Search Results for: slow philosophy

In 2011, Sylvain Tesson left his home in Paris for a 6 month stay, on his own, on the edge of Lake Baikal. He stayed in an old geologist’s hut that was heated by a cast-iron stove and attempted to lead a “simple life and claim back time”.
Lake Baikal in Siberia is the largest freshwater lake by volume in the world and contains nearly 20% of the world’s unfrozen surface freshwater. The lake is a Unesco World Heritage Site and is 395 miles long, 49 miles wide, 1,642m (just over a mile) deep, and 25 million years old. In fact, the lake is so huge that the surface area is as large as Belgium and, at normal walking speed, it would take you 4 months to walk all the way around it.
Off-grid living has the potential to become one of the most amazing experiences or life changing moments in one’s existence. However, if the destination is Lake Baikal, the chips are stacked against you. It is not the extreme environment or the wild and fierce creatures lurking in the dense wood that you will succumb to. It will be the extreme solitude, isolation and loneliness. One must mentally prepare for the marked change from the abundance of faces around you in the city, to the only face for miles and miles is that of your own reflection in the shimmering water.
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2013/may/31/siberia-cabin-lake-baikal-russia. He was driven there by truck in February when the temperature was -30 degrees Celsius and the ice was a metre thick. It was a 6 day walk to the nearest village and a day’s walk to the nearest neighbour. His equipment included: “an axe and cleaver, fishing poles, kerosene lamp, ice drill, saw, snowshoes, tent, liquor glasses and vodka, cigars, provisions (pasta, rice, Tabasco sauce, coffee) and a library of almost 80 books”. Although his time in the Taiga was an experiment and not a complete emigration, Tesson still needed to account for and appreciate the enormity of the solitude he was facing out there.
“Cabin Fever” is an expression for a reason. Cooped up, alone in a hut for days on end can send someone into a spiral of depression. Tessson said that the pain derives from, “the sorrow of not sharing with a loved one the beauty of lived moments” and also “what others miss out on by not being with the person who experiences it”. Routine and remaining occupied are two ways to combat loneliness.
Tesson was warned prior to leaving Paris that boredom would become his worst enemy. He therefore decided to immerse himself in literature. With a library around him, he suddenly had an abundance of friends and stories to be listened to. His collection extended from philosophy and poetry, through to nature books, non-fiction and fiction. DH Lawrence would stir his senses. Nietzche and Schopenhauer would keep his mind …

Tobias Jones is a co-founder of Windsor Hill Wood community in Somerset. His book about his community, Buy “A Place of Refuge” from Amazon UK, is published by Quercus.

In this extract he talks about why off-grid living is better in a community.

BY TOBIAS JONES

We set up our community, Windsor Hill Wood, six years ago in a ten-acre woodland in Somerset, UK. The sole purpose was to offer sanctuary to those in a period of crisis in their lives: those struggling with addiction, depression, bereavement, homelessness, eating disorders, PTSD, and so on. In that time we’ve had well over a hundred people living in our family home, and the benefits – both to ourselves and to our guests – have far outweighed the drawbacks. It’s just a natural, healthy, wholesome way to live.

Yet in all functioning communities, collective choices are made and have to be adhered to. One of the most fascinating communal experiments that emerged from the hippie movement in the US was The Farm, in Tennessee. Inspired by the late Stephen Gaskin, it began in 1971, as you might expect, as a mirror-image of that age’s free-for-all attitude, but slowly began to incorporate “agreements”, which, over the years, made it a very stable and yet very creative space. Communal choices were made to respect the sanctity of marriage and monogamy, to avoid the use of hard drugs, and so on.

But the greatest obstacle to sharing the lessons of communalism is our warped notion of freedom. The essayist Wendell Berry arrived at the heart of the problem in his 2002 book, The Art of the Commonplace:

. . . there are two kinds of freedom: the freedom of the community and the freedom of the individual. The freedom of the community is the more fundamental and the more complex. A community confers on its members the freedoms implicit in familiarity, mutual respect, mutual affection, and mutual help; it gives freedom its proper aims . . . The freedom of the individual, by contrast, has been construed customarily as a license to pursue any legal self-interest . . .”

It is here that, most clearly, a contemporary observer will glimpse the scary needle that administers the medicine we need: to create any sort of community, we need to pool individual freedoms to gain community freedoms. The latter emerge only through submission and obedience, not through exuberance and incessant self-expression. It is, obviously, a hard sell.

It is hard to find a word held so low in the public esteem as “communalism”. For most people it carries a toxic whiff of both “communism” and “commune”, implying dropouts, flakes, fanatics and cultish leaders. If you’re in any doubt about how frightening the word is to the average citizen, try telling your next-door neighbour you’re going to live communally: they will veer away from you (believe me, I’ve …