My Life Review )
(Word count : 4167)
I was born in Guildford, Surrey to an English mother and a Beijan (from Barbados) father. I was adopted at the age of two months by English parents and subsequently removed to Sutton Coldfield (a suburb of Birmingham) where I lived until the age of Two. My parents adopted a second child when I was one year old (my brother Matt) he was also mixed race his mother being English and father from Nigeria.
At the age of two my family decided to move out of the town to the countryside, for the next six years we were to remain in the idyllic paradise that is the small hamlet of Elmhurst in Staffordshire.
I view these years of my childhood as being some of the happiest of my life and feel that they had a definite and powerful impact on shaping who I am today, my core values, a deep appreciation of nature, the countryside, simple living and enjoying outdoor activities.
Whenever I recollect those days I can't help but feel a sense of joy and contentment as well as a deep gratitude for having had the opportunity, to grow up in what was (for me at least) such an idyllic setting.
I'll attempt to give a vague outline of the setting and my general memories of these formative days of my youth.
The house in Elmhurst was a relatively small semi-detached house with quite a small garden area, goat shed and hay barn. There was a large apple tree, we kept two goats and a couple of hens. The garden was bordered at the rear by farmers fields and the front garden met the small village road which culminated in a dead end some fifty metres beyond our house. Where the road ended there was a small woodland area home of Bertha the mystical dog lady who lived on the edge of the woods in a small caravan with a multitude of dogs as her companions.
My brother and I spent most of our time playing in the garden, climbing the apple tree, chilling with the goats and exploring the woods. Most of my memories of this period revolve around nature; spending a great deal of time in the woods with my brother, indeed the woodland became our second home, riding my tricycle around the village with the other village children. Playing with the goats (and drinking lots of raw goats milk) having a great time climbing the old apple tree (my brother and I were both accomplished tree climbers at an early age) and trying to haul other friends (who were less accomplished climbers) up the tree with ropes!
I can clearly recall many excursions we made as a family and with family friends to the local forest ten miles away, where we'd go for day trips and picnics, paddling and swimming in the beautiful bubbling brooks so clean, cold and refreshing. Wandering and exploring the forest with my brother and our friends Ross and Daniel, playing hide and seek jumping into the bracken and generally running amok.
When I was eight years old my parents separated and we moved to the local city which was only a couple of miles away. I remember being conscious of mum and dad arguing sometimes at night before they separated. So when they told my brother and I that they intended on separating I wasn't particularly surprised, it seemed to me quite natural that, if they were no longer content living together, they should separate and pursue happiness on their own terms.
When we moved to the city my mum's new boyfriend - Steve, moved in with us, I don't recall having any particularly strong feelings about that at the time.
The city we moved to, Lichfield, was a predominantly white area with little ethnic diversity. It was here that I first became conscious of the fact that my brother and I were somehow different looking than the other kids. Soon after this I was to get my first taste of racial discrimination.
Having been born in England and raised by white English parents I remember feeling confused when kids at school would occasionally say thing like “why don't you go back where you came from”, were perhaps talking about Guildford I wondered or maybe they were referring to Elmhurst. Anyway it never made much sense to me.
My brother and I were both very athletic and good at running. This paid dividends when we occasionally had to make a run for it from the local racist ghetto kids. Once when I was perhaps ten and my brother nine I remember having to make a run for it on the way home from school one day when a group of men in a van wound down the window, started hurling racist abuse and then actually got out and started coming towards us with the marks of evil intention stamped across their features!
At times like this I remember, oddly enough, not really feeling particularly scared but more a strange exhilaration, the thrill of the chase and confidence in my own and my brothers speed somehow transcended fear and gave rise to a queer excitement. I believe this propitiated the tendency I developed later on in my Secondary school days to deliberately wind-up the older kids in order to get them to chase me around until they were exhausted, safe in the knowledge that they'd never catch me!
All in all I’d say that these experiences of racial discrimination helped me to identify my cultural background and realise that although I'm English I have roots in the Caribbean, tropical blood and a tropical disposition.
I found secondary school life dull and monotonous, I felt too restricted and thought that the format and structure of most of the lessons I was forced to endure was such as to be not conducive to a constructive learning model for me personally. Therefore I became much more intent on having a laugh with my mates than focusing on class.
I've always had a great love of plants and the botanical kingdom, feeling myself naturally drawn to pristine environments; Forests, mountains, tropical island ecosystems etc.
After finishing my GCSE's I enrolled on a horticultural course for 2 years at Rodbaston Horticultural and Agricultural college. It was a modern apprenticeship where I'd go to college once a week and spend four days a week at work.
