Necessary Toxins
When I click on the wifi icon on my laptop, only one option shows up “Katy’s Hotspot”, a feeble bar of signal from my phone’s data. A stark contrast to the lists of wifi names Im used to bombarding my screen from apartment neighbors, nearby cafes and corporate business internet plans.
Out here I have no wifi, no electricity, no water that swishes without thought in the toilet bowl. Everything is a conscious resource, a reflection of the bounty in the little we need from the Earth.
The air isn’t filled with wifi signals, but is instead filled with the crisp, pure scent of the wind that flows around small hand-built house in rural Northland, New Zealand. Here a family of four live, who have voluntarily decided to disengage themselves from the mindlessness of supermarkets, office jobs and on-grid consumption.
After having worked a chemically intense job as a hotel cleaner in Wellington, I took it upon myself to send a message to join this family in a volunteer-to-stay opportunity, to cleanse myself of not only chemical bombardment, but detach myself from the media overload urban environments are embedded with.
And so two days in:
1) I Thought I Was Healthy…
I have always considered myself a bit of a “health-nut”, someone who is quick to modify cakes into the sugar free, zucchini versions chock full of psyllium husk fiber, but oh boy, was I wrong.
Here, the level of daily ‘purity’ reaches an unbelievable level, 90% the food I am eating is grown on this land, in a soil that has never been touched by artificial fertilizers or pesticides. Not to mention, everything is so fresh from the garden, this family has no need to refrigerate anything they eat. I have barely touched a food coated in a plastic lining or container. Instead holistic farming methods including co-cropping corn, beans, and squash (search up the Three Sisters - Native American Farming) are used to supply the bulk of what this family needs. The father (I will delve more into the family later) is a horticulture teacher at the local school, and so is full of information about how to best replicate nature in farming methods, and it shows. Their vegetables plots are full and leafy with healthy, massively producing zucchini, cucumber, tomatoes, beans, alongside orange, lemon, banana, papaya trees speckled around a 200 acre property.
The water they drink is collected straight from the rain, free of any government mandated chemical additions. No chlorine, no fluoride, no leached lead from old pipes. Its freshness is overwhelming.
And I can’t get over the air, the air is pure, with the closest town being over an hour drive way, the property nestled in a pocket of native New Zealand forest with no pollution in sight.
My skin is starting to miraculously clear, without a single of the slew of products I’d use back in Wellington touching it.
Being here all I can think about is how many foreign particles my body has absorbed in my lifetime, and how chemically overwhelmed we are as an urban population.
Pesticides from produce,
teflon from cookware,
greedy electronegative ions from drinking water, ready to attach to human cells,
dissolved micro-plastics
leached compounds from artificial food containers
Toxic fumes from exhaust pipes churning black air
Being here, I just think of the accumulation of it all… how do these compounds interact with each other within our bodies? The magnitude of our bioaccumulation, synergistically generating things we can’t even imagine?
It’s easy to say “research shows X amount of toxin in water/food does not affect human health in the long run.”
But we forget, we aren’t just ingesting, absorbing X, we swim through a murky soup on the daily, drinking in X,Y,Z,A,B,C, on and on…
It’s almost like the human race hates itself, a self-harm we crave for as we reach for the conveniency poison-laden products, wondering why we find ourselves crumpled over and bleeding, when we feed ourselves spoonfuls of different poisons on the daily, all in the name of what?
To dish out even more money to those who grin and fill their pockets as we slowly kill ourselves?
2) The Family
- The Faith
I have always been considered the “hippie” one in my friend group, always quick to question and vocalize my strong distaste in the normalcies of the modern world. My dress is unfashionable in the modern sense, I am not afraid to wear clothes laden with holes, or discoloration so long as they are still functional, and in these ways I feel a connection with this family.
For them, functionality and practicality are at the forefront, when you live this isolated, hours out from the closest store, nothing is to be wasted. Spoons and spatulas with broken handles fill the drawers, well because they still work, old vegetables are pickled, the toilet is compost based as water is dictated by an unpredictable number of rains that happen in a month, clothes are never thrown, always repurposed into a bath mat, a cleaning rag. Everything is a resource to be lived through until you can put it to rest with a smile, knowing its life has served every purpose it could’ve. And with this, I think about how quick we are to throw things out in the urban world. If it’s out of fashion, or shows the slightest imperfection, into the trash it goes, forgotten and reduced by mindlessness into an object that will rot under a pile of other forgotten lives.
