English In May of this year, Rebecca Schiller’s book ‘Earthed’ is released, talking about how, in 2017, she moved her family to a countryside smallholding for a life of sowing and growing. But as the first few years go by, and the ever-expanding list of tasks builds to a cacophony, it becomes clear that this is not going to be simple. In this blog post, LWA member Phil Moore reads and reflects on the memoir.
Reading ‘Earthed’ is like entering into the pages of a deeply personal journal. Author Rebecca Schiller paints the experiences of a new life on a smallholding in rural Kent to begin again, “a little closer to the earth.” Seeking some sort of personal survival plan after the Brexit referendum and Trump’s ascendancy, the family’s pursuit of The Good Life on two acres prompted as much by dreams of self-provision and shuttering the worst of climate change as it was the political ferment.
It is this pursuit of resilience, in the face of a world shifting and lurching unpredictably, that we are drawn into Rebecca’s own story of personal resilience — both mentally and physically. A land-based life is hard work. The romance of harvest quickly thwarted in the January cold as Rebecca describes her first tussle with the leeks left in the ground by the previous owners. Wrestling with the alliums a forerunner of the trials and steep learning curves to come.
And so Schiller brings us into the granular details of her world as she comes to grips with growing. Anxiety a common theme throughout as to do lists and a world gone mad pile up and presage into her thoughts.
‘Earthed’ is interspersed with poetry which I think reflects the feeling and tumult of Rebecca’s mind. Her own words as well as those of others such as Mary Oliver, Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Camille T. Dungy, whose ‘this beginning may have always meant this end’, a kind of stream-of-consciousness-
Rebecca’s words bring to light the spinning vortex of a mind easily undone and at times unmoored. The energy of her words arising from this tension between the dawning realisation of her ADHD (a hunch as she calls it, and, who we, as the reader, know about from the outset as we are thrust into the middle of her psychiatric test on the first page of the book) and her new life.
Detailing life on the plot, observations of the natural world and her forays into the history of the place we come to learn how vital her smallholding is as an anchor to her whizzing mind and keeping her – and her family — earthed.
Reminded to slow down and come into the present, Rebecca shares a moment when her daughter invites her to look at the colours of the sky at dusk; pulling a goose egg from her dungarees with her sick son on her lap, the gift of a fair-tale token to dispel a difficult morning; sorting seeds she notes trying, “not to project into the future today, to avoid stepping any closer to the internal agitation that would otherwise catch light.”
It’s these elaborately descriptive passages and vignettes that brings us into her inner world. ‘Earthed’ recounts the lessons of a land-based living with an honesty that may act as both a relief and surprise to readers with the good earth under their nails.
Earthed is out now. Where possible please buy from your local independent bookshop or buy from this link where 10% of the price goes to support a local bookshop and 10% goes to the LWA.
Phil Moore is one half of Parc y Dderwen, a nascent off-grid ecological smallholding figuring things out. Whilst pretending to be a market gardener Phil enjoys writing, reading and cycling. Him & his partner run a small sauerkraut business in west Wales.
