AUTOPISTA OFF

“...and now for many a year there will be no more rambling through the aisles of the wood, with occasional vistas through which you see the water. My muse may be excused if she is silent henceforth. How can you expect the birds to sing when their groves are cut down?” Thoreau, Walden

As you will see from the video, the main news this week is that a big utility company want to make an ‘electricity superhighway’ (aka ‘autopista electrica’). They want it to run all the way to France, over the Pyrenees, heading just behind my land, coming from God knows where. Satan’s arsehole, probably.

It seems there is nowhere to hide. The quiet, simple life is under threat once again from the incessant march of so-called ‘progress’ and ‘technology’.

The thing is, this technology is outdated. This is a retrogressive step. It is the company, not me, that is behind the times.

Microgeneration is the future people! (Actually, it is the present. I’m not yet sure if we have a future).

I’m sure Big Nasty and Greedy Inc know this. And I’m sure they are shitting themselves. Think of all the profit to be lost if the people can generate their own electricity! Quick, lets build massive infrastructure, before it becomes completely redundant, and see if we can’t squeeze out a few more million in profits, before the excrement hits the solar-powered fan.

It’s ok, BN&G. I have an answer for us both. It’s a win-win situation. You will continue to make supernormal profits by screwing the little guy, and I will continue to be able to sit on my land without getting my gonads fried by your electric cables. Here’s how:

Instead of investing all that money in electricity pylons and bribes (sorry, I mean ‘compensation’) to local Government, you invest it in solar panels. You pay for the solar panels, their installation and, if necessary, their maintenance (NB solar panels rarely need any maintenance, but don’t tell the punters that – then you can stiff them for a few more Euros every month). You supply all the houses you would have supplied electricity for with solar set ups so that they can generate their own electricity! No cables! No children with cancer! No nuclear explosions or waste to throw into the sea! No monstrosities marring this beautiful landscape!

I know I know, it sounds terrible. But bear with me. You still get to make piles of cash.

Instead of households paying you a monthly direct debit for energy usage, they pay you a monthly direct debit to pay back the cost of purchase, installation and maintenance. Plus interest of course. Kind of like an electricity mortgage.

There you go. Clean, safe energy, but we still maintain people’s dependence on big business and therefore the status quo. Everybody happyish?

Great. Well then leave this beautiful countryside alone and go and buy up a pile of solar panel companies double quick, before the competition reads this blog and beats you to it.

By the way, I am giving this idea away for free. There is no patent pending. Just go out and exploit it.

Have a great day, big corporations of the world. May your directors’ bonuses increase exponentially.

DEATH TO THE CITY!

Spending time in nature, having some time away from the distractions of life simply to be with myself, my mind is calming down, the internalised noise of the city is dying away, I am becoming aligned with the sounds and rhythms of the natural environment. My heart is opening, my dreams are becoming richer, I am starting to have realisations about who I am and how I am.

The natural world isn’t just something you look at and think ‘that’s pretty’. It infects you and affects you deeply. You drink it in and it awakens the wilderness in you. And in this way, it alters your perception. It is like a de-hallucinogen. You start to see what’s really going on.

We tend not to realise the impact that being surrounded by a human-made, human-controlled environment has on our awareness. We walk on tarmac, we see straight lines everywhere, everything around us has been designed by humans, to benefit humans in some way. If there’s a problem, there’s someone you can call to complain about it. We can hardly see the sky. The weather can be a mild irritant, but it doesn’t affect us much – we turn on the heat (designed and installed by someone else), close the curtains and turn on the TV, mentally inhabiting a world that has been designed and scripted by humans. It has the look of reality about it, but really it is just the product of someone’s mind.

Where is the god in all this? Gods have become irrelevant. I’m not surprised Big Brother is so popular. I am not a Christian, but I know that this universe is majestic and immense, and it is a miracle. Right down to a single leaf falling from a branch in the forest, as the wind breezes past to carry it to the floor. Right up to the magnificence of the roof of this world – a million stars every night, away from the pollution of street lights and exhaust fumes, you can never get bored of looking at them. Every hour they are different. No wonder the druids built Stonehenge. No wonder the Egyptians found their gods in the stars.

