Mental health: no worries for survivalist Miriam Lancewood, living off grid in wild New Zealand, ‘thanks to the purity of nature and all this beauty’
- Woman in the Wilderness author says she and her husband escaped the ‘matrix’ of urban life, and its stresses, when they went to live in a tent in the wilds
- We have no anxieties, she says, I feel alive there. In contrast, urban living makes psychiatric disorders such as depression more likely, research shows
If ever you have dreamed of escaping the cost and stresses of life in the concrete jungle to live in nature, you may want to take some pointers from survivalist Miriam Lancewood. She and her husband, Peter Raine, have lived in the New Zealand wilderness for more than seven years.
Their life in a tent, cooking with fire, hunting and gathering food to survive and never staying long in one place was encapsulated in her bestselling memoir Woman in the Wilderness. She will share her survival insights with Hongkongers in a two-hour workshop at Twisk Campsite, Tai Mo Shan, on November 9.
Lancewood was staying at a friend’s house in New Zealand to use the phone for our chat – but she did not feel at home there. “There’s no wind in the house,” she remarks. “Nothing around me is living except machines that are kind of living, making lights, beeps and sounds.”
When I briefly describe Hong Kong life – the housing crisis, the property-related issues that routinely occupy citizens’ minds – Lancewood says she has been disconnected from such stressors, freed from the “matrix” in which one gets a job and does whatever it takes to sustain a home and all its modern conveniences.
