Carpe Diem a la Turca. On the whole, folk didn’t waste their precious days saving for a pension. (What would have been the point? Hyperinflation and economic collapse were routine occurrences). They gathered their friends, ate well and danced.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about my days on a Turkish Mountain. Because it all started with what most people would consider a disaster.

In 2011 I was almost forty years old, and as far as I could see my life had slipped inexplicably down the toilet. I’d failed at a yoga camp, was burned out from teaching, had little money and no direction. So to save me paying rent, I bought a cheap Carrefour tent and erected it on a piece of land that I’d fortunately had the wherewithal to acquire a few years earlier. There was never any plan to build a mud home or become a natural builder. These ideas weren’t even motes of space dust in the nether reaches of my awareness.

I remember on that first day, I stood in my field holding a spade I didn’t know how to use, and staring at a wall of thorns taller than my head. I had no house. No water. No electricity. Just a cheap nylon tent, a pile of tools, and an awful lot of dust.

By any conventional measure, this is a rock bottom kind of crisis, isn’t it? And yet...With the wonderful benefit of hindsight, we all now know that what felt like the end of everything was actually a portal to the extraordinary.

What we rarely want to accept is this: Magic simply doesn’t reach us in the comfort zone. We’re never going to feel exhilaration, passion and vitality just playing it safe, ticking boxes, and doing the same thing over and over again. We weren’t built for that. Life on planet Earth isn’t made to stand still. It either expands, deepens and evolves, or it decays and rots.

The five years I spent on Mud Mountain turned out to be the happiest and most fulfilling of my life. This is where I learned to hear the land and to understand that I wasn’t alone. Very soon, my pine-encircled acreage stopped being a backdrop to my human drama and became a presence. The soil under my fingers smelled ancient and alive. Things I had assumed were static and lifeless suddenly became animated and supportive.

And then there was the Dirt Woman…

So at this juncture in history, if anyone is feeling a little anxious because everything seems to have changed and we’re unable to see ahead, celebrate! You can be sure it won’t turn out how anyone expects. In my experience, uncertainty is a gleaming doorway of opportunity. The only real question is, will we step through it into a new beginning where we start to trust something a lot larger and more powerful than our useless portfolio of insurance policies? Or will we just keep clinging onto the doorjamb of a fading security, harking back to a time that no longer exists, blaming anyone and everyone except our own inability to transform?

Talking of transformation and hearing the Earth...

I’ve just created a very unique experience with Kim Fraser of the award winning Hideaway Under the Stars.

For those ready to step through the doorway into another way of living on this planet, do take a look at our one off Earth Whispering Circle in Scotland. It will be an amazing and transforming experience. And you’ll be staying in the one and only magical straw bale Hideaway.

Have a look at my new retreat

In the meantime:

For those who haven’t read Dirt Witch, here’s exactly how that first day on my land unfolded back in 2011. Little did I know...

The Meeting

“You can’t live up there alone! There’s no water. No electricity. In a tent?”

Nilay’s eyes were wide. Her hair was bound in a scarlet silk scarf and the tassels shook as she spoke. “Look, if it’s come to that, we’ll put you up until you get yourself back on your feet.”

My friend was perched in a lilac armchair fastening a bead into an earring. I looked out and inhaled the view. The rocks were Mesozoic creatures poised above us. The pine forests were ancient worlds. It was beautiful. It was wild.

“I’m telling yer, I wouldn’t do it, and I’m a guy!” said Evren. “’S not a good idea. What about the boar? Old Ramazan was taken to hospital when one hit him on his motorbike. Skewered him right in the thigh. And the snakes and scorpions? And how you gonna survive without water?” Nilay’s husband fingered his thick moustache. I could see a few grey hairs appearing in it.

“I’ll get a water connection. I’ve just got to speak to the chief. It’s my land. At least I won’t be paying rent!”

