choices – sealion

Klara vs Farming: Where am I headed?

I landed the exact job I was looking for this season, as a farm hand at a market garden outside of Gothenburg, growing veggies in a field. For three months by now, I’ve been working with Sasha at Earthculture Farm. I only do three days a week, but its becoming apparent that my body – mainly my left knee which has had reconstructive surgery – is taking a hit. So much of the work is done either kneeling, squatting, leaning over or crawling as I’m weeding, pruning, thinning, transplanting…

The percentage of time I’m spending in these bent positions, which are very stressful for my knee, is a lot higher compared to for example being a gardener at the Botanical garden working mainly in the woodland areas.

I went to do a test round with my physiotherapist about a month ago. She though the knee was doing fine although I could benefit from beefing up my muscles a bit. She also reminded me to try and avoid the rotational stress that comes from working a lot in low positions. I admit that I haven’t been heeding that advice. When there’s work to be done, I do it.

It feels strange that I’m not coping just fine as a veggie farmer after spending so many days up in high mountains, climbing and hiking, and mostly doing well. I guess I was overly optimistic that once the knee was functioning again I’d be able to do whatever I want. But climbing and dirt farming aren’t the same things. I come home after work every other day feeling stiff or strained, my knee might be a bit puffed up or I can’t bend it fully. That sucks so hard!

I’m not sure how to proceed with this situation. Is it possible that I just need to do more rehab/rehab? Should I be looking into a more diversified type of farming? Should I be looking for a less physical job?

What could be a way forward?

I SEE YOU

As always, you come to the end of the wave. The rush is over as the force dissipates beneath you, leaving you behind in the frothy surface. Hello..?

Making a decision to act can be a lot like surfing. I decide to go for it (whatever ”it” is), paddle hard, catch the wave, stand up, find my balance and try to adapt to the movement – until the wave throws me of or rolls away. A split second of uncertainty follows, then, sitting up on my board again I have this happy feeling in my body, telling me that I did after all surf that one. The ocean and the waves all look the same, repeating infinitely, but the feeling of success lingers.

Anyways.

It’s fun, comparing different parts of your life, different sides of your personality. I have just decided to act upon an old, hmm, instinct of mine? I’ve just pledged to become a regenerative small scale farmer. The feeling that I belong to the land, to the biosphere, and that I should devote my life to regenerating the ecosystems, it goes deeper then everything else. And so perhaps, perhaps using the word ”instinct” is correct.

After making the decision to become that person, the grower and the stewardess, I relax. I throw my fists in the air, let go of the wave and sink back into the ocean. Making a decision is hard work and I need a break. I read the news, read about different projects, read about what other people have accomplished. Mostly positive, solutions oriented stuff within the frame of climate change and how to address it. It’s nice to see what else is happening outside my little nomadic sphere of right now.

Suddenly, I can sense a shift. The warm fuzziness of achievement is evaporating and a sort of fearful nervousness is creeping into my emotions. Like a hunter I step back and watch, scouting this intruder. Grrrr… I lounge at it and pin it down. Ha!

Oh fear, fuck of! I see you. I SEE YOU. You’re here because I’ve made a decision to act on a small scale and you don’t think that’s good enough. We’ll let me tell you something, you’re wrong. Dead wrong. Because if I don’t start here, with something that I can manage without running myself over, I’m never going to be able to scale up this regenerative plan I’m holding.

Hey fear, I see you and I know you from before. You’ve been part of my decision making process for a long time, interrupting and pushing for unrealistic goals, or rather – pushing for super-fast achievement of huge goals.

E r r o r. Not. Possible.

Subconsciously I’ve been so afraid of not being enough. Of not doing enough. Of being that sucker who saw it all happening yet did nothing or too little to prevent all coming generations of life from suffering.

But how do we measure these things, our actions in relation to the health of the biosphere? We’re all different and can accomplish different things within our lifetime. I for one thought you had to go big or go home. That in the end what mattered surely wasn’t how much money you had in the bank but how much good you had done for The One & Only Planet. Did you save it? No? Shame on you!

But now…

My feelings regarding personal responsibility have changed, they’re still demanding but not overly so. I’m a human, a person who only knows so much, who only has the experience of my own life to count on, and who can no longer be fooled by myself into thinking that what I do is not enough.

I’m doing just fine, because I am doing all I can. Own it, Klara.

I’m trusting myself evermore as the years pass by. I read what I’ve written at different stages of my life and the core of it has always been the same. Help the planet. So why worry about not doing enough when clearly I’m devoting everything that I am to making that happen? Not tomorrow, but in the long run.

I can start small and keep evolving.

I will start small and keep evolving.

Adiós, fear, see you round. You’ve been very helpful in your own way.

Farewell competitive freediving

One can only do so many things at one given time. To me that’s been a tough lesson to learn. I love keeping all my different ideas afloat, giving them a push every now and then and never quite saying no to the though of acting on them. It can be frustrating for those close to me and now I’ve come to terms with that it might actually be holding me back. For many years it was a functional and fruitful way of living, right now it’s not.

