I agree with Matt, the ‘off grid’ YouTubers have long since proved that without large amounts of land, dosh and balls it’s not really an option. I was fascinated by the forager who boiled Amanita muscaria twelve times to remove the poison in order to make sushi with it. My gas bill would be a shocker if I did that! This is a lovely heart warming read and I’ve just bought Hospicing Modernity. Thank you for the light.
I really love this concept. When I read the piece you shared from Vanessa in your book something really clicked in me, I don't want the off-grid dream anymore, I just want a real community.
Very nice piece Dougald. I like what you say about the slightly privileged and unrealistic dimension of the off-grid 'dream'. Running away seems increasingly self indulgent in a World with (sadly) less and less places to run to and the ambivalent impact the 'running away' will have on any remaining quiet areas. I need to get a copy of the Hospicing Modernity book (and your book). All the best ...
It’s amazing how often I read essays and ideas that neglect to include home, one’s own privilege, or the partner in the background who co-created many of the ideas that are being expressed. Like Isabelle I no longer want to escape to the Mountains to live off-grid. Nor do I have the desire to win at the game of collapse or apocalypse. I want to minimize my impact on the environment around me and be part of a community of like minded people working at a community scale to rethink how we live and consume. The only game I care to play is called “Everybody Wins, or Everybody Loses.”
Lovely essay and thank you for your part in the creation of Dark Mountain which is one of the few places my partner and I have found where we feel a sense of both Home and Community.
I experienced this read as a potently quiet comfort. It was the first thing I read after having awoken from a liminal state which was both dream and contemplation. Something in me, which I met in my dream-contemplation, wanted to write an alphabet book, with each chapter beginning with a letter in the alphabet ... A, B, C, D.... A would be for apple. And I'd write about apples and about Johnny Appleseed... and so on through the alphabet. The key was to let pleasure in writing and reading take the lead, rather than any other agenda ... like changing the world.
As I read this essay I knew it confirmed my need to let pleasure take the lead in my writing more--at least sometimes. So I decided to write my pleasurable alphabet book of essays, just for the pleasure in it. But also as medicine for my weary soul.
There is a resonance here which ties my dream-contemplation with this particular kitchen table, the apple trees, the old shoe shop, and the need to literally ground culture in local place and rooted traditions of conviviality. Conviviality, after all, is nothing if not pleasurable. Pleasure in the immediate, the local, the right here, the grounded, the literally rooted which becomes food borne of soil and sunlight.
Thanks, James. For a long time now, it's seemed to me that we have to let pleasure or joy or whatever the right word is be a part of our ways of being, thinking and acting. In the early Spacemakers days, when we were working on the West Norwood Feast and we would convene a weekly open meeting on a Tuesday night for anyone who wanted to get involved, I used to say that you should come away from that meeting feeling like you just had a good conversation in the pub, rather than feeling like you *could have been* having a good conversation in the pub. I used to think of that in terms of the room for toxic self-deception that comes in when we tell ourselves we're being virtuous and self-sacrificing. Another way that I've come to think of it lately is that it's good to suspend our certainty about the consequences of what we're doing, because if it's pointless unless it makes a difference, then that puts more weight on it than it can bear. Whereas if there is some quality of conviviality in the present tense, then we can let go of our need to assure ourselves of its future significance, a need that can otherwise lead us to grip too tightly and crush the life in it. Or, in the words of Sam Ewell (from his book "Faith Seeking Conviviality", which I'm reading just now), "the very language of 'projeto' and 'programas' tended to veil the relational heartbeat driving what was actually happening, the sheer goodness of people doing things together with joy".
Years ago I found a passage in Deane Juhan's wonderful little book, Touched by the Goddess, which struck a deep chord of recognition of truth in me. (https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1016362.Touched_by_the_Goddess#?ref=nav_comm ) He's a bodyworker with a strong sense of somatics wisdom (a field I have worked and played in -- in my case as a teacher and student of embodied mindfulness and spontaneous movement as embodied meditation). Anyway, Juhan spoke the obvious in this book by saying that pleasure is itself healing. The corollary, I have found, is also true. That is, where there is not pleasure, healing is being obstructed.
It seems to me that joy is a form of pleasure, and vice versa. And these resonate with, or are a form of, love, itself a form of kindness. So these are all the same thing in their shared essence, I feel. And they are all healing. Or they can be -- provided that sol e sombra (sun and shadow) are allowed to mix, blend, share a space. The darkness of grief and pain can swallow us up at times, and we can forget how to allow the warmth of the sun to touch us deeply and move us into joy and pleasure. And these are times in which many of us are deeply saturated by shadow. And maybe there is good soul stuff to be found in living in long shadows. But I'm ready for more spring sunlight now. Thanks for your part in helping me to remember.
