(Originally posted on social media on August 7, 2020)
Thank you all for your feedback and encouraging words for my ‘coming out’ as ex-painter / hopeful resident on this planet.
Writing a statement of intention is one thing, but now the real work has to begin of course.
One of my next steps will be the building of a website, which I intend to use as a platform for one or more blogs. In these blogs I would like to address various aspects of the biosphere-crisis in a way that should be accessible for a wide audience. Until the website is ready, I would like to share in this way on a regular basis some loose thoughts, observations and information.
Always feel free to share further! Spreading information will be very important to my feeling, because for very many people the whole ecological crisis is still rather abstract, unreal, irrelevant of of secondary importance, especially in these times when the Corona-crisis - for understandable reasons - is getting most of our attention (but also this Corona-crisis is a part of the crisis in our biosphere, and that fact remains very much obscure for many if not most people).
Information, however, needs to be as reliable as possible, and I do take care to choose sources that are considered reliable, and I take care to check this information using other sources as well. There is more than enough junk information on the internet already.
It is not my intention to ‘preach for my own church’ as the saying goes in Dutch. One of my goals would be to reach people who until now have had little attention on the ‘environmental crisis’. I put the word ‘environmental crisis’ in brackets, as the word ‘environmental’ may indicate to some extent a major problem.: the fact that we consider our world and our habitat as something fundamentally separate from ourselves. Language to a considerable degree defines (and limits) the way we think, and in the larger domain of the biosphere crisis we can recognize many moments when our language itself determines the way we can (not) perceive the crisis and (not) think about it. This is one of the things that makes it so hard to really become conscious of what is happening to our habitat. And this is one of the things I would like to look into further.
For now I will start my new daily ‘work’ in beautiful Somogy County in Hungary. My wife Agnes is Hungarian, and we have an old peasant house here (built entirely of clay, straw and wood) with a large garden, and it is a privilege to be able to live and work in this splendid part of the world, at least for part of the year.
My wife is starting up a project that aims to bring people closer to nature - and to themselves - through observation. And this place is perfectly suited to that goal.
But here again this defining bias of our language creeps in: “we have a house and a garden here”. Right away some strange assumptions about the world become apparent, assumptions that remain below the threshold of our consciousness most of the time. What does it mean to “have” a house that was built more than a hundred years ago by a farmer, using only his own hands? What does it mean to “have” a garden , or a patch of forest? When I walk around here, it often seems to me that it might just as well be the other way around: the garden “has us”. Or rather: that there is no real distinction between the garden or forest and ourselves. But for now I will not digress too much in this line of thought, that is for another time.
What I do feel is that this garden and this patch of forest, which in conventional legal terms we can call “our own”, will play a part in my coming enterprises. It is a daily privilege to be in close contact with a patch of nature which is still bursting at the seams with life. In many places it isn’t like that anymore. Being able to experience this is a daily privilege and inspiration, that brings much joy every day, but that also brings with it a certain responsibility. One wants to take care of what one loves. But taking care of this little part of nature is - for me- connected to the caring for the greater whole. We are all inextricably intertwined with the whole. That is something that is very tangible here, every day again.
Love to you all, stay safe.
