Simplifying / Workaway Diaries
“As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.” –– Henry David Thoreau
Well apparently you can pluck a boy out of a countryside (I moved from bumfucknowhere to London and spent a decade pretending to be a city boy), but you can't pluck a countryside out of a boy!
Ever since starting on our anti-capitalism Workaway journey, my nervous system is lit up like a Christmas tree. It is like coming home and it feels right. Ticks, spiders, new smells, dirt..so much dirt..and zero class. A new rythm, new flow.
Every day, I wear this t-shirt from our 1998 local amateur theatre festival in Blansko, Czech Republic. I smell like a smoked sausage from all the mostly failed attempts on starting fires, I never feel really clean or really warm, but it's a okay, I wouldn't want to be anywhere else.
My mum asked me the other day: "What about all those years you dedicated to your career in post production and advertisement?"
And I said: they were apparently always meant as a ladder allowing me to climb back up to the bliss I only experienced in my childhood, in the simple times. I'll always cherish them, but I believe their purpose has always meant to be this. Not the increasing bank credit score and the increasing amount of shit I buy with my wages. The mortgage, the two weeks per year vacation. Give me some pitchfork and dry brambles to burn, give me a boar hunted on this property that needs to be turned into a dinner by 7pm tonight, give me good people and good music and good weather and good food and good vibes and my uncomplicated childhood self swims to the surface and smiles...
Not racing, not doing the point A to the ever elusive point B swim, and just treading water is a okay too. Thanks to that whole bizarre global Covid storyline, it's what we've been doing anyway. There's only one purpose to treading water: avoiding sinking to the bottom.