As Earth Pilgrims, Cheta and I have no home, we just travel. We combine house-sitting, working on events, staying with friends and travel trips. Our life revolves around organising our diary and planning where we are going to be living, and how we are going to work as we travel. We find it stimulating and interesting, and we thoroughly enjoy it.

But all that is about to change, we are about to move into a different way of life, for a while.

In the past 18 months the longest we have stayed anywhere is around three weeks. That has meant a lot of travelling and a lot of movement. While we have enjoyed it, it has had its toll. Work has been affected by the time we are on the move. Deadlines have been slipping on my lighting design work, posts have not been written on the blogs, finances have not been dealt with. We have talked in the past about how we need to stay somewhere with an internet connection to get work done, we have looked at that situation and decided to make a shift.

The first change is that for the next three months we will be staying in a house we are renting in Tilburg, The Netherlands. We have come back to Europe because we both have work commitments that need us to be around occasionally for the next few months. I have a project, a theatre in England, completing and I need to be around to complete the commissioning. This is likely to be my last large lighting project, and a complex one at that, so I want to be around enough to get it right.

Cheta has a show in Tilburg on Monday June 21st. She is part of a year long piece of work by Zeus Heunderop, the city’s ambassador for the arts and music scene, the Nachtsburgermeester. Each of the 13 moons in the year has a moonscout and Cheta is one of them. She is looking at the area of femininity through the eyes of Amanda, the heroine of her show. So she needs to be around to work with the actors, musicians and technicians (including myself as lighting designer!).

This period will give us a breathing space to work on the specific projects as well as develop ‘Earth Pilgrim’, ‘Male eXperience‘ and ‘Female eXperience‘. In addition I am working a new online project to bring the world of Lighting Design onto the internet, but more on that later in the year. We have both made a decision to combine the writing we have been doing on ‘Rising from the Ashes’ and ‘ChetaLive’ into ‘Earth Pilgrim’. You may already have seen an increase in the articles on this site, you will in the future see a greater posting frequency on the site. We are focusing ourselves to make best use of the time we have available.

The second change is an even bigger one. From the end of July we are starting a house-sit in southern Spain. It’s a beautiful house in the hills above the Mediterranean. The fantastic thing is that this will be for a three to four year period! We will talk more about this later but for now all I can say is WOW! This will be an amazing time for us as we get used to settling in a house, with all that entails.

The great thing about it is that the owners will be going there, from Belgium, on a regular basis so we will be travelling for around four periods a year. We have great plans for this.

So when is a traveller not a traveller. In my view it’s when he stops travelling, at all…

It’s a mistake to think that you have to be travelling all the time, it’s the attitude of mind that is important. For us it is important that we are not settling into our house and leaving our life as Earth Pilgrims behind. Our aim to let go of possessions and concentrate on the nature of our lives is still at the forefront of our lives. We have reduced our footprint in the world and it is our aim to retain that. Settling in Spain, for a fixed period, is just part of our aim to explore and understand the culture of travel.

We are still Earth Pilgrims and we still see our lifestyle as substantially different fro what we lived in the past. That is important to us and will remain so.

What do you think? How do you live your life? What is crucial for you?

Let me know in the comments, I would love to explore how other people live.

They were originally fishing boats that sailed the Zuider Zee when it was open to the North Sea. After the building of the Afsluitdijk, creating the Ijslmeer inside and the Waddenzee outside, the use of these boats for fishing all but disappeared. They are now used mainly for recreational purposes and are lovingly restored by enthusiasts.

They are beautiful, elegant looking boats with their distinctive ‘wings’ used for assisting with the steering.

It’s early morning, Earth Pilgrim is sitting in Gatwick Arrivals having flown over from Schiphol (if you don’t know where these are you shouldn’t be reading this!). It’s the second time I’ve been to Schiphol in two days, and I’m back there tonight. Thinking about the journey this morning I am in awe of what an experience it has been

OK, getting there was a bit of a nightmare in the morning Amsterdam traffic. I had a lift from my friend Marco who drives around Amsterdam from Huizen to Leiden every morning. The experience reminded me of my days commuting to work in London from Buckinghamshire. Packed road, running well and then bang, a wall of traffic for four kilometres, an accident up ahead just where the road narrows from four to two lanes. Just sit and wait! Luckily I am early, it’s Marco who worries about getting to Leiden in time. He does some nifty work with exits and hard shoulders and, eventually, we’re moving again.

Getting into Schiphol is then a breeze, it’s a few minutes off the ring road, and suddenly I am in this bright, bustling, fun shopping mall at 8 o’clock in the morning. Schiphol is one of the airports that has taken the ‘customer experience’ to a high level. It’s well signposted, it needs to be, it’s big. It’s bright and well designed, yes, of course I would notice that. Best of all it’s full of shops and cafes that are open for business and have customers in them. Flying is clearly an experience that whets our desires and opens our wallets. Who needs to fly, you just spend all day here and save the fare, or spend it on expensive ties and pens.

A few years ago my partner was due to fly from Schiphol to Edinburgh. She had never flown before, they are the ‘other’ people, the ones who don’t travel! Being completely unsure of the whole experience and worried about how on earth it all works, she arranged for a friend to take her to Schiphol for the day so they could just walk around and get to know the place. Where better to do this. This is not run-down Heathrow with its complex of Terminals and raging traffic. This is ‘let’s put it all in one building’ Schiphol. The biggest mall in The Netherlands. She had a great day and never looked back.

On the other hand, just recently, an American/Australian friend was flying from Singapore to Rome. She flew KLM and found she had a six hour stopover in Schiphol. She was raging about the injustice of it all. What on earth was she going to do for SIX HOURS! Wow, and here she was in this amazing mall, with a train station on hand that could whip her into Amsterdam in a jiffy, giving her plenty of time to explore the wonders of the red light district and get back for her outgoing flight. I have done this in Singapore, where they even lay on a free bus, and Bangkok. She clearly fails to see the bigger picture.

So why do I hate Schiphol? It’s fun, active and stimulating, isn’t it? Quite simply I have better things to do with my life than sit in Starbucks, drinking coffee and lusting over the leather goods in the shop opposite. I fly because I want to get somewhere. So although my friend might fail to see the bigger picture, I sympathise with her. I just want to get to my destination and get on with my life.

Or do I… Perhaps it’s the journey after all… Hmmm… I’l just go and have a coffee and think about it…

(I just couldn’t resist this picture I found of a urinal at Schiphol, see what I mean about well designed!)