“Yeah, but what you gonna do till you get connected? If you get connected.” Evren huffed, and stepped out from the shop and into the garden of dreadlocks, henna tattoos and hair wraps that comprised the campsite. He pulled out a leather wallet of tobacco from his back pocket as he went. “Nilay’s right. Stay with us,” he said, before walking off.

We were huddled inside a gorge on one of Turkey’s most exquisite coastlines. I scanned the shop walls speckled with bracelets, necklaces and earrings. Nilay had created almost everything herself from stones, driftwood and other natural items she’d collected from the beach.

My friend tugged at the ashtray, and gently rested her cigarette in it. The corners of her eyes softened. “What happened to your yoga camp idea? You were so into it,” she said.

I sat back in my chair and allowed a long sigh to escape. It hissed as it left my throat. Hatefully, I stared at the floorboards. My jaw bone became a rigid boundary. Bringing my gaze to meet Nilay’s, I whispered, “No. That’s over. I’m done with being good and helping people. You know what? From now on I’m going to be a witch.”

Nilay lowered herself back into her chair. She slowly raised both eyebrows. Then she roared with laughter. It was a full-bodied guffaw, and suited her as perfectly as her headscarf. “Oh Kerry!” she wheezed. Then she craned her neck around, “Evren! Evreeeen!” She called out in the direction of the bar. “Bring us some drinks. Now!”

Little did I know that penultimate evening as I washed down my plans with a margarita…little did I comprehend the strange world I was about to enter, nor what it would do to me. Because being a witch wasn’t what I thought it was.

Your email provider may truncate the rest of this message. You can download the rest of the chapter here:

Download Chapter One

The very next morning, I was edging the car down the ragged track. It swerved right and left rollercoaster style. A small ravine fell away on one side. A forest rose on the other. The road slid sharply down, rocks pushing the wheels up like tough white fists. I pressed the brake.

This mutilated strip of dirt was the ‘road’ to my land; a 2500-square-metre plot with no power, no running water and definitely no house. It was this field that I was headed for now.

Pulling off, I parked under a pine branch. The limb belonged to a curled, dry dragon of a tree. It bristled green and black, hissing under the glare of the sun. Still in the driver’s seat, I closed my eyes, pressing my thumb and forefinger against the bridge of my nose. This was madness. Yes, I’d probably look back on this moment and see it as the point I finally tripped off the edge.

I was almost forty years old and with nothing to show for it. At least nothing that would normally be considered important. No partner. No kids. No career. I’d just sunk that well and truly. Now having reached a crescendo of desperation, I was going to pitch a tent halfway up a Turkish mountain, because I simply couldn’t think what else to do.

After a minute or two of procrastination, I pushed the car door open and swung a leg out. It was the beginning of May. The Mediterranean sun was a straggle of hot fingers. They reached through the branches and clawed at the bonnet. The heat smote me. The forest was heavy with grasshoppers, and they throbbed against my eardrums. But what else was creeping about within that morass of untamed foliage? This was an alien place. A place I didn’t belong. Assiduously I checked the ground for critters with stings or fangs, or both.

The boot creaked as I opened it. I hauled out the tent bag, and it struck the earth with a jangle. It was a $50 nylon steal I’d found in the bargain bucket at Carrefour, and I wondered how it would hold up. Next I dragged out the pick, spade, and rake I’d just bought. With a groan, I slung the tools onto one shoulder and gripped the tent in the other hand. Then down I went. In every meaning of the word.

You can’t live up there alone. Even I wouldn’t do it and I’m a guy.

The words were stones rattling down from a precipice where I had just lost my footing.

At the bottom of the hill, a small pathway veered to the right. It slipped through clusters of dog roses, fragile bonnets rocking as I passed. Then I drew sharply to a halt. Oh dear. Eyes popping, I sucked in a lungful of burning air. I was here. On my land. Unfortunately, it wasn’t what I’d expected.

