When is a Traveller Not a Traveller

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.

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@earth_pilgrim @chetaurmila