I have always considered myself as having one foot in the real world and the other in a decidedly stranger world. My friends have mostly been people who live on the fringe. Creative people who partly live in an otherworldly dimension that don’t quite fit into the normal way of things. For this reason I am the first to admit that life is not so straightforward. It’s a bit wobbly and bent out of shape. Structure becomes difficult. Filling in forms a real challenge. Voting is anathema. Suit and tie become a straightjacket. In fact rubbing up against bureaucracy generally is scary stuff indeed.

Because I produce audio products for Quiet Earth Publishing that are sold far and wide, I receive emails from all sorts of colourful and peculiar people. I truly love it because it makes me feel that there is a large community out there, beyond the people I physically meet day to day, that are somewhat like me. Even though I have never met them, I feel a bond of kinship. It is very reassuring. Like being part of a huge family.

A lady contacted me the other day who I have conversed with several times in the past couple of years. I helped her out with some audio download challenges. She lived her life in the corporate world and I only just discovered that she now lives in Siwa Oasis. Now that is in the middle of nowhere in Egypt (weeks by camel to Cairo) near the Libyan border. And what a place.

I believe we have a responsibility to not stray so “far from the madding crowd” that we are disenfranchised. Not in a physical sense as living in far off remote places is really cool. I am speaking more in the notion of being spiritually disconnected. Many fringe dwellers become so angered by the world that they lose their love for themselves and their place in it. That’s a lonely space and not much fun at all. We still have to live and breathe our creative lives and it behoves us to continue to play our part in making this a better world.

So I salute all the fringe dwellers. It can be a tough gig at times but some people have to do it 🙂

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