The Unlikely Peace

As a part of our apprenticeship program this year, we are asking the apprentices to read two books which have been core to our own wild unfolding. We are both currently re-reading one of these books, “The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic” by Martin Prechtel. This morning, I came across these words and felt that they speak so intimately to this moment in time. This part of his story is set just after the devastating earthquake in Guatemala in 1976 in a small village known as Cuchumaquic. Martin and some other young men have brought what little food and water they could muster to this village, whose members are now sitting atop piles of rubble where their homes, pots for cooking, and any remaining foods are completely buried. They sit with their dead and dying, they are starving. Life will never be the same for them.

“Instead of individuals running around trying to hoard things and keep them away from the desperate masses of other individuals doing the same thing, as happened in the bigger cities, in these thrashed and flattened little old-time villages they knew if there was nothing left to lose, then what is not to be gained by being happy together, not sharing the little of nothing they still had? They saw the remaining lives their bodies had left as a miraculous gift of ash and water put together and made sentient by the Holy in Nature just long enough to kiss, laugh, and be together on an Earth that obviously did not need humans at all but who had always nonetheless fed us….

…But the fact that real peace had probably happened here one time for a little while meant peace had probably happened somewhere else just as small and just as real, and probably happened a lot more in times past. Best of all, it could most likely happen again. Did we need a disaster to find peace? I know, at least for myself, that even though this peace as we knew it that day may have had to flee and disappear from view on account of those who couldn’t see it, coursing back into the magic doorways of the spirit houses of the mountain gods from whence it sprang, it certainly lives on in the shiny eyes of the Indigenous wilderness of all our souls where the everyday civilized mind can neither follow nor see. But even so, more significant still is that the unexpected and positive shock of just the possibility of such a peace existing in such a tangibly experienced conscious reality kicked me awake and all of the convenient mental beach of cynical know-it-all-ness where the disillusioned love to bask, such that a kind of furnace of stars began sparkling in that moment inside the still-impressionable mud of that big tearful oven of my heart of those early years as to not only warm and brighten for me the spiritually cold night of this numb mechanical age we’ve all been dropped into to live, but to constantly give me a blazing and noble hope whenever I have allowed myself to doubt the reality of this spark of Peace.”

This book is truly a gift of the possibility of the human heart and certainly feeds both of us in a time that could otherwise consume us with the devastation of human greed and ignorance. We will leave you with these further inspiring words from Martin:

“But make no mistake: that peace of Cuchumaquic lives somewhere inside all of us, inside all people, whether awake to it or not, in the form of a powerful tiny magical seed, and there peace lies waiting alive, behind our mental crust, knowing when the day of a more favorable change of spiritual climate occurs in which this seed like peace itself can be openly cultivated and grown again, the peace I knew at Cuchumaquic will come busting again through the sporadic cracks that the Holy causes to quake into the rigid crusts of what in our fear we have rationalized as real.”

Many blessings and love to all.

A Holistic Approach to Farming and Education

“Holistic education is based on the premise that each person finds identity, meaning, and purpose in life through connections to the community, to the natural world, and to spiritual values such as compassion and peace. Holistic education aims to call forth from people an intrinsic reverence for life and a passionate love of learning.”

Miller, R. (2000). ‘A brief introduction to holistic education’, the encyclopaedia of informal education. http://infed.org/mobi/a-brief-introduction-to-holistic-education

Three years ago we made the decision to follow a dream that led us from one coast of Canada to the other, landing on 74 acres of forest in Cape Breton. We didn’t have a clue as to what we were doing. It sounded like a simple life, simple, however, apparently doesn’t mean easy and we soon found ourselves clearing land, hauling water, using a composting toilet, building a cabin, plotting, scheming, dreaming and embracing the forest around us.

It soon became clear to us that we could not, and did not want to do all this on our own. We had romantic notions of homesteading and self reliance, however there was something missing. We had community around us, however we didn’t have a community of people working directly with us on the land, learning, problem solving and participating in the day to day that was now our lives. We both had prior careers working with people, and so we decided to see if people would come and volunteer, to help, and to learn about how we were trying to live an off grid life in the forest. We had no idea if anyone would come, and to our surprise and relief, young ambitious folks started arriving. It changed everything.

At first, all we did with these young souls was work, and work, and then a little more work thrown in for a little fun. We were in such a panic at times to get things done that we felt it might be an unfair exchange. Yes we were feeding people, but they were working hard, sleeping in tents, and embracing all the humidity, bugs and cooling temperatures as time progressed into the fall season. It was a disorganized mess, but within the chaos something was happening.

Talking circles (council) was how I had interacted with many people in a variety of programs, something I first experienced working with CanAdventure Education, a wilderness program for youth developed by Corinna (Dragonfly Healing) and Greg Stevenson. It worked miracles with the young people we were working with who came from a variety of troubling backgrounds. This combined with significant time in nature created a way to connect with youth on an entirely different level, breaking through barriers and getting at the heart of the matter in their lives. These were transformative times for all us guides and youth engaged in this wilderness project.

Council is a talking circle format. The basic premise is using a talking piece and only the one holding the piece speaks in the circle. The four agreements of council are: speaking from the heart, listening with the heart, being lean of expression (getting to the heart of the matter), and spontaneity, to practice what comes through you as you hold the piece. The book,The Way of Council by Jack Zimmerman and Virgina Coyle is a valuable resource for this process, and the Oja Foundation offers many programs centered around council based practices.

