The Downshift Project

So we’re into November, sailing past Halloween and Bonfire Night. It’s wet and mild. Welcome to Wales in late 2009. As usual it’s been too long since my last post. All sorts of reasons for that which I’ll probably get into below. It was this time last year that I first came to Carmarthenshire to see this house which is now my home. I remember arriving and being amazed by the beauty of the place, all the trees and the streams and the air so incredibly clear and fresh you could literally taste the difference from London. It still amazes me to this day. Every time I step outside I’m filled with such happiness that I’m able to live here. Yes the house is old and wooden and rustic and needs a big repaint, but who cares? The whole landscape is utterly gorgeous.

Growing season for the year has pretty much come to an end. There are still one or two new raspberries in the raspberry patch every time I go outside, but everything else has ground to a halt. My lovely woodland steps which I was so proud of in the Spring, are now completely covered in leaves from the big old oak tree that looms ominously over both garden and house. At some time this winter I’m going to have the oak cut. I feel very bad about this, but as well as blocking the light, it could easily drop branches onto our LPG tank, or even the house itself, if a storm was bad enough. Anyway, I’m putting off the inevitable.

Still no woodstove installed, so this winter we’ll be relying on gas for heating. Expensive, but installing woodstoves isn’t exactly cheap either. Financially, things have improved a little as I’m working through a 3 month contract with an indie iphone software developer I met on twitter. This job has been hugely enjoyable for me. Initially I was going to be spending half my time on .NET business applications, and half on iphone stuff, but instead I’m full time on iphone game development, which is the most fun I’ve had at work, like, ever. God willing, the game I’m working on will be a success and provide the finance to allow the boss to re-hire me again next Spring. I’d never have imagined this time last year that I’d have downshifted my way out of soul-sucking investment banks and into something fun and creative, working with lovely people.

Not only that, but I’m getting to know all kinds of people in the local community. It feels so much like home now. I don’t think I could ever live in London again. I’m still occasionally getting offers to go back to work in London, for hedge funds or banks, but why would I? That part of me is dead now. Eight years ago I encountered a group of young people trying to live in community in an eco-village, and that completely changed my dreams. It’s taken all this time for reality to catch up, for my addiction to career to unravel. And now the old conditioning is done with, the real me is starting to take flight.

A couple of weeks ago I had my first training day for the hypnotherapy/counselling course I’m doing in Cardiff. This is something else I could never imagine myself doing a year ago. I have essays to write, and books to read, and I need to practice. Fortunately a couple of people have already come forward who are willing to let me practice on them.

Dave has been away in London for the last few weeks, finishing the long painting job on his boat (can you believe he started on it last February if I recall?) and working on passing his driving instructor exams. He has a re-test in a week or so. So I’ve had the house to myself and have taken the opportunity to go out and socialise rather than stay in and watch tv. As a result I think I’ve done more miles on my motorbike in the last month than in the whole of the previous 12!

My last significant post on this blog was the 21st September. You may recall I was engaging in some religious soul-searching. Three days after that post I started attending the local Anglican church’s Alpha course. Alpha is a weekly evening of talks, food and open discussion about Christianity. I decided to go along because despite not believing in God, I’d come to realise that unlike most other atheists, I actually did want to believe.

It’s easy to ridicule religious faith as crazy and unscientific, full of made-up bigotries in the name of dogmatic tribalism. So often the only time Christianity (or Islam for that matter) appears in the news is when its adherents are engaged in behaviours that secularism finds offensive. One easily gets the impression that religion is just about crazy beliefs and oppression of others and repression of oneself. But on the other hand, when I think back to the people in my life that I’ve most admired, the people I’d most like to be like, they’ve been exclusively Christian.

