One Spin Around The Sun

One year. Four seasons. 12 months. 52 weeks. 365 days. 8760 hours. An awful lot of minutes. That’s how long ago I arrived at the Pilsdon Community as a live-in volunteer. Then I didn’t know how long my sojourn here would be, although barring any particularly outlandish behaviour on my part I could expect to stay for at least six months. Here I still find myself, a year older and perhaps a morsel wiser, with just one month before my agreed departure date.

Despite the sense of unchangingness which imbues the place, the daily routines of cooking, eating, milking, worshipping and cleaning which have been fixed in place from time immemorial, there has actually been quite a radical upheaval in the people who live here during this single annum. Only eleven of the nineteen who were here to greet me on 15th March 2012 are still here. I make it twenty-two people who have joined after me, counting the three children (one of whom joined by being born), and thirteen who have left.  And of course the new warden arriving in September has brought his own approach to how things are run.

Another relationship has blossomed, in the clandestine way that they must here, between a female volunteer and a guest, and the lovebirds drove off into the sunset this Wednesday (OK, it was a more prosaic 10am). Another volunteer finishes his six months today and is heading back home to Northamptonshire having made the garden neater than it has ever been in its long history. When I’m gone Pilsdon will be down to just two volunteers, the American newly-weds from the Bruderhof community. (No, they tirelessly repeat, we are NOT the Amish).

If you were to include all the regular volunteers from outside, the support staff, the people who come to do pottery, those who stay as ‘respite’ visitors, all the wayfarers, the trustees, the Sunday service congregation, and the friends and family members visiting, there has been an enormous throng spread across these twelve months who have been making Pilsdon what it is. Some I have only a nodding acquaintance with, others have become firm friends, but increasingly during the course of this year I have come to regard this entire rag-bag group of people from all walks of life, in some sense as my family.  I’ve never lived anywhere like it.  There probably isn’t anywhere quite like it.

I find myself in a very different state of mind from that of a year ago. I was then reeling from a marital breakdown and the shock of quitting my career and not knowing what next.  All the usual ties that keep us doing what we do had been cut. At the same time I became more keenly aware of the various cliff-edges that human society is pushing itself towards; the old unquestioned certainties that things will be pretty much the same or better a few decades hence had crumbled and I began to seek security by living a simpler life, close to where my food is grown (and in fact growing much of it myself). 

The months of physical work in the garden, digging as the birds sing and swoop, as a pheasant struts across the field next door, as the sun carves its arc slightly differently each day, has been an absolute and I believe literal god-send. My inner being no longer feels like it is jangling like a Indonesian gamelan tuning up. I’ve regained a sense of direction, a confidence in myself, and an exhilaration at being able to do something about my enormous carbon footprint. I’m going to try to carve out a life for myself, hopefully joined by others in future, as a peasant by a river in a Welsh valley.