Stagtine, 16. The Place of Peace

Section 1, Chapter 13

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We went to bed that night with the moon, the creaking porch chairs still echoing between our ears. The universe felt close, her arms, her near light, wrapping us in a cosmogonic coverlet. We rose the next day anew, reborn in some ancient way, ready to reflect the light of a distant and ageless star.

We knew, deeply, rooted in the ancient well of our gut like ivy, that something lay beyond our small market gardens and small-scale pastured poultry enterprise. We had studied permaculture with Geoff Lawton, the New Zealand educator, and had established large keyline based silvopastures of fruits and nuts and nitrogen fixing species of comfrey, sea buckthorn, and locust. We had created a local, egg delivery service. We had named it all: Síochánta Baile, an old Irish phrase meaning “the place of peace that I call my home.”

Peace. Yes, that is what it was and that is what we were searching for. The more we let go, the more our small, human-scaled systems emerged in ways we never could have planned, designed, and our hearts drifted, like loose limbs bouncing the water, into the woods, into the wildly waving, untouched peripheries of that place of peace that we called home.

We also knew that the agriculture that began our journey was not to be the system that allowed it to mature. Regenerative agriculture and permaculture are fine first steps in the restoration of relationship and the reawakening of memory—from Earth and her waving hair to our two and four legged cousins to us, her simple and so dependent mammal. But something else was growing, not in our market gardens or mobile chicken houses, but growing inside us, that ivied well in our gut, that would soon emerge into what we would call kincentric rewilding: a relational land ethic of letting go but not stepping back, of rewilding ourselves, with the land, an energetic, and increasingly singular body.x A co-creative tellback.

A few months later, I received a phone call over dinner from a real estate agent in Virginia that we had contacted to keep their eye out for some properties priced well enough. Land values around northeast Ohio (where we were located) would afford us a couple of acres, no more.

“Daniel, hello. You need to drive down here.” His voice was demanding, unlike his profession.

“You found something?” Morgan looked at me, half floating above her chair.

“Just come.” He said.

The next day we were in Virginia, standing in a clear cut. Trees were falling around us and others were silent and still vertical, slightly, only for a moment more, like weeping men in an ancient battlefield. Mammoth diesel engines roaring ruts into the soft Earth, crying. The land was a sad play of neglect.

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