It comes too early. The same time each day. A little after dawn. I’d guess half past six on a clock. I wouldn’t know. I don’t bother with clocks here. They don’t mean much. They don’t change the light or the weather or what needs to be done.

I hear it before I see it. Often I don’t see it at all. A flutter of wings at most. Soft. But the sound is keen, sharp, hard to block out.

I tell Diogo. 

‘Tac-a-tac-a-tac?’ he asks.

 ‘Something like that,’ I tell him. 

‘Around dawn?’

‘Every day.’

He laughs. The same little bird has been throwing itself at the skylight of the volunteer house every morning since he built it two years ago. Perhaps it comes to wake the volunteers on time for work. Perhaps it’s convinced one day it’ll make it inside and cosy up by the fire. Perhaps it hasn’t even noticed there’s a house here now and just flies the same route it’s always flown. Those are my theories.

Diogo has another. The bird comes as a reminder, of the way all of us throw ourselves blindly at the ambitions handed down to us, convincing ourselves we are tantalisingly close, changing nothing, questioning nothing.

Diogo stopped hurling himself at the window five years ago. He left the city and moved back to this land, to the valley where his parents live. He had studied economics and was running a company in Rio, designing signs, doing well enough, by those empty metrics of the city.

This was old plantation land. Diogo’s parents had been growing coffee and bananas in failing monocultures. Vast swathes of their land were given up to lawn. 

‘Rich people have lawns to show they don’t need to farm to eat, to show they’re too good to be close to the land,’ Diogo tells me.

 He argued with his parents until they arrived at a compromise: half the land would remain as it was, all plantations and rich-people lawns; on the other half, Diogo would experiment.

He grins as he thinks back to those early failed experiments; the geodesic dome that blew away with the first strong wind, the cob house that collapsed the moment the scaffold was removed.

After years of trying to bring the native Atlantic forest in this valley back to life, he concluded that the best thing was to let nature do her work. On occasion, he brings his son and daughter up here and they fire seedballs from slingshots to help her on her way. For the most part, he lets the forest be.

Any link to indigenous knowledge in this valley had long been severed by the time Diogo arrived here. He couldn’t read the knowledge etched into the trees so he learned in the language of the city, stored in books and computer chips. Now the agroforest produces such an abundance of bananas that Diogo doesn’t know what to do with them. While I’m on the farm, we bake them into cereal bars, make banana ice cream, fill crepiocas and still there’s an entire fridge full.

Us volunteers gather lunch from the vegetable garden and the herb spiral each morning. Most work exchanges involve hard graft, many are looking for cheap labour, but Diogo seems only to want to share what he’s learned. We work a few hours, sow some seeds or build vases with the clay dug up from the pond, then we gather food from the garden. We spend a long while eating lunch, and once we finish Diogo chain smokes and talks about permaculture.

He teaches us to waste nothing. Each time we empty the bin into the compost, the chickens dash over like it’s feeding time. It’s a wonder any of it makes it back into the soil. 

We talk about applying permaculture to ourselves; we are a part of this land too, after all. And principles like ‘Observe and Interact’, ‘Make Use of the Margins’ and ‘Integrate don’t Segregate’ make at least as much sense applied to human life as to working the land.

The volunteers aren’t the only ones who benefit from Diogo’s wisdom. He hosts workshops in the ranch for local schoolchildren, giving a tour of the farm and letting the kids get their hands dirty, building, planting and playing.

After lunch each day, we rest. Diogo asks one day what I’m doing with my afternoons. I tell him I’m reading. He laughs ‘Reading! You’re still trying to escape. Try just sitting and watching the trees.’

So I sit and watch the trees. I see two toucans, a hummingbird and plenty more species of bird I can’t name. I studied the birds in my local area as a child. I could tell you the name of any bird in England. Here I only know the names of birds I’ve seen in cartoons, or locked up at the zoo. I soon learn that there’s nothing a name can tell you that you couldn’t learn from watching the bird itself for half an afternoon.

I couldn’t tell you the name of the bird that wakes me either. I could call him ‘tac-a-tac’ after the sound he makes. I could call him my alarm clock. 

I decide not to name him. But I do start to thank him when he comes to wake me each morning in time for first light over the little farm.