The shape of things to come
A brighter future for people and planet
It’s been three months now since I packed up my life and came here to Peru. The time has flown by in a flurry of activity that’s left me little time to think. Life in the big city is challenging and I miss the strong connection to nature I was lucky to have in Hobart. Here I live in an urban world, in a high-rise apartment without even a balcony. My windows look out onto the buildings across the street, over a concrete canyon awash with the noise of Lima traffic. I miss the view from my windows over my long, narrow garden, across the river to the mountains beyond. The garden…
It’s someone else’s garden now. I may have lost it, but what I do keep, little seeds saved for future sowing, are the lessons that garden taught me: Read More
Happy New Year, my lovely readers. I’m sorry it’s been so quiet around here, but living and working in another country, culture and language is pretty tiring stuff. Once again the half-written posts are piling up as I run out of steam to finish them off and post them up. 2014 is shaping up to be an exceedingly busy year between my project here in Peru and the adventures I have planned. As always there’s more I’d like to do that I possibly can and finding that elusive balance is a major challenge. It’s a lot harder to head out into nature to recharge here in Lima! Still, I managed to get away for a few days over the New Year break and went climbing mountains in Huascaran National Park, right in the heart of the Peruvian Andes.
Climbing up to 4,800 mASL under my own steam, pack and all, was a physical reminder about pacing myself in order to achieve big things. That’s not a bad message to start the year off with, is it?
Here’s to making 2014 a remarkable year for us all, and taking action to build the sort of world we want to live in.
Dare to do great things
My friend Van, who writes the lovely Speed River Journal, invited me to participate in a positivity experiment: to post 10 good things that have happened to me in 2013. It’s been a big year for me, and it’s not over yet, but the Solstice is a good time to reflect on the challenges and rewards the year has brought.
1. The garden was a rich source of pleasure this year. It provided grounding when I needed calmness and sense of connection. It taught me patience, resilience and the rewards of hard work. I learnt more about how to grow food and nourish the soil, and through that myself. There were the escapades of chicken-sitting in January, when some borrowed hens did great things for my compacted, nutrient poor “lawns” and decimated my beetroot crop (I forgave them: the eggs were delicious). There was the excitement of growing and harvesting completely new crops, like oka and Jerusalem artichokes, and just the simple pleasure of lying on the meadow in the sun, listening to the drowsy buzzing of the bees.
2. Hiking was another activity that brought many great moments with it. There’s nothing like standing on top of mountain you’ve climbed yourself to make you feel glad to be alive. For the first few months of 2013 I spent a day most every weekend in the wilderness and loved it, even when my muscles shook with fatigue and the sweat stung my eyes. Taking myself out into those wild places remains one of the best things I can do for myself, to care for my physical, mental and spiritual health and look forward to future journeys to wild places.
3. On the topic of climbing to giddy heights, in 2013 I fell stupidly, dizzyingly, completely in love. In my mid 30’s for the first time in my life I was head-over-heels for someone, and that someone felt the same about me. It didn’t work out in the end, but I still got to feel it, and now I understand how and why people do such incredible things in love’s name. ❤ Read More
I’m a long way from home these days, but I carry this amazing place with me, wherever I go.
When you’re living in a desert city of 10 million people in the developing world resources are stretched tightly. There’s not much room for nature in Lima, beyond the inevitable urban pigeons and a few hardy native birds that take advantage of the artificial oases of urban parks and gardens. There’s no space for wild places within the vast city limits, with one remarkable exception: Los Pantanos de Villa. Read More
Today is International Volunteers Day, apparently. There’s a day or a week or a month for everything, it seems, but volunteering is a good thing to stop and think about now and again. Volunteering – donating our knowledge, labour or skills for free – is a powerful way of creating the kind of future we’d like to see.
I’m volunteering on a big scale, spending a year working to help to develop skills and capacity in the team that tried to balance the social and economic needs for development with the protection of Peru’s network of incredible national parks and reserves. It’s a privilege to be doing what I’m doing, to have the opportunity to experience another country and culture, using my skills to help accomplish things that I’m passionate about. I’m incredibly lucky to have the opportunity, to have found myself at a place in life where I could just pack up and go, to be able to afford to spend an entire year away without a real income. How fortunate I am to have the chance to try to change things (and how bizarre it feels to find myself the ‘expert’ in anything).
You don’t have to do something as big and crazy as I’m doing to change things though. In fact it’s often the local, community efforts that make the biggest impacts and really change the way we live. Volunteering at home, as much as abroad, gives us the ability to touch other people’s lives and contribute towards the world we want to live in. When if comes to building a sustainable, communal, joyful future, volunteering our time and effort is one of the the most powerful things we can do. Read More
It’s a strange thing to find yourself slipping into the rhythm of daily life in an unfamiliar world. I’ve been in Lima four weeks now and my days are starting to take on a more familiar shape.
Two weeks ago I moved into an enormous share-house. Eight of us – a mix of Peruvians and other foreigners – share 6 bathrooms, 2 lounge rooms and 1 kitchen. It’s a big adjustment after 18 months of living alone in the Cottage and was pretty nervous about moving in given how badly I coped with a share-house of 4 in uni. I’m slowly getting used to the noise of others coming and going, and thankfully the others don’t much use the kitchen (and I have my own en suite bathroom) but it’s still taking a lot of adjusting and I’m still horribly under-slept. There’s just too much happening in my poor brain to get good quality rest.
