53 more years ?

circular-painting
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I might as well admit that I am planning to live to be perhaps ideally a little over 100. I have always been fond of old women and I think I’ll make a nice quirky one. That leaves me with, say, at least 53 more years of cooking and eating, 53 more years of creative work, more physical at this end and more contemplative at the other I guess ; so I have an open list of what I’d like to try my hand at, what I feel I would enjoy. So far I have included making things like ceramic, furniture, big wooden objects, fabric design, clothes, but there are plenty more like getting better at juggling, trying to raise snails, getting a tunnel, writing more, remembering my German and learning Italian.
In the shorter term I am looking at what grows well for me in the soil that I work with, what I can raise happily, and how I can transform what I produce inventively in order to sell it at a price that justifies the work I would have put into it. I look at my decision to live on the land and to produce food first and foremost for my people as a political rather than a lifestyle choice. I like that when I am hoeing my soil I can feel that my gesture echoes so many on the earth’s surface this day and ever since the invention of tools. It is important for me to put as much of my own physical energy in my physical survival and in that to feel included in the side of humanity that I have so much respect for.
Here I am, on a Sunday in July, alive indeed, happy, and dreaming up my hand-made life on the earth’s surface, bobbing on the tide that the universe breathes in and out and tasting the water as I go. Fun.
 

10 comments

  1. You might be able to do this, since you’ve got some language bent: ‘El arroyo de la sierra
    Me complace más que el mar’. But, I’ll help you. ‘The streams of the mountains
    Please me more than the sea.’ (J. Marti) That is political. It is also art. I like to think of my decision more of art. The canvas is now. You paint it every moment. <3

    • Yes indeed. Art is the lynchpin of it all, and to make things for art’s or love’s sake, and to question things (painting your canvas as you say “every moment”) is indeed pretty political in an interesting way, as in considering how your position speaks of who you are as human, there are wider perspectives open too…

  2. I’ll be two years behind you! Will we still be blogging? I imagine so. And hopefully still happily shuffling the earth about with a hoe as an act of defiance (and hope) 🙂

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