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The Immaterialist

resilient living in a limitless world

Tag: nature

February 2, 2021February 11, 2021

Anti-trend – and thoughts on being connected

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June 15, 2020June 25, 2020

Interview #5: local sustainability hero Zanzan

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"...commit to a place, feed that which feeds you, give life to that which gives you life, plant more seeds than you harvest, etc. If your lifestyle can sustain you, your community, and the myriad lives you depend on indefinitely you’re probably on the right track."

When I was recently interviewed by Story of Books about my upcoming book Anti-trend, I was asked:

More upcycling bliss! ✨

Looking forward to talking about sustainable design with these incredible visionaries at the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival @ubudwritersfest ❤️

I'm on an upcycling-high! Yesterday these incredible lamps made from discarded motorcycle parts by my amazing neighbour @bajaupcycledbali moved into my house (photo 1-3). This morning I had coffee at yet another incredible little newly opened cafe in our tiny village - a cafe, mind you, made entirely from upcycled second hand wood and discarded windows and doors from old houses @nungkigiri (photo 4). My beautiful friend in Denmark is currently creating the most beautiful garments by upcycling discarded bedsheets @la_femme_rousse (photo 5) And our newly started weavers collective @alamanda_sudaji_bali has taken baby steps towards combining upcycled garments with our handwoven textiles (photo 6)

Last night as I was laying in bed, something pretty magical happened: suddenly my bedroom was filled with fireflies! They circulated the room and illuminated it in the most fairytale-like way, and then they disappeared again, into the garden, and from there into the jungle. I have seen fireflies many times here in Bali, but never before experienced a swarm flying into the bedroom; another benefit of living in an open house with no doors and no walls.

Detachment is a predominant feature in many Eastern religions and cultures. I remember my Balinese friend Zanzan telling me about how, after his third child was born, he walked to a temple on a mountain-top and stayed there for 33 days to practice detachment. What? Was the only thing I could reply, not really being able to grasp what he was talking about. Why would he leave his family? I had to do it, he said, the first 10 days were terribly hard. I was crying, missing my children and my wife, wanting to leave and make sure they were all okay or at least call them, as I was still overly attached. But I forced myself to stay and not to contact them, and then it got easier. By the end of my stay, I was ready to return, as I had detached myself.

Beautiful lunch with a fellow Immaterialist in a house without walls 🙏 Perfection!

The house project is progressing beautifully! 🙏🌴

“We are condemned to freedom”, said the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905- 80). We are responsible for everything we do, and it is up to us to give our lives meaning.

One of my greatest teachers turned 8 yesterday. Not one single day goes by without him inspiring me with his comments, questions, stories, actions, explanations, intuition - well, with his entire way of being in the world.

Textiles like the ones made by the @alamanda_sudaji_bali weavers are charged with time, so to speak: first of all the creation process is immensely slow (it takes four to five weeks for a skilled weaver to create one songket / double ikat shawl), and the slowness seems to linger in the textile surface; you can literally see it, feel it, sense it; all the time and thoroughness that had been added to it in the creation phase makes the object experience very special: when you touch and use the textiles you can immediately feel that it is something unique, something that has taken hours and hours and lots of skill to create, and something that carries stories; stories of the weaving technique and the traditional patterns and stories of the creator or the hands behind the product.

In the interview by Story of Books about Anti-trend I was asked the following question.

I have been interviewed by Story of Books about my upcoming book Anti-trend. I was asked some excellent questions about anti-trendy living, sustainable consumption, crafts preservation, and storytelling.

This summer in Denmark I took this photo of my youngest son running through the cold waves of the North Sea. I was amazed when I saw it. No editing has been done to it and no filters have been used. It just looked like this. What is going on here? Is it just the sun beams that make these colours appear? Or is it his aura?

Zanzan is wearing one of the incredible double ikat shawls made by @alamanda_sudaji_bali

New post at The Immaterialist 🌱 Link in bio.

We often seek to describe aesthetic experiences in visual terms, and overwhelming beauty is typically related to sight: the sky as it changes from orange to light purple and finally to a deep dark blue; the perfect symmetry of a beautiful face; the organic shapes of an architectural construction; the contours of a cityscape; the color scheme of a collection of clothes; etc. Smell, touch, and hearing experiences are less often described in relation to everyday experiences of beauty and often seem to be reserved for poetry: the subtle odor of newly fallen rain in the forest; the feeling of sand sticking to the skin, the sensation of walking into a room; how it makes you feel or what the ambience is like; the tactile variations of an extensively used wooden table; the way a dress caresses the body; the feeling billowing material. We live in a visual world, and we are, as a part of our upbringing and education, taught to focus on and describe the visual nature of things—often linked to the rational overview—and to share the “picture-perfectness” of our experiences. Therefore, beauty is often connected with surface spectacle rather than with the texture and the feeling of the object or phenomena. But aesthetic experiences concern more than visuality. The word aesthetics is derived from the Greek word aisthetikos, meaning sense perception; the word originally meant much more than a visual apprehension of the world. An aesthetic experience is partly a visual experience, but it is also a tactile and an aural or an atmospheric experience, as well as a taste and sound experience. And these qualities are prerequisites for the aesthetic experience’s “ability” to make us feel at home in the world: when we are sensorially aware and present, we realize that we are in fact one with our surroundings. When we breathe in the air, it becomes a part of us, and when we breathe out, we become a part of our environment. As a part of the aesthetic experience this insight and this interconnectivity is intuitive and instinctual. #theimmaterialist #aestheticexperiences #antitrend #aestheticnourisment #aestheticsustainability #aesthetics #interconnected #environment #atmosphere #tactility

Continuation from yesterday. Another short extract from my upcoming book Anti-trend - on the art of living sustainably:

In my upcoming book Anti-trend I investigate the art of sustainable living, and as a part hereof the existentialist, ethical dimension. This is a short quote from the book:

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