Lowlines

Where are you right now? If you were asked to recall the details of the ground you just walked on - the way it felt beneath your feet…the smell…  the sounds, the faces of the people you passed - could you do it? It’s possible you’re drawing a blank…and if that’s the case, you’ve come to the right place.

I’m Petra Barran – a gatherer of people and food on the kerbs of London. I began as a food truck owner, cruising the U...

New Orleans - the most human city I know has to be the first stop on my pull to tune into the pulse of place. It’s the most magnetic of places. Here it feels like the air is thicker, the light has currents in it and the ground is …bouncy. And bubbling up from those streets is the second line, a rolling block party, a neighbourhood parade, a high-voltage current coursing through the city’s veins every Sunday with music, com...

Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana - bottom of the map, end of the world and one of the ‘fastest disappearing places on earth’. Once fertile farmland, the bird’s foot-like piece of land that stretches south from New Orleans is fraying and breaking away under the pressure of industrial canal systems, rising sea levels and a leveed Mississippi river, divorced from building up the land around her with all that rich sediment she ca...

The Sunset Limited, Westbound - Fly or take the Amtrak? The journey or the destination? Taking the slow train to Tucson just felt right. You know when your whole body craves a more gentle, almost human tempo to carry you onto the next place? So, whilst keen to get to the wide open desert, the opportunity to stretch out the journey, savour the changing landscape through Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, and have tim...

I’m looking for a desert woman, someone who is totally in tune with this powerful landscape and who might help me tune into its great vastness a little bit more. I hear in a Tucson cafe that Arivaca is ground zero for such women. I head down there - almost all the way to the border - and start asking around town for a desert woman. Who I end up spending time with is a long way from what I had imagined but who fills me with...

Working with the land, tuning into the pulse of place - the Aztecs knew what was up. They were engineering geniuses who worked with the lake around which Tenochtitlan (ancient Mexico City) was built to create a rich permaculture system - chinampas - fringed by canals and waterways. When the Spanish landed and took over they didn’t get it. They said ‘drain that lake’, make this place make sense - and the city has been sinki...

Two weeks at a plant medicine centre in the Peruvian Amazon - I thought this would be a good thorough deep dive and that I might get wiser and closer to the plants, but I soon discover that two weeks is nothing and that I know nothing. Everything at Aya Madre is a challenge to what you think you understand and who you think you are. An assault on the senses, a take-down of the ego, an all-out reckoning with not even the re...

Leaving the jungle, leaving the Americas, heading home! After OD-ing on mould and the thick, viscose brew - as well as more ‘place’ than I knew what to do with at times - the sweet relief of a plump pillow, seasoned food and a hot bath soon gives way to this eerie sense of…mutedness. All I can hear is white noise - and what do you do about that when you realise that most of your life is soundtracked by this dull hum?

In...