It’s been one of those days. I love seeing people out enjoying nature, and the snowy hills around here have called so many out these past few days. We had to turn around from our planned hilly hike as it was overrun with cars, then when we went somewhere less glamorous (without snow) I forgot my camera.
I suppose that’s when it’s easy to get territorial about a certain place, ‘I live here, I know this place, I hate it when I can’t walk my usual haunts without falling over new faces.’
This is one of the reasons I wanted to up-sticks and move into a van. More and more I feel that land ownership is wrong – that all land belongs only to a kind of Commons Stewardship because land ownership starts to misshape our thinking so that we begin to feel a sense of entitlement to a certain place.
Capitalism has trained us into accepting the giving over of our lives in the hopes of owning just one tiny parcel of bricks, and if we’re lucky maybe some soil in which to grow some food, but this is not how nature works. She is absolutely abundantly gloriously free, and so can we be.
Capitalism keeps us in constant competition for better houses, maybe get our name down for the unicorn of an allotment, perhaps form a cooperative so we can scrabble together enough to buy a bigger piece of land.
Nature tells us that there’s more than enough. For all of us. But to do that perhaps we have to start the process of letting go, and who want to do that? Who wants to be homeless? Placeless? To have no claim over, or stake in, the future of whatever place we want to call home.
I don’t have the answers. I have chosen instead a nomadic life that sings of freedom, but there’s no food security, no pension or property or land to pass down the generations.
What it does bring is a different vision, another way in which to view the world outside of many of my past constraints. One of those being a sense that I have no rights over any place, but as such I can call every place I visit, home.
Photo says:
I climb in search of mountain gods
& am gifted the words
Sacred ground is not a place
It’s a state of mind
(Words gifted from the land on Crete, March 2019)
#100outdoordays day31 #poetlife
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