I worked at a couple of different wholesale ornamental plant nurseries during this period. I learnt a lot and enjoyed work and the course. I felt happy to be learning by doing in a work environment and appreciated the knowledge, support, guidance and practicality of the course tutor.
I had a large crew of mates and some of us would meet up every night. We'd spend our time listening to music, jamming, and talking about life the universe, music and spirituality, going to concerts, performances and open-mike nights.
At the weekends all the crew would get together (between twenty – thirty of us) and party. Often this would happen at a mates house, we'd hook up there and get Irie! Often lots of the crew members would lose all there inhibitions and dress up in my mates mums clothes, props would appear, the wigs and wacky glasses would come out and much merriment was to be had by one and all.
In October 2000 at the age of twenty I embarked on an adventure which was destined to continue for the best part of the next seven years, and although the path has evolved, redefined and redesigned itself in more recent years, is still continuing today.
Arriving at the airport in Mumbai we had our first taste of India, the heat and humidity enveloped us like a smothering blanket, the smells were intense and intoxicating, incense, Indian food, traffic fumes, tobacco and the rank odours of putrification mingling together. The colours vibrant and dazzling, intricate patterns and designs surrounding us, car horns bleating and blaring, a million people all talking at once. The craziness, disorder and chaos presented such a contrast to our dreary homeland where everything seems so ordered,
So arriving in India certainly had an impact, it definitely evoked a lot of emotions.
During this trip Matt and I travelled from Mumbai to Jaipur (capital city of Rajasthan). Rajasthan is in the north west of India and borders with Pakistan, it's a desert state. Jaipur was hot and dusty, but I remember being taken-a-back by the incredible spectacle that befell our eyes upon reaching the gates of that city. The Streets were jam packed with every variety of wonder imaginable, elephants, camels, horses, monkeys, cows, dogs, cats, chipmunks, scooters with families of five on them, women with elaborate, beautifully colourful saris and tinkling jewellery, men holding wicker baskets containing swaying cobras and half naked men coated in ash with long dreadlocks. I was amazed, I fell in love then with India and her beauties.
We travelled through Rajasthan to Pushkar where we sat talking to sadus (men who grow long dreadlocks, cover their bodies in ash and practice austerities in order to further their spiritual endeavours), then up to Delhi, which was overwhelmingly busy and polluted.
From Delhi we took an overnight bus up into the Himalayas. Himachel Pradesh, was the most beautiful place I'd ever seen, the rolling himalayan foothills to the south and the spectacular snow clad peaks towering above us to the North, crystal clear mountain streams, bubbling brooks and fast flowing rivers.
We arrived at Vashisht a small village with a natural hot-spring to Bathe in the cold mornings and evenings, a stunning array of high peaks all around and the fascinating and beautiful foothills, valleys and local villages to wander around and explore.
We then visited Rishikesh where we swam for the first time in the magnificent, cleansing and reviving waters of the holy river Ganga. Spoke to fellow travellers and sadus about spirituality and had a lot of jam sessions.
We had a wonderful month in Nepal where, after meeting an Aussie girl and chatting for a while about our life philosophies and personal visions, she introduced me to the term Permaculture and I realised that there was a whole new world of opportunity and discovery before me. We then headed to Calcutta and then the Andaman Islands. The Andaman's really stuck out for me in terms of natural beauty, very far removed from the kind of beauty that the Himalayas of Northern India and Nepal have to offer but something very special nevertheless, the pristine tropical forests surrounded by white sand beaches, coral reefs and a huge assortment of life in the amazing underwater world that we'd visit in our daily snorkelling sessions.
This voyage solidified in me many of the thoughts, ideas and unlearnings, that i'd begun to develop in my teenage years.
I'd learned a valuable lesson; there's a whole world out there just waiting to be experienced and I don't have to go to uni, get a “good job”, a credit card, a mortgage, a big car, a wife and 2.4 children, a widescreen tv to watch eastenders and coronation street, read the sun, Wednesday and Friday down the pub, 21 days holiday a year doing a job I hate, 40 hours a week until i'm sixty five. No thanks!!!
I spent the next Five or six years following a similar pattern of travel in India and south-east asia followed by brief spells of summer work in England.
On the 26th December 2004 I experienced an event that would change my perspective on life and help to cement many ideas and philosophies that had been circling in my mind for the past few years.
It was 6.00 am. boxing day morning when matt and I were rudely awakened by the shaking and rattling of the pots and pans that were hanging up in the corner of the rustic hut we were staying in. It felt as though four big rugby lads were shaking the posts of the hut, it was getting stronger and more intense by the second, I then became aware of the screeching of thousands of birds up in the sky. As we crawled out of the hut Mr. Parytosh was to be seen clinging to a violently swaying coconut tree screaming “Earthquake! Earthquake!.....
