Efficiency is overrated
Or: what’s the point of speed anyway?
The video is in lieu of voice over audio version. If you’d rather read through it, go ahead and scroll.
What’s the number one plant that you love to hate?
I’ll start.
Brambles.
Boy, do I have a history with brambles.
I’ve pulled them, whacked them, cursed at them, tried to emulate love in the vague hope that it will love me back, learned to live with, hoped to live without. They’re a hard plant to be friends with.
Underneath the willow tree, there is one such beast.
Its tentacles snaking up through the willow branches, holding on, gripping on, making everything unfriendly.
Now, I could use a weed whacker. One of those majestic tools with a circular blade that will make everything into small 20 cm bits and pieces, mulched on the ground. I have historically been known to wield such a weapon.
You put your helmet on, your footwear, your protective glasses, gloves, a harness that you’ll hook the machine onto, and then with its very long beak of metal and destruction, you turn on the engine and it goes trrrrrrrrr.
And boy, are you effffffficient.
Instead, it took me the whole morning until the heat had started (yes, the heat has started here, we’re in the South of France after all).
I slowly went in with only my gloves and garden scissors, straw hat atop and very slowly cut my way through in manageable sections of thorns.
Second on the naughty list today were sticky willies, whom I asked so many times to not stick to my gloves when I try to throw them on the pile.
“It’s in our nature” they respond. “There’s nothing we can do about it.”
There’s frogs, the songs of which I could not have listened to, had I started my efficiency machine.
Efficient for what?
What are we optimizing?
This morning was optimized, heavenly, for summer breeze, willow shades, gentle tug of war with brambles, Alfie checking up on me from time to time from his nap in the shade.
My morning consisted of slow careful movements in the smell of the honeysuckle, of that hazy sort of gaze one gets when trying to discern the shape of a sort of leaf against the shape of another sort of leaf.
The small easy focus when one must cut the right twig in a tangle of twigs.
This morning I made friends with this willow tree in a way that I couldn’t have efficiently done with my big efficiency machine. And in the evening I’ll be slowly grabbing water from the stream and bringing it uphill to my new tomatoes.
Use your time wisely, my friends, this summer.
Make friends with a tree for a morning.
I promise you - you will have much more to gain than from that weekly meeting with Jeff.
This willow and bramble and lovely honeysuckle are our new little friends here in Provence Verte.
Backtracking a little:
After we came back from Tuscany last autumn, we arrived at lovely La Belle Eco for the winter. We were greeted by three Shetland ponies, two inconsistent chickens, and a South African head of gardening so sweet that it makes you want to take him home.
The winter was rainy in France and so we spent most of our time inside.
Alfie, on the other hand, spent most of his time outside with his new girlfriend Marley and a continuous stream of young volunteers who, in their spare time from building the forest garden, would throw him sticks.
Come April, we were packing towards our new leg of the adventure. Gorgeous Provence Verte.
Now it must be mentioned: the magic of how this came to be.
As we were passing from one part of South of France to Italy and then back, we passed on the highway the area surrounding Aix en Provence. Not only is Aix a surprisingly gorgeous town, but the surrounding area - even just the little you can see from the highway - was enough for me to say to the universe “Hmm, wouldn’t it be nice?” and, honestly, then forget about it.
A few months later, as I was sending out feelers for rentals and/or what I call “creative solutions”, this fixer-upper in the Var was one of the first to come up.
And in the first couple of days here, I realized one thing.
This place was inviting me to embody the actual theory and philosophizing that I had been doing for the last couple of years.
I could fully listen to this land and tell you all about it.
Of course I had done that before in other places. I’d say even the other way around, actually: I couldn’t have developed Listen to Your Land were it not for the multitude of gorgeous places we had the immense fortune to live in and experience. (some of them very brambly indeed!)
Learning to build a relationship with a place anew every time is what brought this into being.
For a couple of days more, I convinced myself that I could and should be doing video journaling for you. Show you how I do the practice. Film myself while I’m bloody meditating in the garden in the afternoon glow and stuff like that.
You will not be getting any of this.
Because - as I soon realized - putting slow deliberate presence practice into an entertainment format flattens it.
(Listen to Your Land is like Chinese medicine in many ways and I have a theory brewing on that. If you’re interested or have ideas, DM me.)
As I think of what to write to you next, my dear friend, I look out the window at a poplar tree that’s shimmering in the wind.
Boy, do I love poplar trees.
It’s in these small but repeating moments. It’s in the coming back, again and again, to the encounter with a place, that you build relationship.
So lo and behold, watch me as I segue gracefully towards the Place Journaling practice, whose summer edition is coming in a month’s time, at Solstice.
The practice is free, as is the WhatsApp group. I’ll come with more details next week about it.
Other things
As you can imagine, me sitting still inside through the rainy winter meant I did a lot of things.
One of them is the lovely experiment at slow.land.
Slow Studio
The natural launch of the Slow Studio website. Slow Studio is the umbrella holding all of the creative endeavors surrounding my work. I’ve always done it, I’ve never advertised it. Now it has its own shape and its own little place under the sun. It’s focus is the way we see and draw our places. Of course.
Jo Petroni Property Advisory
The redo of the jopetroni.com website, which hosts the advisory services. And the cooking up of what I call transition services. Pre-purchasing, post-purchasing, deciding, inheritance, stuckness, big decisions.
I help owners and buyers gain clarity in the place they’re in, in their relationship to it.
-
The relationship part is more important than we give it credit. More important than I used to give it credit.
This emotional aspect (how do we define ownership, stewardship, guilt, responsibility, vision, enthusiasm, ego trips, dreams of yoga pavilions made of bamboo) is central to my work.
I have given up being the expert.
I have given up knowing for you.
And I’ve given up trying to prove that Listen to Your Land is efficient in the free market.
Love,
Jo