Drum Beats

The Beginning of the End

I’ve lived alone off-grid for over 10 years. Sometimes it was in a mud hut in Turkey, other times in a van on the road, and last of all I hunkered down in a stone hut in Spain. The underpinning reason has always been freedom: Freedom from the drudge of a job I hate, and from serving a system I find at best soulless, and at worst inhumane. Freedom to wake up when I want, and sleep when I want. But most of all freedom to create.

How I’ve relished my adventures; building homes out of mud and lime, foraging for dock leaves, and watching the great glittering wheel of a starry night turn overhead. I found things in those years I had never known I was looking for: Resourcefulness, an inner wild animal, and different kinds of powers that skim clean over the head of Normality.

This autumn however, I suffered a car crash, and many things changed. The first most conspicuous of these was that I had no means of transport. Camped as I was in an unfinished barn with the incoming tide of winter lapping at my land, I eyed my dwindling wood pile and chewed my lip. It was a ruinous end to an ill-fated year. A year I had worked a little too hard, turned a little too old (or so I felt), and fought too many fires in too many places.

“So what is freedom then?”

It was Nick who asked the question. I was hiring his car, because mine was written off. Nick was a friendly young fellow with plenty about him, which resulted in an engaging chat that toured between diving, capitalism and the Canary Islands. I’ll leave you to colour in the compartments of that particular convo. But, his question tapped at the windows of my mind. What is freedom? It continued tapping after I’d dropped him off, and the mountains grew taller and snowier. That question glared at me as I stood in my acreage and ran my hands over the wall of my ancient stone barn. Because it touched on another question I had already begun to ask in the wake of the accident and the subsequent concussion that followed, namely: Am I actually free?

As I pulled into my land, a hawk rose from one of the old ash trees that command this place. In the winter months they are haggard sorceresses prodding at the sky with their wands. The hawk opened her speckled wings and glided gently into the gulley, while the last remnants of sunlight turned my land into a golden creature with a pelt that gleamed in the evening air. This was why I was here. To live within the supernatural world of the wild. Away from Normality. But was it freedom?

Ah freedom. The word is a grail for people like me. It was the war cry of Mel Gibson’s William Wallace, and the basis of many charters of rights. Philosophers from Voltaire to Sartre have unpicked and debated it. But is it freedom from, or freedom to? Is freedom found in something, or out of it? Freedom is what everyone promises to give each other, but no one ever does or can. Because here on planet Earth freedom is dependent on physical need. Which was why I’d gone off-grid in the first place and built a mud home in Turkey a good decade ago.

Shelter from the Storm

Our most fundamental physical need is that of shelter. As I’m prone to stating; you can survive a long old while without food, and at least three days without water, but you can be dead in a night if you have inadequate shelter and the elements turn on you. Depending on your climate, the only thing as important for immediate human survival is clothes.

If your shelter is decent, warm and dry, the rest is manageable. If it is a little more than that, if it is inspiring and beautiful, then you can truly start considering freedom. Yes I know there are ascetics in India who are apparently surfing on clouds of liberation with nowt but a begging bowl and a grotty temple step, but I’m planning to argue at a later point in this collection of essays that this might not quite be the full measure of freedom it’s cracked up to be. But then, is anything?

So a home in nature has always been part of the equation for me. No heating bills, water from the sky and the stream, food from the land. This was what made me feel free. Until the day I crashed my car, and my head felt like a 1970s television without an aerial, the screen showing nothing but a snow storm of pixels. My body quit on me a couple of weeks later as my immune system collapsed and I laboured under a very long flu. And what do you know? In a matter of weeks my land transformed from a bestower of freedom to a gulag.

Mobility and health

Three months I battled with the insurance company (AXA for your information). Three months I remained carless. This wasn’t in and of itself impossible, indeed I’d survived happily in Turkey with only a motorbike. But my immune system seemed to have crashed along with my car, and as lack of health and lack of transport converged, I sensed my options dwindling.

Snows arrived in the rugged folds of my land, and the analogy of the Siberian work camp grew in similarity. I’d had enough. So I booked a flight and spent the rest of the winter recovering at my dear Dad’s house in England. As I lay on his sofa, I found my mind (and if I’m truthful my heart) wandering to other shores. I saw golden sands and azure seas. I kicked back in beachside tavernas and swung in hammocks just pondering existence. I saw myself sleeping under the stars, and eating good food that I hadn’t had to cook or grow. But most of all I dreamed of being below the waves floating in the submarine world of coral and starfish. I missed diving. The seabed with its slow rhythmic dance is the ultimate panacea.

Weeks went by. My health remained stuck between reverse and first gear. I’d spent so long on my Dad’s couch I was considering applying for residency. Then slowly but surely over the course of that difficult winter, the drum of freedom began to bang in my heart. Boom. Boom. Boom.

The heart beat of the land

Yet, at the very same time my land was audible, the beat of her heart pulling me just as hard. She’s an awe inspiring space frequented by vultures and eagles, badgers and foxes, wild cats and woodpeckers, to name but a few. Then there are the huge but gentle cows (and bulls) roaming free on the mountain tracks, and the horses shaking their rockstar manes. The area in the centre of my chest warmed when I remembered the howl of the wolves on crisp winter nights, and the stories of brown bear sightings. There was my dear old barn as well. I’d slogged for the past three years to turn this crumbling old space into a wonderland. I’d listened to the abandoned outbuilding and renovated him, with great care not to disturb the original stonework. I’d repointed each inch of wall with lime, and hand wattled the interior walls. Finally I’d lobbed my beloved earth plaster at those wattles, and turned the place into something new. When we have a vision, we want to see it embodied. I was yearning to complete what for me was a piece of historical, mud and lime art.

I loved it there. Yet it had begun to restrict me. And to drain me. I wanted to see new lands and new cultures, to hear new ideas and learn new arts. To walk a little more lightly, possibly even skip. Most of all I wanted to have the time and relative comfort to write again. Could I be suffering smorgasbord syndrome?

The smorgasbord approach to freedom

One notion of freedom is the ‘have-it-all’ consumerism that 20th century capitalism promoted. It’s a place where life is an all you can eat buffet, so you’d better cram your plate as full as you can before the restaurant closes. Quantity squashes quality off the menu as people try to pack in a million things rather than savour one. There’s no time for proper conversations, care, or beauty in the great rush of FOMO.

Was I being tempted out of my beautiful life in some hopeless quest for more more more? It was a temptation I’d refused until now, having lived light-footed for years before I became more deeply grounded. I know only too well the limitations of that lifestyle.

As winter rolled promptly into spring, I was still without a car, and still in the UK creating a me-sized dent in my Dad’s sofa. I felt the pull of my land and the pull of the road threatening to split me in two. And all the while the drum of freedom beat louder.

Join me as I begin a new journey of words across the hazy continent of freedom. I have no idea where it will lead, but since when has that ever stopped me?

Like mud homes? Interested in earth-connected off-grid living? Hop over to my mother site, The Mud Home.