We lay on the earth experiencing the ground shake with ever increasing intensity. Sometimes it would seem quite rhythmic at other times it was jolting and jarring up and down, side to side, forwards and backwards. The birds circling overhead, crying out in a frenzy all the while. When it finally finished it seemed as though it had been going on for a lifetime, it had only actually been 2 minutes, but that felt like a very long time to be in such a situation.
We were staying on Smith island, an extremely remote island in the north of the Andaman and Nicobar island chain (a remote archipelago in the bay of Bengal belonging to India). At the time the only way for most budget travellers to reach the Andaman's was to take a boat from the Indian mainland (Calcutta/Chennai to Port Blair) which takes anything from 3-5 days then to get to Smith requires an overnight boat journey to Arial Bay in North Andaman, then another short boat ride to the island.
After recovering our senses we managed to walk over to the coconut tree, where Mr. Parytosh was standing. We spoke to him for a while about the earthquake, he told us, as we'd already surmised, that the quake had been a very powerful one and he was very worried about his family who lived on a larger Island some way off. He left soon afterwards to check on his family.
Matt and I stayed on Smith, with no news of the outside world or any idea whatsoever of the devastation that had occurred in the local region, we were quite content living life to the utmost on our idyllic tropical island paradise. Laughing and joking with the locals about the constant aftershocks; “shaking, shaking,” they'd say laughing, completely unaware of what was happening further afield.
On Smith there wasn't any electricity, no tv's, radio, newspapers, telephones or any other media for information or communication, there was very little concrete or cement, the buildings were all natural builds (wood or earthen) and there wasn't any piped water (everyone there has wells, which withstood the quake very well). The people on the island rarely visit the mainland (North Andaman Island), just once in a while to stock up on the bulk goods that they can't easily supply themselves.
Ten days after the earthquake the police arrived from North Andaman to evacuate us, at the time we had no idea why they wanted to evacuate us but as we left Smith island the picture became more clear.
We saw that the (concrete) buildings on the mainland were in a very sorry state and many of the underground water pipes had been broken by the earthquake leaving people with no drinking water. The district councils were having to pump water from the rivers and creeks to distribute amongst the local inhabitants.
When we spoke to our parents it was with a sense of bitter irony that we discovered that, as we'd been having the time of our lives on a tropical island paradise they'd been fearing the worst, not hearing any news from the authorities of our whereabouts or circumstances. Matt and I were the last foreigners on the Andamans to be found by the authorities and our families back in England had been told to brace themselves for the worst!
I felt very saddened that my family and friends had to endure such suffering at our expense and made an internal resolution at the time to keep in closer touch with my family whilst travelling .All in all I feel that despite the terrible devastation and loss of life, on a personal level I learned a lot from the experience, particularly in a spiritual context; the transitory nature and impermanence of the universe, the worry and grief that are the bedfellows of attachment and the deep and intrinsic connection that we as humans have with the earth our host, our mother, whether we have come to realise it or not.
In June 2006 I went on a pilgrimage to the source of the river Ganga (Ganges), in northern India. The bus ride to the small town of Gangotri was scary, traversing numerous, extremely hazardous, hair-pin bends that didn't have barriers to help safeguard against the bus plummeting, in some cases hundreds of feet down the sheer cliff face to the river and rocks below.
After arriving in Gangotri Matt and I took to exploring the local surroundings and getting acclimatised to the high altitude. A few days later we were ready to set off on the 18km. Hike up to the source. We left early in the morning and made our way up the forest path that runs adjacent to the river. We walked all day enjoying the natural beauty and wonders that surrounded us before arriving in the evening at the lal baba ashram about five or so km. From the source. It was freezing cold that night and I remember being very glad of the warmth emanating from the numerous bodies around me as I slept.
The next morning we got up early and headed to the source. I can't describe how powerfull an experience it was to finally reach the glacier and behold the splendour of the river Ganges as it gushed forth from beneath the glacier, it was truly amazing and awe inspiring.
Bathing in those frigid waters was a profound and soul-invigorating experience, ifelt a new found clarity, I felt re-born!
In May 2007 I took the PDC at The Panya Project in northern Thailand. I consider this as being very much a life changing experience for me. I'd been planning on doing the PDC for several years before I finally took the plunge, being previously unwilling to part with, what was for me, a substantial sum of money that could support my travels for many months.
After doing the PDC and staying for an extra couple of weeks doing practical implementation I went directly down to the south of Thailand to help some friends out with permaculture related projects that they were attempting to undertake.
During this period I got my first taste of community living, albeit a strange and turbid one at times. I also fell into a whirlwind romance with the girl that was to become the mother of my wonderful daughter Ganga. Our relationship was great at first but after 6 months began to deteriorate, it was around this time that I learned that she was pregnant. At first I was very distressed by the news, feeling that our relationship wasn't going well and that there was little chance of a future for the two of us together.
After time I got more used to the idea of having a child and came to accept it. Neither of us were willing to consider the option of abortion, me because of having been adopted myself I had strong personal opinions about abortion; I felt that i'd been very lucky to have had the chance at life, a life which for the most part has been wonderful and could certainly never bring myself to deny any child of mine such an experience. Rajani (my girlfriend at the time) had her own personal reasons for not wanting to have an abortion. So we decided to try and make a go of it.
After spending a year on the island we moved up to Loei in the North-east of Thailand where Rajani's father had a large mango, custard apple and longan plantation. This is where my daughter was born (in Loei hospital) on the 25th of July 2008. A beautiful baby girl, Ganga became the most important part of my life, my pride and joy and the very reason for my existence.
Having a child was a very sharp learning curve for me, not having had very much experience with babies in the past I was forced to mature and take on the responsibility very quickly. Things went quite well for a time and, when I wasn't busy looking after Ganga, I spent my time developing permaculture projects on the land and practising biodynamic market-gardening, to produce our veg and get a small income from the village market.
After a year or so things took a turn for the worse, Rajani and I were having problems! Our relationship entered a downward spiral and many months were spent arguing with each other and generally having a miserable time. This was a very challenging time for me, one of the roughest patches of my life. After spending a month in England with Rajani and Ganga, I decided we needed some time apart and went to India for a spiritual pilgrimage to the source of the river Ganga with my friend Matt. I felt as though I gained a lot of clarity from the trip, which was a very powerful experience, and came out of it with the resolve to do everything in my power to give Ganga the happiest experiences in life whether or not her mother and I were together.
After returning to Thailand we (Ganga, Rajani and I) lived together at Rajani's family house in Bangkok. Rajani and I had decided to try and live together as friends, with the intention of keeping family life intact for the sake of our daughter. For eight months we lived like this during which time, Rajani and I went regularly to a spiritual school for Raja yoga meditation and spiritual discussion. I found this to be a very useful tool for helping to make me much less reactive in potentially argumentative situations and keeping cool and unaffected no matter what the provocation, having unconditional love (metta) and transcending the limitations and pitfalls of body-consciousness.
In June 2010 I had to go back to England for the summer in order to earn money. I spent the summer working on a biodynamic farm on the England/Wales border in Herefordshire. It was extremely hard for me to be away from Ganga for five months and at points I felt as though I was sinking into a quagmire of despair.
Work on the farm was, on the whole, a good experience and taught me a lot; animal husbandry, intensive veg production techniques, storing veg, marketing and especially about ways of managing people and human interactions in the work-place.
When I went back to Thailand it was with the intention of going to live in Chiang Mai (at the panya project). It was so good to finally see Ganga again and I knew it would be hard to adjust to my new life at Panya only seeing Ganga once every two-three weeks. I spent a month in Bangkok trying to make up for lost time with my daughter then headed up to the Panya community where i've been growing, learning and unlearning ever since.
I've been living at the Panya Project as a long-term-volunteer for the last eleven months helping with the day to day responsibilities of running the project, such as gardening, building maintenance and construction, correspondence with short-term-volunteers and course participants etc. I've also had the opportunity to lead practical, active learning sessions on three, two-week Permaculture-in-practice courses and two international school visits, assisted/helped facilitate several social permaculture sessions, taught two theory classes; Food forest (permaculture workshop) and Intensive veg production (PDC), led numerous work-sessions with short-term volunteers, designed and established three vegetable gardens, (Mandala garden, BD garden and Contour garden), built a small-scale biogas digester, experimented with alley-cropping, established grey-water system; Banana, papaya shower circle with thermophilic compost hot water and retro-fitted my house. I've attended an NVC workshop, sat through lessons on three PDCs, done a one-day permablitz at a Montessori school in Chiang Mai, used consensus and sociocratic decision making techniques to help design policies, systems and strategies for Panya, in the context of a permaculture education centre and an intentional community and am currently teaching a sixteen-day permaculture intro and natural building workshop.
I'm pleased with the way my career path in permaculture is unfolding, I feel i'm growing ever more confident as a teacher and am empowered to teach more courses and workshops.
I aim to be making a living from permaculture (design, consultancy and teaching) by the time I have completed my diploma.
I am committed to improving my skills as a permaculture designer. I intend to learn how to create a professional portfolio, learn how to use digital mapping and design software, improve upon my documentation and presentation skills and have decided to enroll on this diploma course in order to help me achieve my goals.
