A Boiled Egg at the Volcano’s Edge

Standing at the volcano rim this morning, I was left with a sense of awe. It was vast and other-worldly, an expansive crater lined with yellow-stained rock and thin white smoke moodily filling the air. The unconventional beauty that came from it was unexpected. I felt small, surrounded by its magnitude, and that was humbling. I could feel the immense pressure that was building below the surface, pushing up and boiling over into acidic pools and letting off sulphurous steam. The lush green forest clinging to the steep slopes, filled with monkeys and bird song, was in stark contrast to the grey volcanic rock laying silent in the crater. A sign that despite all odds, new life was growing through the cracks and being nourished by what had once escaped from our Earth’s core.

Constantly seeking calm and balance, we try to help the kids flourish by finding ways to nourish ourselves so we can manage the pressure that inevitably bubbles up. Like the scientists observing the volcano for signs of increased activity, I have become fine-tuned to the moods of everyone in our tight unit in an attempt to mitigate issues before they arise. My mindfulness practices have become as essential to me as the seismometers to the scientists, increasing my awareness of my own emotions and how they fuel my interactions with the kids, as well as the interactions between those around me.

Our life feels unconventionally beautiful; living on the fringes of normality with a nomadic existence and home-educating our kids as we go. It is the moments like today, when I find myself sitting on the edge of a volcanic pool, next to my nine-year-old, as we both get our legs massaged with volcanic “healing” mud by a local lady, that I am reminded of how incredible this opportunity is. We get to be together, to learn together, to grow together, and it is worth all of the hard moments of self-doubt and friction. Because when the pressure does boil over, it is the love at the core of our unit that allows us to thrive.

The volcano lies on the Indonesian island of Java, north of the city of Bandung. A place we will call home for the next month. We find ourselves living in the house of an American family, looking after their gorgeous cocker spaniel, whilst they are away. In return for looking after their home and dog, we gain full use of their house and car. An unlikely place to find a family of four Brits, as there doesn’t seem to be a lot of travellers or tourists here now, but then that is the beauty of this lifestyle. We have the flexibility and freedom to let fate decide where we travel to next, and it is usually unexpected. As we left Penang and searched for our next destination, this sit felt serendipitous in its timing.

In the last two years we have spent more time living outside of the UK than in it, although we have popped back a few times. Since selling our house in Dorset we have ventured through France, Spain and Morocco, then Thailand, Malaysia and now Indonesia. The photos show a perfect life; freedom and happiness in picture-postcard moments. And there have been many of them. But from living this home-educating, travelling reality, I have realised that life is just life.

No matter how and where we choose to live, there will always be good and bad days. The same temper tantrums, sibling rivalry, and marital pressures, as if we were living back in the UK with a house. The view is different, the activities change, but we are the same people locked together in all of our highs and lows.

When you strip it all back, I guess what we have been doing since we said goodbye to our old conventional life, is trying to find our new version of home. To find out what it is we all need to feel the safety and comfort that the idea of home brings. Because a house is bricks and mortar, and they come and go with circumstances, but a home is a feeling. We have lived in a campervan, rented AirBnB apartments, looked after other people’s houses and pets, and exchanged bed and board for voluntary work. All with two children in tow, a chronic illness and fluctuating financial circumstances.

Here I want to unpick all of this. To look back with a pharmacist’s analytical mind and spot the patterns - what worked for us, what didn’t, and what has been simmering underneath it all. We have made mistakes and certainly do not have all of the answers, but we love the life we are currently living. It is not always easy, but I am not sure any life really is.

Opting to stick our finger in the wind and be guided by where it takes us, we have found our “curriculum” for the next month is Indonesian language learning and geology. Indonesia has 127 active volcanoes, and ours sits at the lowest alert level - which is to say, by all comparable measures, a little boring. Having watched one too many Christmas re-runs of Dante’s Peak, and originating from a country with zero active volcanoes, I admit to feeling as nervous as the kids were at our proximity to an active volcano, envisioning rapid evacuations from molten lava flows. But rather than hide away, the kids have become geologists and now monitor the activity of Tangkuban Perahu daily, watching how it changes over the course of a month. That, teamed with a trip to the volcano itself, some planned science experiments on the volcanic rock they collected, and a trip to the geological museum in Bandung, and I know they’ll be able to recall far more useful information about volcanoes than I ever could as a result of learning from a textbook.

As I sat and watched my son peel and eat his slightly sulphurous boiled egg this morning, with a scene from Jurassic Park rising up behind him, I knew that he would not forget it in a long time. It invoked all of his senses, from the taste of the egg cooked in the volcanic pool, the rotten-egg like smell of the sulphur that he noted from the minute he got out of the car, and the warm water on his toes as he dangled his feet into the hot spring. It is these kinds of practical, lived experiences that we are fortunate enough to recreate for the kids with this lifestyle, and that it would be hard to turn our back on again. I do not know what the future holds, but for now this feels like the best thing we can offer our kids, to nourish them and prepare them for their futures.