9 July

I post a lot about why I think travel is a symptom of a sick culture. But not as much about what I see as the alternative. The alternative is both simple and impossibly hard - we need to rediscover what the term ‘home’ means. If you google it, you’ll get thousands of pictures of - houses. But home is not just a house. Home is your connection to the ground underneath you and around you. To the ‘landscape’, which carries unfortunate echoes of the idea of something you just look at, like in a landscape painting. We treat that ground, that landscape, as a resource. To live on, to extract things from. As ‘real estate’ to be owned and sold. Home is not just where you live, it’s where you’re grounded in the entire universe. A place, where you experience and interact with the entire universe. Travel culture always thinks what’s most meaningful is somewhere else, that if it accumulates lots of sights and spaces, it will somehow get closer to reality. But it’s a delusion. Reality, all of it, the entire universe, is found in every place. You have to stop moving and stay though, for a long time, to start to feel it. You won’t find it moving around, ever. Like human relationships, home is a relationship. To place. It develops over time, long times. Not by quick visits. A society that doesn’t understand home is a cancer to everything else. It consumes the homes of others, for recreation. It thinks that ‘experience’ is bringing it closer to something. But it just distances it even more, from anything.