When we held our first council here on the farm, it was late into the season with a group of young people, some who had been with us for weeks. What we heard hit us hard, and we realized that something was happening to them other than all the back breaking work we threw at them. Their time in the forest, sleeping in a tent, and day to day conversations, set the stage for an opening, a reflection of the inner workings of self. The work challenged them, pushed limits and built confidence. The learning was hands on, and every action felt and seen was experienced in a visceral way.

We heard stories of depression, anxiety and body pain from the state of the world. For some, it was the first time in their lives that they had slept in a forest, and the impact was one that was deeply moving. The shared experience being witnessed in this way gave voice to the feelings in an environment that was removed from their day to day lives. We were moved beyond words to be holding such a container.

We now hold council as a core part of what we do here to share these experiences. Spending time in a way that removes us from the everyday and ordinary offers opportunities to gain new perspectives, especially when the majority of us live in a world that is driven by technology. The economy that we are building here is one built on indebtedness, we need human help and ingenuity to move such a human scale farm project forward. We also realize that we need a community of people here to continue this project beyond our time.

Our response to all this is about creating a space that invites others to be here to learn, to learn in a holistic way. The Apprenticeship program is how we would like to bring people here in a meaningful way, a way that fits into the concept of holistic education. The farm acts as the foundation, it supports us through a process of dieting the land, we become the land that sustains us, and we see, feel and experience the direct relationship with our food. The forest provides the reflection, the time to be with the other- than-human world, to establish our relationship with the wild community. The community provides the container to be witnessed and to explore the depths of meaning of ourselves on how we fit into the larger sense of self as it relates to the intricate dance of human interaction. This is holistic education.

Our calling is about weaving this container of holistic education together on this land, in a world that is often going in another direction. We are no experts, and we are part of this process of learning as much as the people who choose to work with us. What others bring to us is beyond what we ever imagined, and the stories shared and witnessed in council offer us the great gift of listening and speaking from the heart.

Written by William Kosloski of Twisted Roots Farm

Transitions and New Beginnings

“Hold to your own truth at the center of the image you were born with”

David Whyte

In April of 2017, we arrived in Cape Breton after traveling across Canada from Vancouver Island in search of an affordable place in which to homestead. It was the start of a new adventure and a closure on our previous lives back on the West Coast. Hard to imagine that we are approaching three years in this journey and we find ourselves, yet again, at another crossroads in 2020. The past three years has been a time of integrating with this new place that we now call home, a time of isolation, reflection, and rewilding. We are now crossing another threshold as we transition from calling this place Rewylding Woods to her new name of Twisted Roots Farm. This change in name represents the new and unique way that we are being called to offer this place to others.

For the past three months, we have been working and planning this transition with the support of the Nova Scotia Self Employment Program, the Department of Agriculture, Occupational Health and Safety Nova Scotia, The Federation of Agriculture Nova Scotia and the Community Business Development Corporation InRich. All of these services have supported us in creating an economic and operational plan for Twisted Roots Farm. We have also had the continued support of family and friends, which has allowed us to take this much needed time to create a valuable and in depth business plan. We are setting up the farm and forest site to create many offerings, from food to local forest products, as well as opening this land to others for learning.

We are deeply indebted for the help that we have received from volunteers over the last two years in continuing to set up the farm, and we are now expanding our volunteer and educational programming to include a three month and six month stay Apprenticeship program expanding the unique learning opportunities here on the farm. We need this help in order for the project to succeed, as it requires many hands for this vision to come to life; creating a farm among the forest, using low impact, regenerative practices. In this realization of requiring a community of support, our long term vision for Twisted Roots Farm is to create a working cooperative, as we know we cannot do this on our own and want to create a system of employment that is worker owned and operated. We also want this place to continue beyond our time and our invitation of learning is about creating a network of people committed to the project, while generating a supportive economic framework that supports all members.

Our experience of this place has been life changing, especially when either one of us comes from a farming background. There have been times that we have been challenged beyond what we thought was even possible, from harvesting animals to braving the elements in the care of those beings. We have both had to find strength within ourselves and together as a couple to forge ahead when all seemed impossible. We have maintained our health and sanity through it all (or maybe not – perhaps we never had our sanity in the first place!) and feel the winds of change on the horizon as we venture into this new and uncharted territory.

Our intention is to share this journey in a deep and intimate way. We have dabbled with blog posts and instagram, but we also recognize the value of this narrative in a fast changing world under environmental pressures. We know some of the threads that have led us to this place, while others continue to be revealed in their own mysterious ways. We have spent hours and hours researching farming, homesteading, forestry, permaculture, and all things related to living off-grid in the forest. Many others have followed a similar path, and from those folks and their generosity of knowledge sharing, we have been able to figure things out (for the most part) and find new ways of farming that we value and hold dear to our hearts.

Our blog represents all of the things that we have succeeded at, all of the things that we are experimenting with, and all of the things that we have failed at (relatively speaking). Holistic learning includes all of this; to call forth from people an intrinsic reverence for life and a passionate love of learning. We do not see ourselves as separate from our surroundings. We are not observers simply looking in. We are a part of everything and one of our greatest gifts is that we are able to bare witness to the incredible unfolding of life.

And so, the journey continues. Thank you to all those who have supported us and thank you to all those who believe in us; it has motivated us and kept us going. Stay tuned for more from Twisted Roots Farm!!