dailyconnectionwithnature Europe minimalism nature vanlife

This slow travelling life

April 25, 2020

There are an infinite number of contradictory reasons why people decide to move into vans, and the vanlife community is as diverse as any you’ll meet. Digging down deep into our reasons, we find they’ve changed in these two-and-a-half years on the road. At first we wanted to simply travel, to see all the world and have new experiences. I suppose this is still true to a certain extent, but as we’ve slowed down, let go of expectation, and allowed the land and weather to dictate our migrations, we’ve found a deeper undercurrent of thought around this new life. We had no idea that having so few possessions would affect us so deeply and impact our worldview so positively. That letting go was one of the hardest parts of this journey, but it’s been the most revelatory. I’ve often talked about how fragile this life is, how easily it feels it could derail, but in these times the opposite appears to be true, and that too is completely unexpected. Simplicity is easy to maintain in a crisis because there’s so few threads to keep spinning, which is lucky because it’s all we can manage right now. We are Slow Travellers, tuning into the landscape and the natural world around us. We’ll often stay in a place for a month or more, and while it’s nice to have occasional conversations with fellow travellers and maybe cook with new friends, we’re finding more that the silence of a riverbank, or the rush of catching an Atlantic Ocean wave on a surfboard is more than enough conversation. There’s also social media, which perhaps some hate (I use Instagram because its focus is on creativity), but honestly, I’m finding an amazing tribe of truly inspiring, interesting, creative women all around the world to chat with every day, and that is more than I’d hoped for. I feel that this crisis is making me realise and appreciate you all even more. So now we’ll take our hounds for their morning Riverside walk before the rain sets in. I hope you manage to get outside, if only for 10mins, today too. Sending you love from this porch step in Portugal. ???

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