Beyond the Pail?

The ultimate bucket list

This is an essay I wrote back in 2018 but haven’t published here on Substack yet. In a recent conversation with someone about the magic of compost toilets as a vehicle for deep connection with nature I felt it was worth revisiting and sharing it here. Enjoy!

I lived for 5 years in a yurt in an old olive grove in Catalunya, Spain with my wife and two children. I now live in a small wooden house on an old strawberry farm in Finland with my wife and two children. Polar opposites superficially, climatically, culturally, agriculturally; but philosophically, emotionally and logically identical.

You see, our lives are a slow process of unlearning and reconnecting. My soon to be 6-year-old knows no other way. Before he could walk he was living in a cob hobbit house in the foothills of the Sierra de Montsant, taking his baby naps lying in the grass while his parents learned to rotationally graze sheep and chickens, to grow gardens and food forests, to prune almond and olive trees, to come directly face to face with the bare reality of human life. To consider our needs as opposed to our desires, to observe, measure and steer the energetic flows required to survive. And consequently to learn to love the lowly bucket…

We need to eat, to drink water, to be sheltered, to expel our wastes, to love and be loved. And nothing more.

Simple right? I have often repeated that mantra to students and volunteers on our permaculture homestead, to myself, to my wife, to my boys. It bears repeating often and loudly.

Human life is as uncomplicated as the life of a bullfinch, a hare, a pike.

And yet we convolute industrially-civilised-human existence to such a level of abstraction and complexity that it has become unfathomable to even the most erudite.

What would the bullfinch say to us civilised, urbanised human beings?

“Where is your food? I see none here.”

We rely on businesses that bring our food to us in supermarkets via planes and boats and trucks. We do not know in truth where are food comes from or how it was created.

“What do you drink?”

We rely on corporations to pump water from far away, to sterilise it with chlorine and medicate it with fluoride. And when it is dirtied to the point of toxicity, to filter it and re-sterilise it again and again for us to re-drink. We do not know in truth where our water comes from or where it goes.

“Where do you shelter?”

We live in apartments or houses which for most of our lives we do not own, if ever. We rely on banks and landlords to provide these buildings for us and we are indebted to them seemingly forever. We do not understand in truth the mechanism by which we are sheltered, just that we are fortunate to be sheltered.

“Where do your bodily wastes go?”

Clever men designed ways to take away our urine and faeces using our drinking water to flush it to far off parts of our cities where it is ‘cleaned’ and sent away so that we do not need to see or think about it. We understand that this has made cities less lethal than they were before but we do not understand in truth where our waste goes or what happens to it after it leaves our houses.

“What do you do all day?”

5 or 6 days per week we work for the corporations we rely upon, so that we can earn just enough money to pay them back for the food, shelter and water they generously provide for us. On our days of rest we seek distraction to briefly erase the reality we face again the following week. We do not understand in truth why we do this, just that in order to eat and drink and be sheltered, we have no choice.

“Oh…I must be on my way.”

I lived that life. For 35 years I lived a life according to the industrial progress narrative. Did what I was supposed to do because everyone else did the same, not understanding the energetic flows in and out of my life, not seeing a human as an animal, instead dumbly and mutely accepting the lie of our self-made image: A being entirely abstracted from this thing we choose occasionally to visit and photograph: Nature.

And all throughout my adult, urban life of disconnection and misinformation I was the none-too-proud owner of exactly one bucket. A mop bucket, to be precise. It’s all one needs right?

I have now come to realise through my years of living a homesteader’s existence, that nearly everything I do requires a bucket and that despite it being a construct of our technological humanity, this simple vessel represents in almost every way, a chance to reconnect with our true animal selves. The bucket is a tool of humility, of gratitude and of realisation. I now own at least a dozen. Let me walk you through my day in the company of buckets.

I wake, shuffling my way down to the wood stove to boil water for tea. On my way past I pick up the ‘wee bucket’ we use during the night. We separate and collect our urine and treat it as the precious resource it is; a prime fertiliser loaded with all the nutrients needed for garden plants, grasses and trees to grow and flourish. It gets diluted and distributed around our farm as needed throughout the seasons.

Ash from our woodstove needs emptying before we light the fire. This ash is deposited into a bucket and again is spread around our kitchen garden and fields as an additional soil amendment full of calcium, potash and phosphate and helpfully reducing the acidity of our northern coniferous soils here in Finland.

I light the fire with wood my wife or I hauled from the barn in a wooden basket (a form of pre-industrial bucket). While the kettle boils we go out to feed the chickens, ducks and goats and to collect their eggs and milk. We take the scrap bucket from under the sink out to the chickens, stopping at the water butt to fill a bucket of fresh rain water for them. On our way to milk the goats, I stop at a rowan tree to pick berries as a treat for them, enjoying the satisfying pop-pop-pop as they tumble from my hands into the base of another bucket. In the barn I scoop grain for the goats and chickens into a different bucket and we see to all their needs.