Humans cannot possibly match this magnificence, no matter how clever their creations. And in surrounding ourselves with the built environment we lose touch with our place in the universe, and with that feeling of being blessed that wells up all the time when you are surrounded by miracles.

We are supposed to be happy. That’s our natural state. I am becoming increasingly militant in my belief that the city makes happiness difficult.

I went to the city this week. When I have been away from it for a while and then I go back, it is always a bit of a shock. It’s like there has been some enormous national disaster while I was away and I didn’t get to hear about it. Everyone looks so traumatised. And then I remember, no, this is just the city.

The other thing I noticed this time was that life is hard for the vast majority of people. The current economic system is not working in their favour. We are taught that anyone can make it in the Western world, but when I look around I start to think that maybe this is propaganda being floated by the few people at the top with the money. When you look at it as a whole, from the outside so to speak, it just doesn’t seem to be the case. There are lots and lots of tiny apartments, loads of people working hard to pay for the privilege of living in them, and there is crime and litter and overcrowding and ill health. It seems to have all the attributes that people think of when they think of a non-Westernised, non-‘civilised’ life: it’s dirty, it’s dangerous, it’s uncomfortable, it makes you ill, it requires a lot of hard work just to survive. Hello? Is anyone actually looking at how things are in the modern world? Do we really want to fuck the environment beyond repair just to keep living like this?

The thing about not living that city life is that, yes it might well be all those things, but at least you have some autonomy. There is a self-respect that comes out of making your own place (to your own design, based on how you actually want to live), gathering your own wood and water, etc etc. This self-respect is the birthright of all of us – not just for the people who have managed to score some high-paying job selling shares in battery hen futures or something. Buy buy, sell sell, fuck off.

The more I think about it, the more it becomes clear to me that the future should be, and probably must be, about scaling things down. The economy is so complex it allows credit crunches and global exploitation. Would we really buy trainers made by kids in sweatshops if those kids lived on our street?

Schumacher wrote a book called ‘Small is Beautiful’- I have probably written about this before, but he’s right. I am thinking about this not just in economic terms, but as a way to structure society too.

So death to the city. We need small. We need local. And when things are small they don’t need so much policing by external bodies, and they don’t need so many bureaucrats, and that means we don’t have to be bullied by them, and we don’t have to pay them for the privilege. We can run our own lives, and help our own neighbours.

And don’t think this can’t happen either. I’m reading a history of Britain at the moment and, as far as I can work out, things started to go downhill round about the end of the Stone Age. But the other interesting thing is that when Britain was ruled by the Romans there were cities. When the Romans buggared off to play elsewhere, the cities broke down. And then the Vikings came and built them up again, but that was a few hundred years later. In the meantime people got back to having a less sophisticated economy – more local, more village-based. You have to do without your fancy trinkets from Rome and your spices from Africa, but you get to work from home and you don't have some twatty Roman robbing you. Sorry, I mean 'taxing' you.

Anyway, that’s it from me for 2008CE. I shall be back in 2009 with more opinions and news of how I managed to spend the Christmas period without seeing the Queen’s speech and without watching Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

Ho ho ho (said the hallucinating shaman from Lapland) and have a lovely festive period.

Padma

THE YURT IS UP!!!

Last night was our first night in the yurt. Haven’t got the solar gear installed yet so no electricity for now. Hence no video blog yet.

The last week was taken up with building the yurt. I have been consistent in my underestimation of the time required to make things happen here. I thought the yurt would take half a day to put up. A day tops. In the end it took more like four days. This was because we had to do quite a bit of modification to the yurt itself. We made a new crown for it (the last one died during heavy snowfall a couple of years ago). The holes I drilled were a couple of mm smaller than the last ones (predictably) so I then had to shave down a bunch of the roof poles to fit. There were a number of other tiny but time-consuming little dramas to contend with on top of this, made all the more complicated by having few tools, all of which are hand tools, not electric and thus progress is slower and more tiring. Lots of scratching of the head and working out ways to get things done.

Yurt geeks like me might be interested in the full details of my conundrums, but they will be of zero interest to the general reader so I have decided to err on the side of brevity, in a bid to appeal to the general public. Unlike Thoreau, who uses three-line sentences wherever possible. The Plain English campaign was not even a glint in the eye of its maker when Thoreau was writing. You need a nineteenth century attention span to be able to digest what he’s actually saying. I believe there are Cliffe Notes available for us today. The Nintendo generation likes bullet points. And lots of pictures.

