Turtles-Paradise

This weekend is the spring bank holiday weekend – a three day weekend (at least for those who don’t work in retail, call-centres, waste collection services, pubs, restaurants, and whatever other businesses have had to shift to a 24/7 working culture) that I take as an inspiration to celebrate the beauty of late spring.

Over the last week I have added six tomato plants to my garden, courtesy of a work friend who grew too many. I have also lost my two out of three of my thyme plants that had just progressed outside and then got battered by a surprise rainstorm.

On bin collection day I had no landfill rubbish to put – a testament to the compost bins more than anything.

The Great Decluttering Project goes slowly but steadily onwards. I have almost finished all my CD’s – a long task as some were full of old backed-up work and art that had to be transferred onto my hard-drive. I have discovered a company that you can ship old CD’s and DVD’s to and who will recycle them for you. SImply send the CD’s, by themselves, to

Polymer Recycling Ltd
Peninsula Business Park
Reeds Lane
Moreton
Wirral
CH46 1DW

Now, however, I am off to Wales. One of my favourite places to go, a quiet little town near Cardiff. I am going to spend time with a good friend, and just relax for a couple of days and enjoy being alive.

We’ll be back to the permaculture zones very soon, but I just wanted to say congratulations to my other half, who successfully landed two part-time jobs in the past couple of weeks. In ‘Let’s talk about Money‘ I told you we just about broke even. We’ll be in a much better place now. The important thing for us to remember:

• Not loosening up on the frugality side of things. It’s easy to not spend money when you don’t have money! But a lot harder to resist that urge when you do have that extra income. Both of us have the same goals of financial freedom in the long run, and neither of us want to achieve that by working stressful, high-powered careers. The only way to make it work will be to cut our living expenses to the bone.
• Sitting down after my other half goes through the next stage of his visa applications and discussing the next stage. For the past two and a half years the visa application and being secure in living together has been our top priority. I got an apartment, because it looked better for the visa application. We both delayed other life goals in order to make this happen. It cost us well over £2000 in fees and incidental expenses, and who knows how much we spent on plane tickets!

With less than two months to go before he is (hopefully) allowed to remain indefinitely with more-or-less the same rights and opportunities as a British Citizen we will now need to solidify what we want to do next in our joint lives. Of course, we know more-or-less, but we need to write down the exact figures and plans to make it happen.

Okay, enough about us! We’ll be back to permaculture in the next post.

• Pause.
• Close your eyes.
• Stretch.
• Take a slow, deep breath.
• Carry on.

If you’re reading this blog – and kudos to you if you are, and you’re not my Mum – you may be wondering what the point of it is. There is, after all, an entire literature on the importance of targeting a blog at a specific niche. Surely by staggering from Blenheim Palace to my back-garden to tiny living I am sabotaging myself from any kind of success in the competitive blogosphere?

In truth, I find it a little worrying that so many blogs are arranged around neat little articles with a common theme. It’s not so much that I dislike them as they sometimes end up feeling a little hollow and forced.

I think there is a focus to this blog, but it’s more about connecting the dots between a number of different movements and ideas. Whilst the digital age has ushered in one set of techno-wizards and location-independent businesses and freelancers, the kick-back against capitalism has existed almost since capitalism became the arbiter of society, and minimalism and simplicity extends all the way back to the ancient ‘wise men’ and forms the centre of a lot of religions.

In short, the inspiration for these things come from various times, places, people and cultures. And every individual decodes and interprets them in their own way.

Never before has the divide between the wealthy and the poverty stricken been so great though. Never has the flood of Stuff been so cheap, plastic and disposable.

I work in the waste and recycling industry. That we have a problem at one end – the raw materials and destruction of resources – I take on faith. That we have a problem on the other end - hazardous waste, piles of long-lived garbage, growing landfill sites and increasingly expensive disposal charges – I see first hand.

We cannot keep throwing stuff away. There is nowhere for it to go.

It worries me that so many minimalist bloggers tout the importance of jumping on planes to travel the world. Getting rid of your car means nothing if you’re taking frequent flights. Minimalism and sustainability are often considered partners, but there is some disconnect between the ideals of these different movements.

Travelling does not have to be by plane. Slow travel is good travel.

I worry that many bloggers out there are skimming the surface of these movements, reducing substantial ideas to a handful of bullet-points, and not analysing their own contradictions.

I contradict myself too, I’m not perfect and my ideas evolve and change.

We – the wealthy – have simply unprecedented freedom these days. We can choose almost everything about how we live and experience our lives. We can choose what we do, where we work, what we eat, who we spend time with.

But how we choose, and why we choose – we have to think a little deeper than just ‘lifestyle design’.

I feel like a grown up.

For my whole life, people have told me I seem older than what I am. I was sensible, mature, responsible.

When I turned 18, I felt like I was stuck in a time-warp. I stayed 18 for a long time.

Now I feel like I’m 25. A quarter of a century. Going from 18 to 25 is a little strange.

It is about suddenly being the one with experience, the one who travelled, the one with stories to tell, the one who knows how to untangle the thread of bureaucracy, who knows how to navigate the treacherous waters of life. The one who, when someone knocks a glass of coke over, goes and grabs the tissue.

I am, suddenly, a first aider. A fork-lift truck driver. A business woman. I fill in tax forms every year, well ahead of the deadline. I cook my own meals, wash my own clothes, choose my own books. I plant herbs and vegetables. I’m practical. I’m unflappable.

Today, our 18 year old new employee, turned to me and asked, in a wistful kind of way – “Do you know what it is you want to do with your life?”

And all the answers I once had – to be a writer, a director, create a commune, be a journalist, travel the world – they were all cop-outs. Not because they are failed dreams, but because we are so many things in the course of a lifetime – that I value my role as a friend, a lover, a daughter. That I can be a web-designer, a council officer, a writer, a blogger and none of it is ‘what I’m doing with my life’.

All I’m doing with my life is living it.