My father often used to shout "What are all these lights burning - turn them OFF AT ONCE ~ DO YOU THINK WE ARE MADE OF MONEY "?I realized once that he had been brought up in a house lighted by gas ~ hence the lights "burning"
His mother told me how she used to strip a sliver of skin from a reed and dip them in the dripping (fat) from the Sunday joint [of meat]
She was making rushlights - the most primitive form of indoor lighting imaginable and one presumably used for millenia.
In those non-electric pre-industrial days when the world was illiterate [no adverts or - maybe] people would sit by the fire and if asked what they were doing would reply "Just Sitting"Herdboys watching their cattle all day would understand - "Just Sitting".
We are stimulus junkies - unhappy unless something is happening. "Just Sitting" by the fire all evening would be a torture of acute boredom.
Although when we are camping we can recapture something of this lost art when the singing and story telling is done and we watch the fire - "Just Sitting". Is this a meditation or is it a natural state?
Some civilization crazed "yoof" might have plugged his solar panelled rucksack into his ipod/radio or ~ god forbid ~ TV and be set to "rough it in camp" with all the comforts of home. Poor thing.
