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Caught by the river

December 18, 2018

 

 

I wrote a piece for Caught by the River’s Shadows & Reflections series. Here’s an extract (link in biog for full piece). Also, take some time to explore their site, it’s overflowing with beautiful words & art❤️. Photo of the van in Austria by Andy Garside…

This has been a year of weavings and unravellings, of building a day from nothing; of inviting change into our lives, both good and bad and embracing the consequences; of responding to the moment: quick responses in slow time; of slow travel and slow living; of learning to nourish a community aside from narrow geographical confines.

I have called myself a Welsh nationalist even as I question how I can love one mountain more than another; as I travel fluid across borders how can I champion a political stance that draws lines and divides people? I read Jiddu Krishnamurti:

When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.

But Cymru was the first colony. She deserves better than Westminster’s indifference. She deserves to be free, and Liberalism is a failed experiment that allows meaningless crap to flow freely around the world, while people are stacked at borders like unwanted refuse. Does celebrating our differences allow us to build a future together free from hatred? If our differences spring from attachment to a certain piece of land perhaps it is the very act of land ownership that sets people against each other. Perhaps this is what needs addressing. All ownership is theft. We can own the land no more than we can command the sun to stop shining; we are of water, made to flow, to tumble, to experience, to shapeshift, to transcend borders and boundaries, to conflux and learn to share before branching off again in myriad directions. We are magic, if only we could remember that.

Read the full piece here.

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