HOME GROWN
[adjective] (2) (Of food or faming methods) produced or involving production without the use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, or other artificial chemicals. (The Oxford English Dictionary)
We have never intended to be like those movie characters that run away from the city and find their way living alone in the woods. Years ago when we decided to move to the deep countryside of Brazil, we were in the midst of a search. It was to get tuned into another time zone, to a frequency where time was a “territory” and not a currency. We sought a place where efficiency and abundance had nothing to do with quantity or accumulation of stuff.
Nature seemed to be the perfect master: beings and things were simply there and the perfection was to work according to their role in the whole. In our case, perfection is more related to a sense of spontaneity and self-assurance than to a stereotype or a KPI. Working and living on that frequency, it is paramount to accept the never-ending uncertainties and the lack of control. The platform we chose to respond to is alive, organic, independent, and proactive.
To get down to the rhythm, duties, and rights of a life closer to natural phenomena, we had to first put ourselves there. It is physically and geographically the first real step. There was no way of practicing it in an environment where the rain wouldn’t entirely change the course of a day, where the sunlight wasn’t what determined the schedule, where ingredients wouldn’t demand time and dedication to grow and then appear on the fridge, where other beings (non-humans included) couldn’t be easily ignored if we felt like it. We are so ethically connected and dependent on neighbors, cows, pigs, chickens, and seedlings.
Beyond decoding the macro new system, we have to constantly be decoding to who we are. Listening to ourselves demands patience and a lot of bravery. And time to live in silence – not necessarily the length of it, but the presence of it. The time required to wait for the cheese to get mature, to get the water to boil, to get the fruits to grow, to get our friends to visit, to get the Wi-Fi back on.
Those moments cannot and must not be sped up, mainly because they tell stories. Everything we touch has a story.
We have learned to see objects in 4D, where stories become intrinsic and undistinguishable parts of them. Process is everything. Origin, territory, labour and time are what differentiate and also connect things to people, people to people, things to things.
Slow life doesn’t mean an isolated, past-centric, lazy or passive life. It means a daily exercise of recognizing our priorities. Sometimes it is a super important Skype meeting; others, it is to close our computer right away because the cows have jumped the fence and entered the vegetable garden. To live a slow life is to understand the beauty of being present for just one thing.
So a slow life has nothing to do with speed. It’s about presence, about being present. To have each moment as a good (and necessary) time.
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