Stories from a place called home — Ben the shepherd

*** “Stories from a place called home” is a series of stories of people from all around the world who found home somewhere outside the mainstream. Each story focus on one main challenge in alternative living, and reflect on the experience as a whole. My own memories of feeling ‘home’ are intertwined in each story, as a nomad who is yet to find his own home…

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“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” sings Joni Mitchell in one of her most iconic songs, describing a grim truth on the actual meaning of being free.

Despite being a semi-nomad most of my life, this realization came to me only in recent years.
I love to travel and always found ways to escape my routine and go wander. My friends mocked me for being a Bedouin who’s just blowing with the wind, but in my eyes, I never really left the ground until 6 years ago.
While packing my apartment in Tel Aviv before moving to Australia, my ex saw my confusion when I stood there between all the carton boxes and second-hand inflated wardrobe, and told me, ‘Yoav, if you want to fly, you have to get rid of some weight.’
My middle eastern temper kicked in as I muttered angrily, ‘Did you just call me fat?’ But by the time I finished that stupid joke I knew he was right. I accumulated so much ‘stuff’ in those 30 years of existence, and there was no way I can fly like a bird with so many feathers.

By the end of that week I donated half of my clothes to charity and reduced the rest of my belongings to 4–5 boxes for storage and one big backpack for the road.
In the following years I would have to go through that process a few more times to ‘keep myself light’ and learned to adjust to new spaces with a smaller ‘footprint.’ No pictures on the wall, no books on the shelves, and no souvenirs from my travels in exotic destinations.
The concept of home was no longer material, it was spiritual. I either felt home just by being or I wasn’t.

I met Ben and Truman in my visit to rural Catalonia. Ben is an American artist who just moved here few months ago from London. Truman is his loyal and wise furry companion.
Ben had been through a similar process of ‘losing weight,’ initiated after he first moved to London. As he settled into the trendy eastern inner suburbs to mingle with the local art scene, he quickly learned he was not the only one chasing that bohemian lifestyle which comes with an exponentially increasing price tag. As gentrification pushed in into the streets of Shoreditch and Hackney, local renters were pushed out due to the rising prices and forced to seek new homes.
Instead of constantly moving between pre-gentrified neighborhoods like their friends, Ben and his partner bought a boat rather than an apartment, leaving their destiny to the flow of the British canals. In London, a boat owner must move to a new location every fortnight in order to avoid high docking fees, which made this to be a very unusual adventure.
After two years of floating on water, exchanging neighbors before the milk you borrowed expired, and exploring the British capital in what Ben describes as a “farewell trip,” the exhausted couple started yearning for some stability and serenity.
“Towards the end of my staying in London I felt like I am hiding more and more inside my boat, in attempt to avoid the excessive stimulations and noise outside.”
In a matter of few weeks they sold the boat and Ben fled to the mountains of Catalonia, where he bought a house/cave and few hectares of forest.
“Isn’t your current situation a higher degree of hiding from the world?” I ask.
“Maybe”, he answers, “But this silence now allows me to have better and deeper interactions when I choose to. In the city I was constantly busy in trying to figure out my next steps, my next meeting or where would I eat dinner. Here I have simply almost no options, and when I meet people or friends who come to visit, the quality of our time together is far greater than ever before.”

A 30 minutes hike from the nearest neighbor (a squatter with two goats), Ben owns a little piece of heaven on a mountain side with views to the Mediterranean Sea. The master plan for the future is to sustain himself by producing homemade essential oils, and until that was realized, live off the money from selling the boat. His partner is still in London, closing up his independent business before joining Ben on this adventure.
The “‘neighbors’ occupying these rural lands are quite diverse: artists, farmers, and even criminals. Those, ironically, are mostly British, making it perhaps another up and coming suburban pre-gentrified neighborhood.
Even though being so secluded makes him quite vulnerable, he still feels safe, simply because there is nothing to steal. He is so remote and own nothing but an IPad to keep his mom happy with some pictures from his daily life in the wild.

Some things, though, have gone lost. A herd of goats he owned disappeared in the mountains a few weeks before we met, and after hiking for days and days scanning the region, he couldn’t find them.

The pain of losing his only companions transformed eventually to a relief. Now with no strings attached, Ben can travel without care, leaving Truman his dog with the neighbor and his small veggie garden to the forces of nature.

A nomad will stay a nomad, sometimes just due to chronic dissatisfaction with the present, and I wonder how long Ben will stick to the current chapter. “There is no deadline,” he responds. “Maybe forever, maybe less. There is no such thing as longterm plan”.

“Do you miss the city?” I ask. “Not really,” he replies, but quickly contradicts himself, perhaps leaving a clue to his next steps. “I can visit London every once in a while and recently discovered Barcelona which is only 2 hours away by car. It’s my new love story…”