With regards to salaried employment my primary work is focused on teaching and hospitality at this time. Aside from this, I am currently working on the viability of implementing regenerative agriculture/self-sufficiency in the context of historical and cultural tourism as well as rural depopulation in northern Spain.

This is a good question. I’m unsure of any concrete answer to this at the moment, but I hope to provide the impetus to a regenerative/cultural project and to effectively manage it, coordinating with likeminded people. In a more abstract sense I hope to play some small role in both the preservation of heritage and our progression into the future, in terms of culture, community building and resource acquisition/management

I want to continue to integrate the experiences I have had as a teacher and communicator and participant in local initiatives and regenerative projects. I have the long-term goal of rehabilitating some or all of a depopulated village, if possible, in northern Spain. However, my blue-sky idea would be to incorporate an overt element of cultural heritage and art restoration along with material self-sufficiency and landscape regeneration. Part of this could include the restoration of one of the many abandoned Romanesque churches, as a living building rather than as a museum piece.

My personal growth I’m sure will continue until the day I die! But at the moment, I’m working on my patience, mostly with myself and my own perceived failings. Having suffered from a long-term injury and pain, I’m trying to improve my negative self-image/talk. I also want to be able to manage/work with large groups of people without self-doubt. I have been also trying to “snap myself out of” the tendency towards apocalyptic thinking which can sometimes affect the ecologically minded! On another level I hope to continue to improve my Spanish language skills among others, and learn more about local history and folklore.

My professional development is at the moment focused on improvement of skills related to hospitality, and event management both soft skills and practical ones such as maintenance. I want to continue my education in the practical side of regenerative agriculture and self-sufficiency. Furthermore, I hope to learn more about construction techniques in the near future and continue to build a network of like minded people both in the local area and elsewhere who would be keen to get involved in a project such as this.

I’ve invested time and I suppose also risk. Having moved to rural Aragon essentially on a whim after the pandemic, it was an effort to integrate myself without a base and also to gain a driving license and car, neither of which I’d had before the move. On a more long-term level, I’ve invested time into learning Spanish and also in my teacher training, along with several online courses on ecological sanitation and future farming practices. I also have spent time learning about the fundamentals of permaculture in order to gain the Permaculture Design Certificate

Philosophy/religion, and history I think have probably been the most significant. Political theory also. Folklore and the learning of the associated practical traditions/ways of living have also been influential fields of study, both of my native Scotland and Spain. In terms of individual thinkers this is more complex I suppose. As some who straddles the two areas of ecology and philosophy/spirituality, the author Paul Kingsnorth has been a big recent influence, as his diagnosis of our current environmental predicament as much deeper than a technical problem to be solved speaks to me. People like Carl Jung and Jonathan Pageau also encouraged me to think of the world symbolically and to remember the importance of the less tangible things. John Hargrave and his philosphy of design looking to the past and future to synthesise something new has also been an influence. As someone of the millennial generation, I have to say a lot of my philosophy has come in drips and drabs from various sources online! A mangled mush of people like Diogenes, Kierkegaard and Rene Guenon have all influenced my thinking. Then, there are the permaculture-based and bush-crafter/survivalist content creators, which in the practical realm have given me a lot of inspiration and advice.

(Apologies in advance for pretentiousness!) Despite growing up in an essentially atheist/agnostic environment I think I have always been an essentially religious person. I’ve drifted through many philosophies, some less palatable than others, which I suppose you could call growth. For the past couple of years, I’ve found myself drawn to Christianity of all things, and I’m currently a catechumen in the Serbian Orthodox Church. If you’d told me that 5 years ago, I imagine I’d have laughed in your face. It’s been a strange few years.
However, I consider myself totally at odds with certain aspects of common Christian practice that seems are unfortunately all too common, especially in the west. The focus on humans and human society is often done at the expense of other living beings and can be very exploitative. Luckily elements of this are changing. The ideas of Paul Kingsnorth and Martin Shaw, who want to “rewild” Christianity are at the forefront. The stories of the holy women and men of Scotland and Ireland are also inspirational to me as “wild saints”. The ideas of Hildegard von Bingen who talked about the souls of plants (as well as being a rare female voice in medieval Europe), have contributed also. I’m influenced also by Taoism and I don’t necessarily think the two clash.
In terms of the place of humans in all this, I think that the cosmos is constantly perfecting itself and rising “upwards” towards some telos, though I don’t know what that will be. Our creativity and energy have a part to play in this but ironically a lot of it can be achieved by letting go! Letting ourselves flow with the divine will, or Tao, or whatever you want to call it. This is why the idea of regenerative practices as a practical method of balancing our active creativity but also our observation of nature is so appealing.
In terms of politics well, I try to believe in ideas, rather than ideologies, if at all possible! Simple solutions such as Land Value Tax (Georgism) and/or some form of workplace democracy, to name a couple of examples.