Breaking Free!

Contemplating A New Paradigm of Openness, Humility and Thankfulness.

Did you know that the first layer of complexity to present itself when Mankind settled to develop agrarian economic systems was the need to store grain and other produce? Granaries the size of palaces were built to meet that need.

That’s a little factoid that I picked up at The Consciousness of Sheep website (which I highly recommend). The reason I mention it here is that storage for the food that I grow, pickle and preserve is sorely lacking in my very modest, yet paradoxically utterly majestic home.

I jumped out of the system, feet first, almost 12 years ago. Just 9 months after meeting my husband, who’d jumped out several years earlier. - I never imagined then that I’d still be living in a caravan 12 years later!

I also never imagined that my tiny, over-stuffed home would be situated on a south-facing mountain terrace in the heart of sunny Portugal, amid a hectare of fertile land and woodland with acres of pure, natural, sweet spring water on tap, and power provided by that big, burning ball of life-giving goodness in the sky.

~

I’m from Liverpool in the northwest of England originally. Born to a poor, working-class family in the late 1960’s, and thus very poorly educated at the hands of a state and economic system that required us all to stay poor: factory-fodder… Until the factories were closed and manufacturing exported to the even poorer Global South, which happened shortly before I finished school.

As well as being horribly “educated” I was also horribly abused. I won't go into detail about that though. The only reason I mention it is because it was through those awful experiences that I came to know the unmistakable Love of God. The same love that drives and continues to inspire me today.

(You can read a little more about the hidden blessings of my troubled childhood, and one of my many prayers for Gaza, here:

It may sound strange to some that God’s divine presence may be experienced when we’re in the heart of darkness, but what better time can there be to know that we’re not alone?

~

By the time I met Prajna I had already experienced a great inner transformation. I was sober for the first time since I was 14 years old. I was no longer watching television, so my mind was free to experience reality, rather than the mediated fantasies of the historically and culturally illiterate. I was practising meditation, - or what I thought was meditation. Really I was practicing self-love!

Once I stopped drinking I returned to uni’ to finish my degree in politics, sociology and geography (combined hons.) Simultaneously, through the “Freeman”/”Lawful Rebellion” movement that swept through the anglosphere during the late noughties, early teens of this century, I came to realise that just about everything I’d been led to believe about the economic and political order that shaped our world was a lie.

Before I met Prajna I was already seeking a way out, knowing that I could not abide by the tenant's of a wholly dishonest and manipulative system.

Prajna Pranab came into my life through the freeman movement, as did most of my, still, dearest friends. Before we met I didn’t know he hadn’t always been called Prajna, so I was surprised when I met him to find a Kiwi, all dressed in orange, with the brightest, most sincere smile I’d ever seen on a man's face. He was, and is, my sanyasin man. Authentic, intelligent, and as uncompromising as myself. We were made for each other!

Our first Big Adventure came in July 2012. Prajna had a campervan which he lived in, and in which he drove around the country meeting up with friends, attending events, participating in protests, and generally refusing to comply with the demands of war-criminals disguised as statesmen and politicians.

I lived in a rented 3 bedroom house not far from Newsham Park. A rough but very neighbourly part of the city. I left my very lovely home, a place that had been my safety and security during 7 years of deep (or so I thought) healing, in the hands of friends, and hit the road with Prajna in November 2011.

For three years Prajna had refused to pay road tax on his campervan-home. He’d been stopped by the police several times, and had always responded in the same way:

“Gandhi says civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the state is lawless and corrupt, and that anyone bargaining with such a state shares in its lawlessness and corruption. He said there is one sovereign remedy and that is non-violent, non-cooperation. So I’m non-violently not cooperating with you …” This was usually answered with a disinclination to discussion, the issuance of a ticket or a warning, and a hasty farewell.

But the night we were stopped on our way back to Liverpool from the Sunrise Festival in Summerset, the second time we’d been stopped together, police were less receptive to this line of reasoning and decided to impound our motorhome.

In response, we decided to make our home on the grass verge in front of the recovery yard where our home was impounded - Autolift Recovery, at the side of the busy A41 duel carriageway in Chester, where we pitched two small tents.