My lower lip wobbled a little as I scanned the slope. It was engulfed in thorns. They were huge, taller than me. Insects buzzed within the morass of stalks, as though the land were a machine whirring to life, a Frankenstein. Something cold and heavy lurched inside me, because everything had changed. The hill was no longer the bucolic pasture I’d last seen in April. It was a hot, bristling wilderness. The only evidence of humankind was a small cottage the other side of a pomegranate orchard, and a sheeny row of polytunnels below. This was rural Turkey. And I was alone.

Gingerly, I picked my way through the tall stalks flinching at the possibility of vipers. I was terrified of snakes, just terrified. Staring at the huge thorn bushes – great monsters baring tough green claws – I started to feel nauseous. My mind became a city at rush hour. It flashed anxious thoughts at me like traffic signals. Had it really come to this? Bumming in a Turkish field?

And then it happened – the meeting that would alter my destiny within this patch of Mediterranean scrubland. The encounter that would change me. Forever.

“My land!”

I jumped. Swivelling about, I felt my heart punch into my throat. Good grief! Someone else was here!

“My land!”

I stood still within the dry grass, tent bag swinging in one hand, tool handles in the other, like hunter or prey, I couldn’t be certain. Then I saw her. And I swallowed very slowly when I did. My epiglottis squeezed the saliva down, but only just.

There, right at the edge of the forest, was a woman. At least I thought it was a woman. She might have been an animal. Yet she was familiar. Too familiar. A character that had clawed her way out of a dream. The back of my neck prickled as I took her in. Her head was a nest of brown matted hair. She had black wolf eyes, and was brazenly bare-chested. I knew her from somewhere. Where?

As I stared onto my slope, the strange beast-woman began beating her chest. Somewhere far off in the distance, I heard the thud of a drum. It spoke a language I recognised, but didn’t want to.

“My land!” She snarled again, even louder now. Then she stamped her naked feet on the earth and bared her teeth.

I gaped at the bright white fangs, appalled. The outer layers of my persona raised disapproving eyebrows. Deeper within, guerrillas of dread peeped out from grimy subconscious holes.

And then without warning, the beast-woman was gone. Vanished. Into the shadows of the forest. And I was left staring, tool heads protruding over my shoulder, feeling more than a little disturbed.

***

It took three trudges up the dusty red hill to transport my belongings onto my land. Long, hot peregrinations they were, along the edge of the fearsome forest. The pines creaked as I walked, their trunks coiled like bark-encased springs. My ears ached from acute listening. My eyes smarted.

On the final leg, I struggled metre by metre with two ten-litre water canisters. It was a punishment worthy of the Middle Ages, my arms gradually wrenched from their sockets. I stopped to rest a good ten times.

You can’t live up there alone! There’s no water. No electricity. In a tent?

The jackals of Nilay’s words circled me, shoulders raised, heads lowered, hungry for the blood of my already-wavering conviction.

Once it was over, I sat under an olive tree and stared at my paltry heap of belongings: a tent, a kilim, a sleeping bag, a sponge mattress, sheets, a duvet, an icebox stuffed with food, a small suitcase of clothes, books, and a flowery toilet bag, all piled under the olive tree.

How well I remember that moment now. As I surveyed my pathetic hill of possessions, I thought it might be the end. But now I see, that’s exactly what we have to think. That’s the point we have to come to to risk it all, and to find the pieces of us we don’t know exist. Because no one has ever transformed within the safe confines of the tried and true.

The sun inched past the first olive tree, and the streets of my mind filled up once again. There was a honking of horns as thoughts collided into each other.

Survival. Night coming! No house. Tent. Needs erecting. How much daylight? Shit!

I needed to get a move on. But the fact was, I didn’t know where to start. How long would it take to create a camp? What exactly did such a thing entail? I hadn’t a clue really, but clearing a square of dirt seemed like a good idea.

Glancing over at the jumble of poles and metal that was my tools, I debated which to use. To my unacquainted eye they were all ancient weapons. I’d used a pick and a rake once before in my life. A spade, on the other hand, had never graced my palm. Half-heartedly grabbing the thing, I stepped out of the shade and over to the edge of the grass.