So.

I’ve decided to let one of my most long lived dreams go to rest: To be a professional freediver. To compete, get sponsorships and teach freediving. To have my life circling around the ocean through this sport.

I think that deep down it was never really something that I wanted to do, but the thought of it was so… alluring. To be that strong athlete, focused and calm, with a clear purpose.

After 14 years of on-and-off training and competing, ranking at best as 3rd in the world, participation in five world championships, setting Swedish records, completing dozens of competition dives and thousands of training dives, I’m now officially saying farewell to the arena of competitive freediving.

Just as freediving once was key to setting me free and setting me apart, giving me that edge I so strongly needed, it is now keeping part of me hostage. I want to keep diving, I just want to undo my ties to the competitive side. If the thought of training for another word championship is going to keep popping up in my mind, I’m going to keep toying with that idea, putting my energy into the field of freediving, when what I really want to do right now is to root myself even more in my chosen field of work as a food-growing gardener and steward of resilient ecosystems.

Thank you all, it’s been a splash, and I could never ever have done it without you ?

You can always invite me along as your mascot ?

Ethical living, free living

I want to live!

I never wanted to slip into some kind of sustainability expert guru role that scared people away. My goal was to stay a speckled animal, to be both in the normal world and in sustopia. But the more I went for being an example of the ethically correct ways of acting in the world of today, the more confined and separated I got. The more I tried to show with my actions ways of lessening your impact on this Earth system, the more strangled I got. I’ve had so many issues with money and how it’s made, with shame and why more of us are not ashamed of our actions, with the consumption society and endless growth, with individualistic ego trippers, the shortsightedness of man etc.

I wanted to live in a righteous way, but without using outdated religious assumptions. For some time I was also appalled by natural science and it’s love for details and blindness for the larger picture, seeing that the world view I grew up with and came to love also had its flaws. Unexamined assumptions, so potentially positively powerful but for the most, harmful…

– – –

I don’t believe anymore that there is the One True Idea that will appeal to everyone. For sure I was hoping for it, for the unity it would bring. Growing older and continuously traveling the world and submerging myself in various human cultures, I was looking for the similarities that would serve as examples of us all being more or less the same. And sure, they are there. Family. Love. Fulfilling work. Leisure. Freedom. And I was thinking, Yes! We all have the same mental and bodily roots, we could all want to save ourselves and the biological blanket which covers this pale blue dot spinning in space. And I was thinking, Yes! All we need is an evolution of our mutual consciousness and we’ll get there, all we need is free education for all so that we can speak the same symbols and words and meanings! And I was hopeful and strong and young, and I was the one who had to spearhead this change. And everyone I had met along my adventurous road of life had said ”Whoa, little lady, how did you dare do that? How could you swim so deep into the ocean on one breath? How could you walk across Spain? Solobike through Europe? Move to another country all alone? Live in a tent for months? Your such a strong young woman… I never even dreamt of doing any of those things. I mean, I never even had the thought enter my mind.”

And I pitied all the small, scared souls with no brave and great dreams. I did not understand that their dreams were just as brave and great but that we came from different backgrounds and probably with a different persona from day one. My soul is a lunar landscape, is the ocean, is a mountain range. It is wast and hugely unexplored and tantalizing and fantastic. It makes me curious and I want to get to know it, so I set out on all these physical adventures to be able to get to that point where body and mind are a singularity and the crossover is real. I need these experiences to function. Many others do not, they crave not the extreme corners but find their soul in other aspects of life. I thought, I must take what I have learned from being an adventurous soul and use it to my best ability in the every-day-work I will carve out for myself.

You see, I was fearing the takeover of the ego and an egoistic path, fearing that I would not be doing enough good in this world if I stuck to my adventure life, I said to my self, to my soul: Enough with the flying and the traveling. Start acting responsible where you once came from. Go home. Work with what you’ve got.

Engineering. Permaculture. Ethical banking. Urban gardening. Foraging. All responsible areas. I took them very seriously and lost myself along the way.

That decision of responsible acting, to more actively give back to society, was the start of a long internal journey in an ethical and moral landscape, inherited by me from a long tradition of thinkers from around the globe. I have loved and hated this journey. I guess it’s not over yet but at least I have passed one of the most treacherous stages, where I have been confronting the idea of being able to carry others along with carrying myself through life. I know now that I can’t. I will always continue to lend a hand when needed, but the rest each person must face themselves.

I feel like I’ve been crossing over a high mountain pass, starting out strong and fully fueled up, coming up to the pass for a short break, taking in the view, seeing and mentally noting down the surrounding peaks I would love to climb in the future. Heading down on the other side I enter a new valley of life and it’s different and takes me by surprise. I’m tired as I come down to the flatlands again, I slip and fall and snap my knee backwards, but a slow river is calling me and I strip of all that I carry as I sink into its waters. I let this liquid carry me, I let everything be ok. I roll over to hold my breath in the crystal cold, and I finally enter the landscape of my soul as a free mind.

“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:
I love not Man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.”
― George Gordon Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage