philosophy Archives - follow your wild heart

floating with the river…

Last week I was embarking on a new journey full of challenges and new experiences.

I was offered to join a small group of people to go on a 3 day, 3 night adventure with the canoe into the Northwoods of Wisconsin. It was organized and facilitated by the Teaching Drum Outdoor School, so the main goal was a full immersion into the land and to learn and experience to use simple (some would say primitive) tools and techniques to help to get really connected with the natural world around you.

we are starting…

When we started, my feelings were a mix of excitment, curiosity and fear, which is a mix I know all to well, since most of my adventures start off like that. The only difference might be the intensity of one feeling over another. read more

It’s party time!

As I mentioned in my last entry , I finished my tiny house mostly because I set myself a deadline. Aside from the final result, this really shows how good I work with a deadline and a little pressure ;-). And it wasn’t just a random deadline.. It was the date of my (tiny) house warming party!

Over the years I spent some time with project lifecycles and especially systems like the one in Dragon Dreaming and the natural cycles of the medicine wheel resonated with me. Within Dragon Dreaming, there are four recurring phases in the cycle: read more

Home is where my heart is

I’ve been asking myself: When does a house become a home? – Well, I found the answer in an old folk song (probably from the Natives of North America, but I never verified it):

I’ve been travelling a day,
I’ve been travelling a year,
I’ve been travelling a lifetime,
to find my way home.

Home, is where my heart is
Home, is where my heart is
Home, is where my heart is,
My heart is my home.

My heart IS my home, but since I put so much of my heart into my little house, it is now also part of my home. My home also includes people I call family and dear friends, so I’ll probably never be truly homeless, but since I moved in, I do feel like I’ve come home. Being in my tiny house feels like a warm hug by a loved one. Not perfect by outside standards, but perfect in my eyes, including all its imperfections.

lessons and new adventures

My last blog post about the potential transformational power of traveling was mostly inspired by two trips I took recently. Very different, and yet very similar at the same time.

One included a visit to a couple living in a tiny house in the middle of nowhere, completely off the grid. No electricity, no gas, no running water. Watching them interact with each other and their surroundings. And getting a small taste of how it could feel to have a life where everything you do is in direct response to ones needs for living and surviving.

The other trip was to a big city: Paris. There I had a somehow fateful encounter with a person sharing my passion to really get to know and understand the places you visit. His expression of that passion is through offering specially prepared walking tours around certain parts of Paris, not just showing the sights, but really introducing the visitor to the city, its history, its people. Giving a taste of how it might feel to live there.

These recent experiences inspired my new quest to find the essence of communities – big and small – all around the world, which I will write about in a newly created separate blog: essence of community.

Swimming against the tide

I recently listened to a song by Milow that is called "Against the tide" and had an interesting revelation. To swim against the tide as used in the english language means "to do something that is in opposition to the general movement of things" or "to not follow what everyone else is doing". But the way I see it now - viewing the tide as a river - there are not two but at least three different ways of doing something or living your life in general.