Discovering radical love at 42 Acres in England
Annabel Heseltine reviews Radical Love, led by peace pilgrim Satish Kumar in Somerset, where she discovers a multi-talented pagan druid, an enchanting beaver family, and the power of unconditional love
It’s not easy to put one foot in front of you and then just keep going for 8,000 miles but that is exactly what Satish Kumar did in 1962. He walked from Gandhi’s grave in Delhi via Moscow, Paris and London the European cities with nuclear weapons to meet President Kennedy in Washington DC as a peaceful protest against them but, by the time he got there, Kennedy had been shot and so he walked to his grave too.
I didn’t have so far to walk to meet the former Jain monk who settled in the UK, married an English girl, June Mitchell, founded the Schumacher College at Dartington in Devon and - for 35 years - has been guardian of The Resurgence Movement as Editor and now Editor Emeritus.
“Satish’s inspiring vision of a world of peace, love, ecology and resurgence, seemed a tad closer, a tad more feasible and so much more reassuring”
I just had to walk for 45 minutes from my home across the wilderness retreat that is 42 Acres in Somerset just outside Bruton, to where the 86-year-old man many regard as something of a spiritual guru was holding a weekend retreat about Radical Love.
I was tired, disillusioned and feeling disempowered and anxious after weeks of hearing negative talk about the biodiversity crisis. I was longing for some respite, to sit on the floor and be still. Besides, I was intrigued to know more about radical love. I arrived at the flint and red brick farmhouse in time for tea, some delicious cacao bliss balls and turmeric tea with homemade honey, then Satish gathered all 32 of us together in a large round Mongolian-style yurt across the track.
First, he asked us to close our eyes. Bring your hands together, left hand is self, right hand is the world. Together they are inter-connected, he explained, as he took us into a short meditation before inviting each of us to introduce ourselves; five men, two with their wives; a couple of mother and daughter duets, women of all ages. A savvy 17-year-old was there with her mother, a GP interested in land healing. Five girls from Turkey had driven up from London, another had flown in from Norway.
One girl confessed later that she worked for Amazon which might have seemed a little out of kilter with the artists, gardeners, therapists, photographers, coaches, yoga teachers, healers and homeopaths who had come from all over the UK to hear Satish.
He started with a question; how many of you have read Siddhartha? Briefly he evaluated the power of waiting, fasting, thinking and serving; the latter being the most important. Books peppered his conversation over the next two days; Rumi, Aristotle, Fritjof Capra who espoused Deep Ecology, as he explored with us the meaning of love which he described as our inner reality. ‘That’s all there is. Love. That’s it!’
That first evening, he was gentle with us. After an hour of talking about love and peace and its power, we gathered around long tables for dinner. It was where we ate most of our meals, migrating outside whenever the sun shone. Steaming bowls of rice, chickpea and vegetarian curries, soups and red and green salsa, made from wild garlic and nettle flowers foraged in the woods, along with mushrooms grown in log stacks, were washed down with fennel and chamomile water and homemade apple and carrot juices. Depending upon the season, 40 to 80 per cent of the food at 42 Acres is harvested from its own land, the walled garden and a phalanx of greenhouses.
Satish promised he would talk to us about radical love the next day but for now it was back to quiet rooms with warm, white duvets, or to read some of the many wonderful books stacked enticingly on ladders and shelves in the safe spaces, thoughtfully left for guests to relax, a sitting room here, a chair there, a study, a desk.
Love is not that simple, he said, the next day after breakfast. It felt like midday although it was only 10am. Most of us had been up several hours looking for wild bees and beavers with a multi-skilled Polish pagan druid – yes really - who sang beautifully, cooked beautifully and was the God of bushcraft, or had been wild swimming in a lake still veiled in a dawn mist. I had been tempted out earlier by a beautiful land healer who showed me where the beavers lived; their messy home cradled by a boat house. In silence we held our breath, listening to their kits squeaking.
At 7.30am most of us were back in the ger meditating with Satish. By now I knew his delightful rhythm. Breathe in, breathe out, smile and let go. Each time he said it, I felt my shoulders grow lighter as tensions and anxiety slipped away.
And then it was back to business. It’s easy to forget until you hear him speak that there is a tenacity to his talk – we shouldn’t forget those miles he walked. Like all of us Satish knows we face a crisis, like very few of us he does not worry because, as he explained, there is no point being attached to an outcome. It’s all in the journey.
And love, says Satish, is in everything; the music we sing and play, the art we create and food we prepare but unlike moderate love which is the conditional love you give to your husband or wife, to your children and your parents, to your friends and yes, even your colleagues, when you do expect something back, radical love is unconditional.
‘Moderate love is also difficult, but not as difficult as radical love,’ explained Satish, ‘for that you must go a step further and for that you need courage; to give love to someone you might not agree with, you might not like. Radical love has the possibility and potential to transform someone you consider to be on the wrong path. You can hate someone who is misguided and behaving badly but hatred does not transform. This takes a lot of belief and trust in yourself. It is what Jesus has, Buddha, Mother Theresa, Hildegard of Bingen, Martin Luther King and, of course, Gandhi.’
I understood his message about radical love and the challenges it poses but it was when Satish Kumar started to talk about deep ecology on Sunday morning after a second session of meditative session of qigong with June using bamboo sticks, that I connected emotionally. His words spun an entangled web of love encapsulated in his 2013 book Soil.Soul.Society: A New Trinity for Our Time.
It was no accident that he had chosen to hold his retreat at 42 Acres, one of his favourite places, he says, a place opened up to wilderness by siblings Seth and Lara Tabatznik, or that Ben Goldsmith, Seth’s neighbour, walked over to talk about his wilding project, or that we sat around campfires in the woods, some of us camped. Satish’s inspiring vision of a world of peace, love, ecology and resurgence, seemed a tad closer, a tad more feasible and so much more reassuring that day.
