Stay open to change

Allow life to shift your trajectory while remaining true to your core values. Learn as you go, and be willing to take unexpected paths that teach you more than you planned.

You might think your path is set and you've decided what you're going to do, but my experience has been that life seldom progresses in straight lines.

This is why I don't think it's essential to take expensive courses or invest in specific infrastructure when you're just getting started. When we began, we didn't know what we didn't know.

Most of us have limited experience living a truly sustainable life. We start with little experience and learn on the job. The truth is, we don't really know what we'll enjoy or what will teach us the most. If we have kids, we don’t know what they’ll enjoy most or what their needs will be as they grow.

For example, at first, Eugene discovered he didn't enjoy many building projects and wasn't super interested in growing things. He preferred the eating, which is actually ok! And we got better at figuring out the building projects.

We had no idea how much energy it would take to raise our kids at home with us. Despite all my reading, I didn't know how to create a food forest in an area with low rainfall and prone to drought, or how to cultivate food at the scale needed to feed our growing family. I discovered I didn’t really enjoy selling food wholesale. I preferred to sell much smaller quantities to people I could see.

Over the years, we've learned to elevate certain things as non-negotiable: our kids needed to be safe, cared for, and well-fed. We wanted to build lives that allowed us to be relatively healthy. Eugene and I wanted to cultivate a relationship where both our needs, preferences, and dreams were acknowledged and important.

Everything else became negotiable, which allowed us to focus on the non-negotiables in creative ways. We could alter the pace of building the farm to fit what we were learning about ourselves. We could focus on different types of infrastructure, decide what to do ourselves versus asking for help. I could experiment with different approaches to permaculture, finding what best suited our conditions.

We could continuously circle back to values and dreams, and we could grow and change. We needed to discover and cultivate skills we didn’t know existed. Even though we discovered certain tasks were difficult or not very enjoyable, we also discovered that increasing our skill set, and better understanding the time required for a task, made it much more enjoyable.

Practically speaking, having a list of projects with discrete tasks related to that project listed, has helped to determine our course, and then periodically revisiting our values in relation to the projects listed can help us prioritise or deprioritise. You can see our Kanban board below.

When it’s clear how much time and money something will take, and how much energy, and how we feel about it in our guts, it’s much easier to decide whether it’s a suitable next step for our homestead.

Workshops

Our Kimchi workshop is coming up this Saturday. It’s a first, and we’d love help spreading the word.

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