The Touchwood Project

Mostly this blog is a way for Malcolm and I to let our friends, family and some of the people who’ve been on Malcolm’s Five Senses tours and courses to see what we’re up to with this new venture, the Touchwood Project.

Since we started Five Senses three years ago, not long after we moved from Perth to the Orkney Islands here in Scotland, we’ve dreamed big. We knew we wanted a centre where we could teach skills and run activities that ran the gamut from traditional crafts like soapmaking or basketweaving to survival things like wild foods and firemaking. But the point was never to go back in time and replicate a lost way of life.

The point was and is always about leading an ever-happier life, the kind where you wake up in the morning and can’t wait to get out of bed. The kind where you know you have “enough”: enough money, friends, love, and time. The kind where you just can’t believe how lucky you are.

Sounds like a pipe dream, doesn’t it.

But it’s our pipe dream, and one that we want to share. Neither of us can claim we’ve got enough just yet, but we’re getting there.

We’ve spent the last five years experimenting, reading countless books, teaching ourselves how to cook, knit, make fire with a bowdrill, find edible plants, and more.

We ditched our jobs (me as a web manager at Sprint, a telecom corporation in Washington, DC, Malcolm as a hostel consultant on Skye, where we met), got married after two weeks of knowing each other, and left our homes to strike out on a new life together.

I left behind a life in Washington, DC that included a job I disliked, a raft of minor but increasing ailments, eating out or pizza or mac and cheese (I never cooked), a big salary, and a persistent feeling that there must be more to life than this. I also left behind family and friends that I miss every day, but I came to be with the love of my life Malcolm and feel at home in many ways in Scotland.

In any event, I’ve gone from that very urban and relatively fast-track life to where I’m at right now, which is sitting in my kitchen with my Mac on a pitted oak farmhouse table, the howl of a winter gale beating against the windowpane while the old Aga stove gently radiates heat and the cats snooze nearby.

Snug in my kitchen while a freezing gale blows outside

I’ve got a homemade soup on the simmer and a pot of genmaicha tea next to me while I type.

Meanwhile, Malcolm’s upstairs weatherproofing the windows, which in his case means rooting around the garage, gleefully seizing on some spare polystyrene and wool, and tacking them up to the windows to block out the draughts.

This is a moment where I feel truly I have enough. I’m writing about our dream project with the papers of incorporation next to me making it official. I’ve got most of a business plan finished and we’ve even gotten seed funding to run a few pilot projects later this winter to test out our grand ideas.

Life is good.

Tags: social enterprise

Trackback URI | Comments RSS