The Way Home: Tales from a life without technology

by Mark Boyle

I grab my coat and go for a walk. Good to feel the wind in your hair. I need the elements. They help to keep me in my place, save me from any delusions of grandeur and remind me that I need to appease the gods of water, earth, wind and fire.

Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist,

If you don’t make time for health, you have to make time for illness.

Sometimes I miss peanut butter, bananas, halva, olives, sun-dried tomatoes, cashew nut butter, hummus and other delights that can only be grown in other climes, but mostly I don’t. And there’s a sense of real security that comes from knowing that, no matter what crises or catastrophes unfold in the wider world, you know how to put food on the table for yourself, your neighbours and those you particularly love.

ask them, in a friendly manner, if they could at least not spray next to the river. One of them tells me to ‘leave us in peace’. I assume to love and serve the Lord. The Lord must prefer tarmac to rivers.

I approach the pool from the north, I soon realise that this place I love is now as good as dead. The mature trees, shrubs and plants which once cloaked its banks, and provided cover for a heron, kingfisher, ducks, pike, trout, salmon and an entire micro-world of interdependent species, have been ripped out with a digger. In its place is a new farm track running adjacent to the river, complete with a barbed wire fence for its full length. I’ve seen more clear-fells and strip mines and factory farms than I care to remember, but few have hit me as hard as the change to this river.

The tears dry up, the cloud passes. It’s important to give such emotions their time, but it’s also important not to give them a second longer. No point wallowing in self-pity, there’s too much of life to be had.

And while most days I feel fortunate to be able to work both my head and my hands, with each informing the other, writing can often drag me away from the present moment, the place where I physically am, and from what is immediately around me; and I prefer to be where I am, and not somewhere in time or space that I’m not.

One moment the sky above is blue, glorious, unlimited, and I feel blessed for such a spectacular existence; the next, all is dark, ominous, enclosed, and I feel blessed for such a spectacular existence.

Many years ago, I decided that instead of spending my life making a living, I wanted to make living my life.

(Krishnamurti once remarked that ‘it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society’).