This house still stands

There was, in a flash, elec­tric­ity and fear in the air. The bully storm crashed into our tight val­ley and started flail­ing. The first light­ning bolt took out our modem, phone, one com­puter, our water heat­ing sys­tem, the stereo am­pli­fier and sev­eral power cir­cuits.

It buck­eted nearly eight cen­time­tres of water in a day of crack­ling fury and the roof gut­ters and win­dows of our old stone home seeped. Our cami cried floods of red soil and stones onto the road and we began to won­der if it would ever end. But it did.

We waited, res­olute. We had been re­duced to the light of can­dles, but as our eyes ad­justed our sense of place grew stronger. Then we began to patch and re­store what was bro­ken and bat­tered; our way of life. This Cata­lan house still stands, what­ever the weather.

In the af­ter­math of fret­ful force the purr of sto­ical Pri­o­rat toil re­turned: trac­tors, voices from groves, the dis­tant rail­way and road. And stand­ing look­ing at the bro­ken branches on the ground, the blown buck­ets and tar­pau­lins, what struck home more than the tem­pest was the greater po­tency of the in­de­fati­ga­ble peo­ple of the land I live among: the farm­ing/vil­lage pro­le­tariat, where power is in the unity and rhythm of la terra, in strong hands and backs moulded by labour. Many are very el­derly, yet keep loyal to hon­est toil, touch­ing the earth daily as if to ground this life. They, like the olives and vines, are rooted to with­stand.

They will need these roots, be­cause weather pat­terns are now more un­pre­dictable than ever. The storms will rage on be­cause, as I have said many time be­fore, the pres­sure and pre­oc­cu­pa­tions of profit, of the pow­er­ful en­forc­ing their greed, will con­tinue to poi­son the cli­mate, con­trary to the glar­ing need for a sus­tain­able co-ex­is­tence, in a world that cham­pi­ons di­ver­sity, both eco­log­i­cal and so­cial. We have to bal­ance eco­nom­ics with core moral and so­cial val­ues that do not have a price. And we need to stand firm and peace­fully voice that, now more than ever.

I hear that phrase a great deal in the Pri­o­rat. There is so much of this life that does not have a price. The women and men of the land, who live closer to na­ture than any­one, and labour long and hard, are very self-re­liant, often in­de­pen­dent - de­fen­sive of their fam­i­lies and com­mu­ni­ties be­cause they un­der­stand the enor­mous strength of both. This is man­i­fest in the Cata­lan pil­lars that are the vil­lage and town co­op­er­a­tives. Mere toil it is not, for there is rich thought and phi­los­o­phy too.

And think­ing of my Cata­lan friends and neigh­bours, by whom I mean all races and creeds here, I am re­minded of a pas­sage in a book, The Farmer’s Creed, by Crich­ton Por­te­ous, pub­lished in 1947. It is the ed­u­cated au­thor’s ac­count of his rad­i­cal de­ci­sion in the early 20th cen­tury to spurn of­fice prof­its and seek in­stinc­tively the ful­fil­ment of work­ing the land. His good for­tune was to find an eru­dite and grounded farmer – Mr Boone – to teach him. The last words, then, in this part al­le­gor­i­cal of­fer­ing from me (for which I make no apol­ogy) are Mr Boone’s.

Those that labour “are the men re­ally in touch with things. They are the men who could think up­ward from re­al­ity. In­stead of that we seem to pre­fer our thinkers to be men who have never touched re­al­ity.”