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Snow covered back garden
Tat down at one of our last festivals.
Snow ball target practise.
Chilling in the living room.
Trevince House
Living in a community is something I have always wanted in my life. Knowing that there are people around to support and comfort you just feels like it should be reality for many people and it makes me sad to know that people struggle because there are on their own and do not feel protected in the place they live.
There is support, enthusiasm and comfort at Trevince house along with creativity, music, study and hard work. The energy in the house can sometimes be low and sometimes high but that is what you get in a community, a chance to vent your anger, a chance to jump for joy and a chance to be listened to, no matter what.
It is mostly cafe crew that live at Trevince but being the Buddhafield open community house, anyone is welcome. Every morning we have a meeting, a check in where we all have a space to say how we are feeling and what we are planning to do for the day. The work is plenty, help is always required, our communal dinners always need cooking in our tiny tiny kitchen.
We do everything at Trevince to help our pockets, the vans are all serviced before MOTing them and any failures will also be corrected at Trevince, we are growing a part of our own vegetable needs, bread has recently be baked regularly but as our star bread baker has moved out, who know if this will still happen. When the temperatures are above freezing we heat our hot water via our sauna system that comes to the festivals with us and we heat the house with wood burners.We believe in sustainability, living low impact lives and creating a supportive and creative place to be and learn.
Trevince house is siuated not that far from Dartmoor on top of a hill, it’s surrounded by open fields and woodlands and steep slopes perfect in the snow we just had for sledging. The stars shine out brightly in the massive expansive sky and the openess in the surrounding area impacts on our own openess as a community.
-Lou
Living at Trevince, I am the happiest I have ever been. Each morning I get up, with a thrill of excitement that I am spending another day in the place I want to be most in the world. As I make my morning cup of tea I am greeted with sleepy smiles, and warm morning hugs, and gradually (for we are a group with a large range of sleeping patterns!) we all congregate in the living room, to check in and decide the plan of action for the day. After a few minutes of silence as no one ever wants to start check-in first, Satyajit usually relents and gets the ball rolling. I think check-ins are my favourite part of the day, everyone is in one room, we hold the space for each other, and we open to each other in a way I have never experienced before. Anything and everything is said in that space, every emotion, from joy to despair, is expressed and sat with. I always finnish check-ins with a sense of awe, it is so hard to try and understand yourself, to understand what it is that you are really feeling and express it, with as much awareness as possible, but we are trying, and it is so beautiful. I look round the room, in those few moments before we start to talk, and some days I feel as if I could burst, showering everyone with stars, I am so happy and proud to be living with these people, to be part of Buddhafield.
Post check-in the day’s work, the cooking and when we will meditate is discussed, and eventually, the larger group dissapates, each of us wandering off, after another cup of tea of course, to get on with our alloted tasks. A few of us will go to Easterbrook to tend the garden and pick salad, Ruperdarshin will be in his dome, chipping away, others will be working on vans or moving things around, canvas’s need to be sorted and repaired, and there is always cleaning or cooking to be done. Each day is different, even doing the same tasks, there is always something that changes, yet one thing is always the same – my joy at being here, my astonishment at how lucky I am to be living this way.
About 6pm, or later, it depends on who is cooking, dinner is ready and we all gradually arrive in the living room from the different parts of the house and garden that we have been in. This is also one of my favourite times, we all sit together eating and catching up with each other, we swap stories of our adventures that day and talk about different ways of solving problems we are facing. The food is always amazing, we take it vaguely in turns to cook, everyone has their own way of doing things, so it is always interesting eating! Our evenings are spent, again, with each other, people wander in and out of the living room where some read or carve, draw or write. People move from van to yurt to TV room to the office, in search of the perfect warm spot, the kettle whistles sporadically, and over it all there is a low hum of laughter.
-Ruth