I was born in Guildford, Surrey to an English mother and a Beijan (from Barbados) father. I was adopted at the age of two months by English parents and subsequently removed to Sutton Coldfield (a suburb of Birmingham) where I lived until the age of Two. My parents adopted a second child when I was one year old (my brother Matt) he was also mixed race his mother being English and father from Nigeria.
At the age of two my family decided to move out of the town to the countryside, for the next six years we were to remain in the idyllic paradise that is the small hamlet of Elmhurst in Staffordshire.
I view these years of my childhood as being some of the happiest of my life and feel that they had a definite and powerful impact on shaping who I am today, my core values, a deep appreciation of nature, the countryside, simple living and enjoying outdoor activities.
Whenever I recollect those days I can't help but feel a sense of joy and contentment as well as a deep gratitude for having had the opportunity, to grow up in what was (for me at least) such an idyllic setting.
I'll attempt to give a vague outline of the setting and my general memories of these formative days of my youth.
The house in Elmhurst was a relatively small semi-detached house with quite a small garden area, goat shed and hay barn. There was a large apple tree, we kept two goats and a couple of hens. The garden was bordered at the rear by farmers fields and the front garden met the small village road which culminated in a dead end some fifty metres beyond our house. Where the road ended there was a small woodland area home of Bertha the mystical dog lady who lived on the edge of the woods in a small caravan with a multitude of dogs as her companions.
My brother and I spent most of our time playing in the garden, climbing the apple tree, chilling with the goats and exploring the woods. Most of my memories of this period revolve around nature; spending a great deal of time in the woods with my brother, indeed the woodland became our second home, riding my tricycle around the village with the other village children. Playing with the goats (and drinking lots of raw goats milk) having a great time climbing the old apple tree (my brother and I were both accomplished tree climbers at an early age) and trying to haul other friends (who were less accomplished climbers) up the tree with ropes!
I can clearly recall many excursions we made as a family and with family friends to the local forest ten miles away, where we'd go for day trips and picnics, paddling and swimming in the beautiful bubbling brooks so clean, cold and refreshing. Wandering and exploring the forest with my brother and our friends Ross and Daniel, playing hide and seek jumping into the bracken and generally running amok.
When I was eight years old my parents separated and we moved to the local city which was only a couple of miles away. I remember being conscious of mum and dad arguing sometimes at night before they separated. So when they told my brother and I that they intended on separating I wasn't particularly surprised, it seemed to me quite natural that, if they were no longer content living together, they should separate and pursue happiness on their own terms.
When we moved to the city my mum's new boyfriend - Steve, moved in with us, I don't recall having any particularly strong feelings about that at the time.
The city we moved to, Lichfield, was a predominantly white area with little ethnic diversity. It was here that I first became conscious of the fact that my brother and I were somehow different looking than the other kids. Soon after this I was to get my first taste of racial discrimination.
Having been born in England and raised by white English parents I remember feeling confused when kids at school would occasionally say thing like “why don't you go back where you came from”, were perhaps talking about Guildford I wondered or maybe they were referring to Elmhurst. Anyway it never made much sense to me.
My brother and I were both very athletic and good at running. This paid dividends when we occasionally had to make a run for it from the local racist ghetto kids. Once when I was perhaps ten and my brother nine I remember having to make a run for it on the way home from school one day when a group of men in a van wound down the window, started hurling racist abuse and then actually got out and started coming towards us with the marks of evil intention stamped across their features!
At times like this I remember, oddly enough, not really feeling particularly scared but more a strange exhilaration, the thrill of the chase and confidence in my own and my brothers speed somehow transcended fear and gave rise to a queer excitement. I believe this propitiated the tendency I developed later on in my Secondary school days to deliberately wind-up the older kids in order to get them to chase me around until they were exhausted, safe in the knowledge that they'd never catch me!
All in all I’d say that these experiences of racial discrimination helped me to identify my cultural background and realise that although I'm English I have roots in the Caribbean, tropical blood and a tropical disposition.
I found secondary school life dull and monotonous, I felt too restricted and thought that the format and structure of most of the lessons I was forced to endure was such as to be not conducive to a constructive learning model for me personally. Therefore I became much more intent on having a laugh with my mates than focusing on class.
I've always had a great love of plants and the botanical kingdom, feeling myself naturally drawn to pristine environments; Forests, mountains, tropical island ecosystems etc.
After finishing my GCSE's I enrolled on a horticultural course for 2 years at Rodbaston Horticultural and Agricultural college. It was a modern apprenticeship where I'd go to college once a week and spend four days a week at work.
