Ty’r Eithin

Last time I was in the U.K., I stayed as a wwoofer on a beautiful biodynamic farm in the welsh hills. I slept in a little attic room up a ladder, worked on the farm, and cooked and ate with the other young people.

The farm was part of a community network of shared gardens, where many people shared the labour and helped to provide organic vegetables to families in the area. Ty’r Eithin’s gardens alone fed 60 families —a box of vegetables a week, each, for a year.

This is the best kind of food, food that is better than medicine.

In the mornings, I fed and watered the cows, and in the afternoons I worked in the gardens. I helped tether out the goats, shovelled enormous quantities of manure, helped catch a woolly and muscular ram, made music, went morris dancing, dug weeds, discussed philosophy. It was heaven.

The people whom I met there believed all sorts of things – there were vegetarians, pescetarians, and animal rights’ activists, adherents of Taoism and paganism, advocates of Rudolf Steiner, pseudo-Christians and nonconformists… They were all committed to a natural lifestyle. They were all united by a love and respect for the land.

There is something about simple farm work, I think, that can heal almost anything. At Ty’r Eithin, after a long period of mental darkness, I found the sunshine gradually seeping back into my bones.

The farm was a few hundred years old, and there was a quiet wisdom in its fields and stones.

The robust but elderly gentleman who owned it was also full of wisdom; he and his wife had decided to make it a place where young people could come and experience nature and living close to the earth.

“Most people come here looking for an escape,” he said, “—escape from all the pressures and all the damage of a consumerist society. And that’s okay, and it's important. But in the end we should not be trying to escape. We should be starting something new. We must work together, work from the bottom up, to build something that will contribute new life to the world.”