Wanderings

Friday April 18th Just when I thought this walk would end up not having a writing stop, the perfect spot appeared - complete with Forestry Commission bench, located slap-bang in the middle of a sunny glade, the sound of the waves on the beach and the birds on the trees my auditory backdrop.

Up in Scotland on my hols I was invited to take today as my day off from WWOOFing and take it I did! The Mon-Fri work ethic is so deeply ingrained in my mind that I often seem to find myself arriving and leaving on "working days" and not necessarily taking the "rest days" I have accrued. Which, although well and good on one level, on another (the level where I'm having a holiday and enjoying the locality I've turned up in) is a bit of a shame. So this mid-stay opportunity was perfect.

From the Monimail Tower Project where I'm volunteering I set off into the great (by me) unexplored lands of Fife, first stop the Hill of Tarvit. Although the house and tearooms didn't open until lunchtime my main desire was to drink in the gardens - and the sunshine. This was verily achieved with several hours on a very comfortable spot of grass in the formal gardens, by a beautiful dark-pinkish flowering rhododendron. The book I'd started this morning was devoured and in between bits of pondering and jotting occurred.

Onwards I found myself heading North to explore the woods just south of Tayport. I ended up on a merry magical mystery tour finding a convenient spot to park and then my aimless-amble began. It's a very unique experience wandering without a map, without a plan, without a deadline and without any expectations. Very soon I de-shoed and spent the best part of the next two hours following the coastline around, enjoying the different textures underfoot and the different temperatures on my skin (in the sun: really quite warm, in the shade: a bit nippy!)

As my amble crossed into the Tentsmuir Nature Reserve I started seeing an ice house marked on the maps. An ice house? In the woods, by a bunch of dunes? What's that all about? Well, it turns out it's a relic of an entirely non-vegan occupation: salmon fishing. The catches would be brought to this really quite sizeable ice house for storage before being transported south for further processing (and, presumably, eating). And this is where I find myself now.

Sunshine. Barefoot walking. The sea. An ice house. Without paying particular attention but just heading off to what felt like a good place to go (and was only one of several options suggested by my hosts) I've ended up on a pretty much Tigger-perfect adventure. Huzzah.

Addendum
On my walk back I realised that the tall towers I had (wrongly) assumed were part of a bridge were actually an oil platform being towed out to sea. Not something I expected to see! But it reminded me of a throw away comment from one of the room guides at the Hill of Tarvit - "Beautiful view - and no wind turbines!" A brief exchange ensued with me expressing support of wind turbines as an alternative to fossil fuel use (and CO2 production) and him countering with "Well, we're breathing out CO2 all the time!" True, yes - but not quite on the same magnitude as power producing combustion. Which brought to mind two of my current "thought projects":

1) the difficulty of doing "the right thing" while living in a very complex and interlinked world where impacts and subsequent repercussions are often entirely unintended and / or imagineable. Climate change and the energy debate is one such area - particularly given the scope of the challenge (and is a prospective future blog area when my thoughts have coalesced sufficiently!)

2) the importance of the Next Step. Humans are faced with an incredible array of challenges, choices and options - both practically and morally / philosophically. There is rarely a definitive right / wrong answer (especially when the whole human is taken into account - a wide range of crimes can probably be agreed upon as wrong, but the approach to dealing with a human who's committed such a crime - now there's a book in itself). But the simple truth is that the lifestyles being lived in "developed" countries at present isn't sustainable - which is where the next step comes in.

For example, I may* have decided that the answer to this non-sustainable lifestyle problem is for the population to live in housing communities, grow their own food and generally travel no further than 20-30 miles on a regular basis. However, presenting this to someone who has lived a life during which they have travelled extensively, generally purchased prepared food from supermarkets and lived only with immediate family is unlikely to have much of an impact other than for them to think of me as an idealistic nutter who should be ignored, regardless of what I say.

Learning more about where they are, what makes them tick and what would feel like a next step (rather than an intergalactic leap) for them as a discussion and exploration is much more likely to produce a long term positive impact.

All fairly sensible and possibly pretty obvious, but just my own exploration of how the world ticks and what I may be able to do to grease the cogs here and there.

*As much as I would love to have decided upon an answer to the question of how to live sustainably I can say with certainty that I haven't! I am really enjoying exploring community living and growing as what can be a very positive alternative to "mainstream living" but very much in the context of continuing to grapple with the reality of what the achievable "next steps" more broadly may be.