Reflections on Sustainable Living

Today has been one of those grey, misty uninviting days, where I long for a few precious drops of sunshine on my tongue. Mistiness has given way to some (more!) deep reflection. I have to say that I can't feel that I am flying just yet. I am still in a very deep process of sifting and understanding myself. I am questioning London, Paris and the consumerist world I inahbit. I wonder what pleasure, and quality of life the city holds when I naturally yearn for nature. I am in love with trees, plants, open landscapes and fresh air. I feel such a connection with this when I start to put fresh living greens in my body that even the nettles on the sidewalk vibrate to me with newfound life and meaning.

I yearn to live in the countryside, to find the space be self-sufficient, to stop investing my time and money in a mechanical way of living that I feel ultimately detached from. And yet I have some social ties that keep me here, love for example. I wonder if I should accept my fate, as all spiritual paths and creativley optimise what I have, thereby leading the way for others in the same situation - paving alternative ways of living in the city, as many already do. Yet I am alarmed at the efforts I invoke to fund my lifestyle; alternative living in the city is so very expensive. I work so hard just to eat the untreated greens that grow in nature, and so much of my money goes through a middleman and passes into a system that is not about cooperative living but that fuels competition, and one-upmanship. For example I beleive that we are wasting so much time, throwing our money elsewhere to the supermarkets, the global corporations and to imported goods that we lose sense of giving back to our communities and optimising our energies. I am thinking of Permaculture principles here, what if we could go back to a time when I swapped the surplus of carrots in my back garden for some of your excess walnuts and apples. We could minimalise waste too, think how much produce is wasted by supermarkets overstocking to feed the masses. These are all vague ideas, but I really start to believe that we should be recultivating land that has been degraded through disrespect, on lovingly small scales, investing back into our communities and soil, and beginning to be self-sufficient and knowledgeable, developing closer connections between each other.

I live in a tightly packed city and yet I work hard to develop a connection with my neighbour because we live distant lives and rarely have the opportunity to engage. I need to work sixty hours a week, just to feed and house my own back, and those hours to me seems to brutally squander the preciousness of minutes. I want to be optimising my time doing the things that I believe in. I find this hard to do considering the hours that I have to work. When I spent my summer WWOOFING in a self-sustainable community it was a moment of enlightenment, a truly Edenic experience. I worked 6 hours a day doing the things I loved, connecting and observing nature, and contributing to the community that lived there; feeling amazing joy and clarity, and reaping the pleasures that nature gives back. Life in the city since, has been a little confused. I question why I continue to contribute mindlessly to this dysfunctional community. I need to either find a way of making meaning from the raw materials that I have been given and stick to that, making the changes that I want to see where I am or follow my dreams.

Today I had:

3l Warm Water and Lemon Juice
Small Wilted Spinach, Rocket, Lamb's Lettuce and Microgreens with Nori
2l Green Juice

Still not feeling wonderfully enthused about food...don't know why but no big deal. Keeping it liquid.