These are the people I look at and say to myself, “If only I could express love and care for others the way they are able to. If only I could give of myself like they give.” These are the sort of people, who, when you see them in a room, you cannot keep your eyes off them because they are shining inwardly with some kind of peace and joy most of us never experience except for the briefest moments. Maybe you’ve never met anyone like this. Maybe you meet them all the time. As for me, I found I couldn’t easily dismiss Christianity in the way that most of my atheist friends rejected it. For a start, I’ve always had a strong religious or spiritual streak. Religion has always been the most interesting subject for me in any conversation.

I’ve studied Advaita, Buddhism, Taoism (what’s left of it). I’ve read the book of Mormon and the Qu’ran. I have the Catholic Catechism on my bookshelf even though I thought belief in God was the sign of mental delusion. I definitely felt that God-shaped hole in my life. I needed a reason to live and love that was beyond my own selfish desires. So, yes, I wanted God to exist, desperately so. And I wanted to know how anyone could claim to have a relationship with a God they couldn’t perceive. How could anyone experience such a thing with sufficient certainty that their life would be transformed?

So I started asking every Christian I could about their relationship with God. Now you’ve got to bear in mind that I had previously been a Christian of sorts myself back in my early twenties, and at the time I came to the conclusion that everyone was simply faking faith, pretending for the sake of belonging. I figured that really, behind the shiny shallow smiles and homophobia, no one really believed there’s a God ‘out there’ who loves us. I mean, surely they’re just playing along for the good community and the authority that society gives to religious leaders to speak into our lives?

I posed this question to an Anglican vicar: “How to believe in God when there’s no evidence?” He wrote back thusly:

1) Coming to believe in God is not the product of a rational process. Any God believed in as a result of a rational process is an idol, a product of our own minds. There is an inescapable element of intellectual surrender involved, a ‘giving in’.

2) Believing in God is undoubtedly a matter of the heart – but that doesn’t make it irrational. It’s a delusion of Modern society that bringing emotion into play makes for a less rational debate, the truth is in fact precisely the opposite, but the heart itself needs to be educated. (That’s one of the things that religious traditions do, eg through prayer and meditation etc.)

3) Why is evidence so important for you? What do you think evidence can achieve? Are there any _really_ important areas of your life where you have made a decision based on “evidence”? Would you be willing to choose a life-partner on the basis of “evidence” or would you examine your own heart and trust that? If so, why have a different standard for God?

I came to believe because I realised that I had been deluding myself about ‘not believing’ in God, and that, in truth, I had been in love with God all along – it was the love for God that was motivating everything else, especially the search for truth.

I wrote a reply to the vicar that on re-reading now seems so painfully intellectual that I’m surprised he continued talking to me. I now consider that his first reply was perfect and complete but I didn’t grasp that until much later.

Almost simultaneously, a couple of other Christian friends gave me very similar answers. I felt a little dumb. After all, I’d been a Christian for 5 years myself after college, but never experienced any kind of relationship or communication with God. I’d become a Christian back then because of intellectual arguments that seemed to make sense, but I really didn’t get how those around me seemed willing to completely throw their lives into the service of an intellectually unprovable idea.

Something changed for me when I realised that I might not need intellectual scientific-style evidence in order to believe. Several people told me that faith is from the heart, not the mind. I began to think, ‘I feel such an urgent need to love God that I no longer care if faith is fiction. I’m going to act as if God exists and see what happens.’ Part of me felt this was intellectual suicide, but I felt there was no longer anything to lose.

I felt very comfortable at the alpha course meetings. I found it easy to make friends. I found the people easy to love. At some point between the second and third weeks I started to pray. I’ve prayed before. I prayed a lot in my twenties, most prayers of frustration at God’s silence. But I never prayed a prayer of love. I never expressed gratitude for my life, for the beautiful creation around me. I can blame it all on the gorgeousness of Wales drawing it out of me! So there I am, saying thankyou thankyou thankyou and for once it’s like there’s no doubt in my mind that I’m talking to someone. I go to sleep happy. The next morning I wake up, and the sun is shining through the window and immediately I feel an urgent need to start praying again. Thankyou Father for this awesome day! Thankyou for my life, that I can experience and be aware of this incredible universe. I’m so sorry that I ignored you for so long. Please forgive me. Thankyou for waiting for me! This went on for about an hour. Just this continuous stream of joyful thanksgiving.