The terrain was a chest-high rampart of yellow stalks with seed-stuffed ears that shook like rattles. They hissed as a short breath of air moved over them. It wasn’t inspiring.

“Here goes,” I called out to no one in particular. Then I pushed the handle toward the ground feeling as incapable as a person can.

There was a clunk and a clang. The handle quivered, jarring my arm. The spade head had dug in about half an inch. Lesson one didn’t take long to learn. You can’t dig with a spade in Mediterranean soil. It’s fifty per cent stones. Cursing, I let the spade fall to one side.

I wandered back over to the tool pile, this time grabbing the pick. Immediately I grimaced. It was heavy. Everything was heavy. My life. The afternoon heat. These wretched tools all of which seemed designed for bears rather than people. How was I ever going to clear a space for my tent before dark?

Survival. Night coming! No house. Tent. Needs erecting. How much daylight? Shit!

The thoughts circulated the roads of my mind like lost fretting tourists. Meanwhile the air burned. The grass rustled. And the eyes of the forest looked on. Carefully wading through the shuddering stalks, I clutched the wooden pick handle in both hands, and lifted it a little. Then I let it strike the soil.

Poof! Dust leaked out of the ground as it puckered and loosened. So I raised the pick a little higher and swung again, only this time harder. It plunged into the earth dislodging more rocks and stones with a satisfying crunch.

“Aha! This is the way!” I shouted, enjoying the brief spurt of optimism.

I raised the pick a third time. Wham! The earth splintered, releasing a smell that was strangely delectable. Kneeling down, I ran my fingers through the soil, inhaling its aroma. Stones and pebbles fell through my fingers. They looked like nobbled, grey gems. Something inside the coffin of my chest flickered, an old cobweb-draped candle perhaps, or a penultimate matchstick.

The work began in earnest now. I hacked. I dug. I pulled at boulders with the pick, feeling them loosen like rotten teeth. I raked. I scratched. I hauled and cut. The grass began to pile up in a small, sweet-smelling stack. Rocks shifted into line. The sun rolled on, unconcerned. It notched up the hours like a fiery hand as it drew its invisible circle overhead.

And then my arms complained. They burned. And my legs began to tremble. My shoulders had fried in the sun. Though I wasn’t unfit, I was utterly unused to outdoor manual labour, and my body was already screaming. As the light turned copper, and then violet, I quietly panicked. Evening stretched over the sky in a purple smoke, and I stared at the dirt gap in the grass still conspicuously devoid of a shelter.

It was then odd things began to take place. Things cities and standard educations and modern ethics don’t prepare you for. Things you don’t necessarily feel comfortable with…

“My land!”

It was a distant growl, but I heard it. My skin crawled, and my spine shrank into a brittle line.

“My home!”

The voice moved closer. I flung my head up and searched the twilight. The rocks pushed up from the soil like half-submerged tombstones. They were glowing an ethereal white. A slight breeze bothered the trees, and I shivered. A twittering cloud of birds pulsed and swirled overhead. The cloud morphed into a black arrow, and it plunged into my land before mushrooming into a large sphere and sinking within an oak tree. Something itched inside me, something very old, prehistoric even.

“Mine!”

I turned my gaze to the forest on my left. It was a tall wood of inky holes. Slowly my eyes widened as I watched a silhouette move out of one of them. Feeling for the rock beneath me, I held my breath. As the shape developed limbs and features, queasiness filled my belly, drip by cold clammy drip.

The beast-woman. She was back.

“Me no beast! Me wild,” she boomed. The words banged slowly and heavily up the land like an aggravated diplodocus. Surreptitiously, I flicked my eyeballs left and right while holding my head and torso dead-still.

“Okay. You’re wild. My mistake, Wild Woman,” I muttered into the thickening air. And again I sensed the gangs of dread bunching up ready to ambush. It was a terror I couldn’t see. A shadow I couldn’t locate. As though I was harbouring a creature within me. Gestating an alien.

