Europe feature minimalism nature politics travel

A Slow Life

July 26, 2018

I’m embracing the slow life more these days. It’s a way of existing I’ve felt a great affinity with for some years. When we lived in Mold I was the U.K. project officer for Cittaslow UK for a time (Cittaslow being Italian for Slow Town where the idea originated). Just in our small town we planted community orchards and put on festivals ❤. It’s not a movement that’s taken off so much in the U.K. and I would break my head open wondering why. Travelling these past nine months across Europe and then being back in the U.K. I realise how much faster life is here. How little time anybody has, for anything, and perhaps how little understanding we really have of our European neighbours. Someone said to me recently that travel made them realise what a ‘small island mentality’ we have in the U.K. I was a bit offended by this at first. I’m an open-minded, poet and anarchist! But the truth is that we do seem to want to isolate ourselves more and more. And we don’t seem to see the value in the rich variety of ideas that Europe offers, preferring instead the fast-food-hegemony of US culture. Why else are we crashing out of Europe in such a ridiculous fashion? This morning I sat watching crested dog’s tail grasses blowing in a wild wind. It made me think of Bonnie’s tail whipping around and I got lost in the movement of its dance. This is not special grass insofar as it it is not rare, you can find it all over Europe. Which is pretty impressive really: that such a tiny plant has colonised huge swathes of land. And I suddenly realised that for perhaps the first time in my life the internal monologue wasn’t urgent in my ear, ‘come on, hurry up. I don’t have time for this’ and I didn’t get up to move on. I just sat for a while, thinking happy thoughts in this moment. perhaps the trade-off of ‘stuff’ for ‘time’ is really beginning to pay off. It feels as if today is the day the adventure really begins. #dailyconnectionwithnature day66

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