Orange tinted sky and a welcome to the first proper frost this campervan morning. Roof tops and hedge tops crusted white, the ground crisp, crackles underfoot. A clear blue sky and stillness, accompanied by the roar of the far away motorway. Trains picked out on the air making there way town wards. Cold nipping at face and fingers and coffee being chugged down a wee bit quicker than usual. Geese on the air pass over head, crow voices, a couple of starlings in the ash, they seem to have reappeared after a long absence. The oak leaves now a fierce yellow and gold have started to shed with a vengeance. The brass carpeted in frosted leaves. Aeroplanes pass overhead there hard under belies glowing pink in the early morning sun. Seems somewhat strange as I have been walking the hinterland of Australia with Bruce Chatwin over the last few days to hit the best frost we have so far had. Chatwin was fascinated by nomads, the nomadic existence, having spent years with various indigenous populations throughout the world. He believed that at the root of it all we are a nomadic people. There is perhaps an inherent part of us that needs to travel, needs to explore and needs experiences. He writes that ;
“ Man's real home is not a house, but the Road, and that life itself is a journey to be walked on foot. “
It’s a theory, I am not so sure. I sense that perhaps we are as people on a journey and we have relinquished the nomadic part of that, be it thought, travel or living, to fit in, to be controlled, to be told rather than to think and experience it ourselves. People that tell you what to think, what to say, what to chant, what to watch, what to read and where to go. A loss of the freedom to discover, experience. The loose of the intellectual nomad in a sea of nonsense. Not just the constraints of living a non nomadic life, but now the constraints of non nomadic thought. I need to go and journal some of these thoughts. A bit serious for a Saturday morning. Time to immerse myself in outback Australia.
“ Life is a bridge. Cross over it, but build no house on it.” Bruce Chatwin.
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