The slow messy business of getting to know a landscape

Today we were reminded of some of the thoughts and emotions that brought us to this place when reading Paul Kingsnorth writing in yesterday’s Guardian.

The Dark Mountain Project, which has Paul Kingsnorth as a co-founder, has been instrumental in how we have come to terms with how to live in modern times.  You can read the manifesto here, which ends with the Eight Principles of Uncivilisation:

So reading this:

reminded us that becoming immersed in a small patch of land makes sense in so many ways.

I am reminded of Richard Kerridge reviewing Claxton by Mark Cocker:

“…the local nature journal has traditionally been founded on the idea of finding general truths in the immediate surroundings of home; it is partly rooted in the Puritan belief that the cosmos is revealed in the small and ordinary things that surround us. Our need is to take account of global ecological relationships, and consequences reaching into the future.”

By zooming in on a small patch of land and going through the slow messy business of getting to know it we are not shutting out the larger threatening world but finding general truths and new stories with which to deal with it in a positive way.