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A review by jjp723
Homesick: Why I Live in a Shed by Catrina Davies
5.0
*The alternative to living in the shed is slavery, or it seems to me. Indentured to somebody else's mortgage.*
*The jobs we do and the amount of money we get paid to do them seems to have far more to do with our expectations, the foudations laid in childhood, than it does with our skills or talents.*
*The truth was that I was scared of everything. The reason I seemed brave was that I was always terrified. Everything brought me out in a sweat. Sleeping on the top of a mountain on my own was no worse than ringing around for car insurance.*
*In fact, I wanted to be a seal, or a crow, or even a rabbit. I wanted to be anything but human. I was sick to death of shopping and driving and craving and striving and plastic Costa Coffee cups caught in the hedges, and car-flattened badgers. We caused so much friction with our violent hurrying.*
*Electricity was a good thing, I reminded myself, every time I got the sick feeling of loss in the pit of my stomach, and soon enough I believed it and I forgot what life had been like before.*
*But maybe there was another kind of confidence, one that is founded on the laws of nature; the knowledge that everything is temporary, even stone.*
* My heart turned inside out with the feeling of responsibility that seems to be a side effect of love.*
*The Green Perty recently suggested that we should measure wealth in terms of free time instead of money. By that measure, I was loaded. I spent my free time on the ongoing art project that was my life, and my spare time making the small amount of money I needed to survive.*
*We can be greedy for the things that are slowly killing life on earth, like expensive fridges and SUVs, or we can be greedy for the things that support life on earth, like soil and bees and trees.*
*Some days, when the evening sun is lighting up my floorboards and my bones are full of the ocean and my skin is thick with salt, I even find a kind of peace. The peace of knowing that the true art of living is not to gather things and polish them and lay them out for others to admire, but to have next to nothing, get plenty out of it, and give the rest away.*
*The jobs we do and the amount of money we get paid to do them seems to have far more to do with our expectations, the foudations laid in childhood, than it does with our skills or talents.*
*The truth was that I was scared of everything. The reason I seemed brave was that I was always terrified. Everything brought me out in a sweat. Sleeping on the top of a mountain on my own was no worse than ringing around for car insurance.*
*In fact, I wanted to be a seal, or a crow, or even a rabbit. I wanted to be anything but human. I was sick to death of shopping and driving and craving and striving and plastic Costa Coffee cups caught in the hedges, and car-flattened badgers. We caused so much friction with our violent hurrying.*
*Electricity was a good thing, I reminded myself, every time I got the sick feeling of loss in the pit of my stomach, and soon enough I believed it and I forgot what life had been like before.*
*But maybe there was another kind of confidence, one that is founded on the laws of nature; the knowledge that everything is temporary, even stone.*
* My heart turned inside out with the feeling of responsibility that seems to be a side effect of love.*
*The Green Perty recently suggested that we should measure wealth in terms of free time instead of money. By that measure, I was loaded. I spent my free time on the ongoing art project that was my life, and my spare time making the small amount of money I needed to survive.*
*We can be greedy for the things that are slowly killing life on earth, like expensive fridges and SUVs, or we can be greedy for the things that support life on earth, like soil and bees and trees.*
*Some days, when the evening sun is lighting up my floorboards and my bones are full of the ocean and my skin is thick with salt, I even find a kind of peace. The peace of knowing that the true art of living is not to gather things and polish them and lay them out for others to admire, but to have next to nothing, get plenty out of it, and give the rest away.*