Posts Tagged "community"
Crafting My Life Guest Post
“The size of your success is measured by the strength of your desire; the size of your dream; and how you handle disappointment along the way.” – Robert Kiyosaki I’m excited to say that I’m guest-posting on that very theme over at Strocel.com today as part of Amber’s awesome Crafting My Life series. This is one of my favourite things on her blog and I’m honoured to have been able to contribute. She’s busy putting together a Crafting My Life e-course and I highly recommend that you check it out. And in the mean time, I hope you enjoy my post today. I have a dream. This dream began as a talk about what my husband Aaron and I envisioned for our retirement; then it morphed to include what we hope to provide for our kids as they grow up. A random conversation evolved into an elaborate picture of what we want our life to be like and I’m serious when I say elaborate. …Read the...
Read MoreYou Are What You Eat
Last night I had the pleasure of getting out for an evening with Aaron (!) and the privilege of seeing Joel Salatin speak. I first saw Joel in the movie Food, Inc. (which I highly recommend, by the way) and I was captivated by his passion for sustainable farming. He operates a family farm in Virginia called Polyface Farm and has been featured in Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma and also in the documentary Fresh. Here is a clip of Joel from Fresh: Joel’s family raises pasture-fed beef, pork and poultry on their once totally depleted, almost soil-less farm which they completely revitalized without sowing any seed. Refining methods introduced by his father, Joel rotates his herds through his land using portable electric fences to allow the land to replenish itself naturally, without fertilizers. The animals eat grass and roam in the open air. This is the exact opposite of the feedlots and industrial food system. Salatin argues for the local food movement, for transparency in the food production system, for a re-integration of our rural and urban lifestyles where we respect our food producers and include them in the communities where we live and work. He urged us not to expect change overnight but to do what we can every day to change our food system. Ideas included turning the millions of acres of lawns in North America to edible food gardens, reinstating the kitchen as the heart of our homes where we make our food from scratch from real ingredients (not unpronounceable ingredients that come in packages), buying from local farms that allow us to tour the premises and of course, gardening with our children. With sparkling eyes and a big grin, he is a compelling, even mischievous speaker, as he said last night, “I definitely recommend that you break a lot of laws.” This was in response to the question at the end of the night from a man who stated that everything he wants to do is illegal so what laws should he break first. Of course, Joel is referring to the over-regulation of ordinary citizens who want to make their own choices about the food they eat: whether it’s to buy eggs from the neighbour, have backyard chickens or drink unpasteurized milk. I was already sold on his message, but I was further enamored when with a roll of his eyes he stated that our disconnect with food began back in the day when people decided that breastfeeding wasn’t good enough for our babies. He went on to tout the virtues of La Leche League, Lamaze and having dads in the delivery room as examples of ways the pendulum is starting to swing back towards an acceptance of the sanctity of life, even the sanctity of life of the least among us (the animals and plants we eat). Maybe it’s because I’m a hormonal pregnant woman but when he ended his speech by saying, “May your children call you blessed for they have inherited a better earth than we had,” I had just a little tear in my...
Read MoreLeaping
The summer of 2002 everyone must have thought I went crazy. I started dating a friend (who was also the ex-boyfriend of a long-time friend of mine) and by the end of the summer, we announced that we were getting married in September. When I called my parents to tell them I was getting married they didn’t even know I was seeing anyone. That was only half of it. We also bought a 1984 Bluebird schoolbus and told everyone that we were going to convert it and live in it, in the middle of Vancouver. We owned it for a year and were slowly trying to do the conversion on the weekends and not making much progress. We thought if we moved into it, our progress would be quicker. My older sister and her family were moving to Vancouver around that time and we came up with the idea to try to find a house for them to rent where we could park the bus in their backyard. We thought we would subsidize their rent for two years before looking for somewhere else. We started keeping our eyes open for good potential houses. As we went about our business in the city, there was one house that we always noticed had the perfect space. It was on a corner, backing on to a huge green park with a lake complete with swimming beach and where the farmer’s market is held on Saturdays. On Sunday nights, there is firespinning in the park and every summer there is a lantern festival that attracts 10,000 people. The park is in the middle of metro Vancouver in a vibrant diverse multi-cultural neighbourhood. The yard was perfect and had just the right space for a 40′ long bus. My brother-in-law came to Vancouver to house hunt for his family and one evening, after dinner, we drove by the house just to give him an idea of the kind of sweet space we were dreaming of. A few days later, Stewart came back from his search with the classifieds and grinned “You’ll never guess what house I just looked at!” We couldn’t believe our luck that the house was actually for rent! We went to the open house with the landlord and there were a lot of other contenders. The rental market in Vancouver has been tight for a few years now and the house was reasonably priced. We thought it best to be upfront about our plans to park a 40′ bus on the property rather than ending up with a mad landlord on our hands later. We were very worried that the landlord would never want to rent to us with our crazy idea to park a bus there. The weekend passed slowly with much hand-wringing and driving by the corner wistfully staring. At the end of the weekend, the landlord called to let us know that he had decided to take a chance on us and it was ours. We called it the Destiny House. We stayed for 5 years. We got to know all of our neighbours. We built a parking pad for the bus, redid the whole yard including putting in a 40′ long veggie garden beside the bus. I developed a close relationship with my sister who I’d never been close to as she is seven years older than I am. Both of my kids were born there and all of our children grew up more like siblings than cousins. We became fixtures in the neighbourhood and we learned the meaning of the word community. What started as a bunch of crazy spontaneous ideas in 2002 became the most magical experience. I could never have imagined such a perfect vision of this dream made into reality. I wanted to live in the bus in the city and by taking a leap of faith, it came out way better than I even envisioned it. We’ve moved on now but we’ve been having a lot of discussions with my sister and we now share the mondo beyondo dream of creating a...
