Autumn Hunt
Category: Stress-free Zone
I am here
Although I do enjoy spending time online, when I spend far too much time it makes me feel numb. I don’t know what it is, maybe information overload, but there is something desensitizing about the Internet. Of course there are texts, articles and talks that enrich, entertain or provoke us in some manner, where their content stays and grows with us for weeks. However, while reading them it’s really easy to click on those other links that just take up time. I notice that the more I stay online, the more my body and my spirit suffers and I suspect that it’s partially because of this ‘extra’ time of mine that I allow the Internet to rob me of… the time that makes me more detached than it makes me feel connected.
Someone told me once that a good start for regaining balance is to say to yourself ‘I am here’. I am here [breathe]. I am here [look around]. I am here [notice how you feel]. I am here [notice your body]. I am here… Who am I? Where am I going? What have I stopped doing? What am I looking for?
‘I am here’ is for many a start of a prayer or meditation. It allows us to take stock of our physical and metaphysical reality. It brings us back to our homes and personal realities that the Internet so eagerly detaches us from.
I am here, writing these words for you while I contemplate the future of this blog, of its value to you, to me and to my family. Part of me feels that the “I am” in “I am here” wouldn’t be me without writing and photographing… but I also wonder who I would be or become if the time that I spend on writing and documenting life would be spent on other things? I guess that my house would be cleaner… or maybe it wouldn’t.
To allow a change to happen
Education in its all forms, studying, teaching and researching, has always been a big part of my life. Irrespective what was happening, commitment to knowledge was guiding my choices, preventing me from making wrong decisions or coming to the rescue when I already made a bad one. I’ve never tried taking my eyes off books for too long – I felt uneasy if I did that – until now.
I am taking a break from the research I’ve recently been engaged in. It was a tough decision to make because what led to it were many years of hard work and determined dreaming, hundreds of sleepless nights and countless hours of learning how to gather evidence and how to express ideas (I’m still at it, by the way). Just when the library books started filling my shelves and my notebooks thickened with ink and photocopies, just when I (perhaps too proudly) started thinking of myself as a researcher, my body decided to rebel. So I’ve stopped… to allow a change to happen, to allow myself to heal and recover, to regenerate. While this is happening, I am rediscovering my days and am for the first time in my life seriously attentive to how to look after myself. I’ve never been terribly good at it but I notice that with self-care comes a better understanding of how to look after others and obviously the strength to care for them too.
It’s ironic how life works sometimes. At the very beginning of this year I wanted to make the subject of care one of the dominant themes on this blog. I didn’t think then that I would be writing about myself. Luckily, it’s summer and with it come many opportunities for entertaining healthy living: fresh fruit and vegetables are easily within reach, the sun is omnipresent and its rays keep sneaking through to us even when we try to escape them, the garden invites us irresistibly, and friends and family give us excuses to travel. Regeneration away from our usual four walls, away from our heaps of unsorted paper and endless to do lists is what makes the biggest difference. It allows us to stock up on good energy and boy do we need that. The summer doesn’t last forever and before we know it, it is … I won’t say it. I’ll let the summer linger a little longer..
‘Bene così ‘. – It’s good like this.
Alex Britti. Bene così . Song.
“There is no secret to success except hard work and getting something indefinable which we call ‘the breaks.”
~ Countee Cullen
The gift of the mountains
“The greatest gift of life on the mountain is time. Time to think or not think, read or not read, scribble or not scribble — to sleep and cook and walk in the woods, to sit and stare at the shapes of the hills.”
― Philip Connors
There was no Internet where I was last week but a truly wonderful land to explore. A few photos above. Welcome back friends!
When I was walking…
Postcards Without Stamps 