This October, Be The Earth Foundation was pleased to support a collaborative event between The Real Farming Trust and The Good Ancestors Club. The event brought landowners and farmers together at the 42 Acres regenerative retreat, Somerset, to work with them on Listening to the Land.
Farmer Tom Mettyear shares his reflections from the retreat.
As a child, I was painfully shy and a loner but took great solace from my connection, fascination and love of the natural world. I spent hours roaming alone in woods and fields learning to identify the wildflowers, butterflies and birds. As a teenager, I spent four consecutive summers working on my godfather’s organic mixed farm in Suffolk and was taught that you could both produce food and be an advocate for the natural world. I loved that life but not being from a farming family could see no way in, so in my teens and my twenties I moved away from the very thing that touched and moved my soul and tried to make a life in London.
By my early thirties, I was desperate to get out and I realised that what I wanted was to reconnect myself with my true nature and embed myself in the countryside and start a small farm. In 2004 I started a smallholding and in 2012 moved farms and became a full-time organic farmer at Haddon Copse Farm.
The 35 acres we moved to were sad, neglected, tired and needed love but spoke to me the moment I set foot on it. I knew immediately that these 3 large fields (now divided into 15) were to become our home and we would create a farm with soul.
I felt a great responsibility to help bring back her vitality and treat her with respect, so instinctively and with no rational idea what I was doing I helped breathe new life and energy into this land.
I have always talked to the trees, the wind, the rivers and of course my animals and felt a deep spiritual connection and respect for all of life. But over the years I became more and more aware that I was also being spoken to by them. After courses on animal communication and attending talks and sessions at ORFC I started to develop a practice over time of deep listening and giving blessings to all the other than human life that lives on this land. This has been transformative not only for the farm and all who live here but also for me.
I am more present, more centred, more open, more loving, less stressed. The farm now has an abundance of birds, wildflowers, reptiles and mammals. My farm animals thrive and although we sometimes struggle financially I feel certain we are doing what the land wants of us.
Sometimes I forget my practice and get distracted by the chatter in my mind, the list of jobs, the financial insecurity. I forget to bless the animals in my care and to listen to the land.
I have been wanting to deepen both my understanding of this spiritual connection and recommit to my practice and had been searching for a course or workshop to help me.
The universe and the spirits heard me and last week I was blessed to be asked to attend the most transformative 48-hour course, ‘Listening To The Land’ facilitated by The Real Farming Trust and The Good Ancestors Club and held at 42 Acres Retreat Centre. Just spending time with 11 other farmers and landowners who share a deep spiritual practice with their land was both inspiring and affirming.
The universe and the spirits heard me and last week I was blessed to be asked to attend the most transformative 48-hour course, ‘Listening To The Land’ facilitated by The Real Farming Trust and The Good Ancestors Club and held at 42 Acres Retreat Centre.
Just spending time with 11 other farmers and landowners who share a deep spiritual practice with their land was both inspiring and affirming.
Then to be taught and guided to a greater understanding of the potential that we all have to deepen our connection and relationship with all that makes up this wonderful planet by Bríd Walsh and Patrick MacManaway was truly life enhancing and changing.
I was honoured to swim in a beautiful natural pond which was the home to a family of beavers. We meditated, we talked, we walked, told stories around fires in the woods but above all we learnt the key to deep connection and communication with other than human is through taking ourselves to a state of grace. Grace is a still point, a loving state where we resonate at a frequency that can both be heard and received.
I have returned from those 48 hours away a different farmer, a different custodian and above all a different man.