I realised fairly quickly that I’d just fallen in love with a God that only days before I would have mocked anyone for believing in. Moreover, I noticed that what I was experiencing explained the behaviour of all those emotionally attractive Christians I’d found so mystifying. I suddenly knew how they could act the way they did. I dusted off my old bible – 15 years unopened, and suddenly the character of God that I’d experienced in prayer was evident on page after page. I felt like I’d slipped sideways into a faith I had no right to, and of course I don’t.

I used to pray for wisdom in my twenties, but now I realise I should have prayed for faith. Faith is a beautiful gift. You can’t capture it by intellect. I spent years trying and only achieved a fake sort of faith that had no reality or depth. The vicar was right. I was in love with God all along. And when I realised that, and sought after Him with all my heart, he opened the door, and granted me the faith I needed. I guess I expected it all to wear off after a few days. Emotions would fade and intellectuality would reassert itself. But… no. I’ve realised that the more I keep my mind focused on God, the more I talk to him, the deeper the joy becomes. Prayer is like the energy powerhouse that transforms the rest of our lives. In my experience it’s the only thing that can.

It’s hard to express the strength of the love I feel right now for my God. I find it amazing and wonderful that my experience of Him matches that of all the other believers both in the present and in the historical scriptures and writings. So for the first time in my life I know I have as much faith and belief as anyone has ever been blessed with in all of history. No more and no less. And that perhaps is the most joyous thing of all.

I would gladly be God’s friend forever. I’m still an innocent child in Christian terms, and I’m happy for things to stay that way for a while. I’m Just. So. Joyful. It almost explodes out of me. There just aren’t the words. I’d go to church every day if I could find one holding a service. High Anglican, low church, pentecostal, Catholic – doesn’t matter. I just love God. I love the way he says I Love You in the most unexpected moments. I love his tenderness, and his majesty; the soaring beauty of the way he revealed Himself in such a way that every type of person with every type of personality and talent can find a way home to him.

Love God, that’s the key. Love God and love others. And if you don’t believe in him, love him anyway; pray anyway, with all your heart and strength.

Why do Americans call Autumn, ‘Fall’ ? Autumn is a perfectly good and beautiful word, and given my mild synaesthesia, the word even looks the right colour, all reddy-brown and rustic.

I’ve spent the last couple of months away in Northolt, living on the narrowboat and repainting her for sale. After a slow start, Dave and I finally completed the work in late August and she does look gorgeous in coach enamel green.

I think the boat is a fantastic buy for someone. She’s far cheaper than the price I paid 2 1/2 years ago (because of the house price crash) and has been ‘blacked’ & repainted since then, plus engine serviced, a new cooker installed, and a shiny new boat safety certificate valid until 2013.

It’s a shame to sell her really, but unless I decide to take work in London again, she’s a tad expensive.

The problem with being away  from Wales most of the summer has been the way the garden has gotten severely out of control. Dave was here on and off but everything in the polytunnel was pretty much starved of water for 2 or 3 weeks at a time. The tomatoes did not like this. Nevertheless the crop they did produce (and are still producing) is absolutely delicious and next year I intend to improve their conditions immensely.

So what else succeeded in Wet West Wales? Runner beans cropped well, as did spinach and lettuce, once they grew above the slug onslaught. Also, Chard. Cauliflowers and cabbages… not so much. Next door has a fine array of celery and leeks which make me very envious – all ours got eaten while we away boat painting. I had loads of leeks one week – the next, nothing. Not sure what took them – they were too big for slugs.

