You don't have to be like this guy
to become a
FREE RANGE HUMAN
ASTONISHED AND AT LARGE
Free Range Humans live inside ordinary life. They pay their bills, show up to their responsibilities and remain inconveniently and wholeheartedly alive within it. They are a little too wild for the factory settings of modern life.
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We believe that a life built around beauty, slowness and genuine care for the people around us is not a small life. It is the largest life available to us.
ASTONISHED AND AT LARGE
We are for people who want to centre their lives on the creation of beauty, rather than the creation of stuff.
"There is no way to re-enchant our lives in a disenchanted culture except by becoming renegades of that culture, and planting seeds for a new one." Thomas Moore
Anél Hamersma
What does it actually take to remain fully human in a world designed to flatten us?
In 2001 the broekielace curtains of my Afrikaans childhood opened when I was initiated as a sangoma in Botswana. What I understood life to be was suddenly up for debate. I kept a close eye on my teachers, trying to understand what made them so fully alive in a way that regular life just doesn't seem to allow.
In 2010 I was diagnosed with a chronic illness. Suddenly restricted, the question became urgent and personal: how do you foster an inner sense of aliveness that holds, regardless of the state of your health?
Free Range Human grew from that question. I talk to artists, mystics and the odd accountant who seem to know something the rest of us have forgotten.
Latest Interviewees
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What does it look like to be fully alive? And can it be cultivated?
Free Range Human is a long-form interview series and Substack publication that launched in Jan 2026. It explores what it means to remain 'astonished and at large' in a world that tends to encourage the opposite.
Each interview is a conversation with someone who has found an unconventional way of being fully human: people who have refused by instinct or by hard-won choice to make themselves small.
