Need and Nurture

on connection and community

I must apologise for being slow to respond to comments and messages. We don’t have internet where we now live in this secluded old homestead, deep in the hills. Mobile coverage is unreliable standing out on the road. I don’t have the Substack app on my phone anyway, and to get enough bandwidth to log in on my laptop to upload and schedule these posts (which I write offline through the week by early morning candlelight before the day’s outdoor work begins) and check messages and emails I have to drive up to the farm and sit in the car. We’re out in the wilds of southwest Ireland here—it’s not like there’s an internet cafe around the corner. The closest thing we have to a cafe of any sort is the village pub which we seldom visit, and I don’t get mobile coverage there either. My time for sitting in my car with a laptop is limited to the few minutes I can squeeze between farm chores, which take up most of these short, winter days, when there aren’t animals demanding my immediate attention like the sheep breaking into the neighbour’s kale patch or the goats discovering a poisonous, exotic shrub under the brambles.

Winter is upon us and I can’t begin to describe the state of chaos we’re still living in with farm and animals and us spread between places, daylight hours rapidly vanishing into long, black nights and still no power connection (that’s a work in progress) or running water. And our humble hovel—the old, stone barn we’ve moved temporarily into while we begin to renovate this old homestead around ourselves—starting to feel a bit leaky as winter chills the draughts and dampens the stones. We got around to knocking a hole through the wall to put the woodstove in last weekend, lively flames now dance at my feet and thaw the chill from my bones, but not before the temperature plummeted and winter stormed in on a flurry of snow.

Winter arrives not by some arbitrary date on a calendar, but by howling winds, icy rains and snow, after the geese have flown in to herald its coming from the river valley and the mistle thrushes have sung the season’s turning. Winter arrived here last week. It stormed in from the north with a blast of bitter breath and cast this corner of the world into the monotonous grey and lulling rhythm of the dark season.

Most of the time I love that we don’t have internet or mobile coverage in our home. It was one of the things I quietly hoped for when we were searching for a place to make our home. That I can switch off from the noise and distraction of constant connectivity and be completely alone, undisturbed, uninterrupted. Untempted by the lure of the little pocket screen into a world of distraction. To write, I need vast amounts of time alone with my own thoughts, alone to drop into the place where creativity flows, where words flow unhindered. As a highly introverted person with social anxiety that borders on plain weird, I need vast amounts of time alone to recover myself, to just be. I could live happily in hermitage, not seeing or speaking to another human soul for months on end. Solitude. Yes. The word sings a sweet and alluring tune. It is vital to me that my home is my haven, my safe retreat, my sanctuary. That I can close doors and and close myself away and be alone. Or rather, walk into the woods or out onto the land where I am never truly alone but surrounded by and immersed in the greater community of life.

But, I also recognise that isolation can be a dangerous place. I recognise the need for human connection, the human need to be part of something bigger than our individual selves, the need for human community. And so I peel myself from the lichen, brush the bird’s nests out of my hair and step out into the human world once in a while. It’s a stranger place every time I go out there. Those excursions often feel more disconnecting, everybody bustling about in their own busy little bubbles, all wrapped up in their pocket screens, and I hurry to get home to the real, honest, earthy connection with the other-than-human life on my farm, and on the land.

Something about the exposure of living on the open hill in our little shepherd’s hut for the past two years, open to the elements and the eyes of any passersby, made me want to hide. Made me want to shut off from the eyes and noise of the world, close my social media accounts and be unreachable. Craving privacy yet simultaneously yearning for the warmth of real-life community. I think I’m not alone in that, in these disconnected times. The exposure and fickle interactions of the online world are poor substitutes for real human connection.

Side by side, a panoramic view east to north with our little shepherd’s hut due north on the far right, where we spent the past two years living off grid under the open sky.

We have landed now, somehow, in a place where the internet doesn’t reach, where when I am at home in my sanctuary of stone tucked into a wooded dip deep in the hills I am blissfully secluded, incommunicado, out of touch, out of reach of the bing of another message coming through, hidden from the 5G towers and the lure of connectivity, but nestled in the heart of a close little community of neighbours. The sort of neighbours who knock on the door with offers of help, bring us bags of firewood when they notice us putting a woodstove in, and tell us not to worry if our sheep break into their fields because we all get along and help each other out around here so we won’t be falling out over a bite of grass (and sooner or later their cattle will reverse the favour and break into our fields). The sort of neighbours who knock on the door asking for a hand to move a cow down the road, and would we bring our goats up to eat the brambles in their yard? The sort of neighbours who trade their homegrown veg for our homegrown mutton, and come to pick me up when my car breaks down, and turn up unasked with a shovel to scrape the grass off our path so we won’t be walking mud into our humble hovel, resulting in an impromptu neighbouring session with steaming mugs and conversation on the road. The sort of neighbours who don’t care that I’ve got bird’s nests in my hair (because we’re all scruffy, misfit hill folk out here). Yes, real community spirit is still alive and thriving—you just have to open the door when it comes knocking.

The house of this old homestead was struck by lightning and burnt down while we were in the process of buying it. You can read about that here.

My husband is better at neighbouring than I am. He has a humble, unassuming demeanour and a penchant for helping people, expecting nothing in return. He has a way of disarming strangers so that they immediately open up and tell him all about their battle with bowel cancer and their mother’s dementia. And somehow he teases out the inherent generosity and kindness of human nature that transcends political and class divides and even long-standing neighbourly disputes, and gets everybody working together. We moved around quite a bit, he and I, from rental to shoddy rental before scraping together enough to borrow and buy. We’ve had all sorts of neighbours. Some we got along with, some we didn’t. Some that made us so uncomfortable we couldn’t move away fast enough. We always maintained that if we want good neighbours, then we’d better be good neighbours, even if sometimes it meant making compromises or keeping our opinions to ourselves. Even better, letting go of our judgements altogether and meeting people as they are with an open heart. But that’s the thing about having neighbours. You don’t get to choose them. You might not all agree on certain things. You might have widely opposing political views. But by proximity and a certain dependence on local resources you’re all in it together when the shit hits the fan. What makes a community isn’t same-think (how boring would that be?!) but a shared web of interdependence. A net of necessity, of need and nurture. And when the phones and the internet go down, who have we got but our neighbours?

So, I write to you by candlelight in the black before dawn with a wood fire spitting into the dark and licking at my toes, from this secluded old homestead deep in the hills where our mobile phones don’t work, nestled in the heart of a close little community of neighbours who’ve somehow managed to put their differences aside and all get along for the sake of cultivating a real, dependable community of the kind that hold each other up when the lines go down. And I wonder how different things might look out there if we all put down our phones once in a while and knocked on a neighbour’s door.

Thank you for reading. I will check back in on comments when I can.