Riding Free

Everything I ever blog about seems to come out as "woe is me" or self-deprecating and I know that what I write about hardly interests anyone but it's cathartic and it helps me at least try to order the multitude of different thoughts that are zooming through my head simultaneously.

Todays musings touch on the subjects of anarchy, communal living, loneliness, and changing the world.

I'm currently alone because my partner has gone away for a week to do some organic farming and hopefully learn a few tricks about sustainable living. This is part of the WWOOFing organisation. It is a "membership charity, teaching people about organic growing and low-impact lifestyles through hands-on experience in the UK." Basically you find a farm that does things your interested in (permaculture, bee-farming,  organic waste systems etc.) and you go work on that farm for an amount of time (three days, a week, two months, whatever) in exchange for food, board and knowledge. A lot of these places are run by people who are living off the land sustainably and whose full time job is the upkeep of their farm and these people are very happy to share knowledge and grateful for the help. It's a win-win situation.

Now for a while now I've been fascinated with the idea of communal living. I guess it stems from the research I've done into "hippie culture" and ever since I started making friends in college I've been sort of scared of loneliness even if I can seem rather anti-social at times. More recently however it has started to tie very nicely into my research into anarchy and it is now, more than ever, that the idea of communal living really appeals to me.

My research into anarchy has, so far, been brief and I would by no means say that I completely understand what it means to be an anarchist or how/if anarchism could work on a large-scale but my understanding so far is that it is a way of life that involves individuals on a personal level more than it is a political ideology. Now allowing people complete autonomy of their own person is something that seems very idealistic but it is something that has been shown to work, especially in the fall-out at the end of revolutions such as those at end of the reign of Franco in Spain or in Russian during the 1900's. This got me thinking. Can allowing people to have complete personal autonomy work within the setting of communal living? From my research into anarchy it would seem that this question has already been answered with a resounding "yes", but when it comes to complete personal autonomy nothing can be said with absolute certainty. I'm sure there are instances where it's worked and I'm sure there are instances where it hasn't worked. In modern parlance, anarchy has become synonymous with chaos and disorder but this need not be the case. One thing I learned about last year was 'consensus' and this is a tool that can be used to shape a complete personal autonomy into a complete collective autonomy. Running communities/meetings by consensus relies on the idea that by compromising, a certain end-point can be reached that meets all the needs, desires and ideals of a particular group of people, irrespective of what it is that joins that group together (if anything at all).

Given that my views on modern society basically add up to, quite simply, "it's fucked," I am a firm believer that the only way forward is through the channels opened up to us within the ideologies of anarchism, and through the systems of sustainable living that are becoming ever more popular and relevant in the current climate, and I would one day like to combine both of these things. How this will pan out and how these things will become combined within my life I don't know but I know that it will all be with the purpose of not only bettering myself but also with the purpose of changing the world.

It seems like a large, unending, impossible task to change the world but this is something can be achieved if you understand that making a positive impact on a small area of life - be that a community, a village, a relationship, a co-op, a commune - can positively impact the lives of those around you and in turn the wider world. It is in this way that I aim to spend my life changing the world, by making a positive impact on as many small areas in my life as possible.

Peace

xx