I’m currently sitting in a bar in the nearest town, which has intermittent wifi.

Last night I began my time in the yurt with a ritual asking for the blessing of the land and wishing wellbeing and happiness for all beings past, present and future who spend time there. I also played some guitar for the first time in a month. I start to go a bit crazy after a while if I don’t play some music. I have no idea why. But then I have no idea why music has been so important to all cultures everywhere forever. All I know is that Music Runs Deep.

It’s a strange one, building a relationship with a piece of land. One of the aspects of Walden that I have been reflecting on is that, while making general statements about life, Thoreau fills many pages with details about the specific characteristics of his surroundings. Spending time in the environment here, I understand why he is so passionate. It's just so beautiful. It moves you. You can't get across just how magnificent it is by using words, and yet I can see why Thoreau felt moved to try.

When we think about 'conserving nature' or 'protecting the environment' and what have you, we think in quite general terms about this big thing, separate from us, called 'nature'. But the reality is not a general thing. It is specific, and it affects you personally. Sitting surrounded by miles of concrete, you have nothing to go on but the abstract concept. And thus 'nature' becomes just another idea, like 'poverty' or 'war'. Not very real to me personally, and therefore not very urgent, compared with, say, the kids making noise on my street every night. But when the war, or the poverty, or the nature, is right here in front of us, we act.

This love of one’s immediate environment is something that many of us have no sense of. After all, one building is pretty much the same as another. The same with streets. The same, in fact, with whole cities.

The situation is getting worse as time passes. The city centres of England look increasingly like each other. Regeneration seems to mean homogenisation. Personally I prefer diversity. I know it makes it harder for multinational companies to sell the same product, using the same marketing strategy, around the world, but I guess I’m just weird like that. One of the things I have loved most about my wandering life is that it is possible to go somewhere else – not just a different version of here.

The downside of my wandering life is that I am always somewhere else. Building a relationship with one place is something I have not really managed to do since leaving my hometown many years ago. Philosophically speaking, I think staying put is key to being human – communities only really develop if people stick around, have kids together, and grow old together. But my feet just keep wandering off.

The good news is that I think I may have solved the problem. If I am to be a nomad, my plan is to live more as nomads actually live. Rather than simply being rootless, my idea is to have a nomadic circuit, so that I am returning to the same places again and again. I have been managing this with Catalunya. I have been coming to this area for a few years now, watching it change, seeing the lives of my friends move on. I like it. Putting down the wooden floor is the most permanent thing I have ever done. So maybe I just need a couple more hubs and I will be set.

The other thing I’ve been thinking about this week is the fact that I haven’t really been thinking very much. There is a line in Walden where he says that, for the first summer, he read nothing. He hoed beans. That’s been pretty much my experience. Just doing. There will be time to be later.

I have become used to waking up with my arms aching, and feeling that today it is unfeasible for me to carry anything. But then I get up and moving, and soon enough I have more things in my arms, carrying them down, up, or across the mountain. A stove. A door. A double mattress. Everything that is here has been carried by hand. And I feel strong, and good. It occurs to me that the body can take quite a hammering. We are very careful with it, and protect it with all manner of behaviours, nutrients and creams, and this is all well and good, but it is specific to a fairly sedentary mode of life. 20 minutes of exercise 3 times a week. There is a different way to be.

I don't really have the words for it yet, but it is something to do with not experiencing one's body as an object. Being with the land, moving through the land, not looking in a mirror, experiencing the breath and the muscles, and the hunger after a hard day of physical, varied work that involves the whole being, not just the muscles. I don't know, it's a good feeling. I feel more like a dog looks, when you look in a dog's eyes and you see an integrated being. Fully savage, openly loving, an extension of its biology, its instinct, not a denial of such things. Does that make sense? We percieve instinct and animalistic drives as dangerous - leading to violence, rape, theft and such things. But I think instincts only turn nasty when an animal is brutalised. The natural state is one of harmony, love, and peace...

It is an incredible feeling to sit in one’s dwelling, look around, and think ‘I made this’. There is an intimacy about it that you don’t get with a place that you just move into. It’s been hard work, but I feel extremely lucky.

I'll get the video blog sorted asap.

Padma