I worked at a couple of different wholesale ornamental plant nurseries during this period. I learnt a lot and enjoyed work and the course. I felt happy to be learning by doing in a work environment and appreciated the knowledge, support, guidance and practicality of the course tutor.
I had a large crew of mates and some of us would meet up every night. We'd spend our time listening to music, jamming, and talking about life the universe, music and spirituality, going to concerts, performances and open-mike nights.
At the weekends all the crew would get together (between twenty – thirty of us) and party. Often this would happen at a mates house, we'd hook up there and get Irie! Often lots of the crew members would lose all there inhibitions and dress up in my mates mums clothes, props would appear, the wigs and wacky glasses would come out and much merriment was to be had by one and all.
In October 2000 at the age of twenty I embarked on an adventure which was destined to continue for the best part of the next seven years, and although the path has evolved, redefined and redesigned itself in more recent years, is still continuing today.
Arriving at the airport in Mumbai we had our first taste of India, the heat and humidity enveloped us like a smothering blanket, the smells were intense and intoxicating, incense, Indian food, traffic fumes, tobacco and the rank odours of putrification mingling together. The colours vibrant and dazzling, intricate patterns and designs surrounding us, car horns bleating and blaring, a million people all talking at once. The craziness, disorder and chaos presented such a contrast to our dreary homeland where everything seems so ordered,
So arriving in India certainly had an impact, it definitely evoked a lot of emotions.
During this trip Matt and I travelled from Mumbai to Jaipur (capital city of Rajasthan). Rajasthan is in the north west of India and borders with Pakistan, it's a desert state. Jaipur was hot and dusty, but I remember being taken-a-back by the incredible spectacle that befell our eyes upon reaching the gates of that city. The Streets were jam packed with every variety of wonder imaginable, elephants, camels, horses, monkeys, cows, dogs, cats, chipmunks, scooters with families of five on them, women with elaborate, beautifully colourful saris and tinkling jewellery, men holding wicker baskets containing swaying cobras and half naked men coated in ash with long dreadlocks. I was amazed, I fell in love then with India and her beauties.
We travelled through Rajasthan to Pushkar where we sat talking to sadus (men who grow long dreadlocks, cover their bodies in ash and practice austerities in order to further their spiritual endeavours), then up to Delhi, which was overwhelmingly busy and polluted.
From Delhi we took an overnight bus up into the Himalayas. Himachel Pradesh, was the most beautiful place I'd ever seen, the rolling himalayan foothills to the south and the spectacular snow clad peaks towering above us to the North, crystal clear mountain streams, bubbling brooks and fast flowing rivers.
We arrived at Vashisht a small village with a natural hot-spring to Bathe in the cold mornings and evenings, a stunning array of high peaks all around and the fascinating and beautiful foothills, valleys and local villages to wander around and explore.
We then visited Rishikesh where we swam for the first time in the magnificent, cleansing and reviving waters of the holy river Ganga. Spoke to fellow travellers and sadus about spirituality and had a lot of jam sessions.
We had a wonderful month in Nepal where, after meeting an Aussie girl and chatting for a while about our life philosophies and personal visions, she introduced me to the term Permaculture and I realised that there was a whole new world of opportunity and discovery before me. We then headed to Calcutta and then the Andaman Islands. The Andaman's really stuck out for me in terms of natural beauty, very far removed from the kind of beauty that the Himalayas of Northern India and Nepal have to offer but something very special nevertheless, the pristine tropical forests surrounded by white sand beaches, coral reefs and a huge assortment of life in the amazing underwater world that we'd visit in our daily snorkelling sessions.
This voyage solidified in me many of the thoughts, ideas and unlearnings, that i'd begun to develop in my teenage years.
I'd learned a valuable lesson; there's a whole world out there just waiting to be experienced and I don't have to go to uni, get a “good job”, a credit card, a mortgage, a big car, a wife and 2.4 children, a widescreen tv to watch eastenders and coronation street, read the sun, Wednesday and Friday down the pub, 21 days holiday a year doing a job I hate, 40 hours a week until i'm sixty five. No thanks!!!
I spent the next Five or six years following a similar pattern of travel in India and south-east asia followed by brief spells of summer work in England.
On the 26th December 2004 I experienced an event that would change my perspective on life and help to cement many ideas and philosophies that had been circling in my mind for the past few years.
It was 6.00 am. boxing day morning when matt and I were rudely awakened by the shaking and rattling of the pots and pans that were hanging up in the corner of the rustic hut we were staying in. It felt as though four big rugby lads were shaking the posts of the hut, it was getting stronger and more intense by the second, I then became aware of the screeching of thousands of birds up in the sky. As we crawled out of the hut Mr. Parytosh was to be seen clinging to a violently swaying coconut tree screaming “Earthquake! Earthquake!.....