I planted some sweetcorn for a larf. Didn’t expect anything to come of it in a wet semi-woodland location, but actually they’ve not done too bad. I mean, they’re still there for one thing, which can’t be said for every crop we’ve put in the ground. Not sure there’ll actually be any corn at the end of the day but it’s all about experimenting to find what works. At least, it is for me. I hate being told what works and what doesn’t… I’d much rather find it out for myself. After all, other people could be wrong. It happens quite a lot you know.

We cropped quite a lot of onions and potatoes – albeit small, but we think we would have had more if the land a) had been well manured and b) had more light. So the plan is to take out more obstructing trees this winter, including the big oak that towers over the house and garden like an ominous headmaster. I feel quite guilty about this but hey, it’s one oak tree on the edge of a woodland, not the Amazon rainforest.

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Dave is still working on his driving instructor training. He has a final lesson next week before his ‘part 2′ driving test in a few weeks’ time. This is where they test your driving skills to extreme levels of perfectionism. Once that’s passed, he gets to go on to learn how to be an instructor proper. Then there’s more tests. Then, finally, he can solicit business and earn money.

For myself, the very nice work-from-home programming gig I thought I’d secured back in July unfortunately went away at the last second. They agreed to hire me but then decided they couldn’t afford to take someone on after all. This was a great shame as I really liked the company’s owners and would have enjoyed working with them I think. In the last couple of days however another opportunity has arisen which potentially looks even more exciting. I’m currently in the interview process so I don’t want to say too much at this stage or count any chickens.

I’ve really been indulging my love of coding recently after becoming inspired to get into iphone/objective-c development. After so long immersed in Microsoft technologies (c#, .net, sql server etc) and business applications, the wonders of objective-c, cocoa and core animation are a new and fascinating thrill. The iphone as a software platform reminds me of the early days of ZX Spectrum gaming – you can still make something worthwhile either on your own as a coder, or in partnership with an artist, or as part of a small team. The day will probably come again when you need 100 people and a $200m budget to make a game for a mobile platform, but for now it’s the pioneering days again. I was just too young to get involved when 8 bit computing was kicking off, so I feel like I have a second chance 25 years on. I definitely feel a surge of excitement when I get my little sprites running around a scrollable maze on the little iphone screen. It reminds me of my teens when I used to design and create board games. I may have missed my calling the first time around…

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In late October I’m starting my counselling course, which runs one weekend a month over in Cardiff. This is something else I’m really looking forward to. I had a few therapy sessions back in Northolt and found the experience very helpful, so I’m excited to be able to learn some of the skills myself. Almost as interesting as the study will be meeting a bunch of people who are dedicated to learning and practising the therapeutic process. It is always a pleasure to be around such folk.

I find the same attraction to being around religious people, even though I’m an atheist, and this is really what I wanted to talk about in the second half of this post. I’ve noticed recently that despite an increasing willingness on my part to admit to a complete lack of belief in supernatural deities of any description (encouraged no doubt by strong atheist voices such as Richard Dawkins and Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio among others), I still find the idea of faith and God completely compelling, as if I’m yearning for something I’m excluded from.

There’s no question that I wish I believed in all all-powerful deity who loves me. There’s no question that I’m envious of those who can and do believe in the existence of such a being, without any great evidence to speak of. But this yearning I think may say more about my experience of growing up and my relationship with my parents than anything about whether a god exists, let alone the quite specific Judeo-Christian God.

But whatever the reason, there are certain aspects of religious faith and practice I find incredibly appealing, something which also applies to many adherents of said religions – particularly the more liberal-minded inclusive types such as anglicans, methodists and so on that don’t see misogyny and homophobia as their raison d’être. When I meet people who are deliberately and consciously trying to become better people and bringing the practice of virtue into their lives, I find that incredibly attractive. So it seems a shame sometimes that I can’t just join in by willing myself to Believe in things I can’t perceive.

I do know that when I act as if God exists I feel a sense of completeness and peace. Sometimes I have conversations with my imagined idea of what God would be like if he existed, and I can imagine that if I was a believer in such things I would call it prayer and feel hugely reassured and fulfilled by the communication.