During the day we visit the bathroom, which, you guessed it, is a bucket-based compost toilet. When it’s full after a few days use, it gets transported out to a much larger container for long term composting. Just as with our urine, our faeces is a valuable resource we treasure, as through the magical process of decomposition known as composting, it can be returned once more to our soil to regenerate it over the years.

Around lunch time one of us will wander out to the kitchen garden in summer, or the cellar in winter to collect vegetables. The ubiquitous bucket swinging at our side. The bucket therefore becomes a unit of measurement, an assessment of quantity, as much as a means of transport. A quarter of a bucket of potatoes per meal equals how many buckets needed per year to sustain us? A bucket of oats pays a dividend in so many litres of goat milk. How many buckets of compost are required per veg bed per year? Our universal and quotidian reference gauge.

Our water comes from our own well and here I have to admit to having made the uneasy transition from bucket to pump. For our first few months in Finland we drew water from the well by bucket and hauled it the 35 metres from the well to our house. I am, at heart, a luddite and carry with me the story a friend once told me about another friend of his, obstinately refusing to install a tap and pump from his well to his house. His reasoning was simple:

“I want to know the weight of water”

This answer conjures untold images of women and girls of the global South carrying, often huge, containers of water on their heads or their backs. For these women that know daily, the weight of water, the preciousness of every drop, this friend of a friend feels the need to continue to bear that weight as a token of unspoken solidarity. But I have to admit that I have succumbed to a certain modern pragmatism in this aspect of our lives as the thought of drawing water from our well in minus 25 °C during our long Nordic winters got the better of me. The well bucket sits patiently however, biding its time, waiting for the day the pump breaks or the electricity comes to an end.

Our experience of regenerative farming in drought ridden Southern Catalunya, gave additional meaning to the weight of water in our own lives. Every drop collected in our rain gauge and our soils was duly recorded and celebrated, every litre of our drinking water needed to be fetched up the dusty hill to the farm from the village fountain. During our initial 6 month permaculture apprenticeship in Montsant, Catalunya our hosts and mentors, eked out their spring and rainwater capture with stoic determination and often painful realisation. If the autumn or spring rains didn’t come there simply would not be enough water to justify planting certain crops.

July onwards in Finland delivers a harvest of delights from the forests. The shlop of wellies, the insistent whine of mosquitoes, the brush of a bucket or basket against our thighs, the soundtrack as we head into the woods to harvest raspberries, bilberries, lingonberries, chanterelles, ceps and hedgehog mushrooms. On these trips the bucket, an empty vessel as we start out, represents a question posed to the forest and to our animal neighbours.

“May we, please fill our container? Are you willing to share with us? Us, the species whose modus operandi is to take without asking, to take all without leaving enough for others in need. Can you re-teach us unconditional generosity and reciprocity?”

A bucket comes on every fishing trip with us in case we get a catch. Again more in hope than divine right.

And twice a week, at the end of the day, we light another fire to heat water and sauna stones and clean ourselves. The method we, and all Finns in the not too distant past, use to wash ourselves. Scooping water directly from a barrel (aka a bucket on steroids). When hot water doesn’t automatically come out of a shower or tap — as it hasn’t in our lives for the last 14 years — a different appreciation is fostered for it. We learned directly exactly how many buckets of hot water a family of four needs to wash themselves during our time in Spain. Sometimes heating our water through pipes running through the body of a very large compost pile, sometimes heating water on our stove or via the sun, we came to appreciate the calorific energy, both human and fuel based, required to get our bodies clean.

And then finally, after long tiring days of fetching and carrying, off to bed, ‘wee bucket’ in hand, to collect more of that liquid gold.

And that is only a small example of the uses we have for this ultimately useful tool. Living a life that requires the use of a bucket so many times per day, means living a life in which you are literally, physically, carrying those energetic flows through your days. Our food and water and fuel come in, grown, and chopped and carried by our own hands. Our fires are lit and our bodies are nourished and hydrated and warmed and cleaned. We understand where that nourishment and warmth and hydration has come from, how it has come to be available to us. We are humbled and grateful that we can be part of these most natural processes of the human animal. And afterwards the energetic flows from our bodies and our lives are returned directly to the land and ecological communities that sustain us. Our bodies and our buckets are the vessels for that return to the earth. By carrying our basic needs in and out of our lives we can answer with honesty and clarity, when our comrade, the bullfinch asks us his probing questions.

“We do, finally, understand how to live and every day we strive to move one more blade of grass closer to our home alongside you, bullfinch. But we do not understand in truth, why we ever felt the need to venture beyond the pail.”