I agree with Matt, the ‘off grid’ YouTubers have long since proved that without large amounts of land, dosh and balls it’s not really an option. I was fascinated by the forager who boiled Amanita muscaria twelve times to remove the poison in order to make sushi with it. My gas bill would be a shocker if I did that! This is a lovely heart warming read and I’ve just bought Hospicing Modernity. Thank you for the light.
Stupid question but how are there off grid’ YouTubers?
Haha! I know. Just put ‘off grid’ into YouTube. They are all there!
I really love this concept. When I read the piece you shared from Vanessa in your book something really clicked in me, I don't want the off-grid dream anymore, I just want a real community.
“I don’t want the off-grid dream anymore, I just want a real community.” So much this!
Very nice piece Dougald. I like what you say about the slightly privileged and unrealistic dimension of the off-grid 'dream'. Running away seems increasingly self indulgent in a World with (sadly) less and less places to run to and the ambivalent impact the 'running away' will have on any remaining quiet areas. I need to get a copy of the Hospicing Modernity book (and your book). All the best ...
It’s amazing how often I read essays and ideas that neglect to include home, one’s own privilege, or the partner in the background who co-created many of the ideas that are being expressed. Like Isabelle I no longer want to escape to the Mountains to live off-grid. Nor do I have the desire to win at the game of collapse or apocalypse. I want to minimize my impact on the environment around me and be part of a community of like minded people working at a community scale to rethink how we live and consume. The only game I care to play is called “Everybody Wins, or Everybody Loses.”
Lovely essay and thank you for your part in the creation of Dark Mountain which is one of the few places my partner and I have found where we feel a sense of both Home and Community.
Lovely piece. It’s put me in a quiet space, remembering past gatherings and meals and conversations. Food and community are the stuff of this work.
I experienced this read as a potently quiet comfort. It was the first thing I read after having awoken from a liminal state which was both dream and contemplation. Something in me, which I met in my dream-contemplation, wanted to write an alphabet book, with each chapter beginning with a letter in the alphabet ... A, B, C, D.... A would be for apple. And I'd write about apples and about Johnny Appleseed... and so on through the alphabet. The key was to let pleasure in writing and reading take the lead, rather than any other agenda ... like changing the world.
As I read this essay I knew it confirmed my need to let pleasure take the lead in my writing more--at least sometimes. So I decided to write my pleasurable alphabet book of essays, just for the pleasure in it. But also as medicine for my weary soul.
There is a resonance here which ties my dream-contemplation with this particular kitchen table, the apple trees, the old shoe shop, and the need to literally ground culture in local place and rooted traditions of conviviality. Conviviality, after all, is nothing if not pleasurable. Pleasure in the immediate, the local, the right here, the grounded, the literally rooted which becomes food borne of soil and sunlight.
Thanks, James. For a long time now, it's seemed to me that we have to let pleasure or joy or whatever the right word is be a part of our ways of being, thinking and acting. In the early Spacemakers days, when we were working on the West Norwood Feast and we would convene a weekly open meeting on a Tuesday night for anyone who wanted to get involved, I used to say that you should come away from that meeting feeling like you just had a good conversation in the pub, rather than feeling like you *could have been* having a good conversation in the pub. I used to think of that in terms of the room for toxic self-deception that comes in when we tell ourselves we're being virtuous and self-sacrificing. Another way that I've come to think of it lately is that it's good to suspend our certainty about the consequences of what we're doing, because if it's pointless unless it makes a difference, then that puts more weight on it than it can bear. Whereas if there is some quality of conviviality in the present tense, then we can let go of our need to assure ourselves of its future significance, a need that can otherwise lead us to grip too tightly and crush the life in it. Or, in the words of Sam Ewell (from his book "Faith Seeking Conviviality", which I'm reading just now), "the very language of 'projeto' and 'programas' tended to veil the relational heartbeat driving what was actually happening, the sheer goodness of people doing things together with joy".
Years ago I found a passage in Deane Juhan's wonderful little book, Touched by the Goddess, which struck a deep chord of recognition of truth in me. (https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1016362.Touched_by_the_Goddess#?ref=nav_comm ) He's a bodyworker with a strong sense of somatics wisdom (a field I have worked and played in -- in my case as a teacher and student of embodied mindfulness and spontaneous movement as embodied meditation). Anyway, Juhan spoke the obvious in this book by saying that pleasure is itself healing. The corollary, I have found, is also true. That is, where there is not pleasure, healing is being obstructed.
It seems to me that joy is a form of pleasure, and vice versa. And these resonate with, or are a form of, love, itself a form of kindness. So these are all the same thing in their shared essence, I feel. And they are all healing. Or they can be -- provided that sol e sombra (sun and shadow) are allowed to mix, blend, share a space. The darkness of grief and pain can swallow us up at times, and we can forget how to allow the warmth of the sun to touch us deeply and move us into joy and pleasure. And these are times in which many of us are deeply saturated by shadow. And maybe there is good soul stuff to be found in living in long shadows. But I'm ready for more spring sunlight now. Thanks for your part in helping me to remember.
Jealous.