We lay on the earth experiencing the ground shake with ever increasing intensity. Sometimes it would seem quite rhythmic at other times it was jolting and jarring up and down, side to side, forwards and backwards. The birds circling overhead, crying out in a frenzy all the while. When it finally finished it seemed as though it had been going on for a lifetime, it had only actually been 2 minutes, but that felt like a very long time to be in such a situation.
We were staying on Smith island, an extremely remote island in the north of the Andaman and Nicobar island chain (a remote archipelago in the bay of Bengal belonging to India). At the time the only way for most budget travellers to reach the Andaman's was to take a boat from the Indian mainland (Calcutta/Chennai to Port Blair) which takes anything from 3-5 days then to get to Smith requires an overnight boat journey to Arial Bay in North Andaman, then another short boat ride to the island.
After recovering our senses we managed to walk over to the coconut tree, where Mr. Parytosh was standing. We spoke to him for a while about the earthquake, he told us, as we'd already surmised, that the quake had been a very powerful one and he was very worried about his family who lived on a larger Island some way off. He left soon afterwards to check on his family.
Matt and I stayed on Smith, with no news of the outside world or any idea whatsoever of the devastation that had occurred in the local region, we were quite content living life to the utmost on our idyllic tropical island paradise. Laughing and joking with the locals about the constant aftershocks; “shaking, shaking,” they'd say laughing, completely unaware of what was happening further afield.
On Smith there wasn't any electricity, no tv's, radio, newspapers, telephones or any other media for information or communication, there was very little concrete or cement, the buildings were all natural builds (wood or earthen) and there wasn't any piped water (everyone there has wells, which withstood the quake very well). The people on the island rarely visit the mainland (North Andaman Island), just once in a while to stock up on the bulk goods that they can't easily supply themselves.
Ten days after the earthquake the police arrived from North Andaman to evacuate us, at the time we had no idea why they wanted to evacuate us but as we left Smith island the picture became more clear.
We saw that the (concrete) buildings on the mainland were in a very sorry state and many of the underground water pipes had been broken by the earthquake leaving people with no drinking water. The district councils were having to pump water from the rivers and creeks to distribute amongst the local inhabitants.
When we spoke to our parents it was with a sense of bitter irony that we discovered that, as we'd been having the time of our lives on a tropical island paradise they'd been fearing the worst, not hearing any news from the authorities of our whereabouts or circumstances. Matt and I were the last foreigners on the Andamans to be found by the authorities and our families back in England had been told to brace themselves for the worst!
I felt very saddened that my family and friends had to endure such suffering at our expense and made an internal resolution at the time to keep in closer touch with my family whilst travelling .All in all I feel that despite the terrible devastation and loss of life, on a personal level I learned a lot from the experience, particularly in a spiritual context; the transitory nature and impermanence of the universe, the worry and grief that are the bedfellows of attachment and the deep and intrinsic connection that we as humans have with the earth our host, our mother, whether we have come to realise it or not.
In June 2006 I went on a pilgrimage to the source of the river Ganga (Ganges), in northern India. The bus ride to the small town of Gangotri was scary, traversing numerous, extremely hazardous, hair-pin bends that didn't have barriers to help safeguard against the bus plummeting, in some cases hundreds of feet down the sheer cliff face to the river and rocks below.
After arriving in Gangotri Matt and I took to exploring the local surroundings and getting acclimatised to the high altitude. A few days later we were ready to set off on the 18km. Hike up to the source. We left early in the morning and made our way up the forest path that runs adjacent to the river. We walked all day enjoying the natural beauty and wonders that surrounded us before arriving in the evening at the lal baba ashram about five or so km. From the source. It was freezing cold that night and I remember being very glad of the warmth emanating from the numerous bodies around me as I slept.
The next morning we got up early and headed to the source. I can't describe how powerfull an experience it was to finally reach the glacier and behold the splendour of the river Ganges as it gushed forth from beneath the glacier, it was truly amazing and awe inspiring.
Bathing in those frigid waters was a profound and soul-invigorating experience, ifelt a new found clarity, I felt re-born!
In May 2007 I took the PDC at The Panya Project in northern Thailand. I consider this as being very much a life changing experience for me. I'd been planning on doing the PDC for several years before I finally took the plunge, being previously unwilling to part with, what was for me, a substantial sum of money that could support my travels for many months.
After doing the PDC and staying for an extra couple of weeks doing practical implementation I went directly down to the south of Thailand to help some friends out with permaculture related projects that they were attempting to undertake.
