The Land of the Tiger God!
In the heart of the valley, flanked by sprawling Acacia forests, lies our farm, Huli-de-Vana. Seen from the vantage point of the hill, the densely gathered tops of its coconut and areca nut trees are a markedly different shade from the green of the Acacia trees. The farm itself is a veritable fiesta of green and every other perceivable colour. The deep maroon kokums hanging close to their slender branches, the large peach coloured nutmeg-fruits cracking open to reveal the red flame inside, clumps of bright orange areca nuts silhouetted against the green fronds, the purple-pink clusters of flowers nestling in a rosette of leaves indicating the start of a pineapple, and these are only the fruits.
Every change of light, every passing insect, every turn of weather elicits a change in the very mood of the land. It may appear chaotic, yet there is nature’s own indisputable method behind every small change. We at Huli-de-Vana strive only to protect this method.
When philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche warned us against being "human, all too human," it was for him one of the greatest dangers to fall into, to live only within the small provincial world of humanity. This is not to undermine the human capacity for brilliant expression, but he saw in us a danger of believing that we are the crown jewels of evolution, the chosen animals, given this paradise to do with it whatever we wanted.
We are living at a time where ecological crisis, global warming and other terrible consequences of our industrial behaviour are slowly beginning to wake us to the fact that we are not alone on this planet, that we need to be the guides of the planet, not its careless owners.When we become too obsessed with the human world, we lose our capacity to be affected by the world around us, our ability to listen to the non-human expressivity that is so important.
What exactly is non-human expression/expressivity?
The land we stand on is constantly expressing, if only we care to listen. Think of what the world around is saying through the constant emergence of tornadoes and hurricanes; the constantly changing clouds, their varying aesthetics, leaves changing colour; the changing textures of mud.Think of the earth constantly reshaping itself, the explosion of a volcano or the movements of tectonic plates that are invisible to us but are dramatically changing our landscape. Think of the complex patterns we are faced by when we see the side of a mountain that's been blown apart to create a road. Everything, even inorganic creatures express themselves. For example, think of how a crystal expresses its identity in its form, in the way it interacts with light, in its way of refracting and reflecting rays of light. Regardless of whether there's a human holding this crystal, it can produce a magnificent rainbow of light and express itself. Even atoms in their humble being express their identity. When an atom of hydrogen or helium interacts with radiation, it leaves a fingerprint of its identity in that radiation. These fingerprints allow us to identify every atom as an atom of a given species. A physicist can then use that expressivity, that information that atoms imprint, to identify them.
But even without humans around these inorganic entities were already expressing themselves. The land we stand on is constantly expressing, if only we care to listen. This geological expression is a small part of what makes our planet unique, giving us reason to admire and appreciate the earth for itself.
We at Huli-de-Vana are simply trying to understand this expression of the land, trying to understand why we are here, and seeking to bring to you what the land offers in its purest form.