Living with nature

The author has chosen a sustainable lifestyle to restore congruence between living, learning, and livelihood - where livelihood is about securing life’s essentials, living is about organising life around those essentials, and learning arises naturally from that lived reality. When these three are in congruence, they create a way of life that is both resilient and robust.

 Inspirations have come from so many - family, friends, people close to me and those unknown to me too. From those who have questioned the status quo, who brought about desired change through conviction, persistence and consistent effort. And most of all, from indigenous and rural landscapes and lifestyles. The simplicity, the humility, the quiet strength of the indigenous character  - these continue to inspire me; and the elegant complexity woven through nature and its rhythms fascinates me no end. 

She thanks her mother and father for their unconditional love; her husband for the innumerable deep conversations, for hand-holding, experimenting and journeying along; her daughter for her integrity, her perspective and her comforting warmth.

She shares combatting all her challenges too. During her travels to far-flung tribal and rural areas for extended periods, not knowing the local language was often a real challenge. Simply connecting at a human level - trying to relate deeply, beyond the spoken word -  helped enormously. With persistence, it was so heartening to find how the natives would accept her as their own and help her integrate into their ambience.

When we started planning to shift to an off-grid home and eliminate fossil fuels from our daily cooking and mobility, sustaining it felt daunting. But Vivek Kabra’s Sunwings solar cooker resolved the cooking-without-LPG challenge beautifully. For the past six years, it has cooked every meal we have eaten and will continue to. We switched to an electric car and public transport to avoid petrol and diesel for our daily mobility. Extracting fossil fuels and groundwater for daily consumption feels profligate now.

Since our house does not have light bulbs, every evening, at dusk, lighting the oil lamp feels very special. In that moment - when daylight fades and darkness takes over - lighting the lamp, having conversations in the dim light without clearly seeing each other gives those exchanges a different quality and depth. And feeling the presence of darkness (not the absence of light) is positively overwhelming and humbling.

We use only stored rain water for our needs. The rain water we harvest during the monsoons must last us through the year, or untill it rains again. We use as little as possible for each chore, and recycle what we use through a  grey water system – returning it to the plants. Closing the water loop makes every drop precious. Similarly, closing the energy loop and the food loop, mending broken loops wherever possible.

If you are mindful, the world you seek already exists and the change you want to see in the world starts from you.

Living like this, we feel very happy, peaceful and wholesome. It feels like our skin, our nature – Congruent. 

By Reva Jhingan Malik