I’m treading a fine line here. Atheist readers of my blog will no doubt be appalled at this equivocation. It does seem to me that there are three very distinct categories of people on this subject: There are those who simply utterly believe in God and will never be convinced out of such a thing. There are also those who simply will never subscribe to any kind of religion (except maybe the religion of scientific enquiry).

Dave is one of these people. I cannot imagine Dave under any circumstances getting on his knees and praying to a supernatural being. It just would never happen. He has his own beliefs about right and wrong and although most of them will have been directly or indirectly inspired by Christianity simply because of our cultural heritage, I don’t expect I’ll ever see him worshipping or communicating with God, or taking instruction from any kind of spiritual authority.

For myself, and I know I’m not alone (although we may be rare), I find myself flitting nervously between the two camps. Intellectually I see no evidence of a transcendent deity except for the existence of reality itself and the self-awareness to perceive and consider it. Maybe there’s a creator beyond the universe, but absent some kind of definitive communication, it seems like the possibility solves nothing. Maybe we’re all AI subroutines in a massive computer; how would we know? But regardless of the intellectual questions, I still find great peace and happiness in bowing down before an imagined creator and expressing gratitude for my life and the wonders of existence. And I love to hang out with people who feel the same way, especially if they can get over those many years of self-righteous petty theocratic indoctrination by people who only found satisfaction in power and authority.

Some of these same sentiments are also expressed in the first part of a three part article about an American woman’s seven year journey into Islam. Only part 1 has so far been published but the reasoning the woman offers for converting to Islam sound remarkably familiar to me. None of it was driven by a belief in God. She actually had to indoctrinate herself into belief in order to experience the belonging and understanding and acceptance she was seeking. Some of us just love to join religions. We love that moment of intellectual and spiritual submission, even though we don’t believe.

I don’t as yet understand this motivation I experience to be a committed believer in some kind of spiritual path. It rides in horrendous conflict with my intellectual scepticism and causes a kind of perpetual cognitive dissonance. I know I yearn to be a kinder, less selfish person, and communion with God – even a made up imaginary God – seems to be efficacious towards this end in a way that nothing else seems to be.

For almost every Christian I admire (and I do admire Christians more often than atheists I confess), a relationship with God almost forced itself on them at some point in their lives. Anyone who is intellectually argued into a belief in God will later tend to be intellectually argued out again. Those that stick it out for the long haul tend to be people who just find the whole intellectual debate irrelevant. They have this thing called Faith, which doesn’t mean they necessarily ignore evidence, but that they accept they don’t know the answers, and decide to submit their lives to their idea of God anyway, because they love it/her/him so much.

It’s this passionate love for an ideal while suffering in a state of uncertainty and unknowing that I find completely admirable, and this is why I will never feel the sort of dismissive abhorrence expressed by many hardcore atheists towards believers as if the latter were stupid and ridiculous children to be scolded, mocked and laughed at whenever the opportunity should arrive.

And it wouldn’t surprise me at all if I didn’t have another go at trying to be a believer at some point before I die. I still love God, even though I don’t remotely believe in Him.

It’s about time for another post isn’t it?

I’ve been wanting to post or podcast for a while, but things have been changing so rapidly that I felt like whatever I wrote/said would become out of date almost immediately, perhaps even by the time I finished the post!

Let’s deal with the practical stuff first. I’m back at Northolt right now, gradually working on repainting the narrowboat and cleaning her interior. The gas work that I thought was going to be expensive didn’t need to be done in the end. The problem was found and the boat safety certificate was issued. So now she’s all ship-shape except for general grubbiness. It’s still rather frustrating how long this is all taking, but at least we’re coming to the final straight I think. It remains to be seen what price level I can sell her at – one broker insists the market is 20% down on two years ago in line with house prices, another says that’s ridiculous and prices haven’t been in any way affected by the housing market. Who knows.

