Stories from a Wild Wooder!
How to buy a wood?
Picture the scene, it’s a wet Saturday night on November 9th 1994, the first night of the lottery. Noel Edmunds is rattling on about how the numbers are chosen. I just wish Mr Blobby would appear.
My Mother and I have bought tickets, she’s spent £10 and I’ve spent £1.
Mother; “Sweetheart, if you win what are you going to do with the money?”
Me; “I am going to buy a wood and plant trees”
Mother; Deeply Sighing “ Oh I thought you may have got over that”
Neither of us won any money.
Autumn 2015 and I’m covered in mud. The track to the woodland I bought in 2010 is now a bog. I am happy. My heart is filled with such joy to be outside looking at the view of the Breacon Beacons, deer scuttling around and the Birch trees how so many shades of orange and yellow it’s uncountable.
Why buy a wood? My heart told me to
How did I buy a wood?
- I dreamt strong
- I got a financial advisor who got what I wanted to do.
- Grovelled to the Ecological Building Society
- I didn’t give up!
I love our Earth. Technically I am an ‘overseer’. I cannot own our Planet. I am in the role of Trustee and guardian of the tiny acreage in Wales upon which I have a very large loan. If I can get the money to do it anyone can. A friend and I went to loads of car boots selling all kinds of stuff. My beloved Mother sold some of her ‘bling’ jewellery as she realised I had a clear intent and we scraped together £5000. I learnt to play poker and went to a poker night in a local pub. It was nerve racking but the one and only time I played I came second and won £50. To copy Tesco’s, “every little helps.”
Payment of the loan comes from the money I earn as a Shamanic teacher and healer. Ethically it felt appropriate to use the exchange for the sacred work to be returned to keep our land in sanctuary.
Sometimes we think that everything has to have a purpose that we have to keep ‘doing.’ Our purpose can be to listen to what our woodland needs, be still, rest and restore in these amazing places. Descendants of ours may thank us for this step we are taking.
My legacy will be leaving will be a woodland Sanctuary which on my death will go into a trust for 125 years. At the end of that time it becomes common land again. To repeat: If I can do it anyone can!
Be brave and buy a wood!