Staying connected

The week that we spent at the yurt workshop made me think a lot about other topics, too. We spent a week with a group of people in a very different setting than we normally are. Working outside all day, sleeping in the hay, cooking with fire, it felt a bit like "Our little farm". Also, the people we were with were all in some way very alternative. We soon found out that this doesn't mean that we all only had one opinion, left allone the same goals in life. There are as many different kinds of 'alternative' as there are people using this term. Still, the small group we worked in most of the week got very close very quickly. I guess you don't have much choice, things just have to work out. Although I'm not sure how soon and how often I will see those people again, I still think of them as some sort of family members. Working together on one big project feels very uniting.

Maybe you remember me talking about how tiring it sometimes is to define another way of normality inside a social system that doesn't support the life that you chose. This factor fell away almost completely during this week, because I was surrounded by people who had the same or even more extreme terms on normality (some of them didn't use any plastic at all, others brought all their food from home because they want to be self-sustaining as much as possible) than me.
Discussions often turned to alternative communities. There are a lot of them all around europe. Some of the people we met had stayed in one of them for some time, some intended to start their own. It got me dreaming about doing the same. How EASY everything would be if you could life with people who had the same priorities in life. No long researches about where to find a product with the kind of ingredients that you want, organic food as a standard, no complicated explanations about why you want to live that way...

Easy. Just put your freak-hat on and wave the system goodbye.



The sad thing is that you also say goodbye to your influence if you give up all connections to the 'modern' world. There goes another freak, gosh, I can never understand those people. How can they live without pizza?
And nobody is there to explain, that it is very possible to make organic pizza and that it is actually loads better than what we normally get. How can there be any change if people who try to find new ways just go off and stay amongst themselves?
It might sound a bit martyric there, but I really wanna try and make a change and not just go off and live a great life in my mousehole.

Well, maybe I would think about it if there is wireless in the hole. :o))