Nomadic minds, nomadic bodies

I often watch films and documentaries on ‘alternative lifestyles’; they always pick me up and generate the sensation of a tight skin or coat of armour being dissolved from my body, a feeling of lightness like a balloon that has been untethered.

I’m under no illusions that this way of life can be difficult – is difficult – but when I read, hear and see these stories, its like someone opening a window somewhere in my soul and I can taste a fresh breeze and get an immediate sense of space, another way of being on the most primitive level.

I guess in a sense it makes me feel like a kid again.
Being ‘off the grid’ so to speak, not having my psyche and physical body organized by an architect, not being yoked like cattle to the mainstream governmental/consumer infrastructure, is incredibly liberating on an imaginative and sensory level, but I wonder if I’d have the bottle and the determination to sustain that lifestyle through all the xenophobia, bad weather and lack of rooted-ness. But then again, I’ve never felt particularly rooted to anywhere.

There’s still that little kid inside of me who used to roam so freely around my grandparents Caravan site when I was kid back in Shropshire. There used to be a large hill nearby which seemed like a huge mountain to my miniaturized senses, it was called the ‘The Pimple’ – a name coined by the adults, to which the irony was lost on us young ‘un’s of course.
Saying that, because the caravan site stood on a rise in the landscape – a natural plateau – The Pimple had a bit of leg up from Mother Nature, an apprentice mountain.

It was an odd geographical anomaly of scrub, rabbit holes, mole-hills and red sandstone. When I think of it, I can immediately feel the dry grainy soil running through my fingers, the sense of power and detachment as I gaze out on the sprawling landscape from my eyrie; all the caravans strung out like pearls around the hill, the ribbon of tarmac disappearing into the black pine wood, and the big heart stopping skies.

My Grandfather told me there was a crashed Lancaster bomber buried in the top of The Pimple: this of course explained the large Bronze age barrow-like structure that snuggled at one end of the summit…still, seemed a bit small to me at the time, but it fuelled my imagination again, encouraged me to dream.

Funny, when I talk of the nomad/gypsy/traveller lifestyle I cartwheel away into my childhood like a frail kite suddenly gripped by a strong breeze.
But then again, somewhere, buried deep down in my neural network is a geological sediment of associations, archaic biological semaphore which is signaling: Caravan’s/nomadism/nature = security (in a strange way), space, freedom, unlimited possibilities and horizons (both physically and imaginatively), and a kind of Ray Mears meets Huckleberry Finn romantic idealism.
I’m proud to call myself a dreamer though…and I’m not the only one…(apologies for the Lennon sample).

I suppose we’re all prisoners of our childhood though – both good and bad – and being an adult is sifting through the chaff to find the wheat, stuff we can be nourished by and binning the crap that makes us juvenile rather than merely childish. Children just see things as they are, it’s the grownups that are often the most juvenile in their unresolved war with the hidden aspects of themselves; all that education and culture - the so called civilizing process.

The older I get, and the more people I have seen die – often horribly in some fetid and impersonal hospital ward, or snatched away by a sudden heart attack or accident – personal freedom, escaping from the machine, being ‘off grid’ appears the most sensible and authentic way of living.
Its not irresponsible or absurd, but a rational individual response to an irrational society.

These films illustrate some of the highs and lows of being off the grid: