Objects

There are many moments lately when I ask myself how we got here. The human mind dreams of freedom but creates constraints.  We lie to ourselves that we are free people but we struggle with our dependence in every single moment. Comfort gives the illusion of power but it is actually our weak point. Without comfort we are just scared clumsy animals. Our comfort is sustained by the idea of money. As long as we have money we can own everything we wish to. Of course our wishes depend on the amount of money we have. So we cannot wish more then we afford. And this way we become consumers. As long as we have money we can be irresponsible so we can waste, produce and destroy as much as we desire. As long as we have money for another car why should we use the old one? Even production is designed nowadays in a way that things cannot last to much. If the objects that we buy resist to much then who will buy them new ones? Am I the only one who sees something wrong in this? So I ask myself, how we got here.

Spicy Pyrenees

As we were allowed to enjoy the beauty of the Pyrenees another time we wanted to go a bit deeper and to discover some of the edible plants that grows there. Our first discovery was two magnificent plants that have their home in these mountains. One of them is a very common plant in the highlands in all the mountains of Europe: Juniperus communis or Juniper.  This great plant is a real help in the high mountains because it is the only source of wood for fire as there are now other kind of trees there. It is well known that the Juniper berries are used as a spice for food and also for the known alcoholic drink Gin. We tried the berries as spice in our daily soup as we didn’t afford to carry other spices with us from the city. The second plant we used as a spice was the Thymus praecox or the wild thyme. I think everyone of us used at least once the thyme as a spice. Well, the wild thyme has the same flavor just that you can find it near a beautiful waterfall or a rocky riverside.

Try these little presents of nature the next time you have the occasion to enjoy the almighty mountains that lay there, somewhere, waiting for us. Inside us or outside us….

Netherlands 1

The idea to bike trough Netherlands appeared because of many circumstances. It is not something extremely special what we did but we decided to at least make it special by using minimum of resources. What do I refer at when I say this? Well, let’s list some of the things we made economy with:

-          second hand bikes with no gears or special equipment;

-          cheap map for car routes;

-          no special bike clothes, just some sport clothes we had around;

-          one 3 euro bike bag and one borrowed bike trailer for carrying our things around;

-          no hotels or restaurants.

For sleeping we decided to use Couchsurfing but not only because of financial reasons but because we love to use Couchsurfing every time we are travelling. Couchsurfing really gives you the opportunity to meet great people and to feel at home everywhere you are around the world.

We planned our route using this website and our car map. The website is in Dutch but with a bit knowledge of German it is understandable.

Our target was to get from Amsterdam to Boxtel, near Eindhoven in 4 days. The reason we wanted to get to Boxtel is because we planned to stay there for 2 days in an eco village and work together with a team from France in building a sustainable house. After Boxtel we planned to take the train back to Osnabruck, but the plans changed a bit on the road, as you will se in the next blog posts .

If our plan worked and what problems we had you can read further in the detailed description of our trip:)

Planning Netherlands -1-

I love the ideea of spannungsbogen described by Frank Herbert in Dune: “…spannungsbogen –(..)is the self-imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing”. Starting from this definition I can say that in generaly we spend our lives from a spannungsbogen to another.The problem is that our delay is almost never self-imposed but society-imposed, or more corectly said,
survival-imposed. We need to carry out our lives as society tells us because this became survival nowadays. But it feels great when we see in front of us a short moment of escaping our daily society-imposed lives. So we plan our escape with delight and fear in the same time. The delightment comes from imagining every moment of our getaway in a bit exagerated way and the fear, like many of our fears, comes from the ideea that we will fail in fullfiling our desires. But things take time and time is our enemy when it comes to spannungsbogen.
And we wake up every morning happy that we are closer to our dream but we run like always from a place to another, from a feeling to another.Still we keep our desires somewhere on a treshold, waiting for us to let go of them, burning in us like little candles.