“Me from the dirt!” she growled. I could just about make her out now, striding in my direction, her incisors glowing like the stones.

“Right. I see. You’re from the dirt,” I repeated slowly. I rocked on my perch nervously. Heck! Night was almost here and there was a dirt primitive on the loose. I wondered what to do about it. I decided it might be best to strike up a conversation.

“Erm, well nice to meet you, Dirt Woman…”

Silence. I squinted and tried to spy movement in the forest, but all I could see was darkness. I battled on. “Er, you know this is your land…?”

Stalks rustled. An eerie trilling began, as grasshoppers and katydids ushered in the gloaming.

“Well, the thing is, property acquisition and ownership, that all came in with capitalism. It’s all to do with ego you know. The Earth belongs to everyone.”

“My land!” Suddenly her face appeared. It was so close to mine, I felt her breath on my face. It was hot and strong. Her eyes were arrow tips poised at my head. Her body was a bow, pulled back and ready to launch. I gulped.

“But…but don’t you think it would be more evolved if we shared things?”

The Dirt Woman moved her lips, hacked up something ghastly in the back of her throat, and spat it out in front of me. “Pah!”

I blinked. Clearly reason wasn’t going to get me very far up here. There were other powers at work. One of them was something called evening.

Turning from my wild new acquaintance, I noticed both the shadows and the light losing their definition as the planet teetered on the verge between day and night. There was a coolness, and a lull in the breeze, as though something somewhere was waiting. And then I felt it. It surged into me from nowhere. Boom!

Despite having grafted all afternoon, despite arriving on the land feeling like a failed hobo, for no good reason at all as far as I could see, I came alive. Energy was pulsing through me as though I’d been plugged into the national grid, which was impossible as I hadn’t even spoken to Turkish Electric yet.

My senses opened like a set of venetian blinds. Everything came into focus. I forgot about the Dirt Woman and property rights. There were perhaps ten minutes of light left at most. I had to get the tent up. This was survival!

Leaping to my feet, I ran over to the olive trees and snatched the tent bag. Immediately I hurled the sack of poles and pegs on the floor, and set about erecting the thing. Unbelievably, within five minutes the dome was in shape, and I was positioning the tent door in front of the view.

The air was thickening now as the light faded further. Night was after me, chomping at the bit to crush all into darkness. I thrust a peg into the dirt at each corner. There was no hammer. And that didn’t matter. As the ground was mostly rocks and dust, it made for a rudimentary fastening, but I guessed my belongings would weigh the shelter down.

Running now, I fetched the mattress, duvet and pillows, and I hurled them inside. The rest of my belongings followed. Hurriedly I arranged everything. I pushed the suitcases of books into the dome corners for ballast, and made my ‘bed’. Last of all, I found my headlamp and hung it from the apex of the tent.

It was then it fell like an almighty black club. Night. It was here. And that strange energy – the power of twilight – was gone. It was as though someone had yanked me out of the cosmic plug socket and thrown me on the floor in a straggly, useless heap. Fatigue clobbered me. I knew if I sat down, I’d never rise.

Kneeling in front of the water canister, I poured a little into a bowl. Next I cursorily washed my face, neck and torso. The rest of my body I left to its fate. Darkness was now all over me in a blinding, impeding sludge.

Stripping off my vest top, trousers and underwear, one by one I hurled the rank, dishevelled articles into a corner. Then I zipped the tent door shut, before flopping heavily onto the duvet-covered mattress. I was so tired I didn’t stop to wonder where the Dirt Woman had vanished to. Or whether she had actually gone at all.

Home. This was now my home. A four-person tent perched on a lonesome hill. If I had known then what I know now…if I had known I’d still be on that slope five years on, what would I have done?

Probably nothing. I was too tired. Nothing existed in that pit of unconsciousness. Not the past, nor the future, not my failures, nor my age. Not even this peculiar new Dirt Woman character. My land had sucked out my marrow, and now it was digesting it.

You’ve just read chapter one of Dirt Witch - Unearthing the Secrets of my Land

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