Read MoreJust Renting
Bear with me for a moment while I do something taboo and talk about finances – you know, how much money we make (or don’t make). My husband and I are the last people we know who are still renting. Seriously. I don’t just mean the last in our group of friends. I mean all of our friends and acquaintances and the new people we meet all seem to own a house, a townhouse, a condo, something. It’s like we’re the last people in our demographic who are still renting. Although, what demographic do we really fit in anyway? If it’s age, that’s easy. But income? Class? That’s a little trickier. I have started to notice the subtle ways we apologize for things we think society finds objectionable, like renting. When we moved to our small town in 2008, everyone assumed we were escaping the Big City real estate prices and were surely buying a place. When we moved from our 1 year lease last summer into our current house, everyone assumed we’d bought our cute too small war time bungalow. Our answer is always this kind of bashful “No, we’re just renting.” Sure, some of it is by choice, but really, honestly, truthfully, we can’t afford to buy. It’s hard not to feel apologetic when you’re revealing a semi-embarrassing class barrier. Especially when all of your friends are on the other side of it. The people our age who own a house, have done so because: 1) they are professionals 2) their parents have helped them out SIGNIFICANTLY 3) they were the recipients of an inheritance We are not professionals. I am a stay-at-home mom and former administrator. When I went on maternity leave, I had been working my way up at the company I worked and was getting to the place where my salary was not too shabby. But I’d be back at the bottom if I returned to work now, after all the time off. My husband is in the trades. The non-unionized trades. So no big bucks there. Most of our married life we were paying off my student loans for my General BA in the humanities – you know, the degree that gets you tons of high paying job offers? There was no chance to pull together a down payment for anything. Our parents will not be helping us out. Our parents are working class. My in-laws are farmers in Saskatchewan. My parents are former Nazarene ministers who lost a house in the early 80’s. (Oh, yeah and those student loans I was paying off? Also because I wasn’t getting help from my parents. I’m ok with that. I do think it builds character. But it definitely changes things when you leave school with massive loans. That’s a totally different blog post though.) Our extended families are also working class. There will be no surprise inheritance from a great-aunt or aged grandparent. Even if there was, we’d be splitting it 36 ways with cousins. And for the few friends I have that were able to buy a place because they’ve already lost a parent? I can’t think of anyone who envies them their houses…they came at a price far far greater than any mortgage. I stay home with our kids – with two, I’d have to earn a lot to cover the childcare anyway. Aaron just started his own business so the banks won’t be looking at us seriously for a few years. For some reason, I feel apologetic about that. Every time someone asks me if we own our house, I forget the choices we made and I toss in that little just, “just renting”. So after all this whining about class and income, why am I saying choices? Because there was a time, before we had kids, when we lived in the Big City and were both working when we probably could have bought a place. But we consistently made choices not to buy real estate. Aaron’s parents did give us a bit of money. At the time, it would actually have...
Read MoreVision
2010 is our time to turn our eyes to the future, to look ahead and figure out where the road might be leading. The word for 2010 is VISION. This is the year to find our feet, develop our vision and begin the task of building. We are in a unique position to carry forward the lessons in being present and being mindful from 2009 and place them in the context of what do we need to do today to make tomorrow a reality? This is going to be an exciting year, not because a lot of things will happen but because we will be able to see what is coming. The big rocks for 2010 are: Rain starts Kindergarten – where and what that looks like TBA Continue with self-sufficiency and creativity projects Continue to grow our business Reduce/eliminate debt load Mindful parenting & positive discipline Self-care (reading, writing and figuring out how my hopes and dreams intersect with my hopes and dreams for my family) I have quite a few specific goals that I won’t list here. Maybe I’ll do a monthly goal post just to keep me accountable. At the very least, expect more news about the future vision and the direction of those calls with my sister as the vision gets clearer. How about you? What’s on the table for...
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