Clearing paths this week with @vincentnijman on our land in Molise... was powerful challenging, and the labour brought up a lot around depression – around what needs to be unpacked or expanded or ‘decompressed’. As you can hear in our conversation this week, when Vincent and I recorded our first proper podcast together, Unpacking Depression, the actual release of depression is not complicated. Nor is it impossible: it is part of our everyday and our return to Nature, and we kind of relish the work (the mental and emotional) that is demanded of us, when it comes up...

This week was dreich!! We had a couple of pretty-darn cold days, with also a lot of rain, which helped us to see that the house was EVEN LESS
water-proof than we had previously thought! So our minds were overflowing with problems to solve, as it is not as though the leaks are simple holes that
can be covered. I felt overwhelm and helplessness this week, more than I've felt in a long time: very early memories came up, which are extremely unpleasant at best, and which made me think that I'm never going to have a stable or safe home.

The worst of the current house chaos is the terazzo, which is made of a horrible concrete and holey terracotta bricks combination, held together by a bizarre cement beam which is in turn held up by two improvised supports that the last owner left for us. Without these temporary measures, the ceiling (and our terazzo) might well have fallen in.

Which would mean one less useful room, a lot of detritus to tidy up and get rid of, and a perilous hole in our terazzo. However, we sat and mused on it at length, talked late into the night... The problem hadn’t been more than an occasional puddle on the cantina floor below up until this autumn (what with it being a drought for so long), but as soon as the wet season began... Oofah; our tools had to keep being moved, the bricks seemed to look more and more precarious, and the house as a whole was feeling like it might never be habitable – or even utilisable! We had more than one outpouring of worries around it, and I spent at least some energy on effing and blinding towards the mounting problems.

In the meantime, we set out for the woods, with saws and loppers and secateurs in hand. And spent various hours on end, sawing and lopping and secateuring, as we clear paths through thick forests downhill from the aforementioned (problematic) house. It got colder, we got wetter, and the issues with the terazzo got more impacted: more water came down into the cantina, and less stability was left in the ceiling/ terazzo.

We spent one evening brainstorming to the extreme, as we tend to do when things get super-overwhelming: we recognise that the feeling of not being able to find a solution was probably based in not thinking big enough – so we unwrapped a lot more ideas, thought WELL outside the box, and came up with a good temporary solution, and a potential long-term change to the space: a staircase where the terazzo is most liable to collapse....?

Our quick-fix was able to manifest during a break in the downpour, yesterday. We super-efficiently swept the water (and algae!) off the terazzo, moved some bricks and furniture away from the edges, and dragged our immense piece of thick plastic (10 x 10m) across the space, securing it with some beautiful big trunks that Vincent had sawed down earlier. We finished just in time to listen to the lovely sound of rain on plastic, and hope that the securing was sufficient to not have been whipped up by the wind in the night. We were exhausted, chilled to the bone, and for my part a tad faint, as we trudged back to the car along the slippery muddy track...

But a large, nourishing evening meal of mince and tatties, a brilliant seasonal movie (Three Nuts For Cinderella, a gorgeous Czech film from 1973), and
some hot water bottles, and things felt better than ever!

Paths were cleared in our minds and emotions, and we felt like we’ve completed the first step in the restoration of this mega-issue. From here, we can think much more clearly. The actual paths n the woods that we are clearing, we kind of take for granted as soon as they are in place, but they change completely the way we can move around our forests; we can have a walk now, rather than a scrambling wrestling clamber!