The Earth’s heartbroken state is unfathomable, she has bestowed everything that was needed to make that object: water, wood, energy, light, air, and yet we forget with disgusting ease, coaxed by trends and an corporate imposed lack of innovation (“why should you care about making or reusing that item when you can just pay us to do it?”), that she has done all this for us.
In these ways I connect deeply with this family, they are active questioners, and many conversations have been had showing this shared disillusionment with the modern world. Some topics of interest including:
- Governments using artificial fertilizer byproducts to supply the chemicals for water fluorination (sounds similar to the profit of plastic production as a byproduct of oil refinery)
- The pipeline post-world war II of gunpowder refineries switching to artificial fertilizer production (something was never used in mass before that era)
- The loss of thousands of varieties of various crops due to mono-cropping mandates wiping out the nuanced versions of different foods we only know one variety of today (Search up how many varieties of rice India had before 1970, vs today, its a genetic genocide)
But to me, they are unquestioning questioners.
The main driver in their quest to live this lifestyle is biblical belief. They are fervent Christians, and while I have no issue with that, it seems as though they question everything due to an unquestioning of their own faith.
This has caused some discomfort for me, I cannot help but feel there is an undercurrent of christian righteousness that is ingrained in their manner. It is one thing to allow faith to drive your decisions and to allow you guide to you, but as someone who is veering on a Buddhist path more than anything, the imposition of this light feeling of judgement, of my “heathenness” I sense from the family does make me careful about what I expose or say about my own journey.
And in that sense, when they are questioning the world around them, if their questioning seems sound, they ordain it to the will of a higher being, which makes it difficult for them to change their minds if there is in fact evidence to suggest something is not as they believe it is.
It makes me think, their overall mode of staunch belief, in using faith to cement their thoughts, is not much more different than the concepts the corporate world uses in conveniency and mindlessness to cement the modern population in their thoughts.
This has come up in some topics that they have presented to me (that I internally disagree with, but have been quiet about), most notably hat they are anti-vaxxers for certain vaccines they don’t believe grant immunity, amongst a number of things that verge conspiracy more than anything.
There is a fluidity in mind I aim to achieve in my being, and while these individuals live in a manner that embodies much of what I believe in, the means of reaching these conclusions are performed in a mode that I am wary of.
But with that, I believe tolerance and understanding is at the forefront of why I embark on these experiences, and so I am curious to see what I have to say by the end of my time here.
- The Lifestyle and The Children
As a nomadic individual myself, coming and living on a plot of land like this, I realize that to build something as intricate and self sufficient as this, it requires work, constant work.
I am used to scuttling around back and forth up and down, always looking forward to the next thrill, but I have always fantasized of an off-grid, homesteading lifestyle, but being here, its making me think.
People like this don’t travel, not because they don’t want to, but because they cant. How can you expect to take 2 weeks off when you have ducks, dogs, chickens, cows, vegetables, trees, a greenhouse that require tending to the daily?
You either choose this, a life of long-term maintenance, or a life of sporadic comings and goings, and that is something I have had to begin to stomach and reevaluate.
Do I want to live a life of this purity, this calm? Or face the inherent toxins and uncontrollable nature of nomadism? Is a life of experience and exposure worth the negatives that inherently accompany it?
It’s been an interesting thing to process, because one of the children I speak to here is 16 year old girl, who has never known any way of life.
While she has grown with a wealth of knowledge of the land and self-sustenance, I can’t help but sometimes be astounded by her naïveté, and often try to recollect how I was back when I was 16. If I acted so childlike in my teenage years.
In many ways her life has been idyllic, safe, shielded and non-toxic, but its made me realize how much the slew of insanity that I’ve lived has hardened me in ways that prepare me for not just a life of off-grid inconveniences, but really any life that is thrown at me.
And so I wonder, what do I even really want?