Changes come thick and fast and the challenge is finding enough down-time to process all the new information that’s super-saturating my brain so I can wind down enough for sleep. It’s not helped by a culture where plans are made at the last-minute and you suddenly find yourself with an unmissable invitation on the day you were planning to catch up on sleep. There’s always something going on here in Lima. Read More
It’s a strange thing, packing up a life and heading off into the unknown. It’s funny what a life comes down to, really.
In a world of regulations, a life is constrained into ticky-boxes. There are accounts to be cancelled or suspended and the problem of redirections when you have no forwarding or returning address. All the notifications, proof of travel, suspension and cancellation fees: yhe official records of our lives contain nothing of ourselves at all.
So where do we keep ourselves? Much of our identity is drawn from our surroundings – the place we live and the things we own – but these too are insubstantial in the scheme of things. In the last fists-full of time I had left in Hobart I sold or gave away so many things; my car, half my furniture, half my clothes… Read More
Way back in the dimly-recalled shadows of the 1990’s an inescapable pop song called “Waterfalls” burrowed its way into my brain. Don’t go chasing waterfalls – implored the lyrics – please stick to the rivers and the lakes that you’re used to. My teenaged self took a serious disliking to this exhortation to play life safe: chasing waterfalls sounded like a much better plan. The song is barely remembered now, but the idea stuck so fast that I still think of following big, bold and slightly crazy dreams as “chasing waterfalls”, and lately that’s just what I’ve been doing.
Myrtle Falls, Wellington Park, Tasmania
If you thought perhaps I’d fallen silent because I’d had an attack of good sense and spent the winter relaxing and catching up on sleep, well you mustn’t know me very well. That may have been the sensible path, but this is *me* we’re talking about and if I’m not busy challenging myself and trying to do too many things at once I don’t feel quite properly alive. I’m curious, inquisitive and have a tendency to wander off poking at things that catch my attention.
For the last year or so South America has been a source of inspiration and fascination, particularly the mix of complex sustainability issues and welcoming culture I found in Peru. I came back from my last trip in April with a head full of ideas but no clue as to how to make them reality, so I did what I always do when I lack sufficient data and threw myself into learning how exactly one goes about trying to support sustainability management in a developing country on the other side of the world.
Weekends were spent reading research papers and NGO reports to understand the issues and governance frameworks. Free evenings were swiftly occupied by Google searches for programs and companies doing the sorts of work I was interested in. I enrolled in Spanish classes. I talked to my boss about opportunities for sabbatical leave and worked out how to go about packing up my life to follow a dream. I was all in.
I leapt, and as so often happens when you’re on the right path and making the right choices for all the right reasons, I found my wings on the way down. I have a job, for a year, in Peru, doing sustainability-shaped things!
Dove Canyon, Cradle Mountain – Lake St. Clair National Park, Tasmania.
I’m going to be light on the details to make sure I stay on the safe side of the code of conduct I’ve signed with its strict conditions for social media mentions, but what I can tell you is this:
- It’s a volunteering but with living expensed covered type of gig;
- I’ll be embedded with a Peruvian host organisation, the only foreigner working as part of a small team;
- I’ll be based in Lima and working in a Spanish-speaking environment, which is wonderful and terrifying in almost equal parts;
- I’ll be helping to develop environmental management processes and protocols for sustainable natural resource management for protected areas; and
- I may be lucky enough to visit and work in some of the most biologically diverse places on earth!
I am wonderfully, joyfully excited about it all, and just a little nervous and apprehensive too. Most of all, however, I am busy as I sort out my life and get ready to go.
I’ve got projects to finish at work, and I’m wanting to leave on a high note (especially since they’re letting me come back again) There’s background reading to make sure I’m informed and Spanish study to do, plus epic amounts of paperwork, medical and logistical planning to work through (I’m immune to rabies as of today, which feels like quite an exotic thing to be). There’s the huge job of sifting through my possessions and sorting out what to store, share or sell and still all the inescapable day-to-day work of running my very lovely but rather busy life.
Yes, I’m still harvesting veggies from the backyard (so much broccoli) and cooking myself proper food, still shopping at the market and the local grocer, still cutting more and more plastic out of my life, but I will admit that I catch the bus a little more often than I used to, and drive the car a tiny bit more to save time where I can. I’m not getting as much good sleep and rest as my body tells me I’m needing, and I’m not getting out bush-walking anywhere near enough. Sometimes I really can’t do everything I want to do, no matter how determined or stubborn I am, but I’m still doing ok. I’m still acting in ways that agree with my values, and I’m happy that even when going through such a big upheaval almost all the good changes I’ve made are being maintained. Certainly my learning to do without “stuff” is paying off in spades as I have so much less to pack and store than I did a few years ago: moving 4 times in 5 years really clarifies what you do and don’t need!
What good is material stuff, anyway, when you’re off chasing waterfalls?
Somewhere in the Lares region of the Andes, Cuzco region, Peru.
Adventure called and I answered. I’m off just next month for a year of finding out what I’m really made of, trying to make a meaningful difference to this crazy, beautiful world. A year volunteering in sustainability management in Peru: that’s the shape of things to come!
The shape of things to come 