I like sharing a campsite with chickens and goats and sheep. It’s barebones in the best possibble way. Some of these places can be over produced like they’re trying to create a luxury experience in a field.
This place, Grange Farm, is the opposite. It’s just grass, canvas, animals, weather and the small practical ritual of keeping yourself fed, dry, and reasonably human. Although, three days without a shower and I’m starting to feel ferel.
On the first of July I started a 31-day weblogging challenge. I wanted to blog in the original sense of the word: not posts designed around hooks and calls to action, but entries. Entries as field notes, half-formed thoughts, fragments, or full on essays if that’s the way text goes.
Last night I wanted to read something close to the way I’m trying to write. Something observational. Embodied. Simple in time and space. Definitely less theory and more of what is around me.
I was reading Tarot of Self-Discovery, but it was getting heavy with archetypal psychology, and out here I didn’t want more interior landscape. I wanted solid ground.
So I scrolled through the Kindle and found, somehow, a book I don’t remember buying: Mythogeography: A Guide to Walking Sideways. From the title, it sounds like just the thing I’m trying to avoid. But then the subtitle kicks in with this: “compiled from the diaries, manifestos, notes, prospectus, records, and everyday utopias of the pedestrian resistance.”
That felt close to what I wanted.
Especially pedestrian resistance. That sounds intriguing.