Right Now We Have a Shed
When I first started this project, I regarded the shed as a useful but slightly embarrassing structure. Here I was painting a picture to people of an exquisite retreat centre surrounded by beautiful native grassland. But the shed, surrounded by weeds, was the actual unglamorous reality.
There’s a tension we all hold between dreams for the future and what exists now. And as a future orientated thinker, I easily get drawn into inhabiting a future that does not yet exist.
To paint that picture for you: the future of this place is an abundant, self-sustaining native grassland that is home to a rich diversity of plants, birds, reptiles, and insects. It’s an iconic South Australian retreat centre that is home to healing, learning, grieving, celebrating, and the whole gamut of human emotions. And it’s the model of regenerative, distributive business practices that our world needs to transition towards. I can absolutely see that as a possible future in the next decade.
The shed at sunset.
But the reality right now is so different and so unapologetically in my face. Let me tell what you the reality of the last three years has been.
We’ve been spraying weeds with chemicals that really concern me and I deeply hope we don’t regret. There are reasons for it at this scale but that’s for another essay.
Our nursery has been a real mixed bag. Lots of effort and only partial success for the yield of native seed we were hoping to have produced by now. The wind, the sun, the soil, the weeds. It’s all a lot harder than I was expecting.
And we’ve been cutting down plantations trees that had failed but were still providing cover for the extraordinary number of Eastern Grey kangaroos.
And well those roos; we’ve been trying very hard to drive them out of the fence enclosure. But the ones that we can’t get out will need to be shot before the major planting begins this winter.
Being in that place has been like a mediation of sorts. Having spent three years doing these hard things, I now understand the the project is less about what I can dream into the future. It’s what’s here now that matters.
And so my respect for the shed has grown. It’s a thing that is already here. And the humble shed has made possible all the magic moments of learning, care, and awe that we’ve shared on those hills. Instead of waiting for the next three years and the next $8M raised to build the retreat centre, I (we) get to have those experiences right now.
I’ve relaxed around the timeline of when we’ll be holding major retreats, and am more into the excitement of our very near future events; our first planting festivals, and our first ceremonies. It could be easy to read this as some sort of resignation or detachment from the bigger project, but it’s truly not that at all. I feel more joy and more grounded by spending more of my time here, and less time there.
And so the shed has become like a symbol for me, of the place where good things actually happen.