Sunday notes

Homesteading, writing as prayer, artist residencies at my home

As I cleaned and filled up the chicken’s water this morning I thought, as I often do on Sundays, that the day of the week is irrelevant in nature. You cannot tell the animals, ‘It’s Sunday please feed yourselves’. I cannot demand that the clouds gather and let out the perfect amount of rain because it’s Sunday and I don’t feel like watering the plants.

It has long been my dream to have a homestead. I became interested in permaculture and sustainability, health and healing in my twenties when I dived into yoga and decided I would be the best yoga teacher in the world! After a year of teaching yoga I realised I didn’t want to spend my life telling people to breath in and out and relax but it was a vital stepping stone in my exploration and discovery.

When I lived in Canada I had bees on my patio (see below) until my neighbour’s jacuzzi was over run with my little honey givers using her jacuzzi as their drinking water. I also had a small greenhouse that grew scraggly green plants that never quite had time to bare fruit because winter would reliably arrive just before the plants had time to produce.

Fast forward to the here and now.

I have five acres on which there are five bee hives, approximately twenty chickens and turkeys, two dogs, a forest of hard wood trees that I can thin out to get my own teak, mahogony, balsa and laurel wood for building, an orchard of fruit trees, a garden of medicinal herbs and another series of beds with other plants and, my favourite spot, where I’m writing to you now, my art studio on the top floor of my house - the entire top floor of my house is a big studio level with the tree canopy and I love it up here.

I’m entirely off grid. Solar panels, my own well, a septic system.

And it’s been really crazy hard work to make all my fluffy dreams of flowers and rainbows of homesteading into the reality. I could give you a long list of all the crazy mad nutty difficult muddy broken down things but I’m kind of over complaining just now. I still choose to be here and am more aware when fluffy dreams should stay in my head and careful in choosing where to place my focus.

Sunday.

The garden is tended and I have time to write. Writing is my prayer time. To put these words down feels like I open up the path of truth and goodness on this day. It centres me and connects me out from my jungle acres to you, out there.

I am wishing you well this day.

With love,

Lucy

p.s. I am hosting writers residencies through the year and sharing my beautiful work space to be in good company with others - if you have a book or a project that needs quiet focus consider coming to stay for a month or longer - here’s the information on coming to stay and be looked after so you can get the art that’s been longing to be given form, out into the world. Come stay and be part of the writers residency program at Apothefinca : https://www.apothefinca.com/retreat