We’ve been learning tons since living here, so here are some things I’ve noticed about living in nature:
There are fewer choices and distractions—a good thing
Cities are full of countless modern options, leaving most people wondering what to do, see, visit, buy, etc. next. But in the Portuguese countryside, you are surrounded by forest, skies, unrelenting heat, and inconvenient distances. There are half-empty villages and rolling hills wherever I look, so my choices revolve around what’s here.
In other words, my choices are interconnected with what the land, house or the people working around me need. Like: should I water the vegetables or the young fruit trees, prune the olives trees today or plant seedlings tomorrow, sit behind the camper in the shade to type a blog (hoping my mind functions in this heat) or harvest ripe elderberries for syrup?
As for distractions, they are nothing like they would be in the city, such as window shopping, bumping into friends, grabbing a pizza, or doing something frivolous and spontaneous. Our distractions here are just work that needs to be done later. Meaning, if you try walking past something that needs to be fixed, recycled, restored, cleaned, moved, broken down into hundreds of pieces, or whatever, before you know it, you’re fixing, recycling, moving it, etc. “But wait, I was just looking for the pruning knife…” turns into removing rubble from a 100-meter path.
Simple living makes you super appreciative
Fulfilling our basic needs takes up a lot of our time. Because our house is a construction zone, we sleep in the camper. Our volunteers and guests stay in tents. We cook on an abandoned gas cooker we found on the streets and eat outside on the house terrace. There’s no sink or plumbing, so doing the dishes means fetching water from a tap on the side of the house, and the same goes for drinking water. But getting water just takes a minute more of my time, not half the day, as it would in some remote African village.
We don’t have a shower, but it’s hardly a pressing need in 30+ degree weather, so we swim instead. I cannot shout it out loud enough, swimming in a body of natural water every day is incredible. It’s grounding, blissful, healing, and such cold, bristling water stimulates the body and heart. It is the simplest of things that gives back the most.
I have taken 3 hot showers since May (at a friend’s place) and it was an unexpected luxury. Warm water has a different quality to it—it’s much more relaxing, and soothing—and using soap suddenly felt strange, it was almost too perfume-y. I am now used to the smells of nature, a mixture of dry earth, flowering mint, windblown pine, dusty bricks, and the hot air blowing over it.
To be honest, I constantly have dirt under my nails, wiped across face, and have become much less squeamish dealing with the decay and stickiness of nature. After days, weeks and months of living this more primal, simple life, I’ve let my unwashed, tangled hair down and relaxed.
With fewer so-called luxuries, you realise that some of the greatest luxuries are being able to feed yourself, finding the time to look around you and enjoy what makes up your life, especially who you’re sharing it with.
The slow life is the good life.
Slowing down is difficult for many of us to do, certainly me. I am a mental person, constantly thinking, doing, and in motion. But living in nature demands slowing down. For one, being fast can be painful—if you quickly grab a plant, it might have thorns; if you hurriedly grab a heavy rock (like I did) you end up spraining your wrist.
By rushing to conclusions, you also pay the price. One of the tenets of permaculture, the art of working with nature rather than taming it, is observation. Permaculture encourages practitioners not to do anything with their land for a year. Just watch what it does, how it reacts, and observe nature’s deep unfolding intelligence in action.
I didn’t do that. I planted veggies straight away though I am totally inexperienced. I didn’t research the ideal position for each plant, just put them in the ground and started watering. I had beginner’s luck, but about 1.5 months in, the tomatoes were rotting on the stem, the cabbage hardly grew, the broccoli and aubergine were sunburned, etc. My hurrying led to weeks of wasted effort and throwing too many vegetables into the compost heap rather than eating it in a meal.
By slowing down, I've noticed the incessant buzzing, labelling and storyline going off in my head and I am learning to tell it to shut up. I am learning the art of dozing off in the sun, watching birds fly about, and observing the wind. Here it’s easy to forget the everyday stresses of an over-scheduled life and just be, like that hippy catchphrase. Most of what needs to get done doesn’t have a deadline. Like in nature, things grow and ripen in due time, there's never a rush.
Small things are great!
A week ago, a friend left me a voicemail about attending a professional conference with 30+ colleagues over 10 days and she sounded happy and fulfilled. I laughed because that day I was thrilled that I had figured out how it was cheaper buying a whole box of ice cream at the local village supermarket (the ice cream is stuffed in the same tiny freezer as the shrimp) than the ugly modern restaurant across the street.
It got me thinking that in the city, we are often set on producing and showcasing our efforts, which usually accompanies a need for acknowledgement, validation and accomplishment. We are geared on doing the next best thing, going deeper, and doing more. But most of life rests with small achievements, small insights or small moments, which turn blah days, conversations, and experiences into richer ones. For me, scoring ice cream in baby Portuguese felt like kicking a winning goal.
It’s not that I don’t have a need for greater accomplishment, but the smallest of things lead to real joy. It's easy to look past them, but these moments make up my life.
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