IT’S SPRING!!!!! The Spring Equinox is my favorite day of the year.
A thought that came to mind on this glorious first day of spring is that revolution is also to take back our lives from being serious all the time. To allow fun, play and laughter back into our lives. To play hide and seek, sit in a tree with your friends and listen to the wind, eat too many cookies, giggle, conspire and be ridiculous just for the sake of it.
Today was a day like that. A gentle reminder that playtime does not have to be over as adults. Likewise, our work does not have to be a path of constant stress. I am currently staying at Navdanya, a biodiversity conversation farm in India. Here, people take on the largest, most powerful companies in the world, organize their villages and country, maintain a seedbank and farm, freely share its seeds with farmers across India, and still find time for play every day. Each day at 5 pm, even on busy days of work, people gather to play volleyball and have social time.
The other day I was throwing back and forth a ball with an Indian staff member of my father’s age. I had not played with another adult like that since years. It was so nice to simply enjoy ourselves and throw the ball to each other. It took me back to hot French summer days, playing in the garden of a holiday house with my father. My world consisted of eating, swimming, playing, sleeping and ice cream.
Often, in adult life we tend to be serious all the time. Companies and banks have us worrying about our finances. An economy that only values profit makes us feel guilty for doing nothing. However, constant productivity is not required to live a healthy, abundant life. It does not suit an ecological way of living. We can adopt more natural rhythms of work, rest, recreation, play, being together and nothingness. As revolutionaries, we can take back our lives. We can rediscover what is healthy and what is joy.
Now that Dutch elections are over, I am feeling much more relaxed. I can leave the ridicule of Dutch politics behind me for a while and nourish myself. I am working to make my deepest longings come true.
A life with early wake ups. A meditation practice first thing in the morning. To be outside in a natural healthy environment most of the day, instead of inside our houses. To actually be in the natural world. To have animals roam around freely and going where ever they want, instead of being bored and alone all day waiting for their caretaker to come home and take them outside on a leash on a five minute walk in a city filled with fumes.
To be in community, share with others and help each other out making life easier by sharing cleaning, cooking and administrative tasks. To live according to the rhythms of the Moon and the menstruation cycle, with its high peak energy when full, rest during the dark Moon, and inspiration for new beginnings on the new Moon. Not the artificial monday to friday schedule that requires constant productivity fifty two weeks a year. To be a living being with a need for cyclic living: planning, seed sowing, manifestation, rest and reflection, nothingness.
To play exciting games as an adult and have fun with each other, rather than sit behind our computers and talk to each other in chat screens. To spend time each day connecting to the land, working the fields and being physically active, instead of sitting inside in an office chair and not moving our bodies. Except for our right arm clicking a mouse all day until is becomes overworked and you get RSI. To spend time each day working on embodying my full potential. To work on what I know is my full potential, and not a boss who merely wants me to learn what would be convenient for the organization I work for and who tells me what to do. To study, read, practice, learn and grow because I want to. The topics of my studies are what I want to know. Because I am motivated myself. Because there is a fire burning in my soul longing to acquire these skills and this knowledge.
It is such a joy to find myself embodying these longings more and more each day.
This Spring I invite myself and whoever feels called to do so to leave our adult responsibilities alone for a while every now and then. To find our ways to the woods, lay in a field of flowers and watch the butterflies fly graciously over you, climb a tree as high as you can, jump in a lake with way too cold winter water and set your alarm at night to play hide and seek in the dark.
Happy happy happy spring!
“The doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.”
― Clarissa Pinkola Estes: Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype
In this Reality 
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