During this period I got my first taste of community living, albeit a strange and turbid one at times. I also fell into a whirlwind romance with the girl that was to become the mother of my wonderful daughter Ganga. Our relationship was great at first but after 6 months began to deteriorate, it was around this time that I learned that she was pregnant. At first I was very distressed by the news, feeling that our relationship wasn't going well and that there was little chance of a future for the two of us together.
After time I got more used to the idea of having a child and came to accept it. Neither of us were willing to consider the option of abortion, me because of having been adopted myself I had strong personal opinions about abortion; I felt that i'd been very lucky to have had the chance at life, a life which for the most part has been wonderful and could certainly never bring myself to deny any child of mine such an experience. Rajani (my girlfriend at the time) had her own personal reasons for not wanting to have an abortion. So we decided to try and make a go of it.
After spending a year on the island we moved up to Loei in the North-east of Thailand where Rajani's father had a large mango, custard apple and longan plantation. This is where my daughter was born (in Loei hospital) on the 25th of July 2008. A beautiful baby girl, Ganga became the most important part of my life, my pride and joy and the very reason for my existence.
Having a child was a very sharp learning curve for me, not having had very much experience with babies in the past I was forced to mature and take on the responsibility very quickly. Things went quite well for a time and, when I wasn't busy looking after Ganga, I spent my time developing permaculture projects on the land and practising biodynamic market-gardening, to produce our veg and get a small income from the village market.
After a year or so things took a turn for the worse, Rajani and I were having problems! Our relationship entered a downward spiral and many months were spent arguing with each other and generally having a miserable time. This was a very challenging time for me, one of the roughest patches of my life. After spending a month in England with Rajani and Ganga, I decided we needed some time apart and went to India for a spiritual pilgrimage to the source of the river Ganga with my friend Matt. I felt as though I gained a lot of clarity from the trip, which was a very powerful experience, and came out of it with the resolve to do everything in my power to give Ganga the happiest experiences in life whether or not her mother and I were together.
After returning to Thailand we (Ganga, Rajani and I) lived together at Rajani's family house in Bangkok. Rajani and I had decided to try and live together as friends, with the intention of keeping family life intact for the sake of our daughter. For eight months we lived like this during which time, Rajani and I went regularly to a spiritual school for Raja yoga meditation and spiritual discussion. I found this to be a very useful tool for helping to make me much less reactive in potentially argumentative situations and keeping cool and unaffected no matter what the provocation, having unconditional love (metta) and transcending the limitations and pitfalls of body-consciousness.
In June 2010 I had to go back to England for the summer in order to earn money. I spent the summer working on a biodynamic farm on the England/Wales border in Herefordshire. It was extremely hard for me to be away from Ganga for five months and at points I felt as though I was sinking into a quagmire of despair.
Work on the farm was, on the whole, a good experience and taught me a lot; animal husbandry, intensive veg production techniques, storing veg, marketing and especially about ways of managing people and human interactions in the work-place.
When I went back to Thailand it was with the intention of going to live in Chiang Mai (at the panya project). It was so good to finally see Ganga again and I knew it would be hard to adjust to my new life at Panya only seeing Ganga once every two-three weeks. I spent a month in Bangkok trying to make up for lost time with my daughter then headed up to the Panya community where i've been growing, learning and unlearning ever since.
I've been living at the Panya Project as a long-term-volunteer for the last eleven months helping with the day to day responsibilities of running the project, such as gardening, building maintenance and construction, correspondence with short-term-volunteers and course participants etc. I've also had the opportunity to lead practical, active learning sessions on three, two-week Permaculture-in-practice courses and two international school visits, assisted/helped facilitate several social permaculture sessions, taught two theory classes; Food forest (permaculture workshop) and Intensive veg production (PDC), led numerous work-sessions with short-term volunteers, designed and established three vegetable gardens, (Mandala garden, BD garden and Contour garden), built a small-scale biogas digester, experimented with alley-cropping, established grey-water system; Banana, papaya shower circle with thermophilic compost hot water and retro-fitted my house. I've attended an NVC workshop, sat through lessons on three PDCs, done a one-day permablitz at a Montessori school in Chiang Mai, used consensus and sociocratic decision making techniques to help design policies, systems and strategies for Panya, in the context of a permaculture education centre and an intentional community and am currently teaching a sixteen-day permaculture intro and natural building workshop.
I'm pleased with the way my career path in permaculture is unfolding, I feel i'm growing ever more confident as a teacher and am empowered to teach more courses and workshops.
I aim to be making a living from permaculture (design, consultancy and teaching) by the time I have completed my diploma.
I am committed to improving my skills as a permaculture designer. I intend to learn how to create a professional portfolio, learn how to use digital mapping and design software, improve upon my documentation and presentation skills and have decided to enroll on this diploma course in order to help me achieve my goals.
