A new beginning

This is An Animist's Ramblings, a demi-hermit's cultural commentary from the periphery of civilization.

After a three-year break from writing, I finally decided it's time to pick up the (virtual) pen again and, from now on, I'll write a few quick pieces here and there, just to get things off my chest.

I've never been much of a serious writer (I published a handful of pieces on medium.com with mixed success, and usually restrict my writing to communications with family, friends and acquaintances), but I found writing to be a comforting way to deal with certain thoughts, ideas, fears, and worries - whether anyone reads the result or not. I've had some of my best ideas while writing, and it is a this point an almost therapeutic exercise for me. What I'm planning to do here is exactly this: if I have something that's worth writing down, I will publish it here for friends, family and supporters to read. I will probably write a few pieces before even telling anybody about this new side project, so that this blog doesn't look too sad and empty when folks first stumble upon it.

One of the reasons why I hadn’t had the time to write is that we moved to a new place at the end of 2018. This means that I've been very busy the last three years, probably busier than I've ever been before. My wife and I found, through a mystical concatenation of good fortune and sheer coincidence, a semi-abandoned fruit orchard on a hillside next to the jungle, just waiting for someone to steward the land. We've spent the last three years setting things up, digging, chopping, building, mixing soil, planting countless trees, composting, learning, experimenting, reading, talking and simply enjoying a simpler life, in tune with the seasons, the elements, and all the incredible creatures we share this piece of the Earth with.
There are many fruit trees on our land that are already mature - the tallest is a 15m-high Santol tree - but we recently reached a milestone: the point where the trees we planted three years ago are higher than ourselves (in some cases significantly higher - there’s a Mahogany tree we planted close to our house that’s already three times my height!). The feeling of walking through our garden is a distinctly different one now, there is no rush anymore, no need for urgency: the most important species are established and thriving, and we can lean back and relax more from now on. I have more time on my hands to spend on things that are not directly related to our garden, so I finally have some time to write again.

It’s rather chilly in the morning right now - we’re currently in the cold dry season (“cold” meaning temperatures as low as 12◦C) - and no place feels as comfortable as sitting in my hammock in a comfy, warm sweater, hand-knitted woolen socks from my grandmother on my feet, and a hot cup of coffee in hand: the perfect setting to get the things off my chest that accumulated there over the last three years. That’s what I’m doing right now.

We are not fully self-sufficient yet (if that's ever really a possibility), but we've made it quite far in the short time we live here. We now tend over five hundred (!) different species and cultivars of all kinds of different plants; trees, shrubs, herbs, grasses, vines, tubers, berries, fruits, nuts, vegetables, and rhizomes, mostly native stuff, but including a few gems from all around the world. Much of what we do is motivated by the task to heal the ecosystem we're part of, and much of what little we earn (financially) gets reinvested immediately in organic matter, plant diversity or things we happen to be short of.

Another reason why I didn’t do any writing is that we live off-grid (we actually were without electricity for the first two years here) and just installed a small solar system at the end of last year to allow for such civilized conveniences as electric lights and the means to write and publish what you're currently reading.

Living off-grid was, to be honest, initially not our own choice: a few years before we moved here a young elephant bull made that choice for us when he ripped down the power lines that the previous owner had set up (it's not his fault, though, someone scared him by firing a gun to chase him away - I mean, the elephant, not the previous owner). But we are not the kind to decline a little challenge, and so we decided to try it, and - who would have thought - it's surprisingly easy! To be fair, we had two headlamps and a phone that we occasionally charged at a friend's place down in the valley, but the point still stands. Anyone who now tells me that “humans” “need” electricity can expect to get a smug answer.

The reality is: you go to bed earlier, you wake up earlier. You are more productive during the day, and you sleep better afterwards. Your attention span is not under constant assault from digital media, and you have copious amounts of free time to do everything from reading, weaving baskets, carving wood, playing guitar, and all the other things you always wanted to try.

What we are doing here proves that human life, contrary to the Myth of Progress, doesn’t have to move “forwards”, and a step “back” can indeed be a step in the right direction, down a new (or old, depending on your perspective) path. We’ve had our experience with city life, we worked regular jobs that served people who already have more than enough, ate shitty food prepared without love or connection to the ingredients, wasted hours every day just to get to work and back, got annoyed by strangers, artificial environments and by the factitiousness of life in modern society, and we realized that this kind of life doesn’t correspond to how it looks like in advertising, on TV or in the movies. Its stressful, wasteful, and doesn’t to anyone any good. It’s not worth it.

Good news is, humans were not made to live like this. We didn’t evolve to walk daily among thousands of people we don’t know, eat food that doesn’t nourish, spend our time alone in the company of machines and screens, and work repetitive and dull jobs for the majority of or lifetime on this Earth. This is not life. This is a sad replica of what we were meant to do, what we were made to experience, and how we were meant to live.

So, how are we meant to live?

This is the question I’ve been trying to answer myself for the past ten years, and maybe longer. I realized early in my teens that modern life simply doesn’t work, neither for people, nor for the environment we inhabit. The first alternatives I encountered as a teenager were Buddhism (in terms of spirituality), and Communism (in terms of politics), and I enthusiastically embraced them, only to find out, years later, that they’re basically the same thing in different packaging - a different flavor of alienation and disconnection, leading ultimately to the same fate.

Worse still, the number of unanswered existential and metaphysical questions I asked myself seemed to increase steadily, and no matter where I looked, I didn’t find answers that satisfied me.

When I moved to the Thai countryside to volunteer on an organic farm in 2014 I was trying to start with a clean slate, with the very basics of life - food, water, shelter, community - in the hope that this new perspective would allow me to see those questions in a new light and perhaps show me the general direction in which answers might be found. Real answers, not the circular reasoning, unquestioned assumptions and mystical half-truths that this culture usually has in store for anyone bold enough to question the fundamental paradigms that buttress this culture and justify its existence.

It turns out I was on the right track.

The unique combination of subsistence farming/foraging, the experience of living with the land, not off the land, of doing things myself, not paying strangers to do them, and of reducing what are commonly referred to as “comforts”, “luxuries” and the “material standard of living” to a minimum, while at the same time devouring every book and article that pointed further down the road I was following put me into the privileged position of actually having a chance to find at least some answers to those questions.

This blog is about those answers. It is an attempt to answer the questions that plagued me for the better part of my life, and about what to do with those answers. About what it means to be human, what our mission is, the goal of our life, the reason we’re here, where we come from, and where we’re heading.

I invite you to follow my journey as I explore those issues, and I welcome your feedback in the form of comments or via email.

Best greetings from the Jungle,

Dave

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You can learn more about the project that I help coordinate on our website feunfoo.org. If you like what we do and what I write, please consider supporting us by subscribing or becoming a Patron. Your contribution is most valued!