A Voice in the Crowd

The true free living human-being is the one that achieves his dream without depending on someone. -Lao Tzu

This somewhat Nietzschean quote justly expresses my highest aspirations and gives good clues as to why I want to become a permaculture designer and horticulturist - as well as to what my stance about relationships is. Although autonomy is an illusion, developing understanding and control makes me feel alive and whole.

The various musings that have punctuated my waking hours for the last couple years have brought along gentle change. Like Anemoi slowly sculpting a dune, gusts of different intensities have given shape to my worldview, my sense of identity, and a sense of connection with my intuitions. The dune remains at the mercy of yet stronger winds in the future, collecting grains of sand from other dunes, but its body is essentially formed. An everlasting work-in-progress with boundaries in flux but boundaries nonetheless.

My exploration of personality theories, Yoga, Buddhism, a plethora of novels, the works and teachings of various philosophers and spiritual guides, social psychology and the world of pick up artists, as well as plenty of experiences with friends, strangers and family, abroad or home, have given me a sense of what is my "natural mode of interaction" with my environment. I have developed a certain capacity to isolate and listen to my voice within the sounds of the choir.

Despite embracing the concept of an "interrelatedness of all things" and knowing the crucial importance of learning lessons through a wide variety of experiences in order to grow, - many including other people - I am decidedly not a man of dogma, shunning "belonging for the sake of belonging" and prizing autonomy above everything else. I am one of Thoreau's men who hears a different drummer. Schopenhauer's self-heating porcupine. An arrogant prick who nonetheless holds compassion as the ultimate standard. A man doomed to be an apostate, who needs to create his own reality, who runs away from isms, knowing that even when he might be on his own, he will always belong to some abstract community. The somewhat moderate ascetic who shares the Stoicist's suspicion that overindulgence bogs down while peace of mind frees.

No, I do not wish to escape society by seeking refuge in a garden. There is too much to learn from others and to share. What I do wish is a livelihood which is compassionate, wholesome, demanding, frugal, solitary, within nature but where I have a certain amount of control over my environment and can satisfy my desire to constantly learn and grow good sense while playing with variables on a macroscopic scale (variables less dramatic than those of the shepherd Tim). If I do take "the one seat", permaculture horticulture would be a great one.