In terms of making money to sustain life away from the Big Evil City, three items of good news there:-

Firstly, Dave just passed his theory exam to become a Driving Instructor, so now he can move on to learning the practical side of things – how to teach people to parallel park etc – slightly ironic since of course he never had to do that himself when he learned to drive!

Secondly, I’ve had a provisional job offer for a working-from-home IT gig, doing product development for a Sharepoint software house. It’s a startup firm, but the CEO comes personally recommended by a guy I used to work for in the late 90s, for whom I feel a high degree of trust. The salary will be low, but I’ll be sharing in the profit from product sales, and there’ll be share options, so there’s enough entrepreneurial excitement to make things very interesting. First though, I need to learn Sharepoint and pass one of those multi-guess Microsoft exams!

Thirdly, I’ve signed up for a part time course in Counselling offered by Chrysalis. This is a relatively cheap course taking an eclectic approach to counselling and psychotherapy. It’s a subject that really does fascinate me, and increasingly so since I’ve been away from the money-making City rat race. I’ve no idea what the quality of the training will be like, but it’s cheap enough so that I don’t feel like I’m selling my soul (c.f. the £24k cost of my MBA, which did indeed leave me the Master of Bugger All).

I’ve been away from Wales for a couple of weeks now, so no doubt the garden is just more bonkers than ever. Dave’s been there to keep things under control. Last I heard, the broadbeans were cropping, the runner beans were rocketing off the top of the long bamboo climber poles I’d put in for them, and the spinach was all ready for cutting. The tomatoes I think are suffering a bit from overcrowding and lack of light, but there’s not a lot I can do about the latter. Besides, it’s all good experience. This first year I just want to see what happens. I can worry about ‘getting it right’ later, which I suspect is going to involve a lot of tree culling.

That’s the practical side. The other things that’s been going on for me is philosophical. I’ve discovered that not working full time has sent my mind into a full-on introspection that I haven’t really experienced … well, ever. I’ve always been introspective, but at every other point in my life I’ve been so distracted by more immediate concerns that I never really got at the heart of things, like, what are my values, really, and where did they come from? That’ll be the focus of my next post.

We have a curious half-acre of land to work with here at Limpets Folly. The house is a small wooden bungalow at the bottom of a steep south facing hill. Managed sycamore, oak and ash woodland lies to the west, while our neighbours have a similar property, also bounded by woodland.

Neither of us are complete newbies at the veg growing lark, though Dave has more experience than I do, due to his mother having trained as a horticulturist in her youth. She still grows the vast majority of her own fruit & veg needs in a garden far smaller than ours. Personally, until Spring 2008, I hadn’t touched a seedling since I was a child.

Still, it can be quite addictive, watching a plant grow from the tiniest seed into something bearing edibles. For a city girl, that first home-grown radish can be quite an emotional experience.

But we have no particular expectation of self-sufficiency or anything close to it. If we have a goal, it’s probably self-determination, the desire not to be under the authority of bosses. We’ll live as frugally as we need to in order to be as free as possible from wage-slavery. Yes, there’s also the desire to live with a low environmental impact, but speaking personally, this comes second as a motivation. It probably shouldn’t, but it does. At least it comes second.

So far, since we moved in after Christmas, most of the work we’ve done here has been outside the house. Inside, Dave’s put up some shelving and installed the plumbing for our washing machine, but it’s outside where most of the effort is going. The shed was falling apart due being soaked in Welsh rain, so Dave weatherproofed it and redid the felt roof. We have a new water butt for rain collection, with plans to install a pump to take the water up the garden (about 10m head to the polytunnel). The polytunnel itself is Dave’s primary project right now. He’s nearly finished it – the structure is up, it just needs some final strengthening and then the plastic sheet can go on. I’m very impressed with it.

