In 1909 E.M Forster wrote a short story called The Machine Stops. Set in a dystopian future where people were ruled by ‘the Machine’, everything in life was automated, artificial and synthesised. Humans had lost any sense of spirituality or connection with the natural world. Progress had come to mean progress of the machine. Defects began to appear in the machine but still this went unchallenged. Some people dreamed that there was life outside the machine, but they were ridiculed. But one day the machine stopped, and humans had to rebuild civilization: they had to relearn (or unlearn) how to live their lives in connection with the earth, without the machine. The machine, to me, is western capitalism. I am hoping that tomorrow the machine will stop, but until tomorrow, we just keep moving on. 😉
After having a child, my Turkish muslim partner and I went travelling, Europe, Morocco, Tukiye and the Balkans in an off-grid campervan. Now our son is older, we are homesteading, rooted in a sufi muslim community in rural Andalucia, learning about sustainable living and natural farming.
This blog documents my reflections as we travel, and settle, and parent and carry out the work that is surviving. Our journey, gradually moving further away from ‘the West’ and what it embodies (literally and metaphorically), we are trying to unlearn the things we take for granted as normal, searching for different forms of value.
This is not really a travel blog, and it is more than being about #vanlife. And this is not your typical homestead blog either. Without a home-making bone in my body, I struggle to make egg and chips, let alone excelling at baking, pickling and preserving. So you’ll be waiting a long time for that blog post. Struggling with a neurodivergent family, I’m even failing at parenting.
But at least I can write.
Someone once told me that I am a natural writer. I replied: ‘no, I’ve been practicing for forty one years. There is nothing natural about it’. Through musings, ideas, revelations, troubles, failures and fuck-ups, I want to open up an emotive discussion about what we value in life and how we want to be valued.
What am I writing about?
- Parenting and unschooling
- Vanlife
- Redefining work and labour
- Communal living
- Farming and permaculture
- The complexities of lived capitalism (let’s not beat ourselves up)
- Vernacular Islam
Not baking, pickling, preserving.