When our motorhome was taken away to be crushed two weeks later, we built our first make-shift shelter and bedded in for the duration: three months, as it turned out, from the 4th of July, until the 1st of October 2012.

Our camp grew thanks to generous donations of materials from supporters: a large tent, an old caravan given to us by some local Irish Travellers, timber from a Freeman friend who worked at a shed factory, tarps, and even a pair of hardwood patio doors - which the police courteously knocked on on their almost daily visits. People came to see us there from all over the country. We made the front page of the local paper and were talked about on the local BBC radio station, Radio Merseyside.

Musical Interlude: Not Tax For War, by Litmus A Freeman:

https://freemanmusic.org/notaxforwar.htm

Our little adventure was called Camp Autolift (which you can read about at tomboy-pink.co.uk if you wish) and marked my “look, no hands!” leap out of the matrix.

During the intervening twelve years of living, quite literally, on the edge, with no support ropes or safety nets, managing to get by on Prajna’s minuscule war mention (he was once an officer in the Royal Engineers) you can bet I’ve come face to face with the deepest, darkest, saddest parts of my psychi, the most intractable aspects of my desperate, clinging ego - and that deep oceanic experience of being One with the All of Everything that comes with Letting Go. I experienced it all!

The deep healing came gradually, as I came to recognise the many ways in which my ego kept trying to convince me that it was me.

Over time, and with lots of practice, I came to realise that the key to living in harmony with the All Loving Divine Creator of the All of Everything, and thereby in harmony with myself and with life itself, is faith - knowing that that which has always supported me will always continue to do so. Just as I can rest assured that the sun will rise every morning.

There have been many times over the years, including a time of virtual homelessness in Portugal after we split from the couple we came here with, and the time we found ourselves sharing a squat with a pair of vile paedophiles near Huddersfield in the north of England, times when I’ve been in states of such despair… lost, lonely, misunderstood… misunderstanding everything! Crying out to God when I should have been looking inside, to quiet my ego-pain and find the Love that waits quietly beyond it.

Things always unfolded in accordance with the Will of the Divine whenever I stepped out of the way, whenever I dropped my ego, my need to know “what next”, and my complaints - heartfelt as they were - against life itself.

It’s as if God leaves us to handle the things our ego’s take hold of and try to control. But once we admit that a Divine Plan is unfolding if only we’d stop interfering, trying to figure out the direction and the details, that God moves in, and things, the most unexpected and right things, just fall magically into place!

Our friend Litmus (composer of our musical interludes today) bought this Quinta we now call home once he finally, after many years on the market, sold his houseboat, Badger. At the time Prajna and I were living on a small terrace that the son of a local lady, Smiley Ana, donated to us after the big, wild fire of 2017 had swept through the mountain (as well as most of Portugal) clearing so much previously overgrown land, and revealing so much hidden beauty. Yet another of life's incredible paradoxes!

Musical Interlude: Badger, by Litmus A Freeman (one of the most beautiful songs you’re likely to hear today.)

https://freemanmusic.org/badger.htm

So now here we are, safe and secure, with all of our wants and needs met, loved by the local villagers despite our strange ways and poor Portuguese. We do not do business, don't keep accounts, give all that we can, including helping aging locals to manage their Quinta's, simply for the love of it.

My gardens grow bigger and more productive every year. I do my best to preserve as much as I can in my wee caravan kitchen, and to find space to store my produce and other concoctions.

One day, God willing, I will have a real kitchen - the frame for which Prajna has already welded together - and real storage. But that’s non of my business and none of my concern. It will come when the time is right, and not a second sooner.

That my home, this magical and magnificent paradise, fills my heart with joy, my eyes with such beauty, and my soul with deep gratitude is enough. Let economic complexities take care of themselves.

I hope that you, dear reader, might find inspiration in my telling of this tale. Because it is in Letting Go, in trusting the Divine, in fearlessness, that we may find salvation from the debauchery and dangers of the unhinged world order that is currently threatening us all.

In the very near future I plan to write about the ways we might disempower and starve the system, whilst empowering and feeding ourselves.

Thank you for reading!

With love,

Kali.