While this has been going on I’ve been digging the veg beds and repairing paths and adding steps. Some garden archeology reveals olde steps winding their way up the garden (which shows signs of serious cultivation in the distant past), but these steps are now overgrown and moreover are partially obscured by a patch of raspberries, which we’d rather keep in situ. So I’m making some new woodland steps, which I’m rather proud of. And in front of the house another patch of ground has been reclaimed for a herb garden. I had to cut down a eucalyptus tree to get light onto that particular area. This was particularly tricky as the tree was quite large with many stems, and was quite interwoven with the power cable feeding the house, which had me nervously checking the lights inside every time I sawed off another branch.

Two veg plots have been planted so far. The aforementioned front-of-house herb plot has thyme and rosemary and sage and parsley. I filled the rest with radish seedlings. I am a big fan of the radish. I can eat them like sweets. The second veg plot is full of onion sets. You can never have too many onions. They go in just about every meal.

The third plot is just about ready for planting. This will be split in two I think. One half will be broad beans, while the rest will be leeks and spring onions. I’m not an expert yet at the proper rotation of the four main crop types, nor do I know much about which vegetables like to be close to others, and which dislike it, but I figure best just to get the stuff in the ground at first and figure out how to finesse the system later. I am an optimiser by nature. When I was a software developer, everything was done by gradual iteration, and I still like to work that way. Try and design it all perfectly up front and either nothing will ever get done, or something will go wrong anyway.

I like the idea of permaculture. It makes sense to me to take the waste of one system and turn it into an input into another system. I sometimes wonder how many of the clever permaculture ideas one hears about have actually been proven to be efficacious in practice, but it’s the thinking process that counts. Once you start to think along those lines, all sorts of possibilities present themselves. I figure, the more experience we get, the more naturally we’ll start to develop and enhance the way we lay out our garden for optimal food yield.

And it’s not all about food of course. I may have a fascination with small scale food production, because of the possibilities it holds for escape the dominion of The System of owners and wageslaves, but I’m not without an eye for the pretty. There are some obvious areas of the garden which are just begging for flower beds. Most notably the raised bank that the polytunnel sits on would look stunning in flower, especially from the bottom of the garden as one looks upward. I can imagine putting a bench up there, and maybe digging a pond just below. We have a tiny pond already, not much more than a bath, which is presently full of tadpoles. Such wonderful wildlife could do with a more salubrious home methinks.

Before I go, I’d like to recommend if I may, an article by Charles Eisenstein called, “Money and the Turning of the Age” which is a long but interesting analysis of the role of money in society. I particularly like the following quote:

No matter how highly paid, if you lack the opportunity to fully apply your gifts toward a purpose that inspires you, any job eventually becomes soul-destroying. We are here to express our gifts; it is among our deepest desires and we cannot be fully alive otherwise.

This kind of post-modern critique of civilisation intrigues me a lot. I imagine the people around Marx felt the same way about his ideas, as if the whole damn elitist kaboodle had just been laid bare for everyone to plainly see. Still, more of the philosophical side of things in another post I think.

~Tess

Limpets Folly is the name of a small wooden bungalow in Ferryside, a small village at the mouth of the Towy estuary in southwest Wales. Dave and Tess bought the property in December 2008 in pursuit of The Good Life: home grown veg, chickens, and a more rewarding lifestyle.

Back in the big smoke, Dave used to be an academic working on satellite radar altimetry, until the funding mysteriously ran out for his postdoc position after he fell out with his supervisor. Tess was both a software developer and later an oil market analyst for Merrill Lynch but quit just before the bank was forced to sell itself to Bank of America. These latter two events are unrelated. Honest.

Both Dave and Tess used to live on narrowboats based in Northolt, NW London, which is where they met in Spring 2007. You might consider that the narrowboat lifestyle was in itself a neophyte effort at downshifting, but proximity to London and the lack of even a stamp sized morsel of terra firma to call our own encouraged a move to more distant shores and we headed into the West like every good dropout before us.

This blogcast will be a record of our attempt to live a gentle and sustainable community-oriented life. No more rat race. No more running to stand still. The time has come to reclaim our lives from civilisation’s relentless machine.