We grew up very differently. Jocasta in a Newfoundland fishing village and Peter abroad travelling the world as part of a mining family.
When we met we connected instantly. Life had its own plans for us and those have been revealing themselves in the 8+ years we’ve been together. If you saw us separately you’d never put us together. We wouldn’t have either. We didn’t, in fact. But, Nature had other plans. Peter is steeped in propriety and classical tendencies, Jocasta walks on the wild side. But, when we met sparks flew.
Some time later, right about when we shacked up, Jocasta fell ill with what would later be diagnosed as an autoimmune condition. Specialist upon specialist and dozens of tests didn’t go too far in sorting it out. When the pandemic mandates hit, there was no way she was going to risk further damage to her health by taking an experimental shot. Her employer wouldn’t hear it and put her on leave without pay in such a way as to also strip her of access to unemployment insurance. That was a breaking point. We felt the press of malevolence upon us.
We decamped from our urban home in Ottawa.
Peter had always wanted to find a yurt nestled in the forest, so had got a sense for the area around the Gatineau Hills. We met a wonderful couple there who had an eco home to rent on Gatineau River. We were too late, though. The place had been rented out. Disappointed we turned our sights back onto the rental market on the Quebec side of the Ottawa river, there was more available there and it was more affordable. Then the phone rang. The property owners had changed their mind. We could have the eco-home if we still wanted it.
This was at the height of that extraordinarily difficult time for everyone. The mandates were flinging families, society, and our understanding of how our world worked into chaos.
Part of our decamping to the riverside was to be sure we had access to ‘the outside’ if the mandates continued to get more and more strident. Our financial, familial, personal, and mental health were all on tenterhooks. The place, as it turns out, might have saved us.
While we were living there we came into contact with all kinds of creatures. We came to call the place Odin’s Wrest. The terrain was beautiful but a little severe. We shared the place with two Raven’s, Odin’s emblem. They seemed to be working all the time. We watched them build, scavenge, and defend their territory. The place was beautiful, but one had to wrest from it what live one wished.
We wrested, while taking refuge there, some time and space to come to terms with how much it appeared the world had changed. The scales fell off at breakneck page. The implications of all that had happened to us and was happening to so many others was bewildering. If we hadn’t had the place, we might have gone crazy.
In the meantime, not satisfied with her state of physical health, the progress being made by the allopathic medical system or the prescriptions made, Jocasta turned to gardening and to food to heal. And she did.
An ardent researcher, scientific mind, and of dogged nature, she narrowed things down and built herself a custom Keto diet. Careful measures, new recipes, and loads of things cut out of our kitchen habit and two years later she had lost 50 pounds, regained her mobility, inflammation decreased, and energy levels high. She’s off all of her prescriptions.
It’s not that this pattern of self-advocacy is new to us. Between the two of us we have seven children who were all raised outside of the allopathic medical system. Diet, exercise, care, and naturopathic, homeopathic, chiropractic help when we needed it. We’d engage the health care system in an emergency, but otherwise tended to prevention and whole living.
The pandemic put those sensibilities into high gear, but no longer just with regards to health. Stunned about how fully our society had ceased to function we felt we had to reorient ourselves, to reclaim our agency, to re-skill, to learn again things forgotten. We knew family and community mattered most, and that rebuilding and regenerating or lives, communities, and culture had to be done from the ground up.
We had to learn how to home in stead. First, we had to reconnect with skills and knowledge that were too easily set aside, hired out, or even replaced by consumables sold to us by folks far away and in conditions and situations we know nothing about, so far away that supply could be disrupted, taken away, on purpose or by accident, all too easily.
Emerging as so many did from that crisis with new eyes and attitudes, we were delighted when the property owners, who’d intended on building their own home at Odin’s Wrest, invited us to instead stay at the home they were then living in with their children. A house swap.
Just as at Odin’s Wrest, we waited for the place to tell us its name.
We’ve been asking for years, Peter since 2012: What does it mean to be Indigenous? It’s a long contemplation and can take many routes. So, the prefix Indie was already in mind. The Indie music scene, of the country and folk varieties especially for us, have been favourites. The history of the Indie music scene was a break from big business, and a reclaiming of creative rights and power for and by the artists. We also find ourselves always feeling more whole when we are around artisanal types, be they bakers, salmon smokers, potters, healers, or grocers.
It just feels better.
Where we live is not so far away from a small town called Wakefield where many of these fine sorts of people live. There are artists aplenty closer by, all infusing the place with signs of its own ethos and sensibility. You can feel a place. It speaks both to, and through, us.
So, that’s the Indie bit.
As we made the place our own, planted gardens, met the creatures, tended the soil, and lived into how the place felt, the home, surrounded by more verdant foliage than Odin’s Wrest, held us more softly, and yet, in the the wild.
As to the Wylde, well, it doesn’t take much more to imagine where that comes from. We are exploring what it takes to be Indie, in all the ways the word might suggest, while regaining our relationship with Nature. To boot, Jocasta’s proclivities for the wild side, and Peter’s classical tendencies, invite the word to be styled thus.
We find ourselves, here, Indie-wylde.
