Slow House-Hunting - part 2 | Ecency

Dearest Hive Friends and Lovers of Freedom,

Part One of Slow House-Hunting can be found HERE

I am sitting opposite @vincentnijman in Feni’s Bar in Agnone, during the VERY quiet siesta time here in this most glorious of historic, artigianale and artistica cities in Molise, Italy…. We’ve been here since this morning, having driven through kind of extreme rain and waterlogged roads – for Italy, that is – with disfunctional windscreen wipers (eek!), and having eaten pretty much mothing but pizza for the past few days.

We did find rather a splendid combination of pizza-like snack back in Capinone, from another typically-highest-quality general store in this region: a beautiful flatbread, slathered in basil pesto, with ripe red small tomatoes, and a truly divine cow’s cheese with tartufo (truffle). A taste explosion of the most wonderful variety, which we repeated for (first) breakfast before heading out towards Agnone not long after dawn.

It is not so easy to sleep in a new place, especially when it’s kind of an Ikea ‘automated’ B&B; the centro storico of Capinone itself was super peaceful – and a very nice vibe altogether. However, the machines in our room made funny noises at inappropriate moments, and somebody upstairs – even through medieval thick ceilings – had similar even-more-active appliances rumbling through the night. The vibe of the place was high, but the specific location was a fairly soul-less cantina, that had any genuine characteristics thoroughly ironed out of it.

We woke through the night, and eventually settled into a great and transformative conversation pre-dawn, as the first rains were dripping gently around the buildings nearby.

Our process arounding making a move, thinking about a new home, connecting with land – whilst simultaneously leaving behind all that we have lived beforehand – is mounting in energy.

We feel intensely challenged by what we are tasked with: we’re not simply swapping one place for another. We are shifting heaven and earth, and all the molecules of our Beingness – into new and better alignment.

This means that a quite seriously dynamic process is going on inside of us too, as we align with what is Rightly ours: a free and Natural Law movement of living paths, into a stronger and clearer shared path – then seeking a place to root ourselves in this new relation-ship: a harbour that is Right for us, and where we can fully manifest the kind of Living Co-Creation that will be much more normal in the years to come.

For my own part, I have to disentangle my current reality from the romanticising of my childhood and upbringing that still sits in my heart; the sunny summer days barefoot on soft grass thick with bright daisies, of playing between rockpools and waterfalls, of mushrooming and watching wildlife living symbiotically alongside us – it is easy to remember freedom as it was in its proverbial virgin state, and to think that this can be relived. There are, invece, myriad aspects of our modern reality that need to be attended to, unravelled, researched, redrawn, and reformatted – before we can attain any kind of Freedom in the context of being a human in ‘western’ ‘civilisation’.

Our particular path on this journey into Sovereignty has a lot of similarities, and it has some differences – cultural, gender-related, economic, familial, e.g. - and now our paths are the same, our rhythms are being brought together, and we are challenged to construct and sculpt something quite Other than what has ever existed before – for either of us, and for the collective.

It is a great honour, to be creating the New. It is a phenomenally different way of living, quality of choice-making, and very much the more colourful and eventful approach. We don’t always meet with folks who support us in being so different: in ordering our tea and our cornetti differently, in asking for non-automation, or offline/ more analogue requirements and solutions. Seeking a private contract, face-to-face and in real time, rather than searching for a house via an agency/ a corporation/ an App.

And even though we are both extremely open-minded and flexible, ready for change and loving our process – nevertheless there are moments when the difference is uncomfortable also for us – as a couple, as foreigners in Italy, as black sheep in our families, as the multicultural-multilingual creative heroes that we are. Sometimes we tire ourselves, and need to fun-wrestle a little to get back into the Flow!

Our minibreak is coming to completion. We viewed precisesly 0 houses. We drank cups of ‘caffe latte’ with ginseng and felt rather good in various places, we drove through many, many, many kilometres of tall forests, past beautiful stretches of pastureland and around lakes, we ate all manner of bread-and-cheese combinations, and we got things off of our chests with each other about a whole spectrum of messy wee issues. It feels like we are closer to finding our homestead, by default of having followed ‘the waters’: simply being, and moving forward as we feel in each moment – we find ourselves more and more in Rightness.