When I was 27 I bought a 20-acre property in North Central Victoria. It had a mudbrick house and a separate mudbrick 'artist's' studio on it, a very big dam, an old orchard and vege patch and a few other interesting bits and pieces. It was hidden in a state forest at the end of the road. Last year I sold it, sick of looking after it all while working full time and I had started to feel very isolated there - it was 15mins to town and 3 hours to Melbourne. I don't regret selling it as I do want to go back to WA and I knew I didn't want to be stuck in that particular part of the world. But I feel a bit silly that now, when I don't own that property anymore, I'm interested in self-sufficiency and all the rest. I was interested in that stuff before but I just couldn't work out how to do it. I realise now that what I couldn't work out was that if I was more self-sufficient I wouldn't have to work as much, meaning more time for being self-sufficient (growing food, looking after animals etc.).

So while this might seem a bit backward, I do feel there is method in my madness, lessons I had to learn, people I had to meet, experiences I had to go through, to get where I am now: open and ready for this new life. My resignation will be announced next week - just another step in the path - and I will send off my application to the WA ed dept. Even though I don't really want to work as hard as I am at the moment, I still need a job. And as the year goes on, I think that I'm not really going to be able to do the WWOOFing. To decide to do that is a brave leap and although I've done many of those before I haven't done them with someone else before. That is the scary thing for both of us.

I'm rambling. As I'd say to the kids - no structure or organisation! But I'm also four drinks into the evening, so forgive me.

One change after another

This week I resigned. I won't be leaving until the end of the year, but I need a reference asap for the WA ed department and hanging onto the secret that I was going was starting to rot my soul. My boss and the few people I've told (it will be announced when the ad for my job goes in the paper) are sad to see me go and have said they'll really miss me - which is so lovely to know and hear. And now I feel rejuvenated about work, happy to be going, excited about the things that are coming up, including the challenges. It is amazing what a change this is for me, especially after spending the weekend sobbing and miserable.

The other thing I've done is re-learnt how to knit. I used to knit when I was a kid but haven't for years and years. So on Sunday, after looking at expensive books and looking at the library for something I eventually went to Spotlight and found a simple 'magazine' type thing, bought some needles and wool and started knitting. It has consumed my time at home as I just can't wait to get back to it. Even thought the scarf I'm making is wonky and weird - it is for the bf and he doesn't mind - it doesn't matter. I'm making something and it feels great.

So I guess it is all positives this week. The bf and I keep talking about what we want for our new life and this dreaming is so important and lovely. Things, perhaps, aren't so bad.

Thoughts on sitting at a cafe at noon on a Thursday

Mostly I spend my time driving to work, being at work the whole day, driving home from work and in my house. Boring I know, but today I took for me and one of the things I did was sit at the outside tables of a cafe just on lunchtime. Apparently the only people out and about at this time were visibly rich or weighed down with children. I will say it time and again but; this scares me. I was listening to Jeanette Winterson (one of my favourite authors) on Radio National's The Book Show today and she was talking about the absolute futility of the modern world in the face of a dying planet. I was looking at women's handbags today, beautiful, obviously expensive handbags and all I could think was 'was that made by a slave in China?' and 'I wonder if the cow that provided that leather had a good life?'. I suspect the answers are yes, and no. Sadly. Am I just cynical that I see even the tiny excesses - handbags - as the enemy. And how much am I a hypocrite as I have a somewhat expensive handbag, I don't turn things off at the wall, I buy Coke Zero, I drive my car miles and miles every single day, I have a clothes dryer, I use a dishwasher, I grow none of my food, I occasionally eat supermarket meat. Will I be a better person if I make little flannelet squares to use instead of toilet paper, if I plant lettuce in a window box, if I quit my job, sell the car, drift out of society? More importantly will this protect me from what is to come and will this make me happy?

After the cafe I hid under the doona for a few hours then made pumpkin soup.

Positives

After being so cryptic and then writing all my woes and frustrations into my paper journal I'm now trying to be positive. So I've found a heap of information on the web that will help me with this huge change in life (although that makes me want to just get on with it!) and joined a forum called 'Aussies Living Simply'. I'll put it on my links when I get around to it. I found some interesting-looking books too, but I don't want to buy anything really so I just wrote down the details for later. Oh, and a great tomato sauce (as in for pasta) recipe.

I really think I'd like to try not buying anything. Watching ads on tv for this or that thing to buy, have, use or whatever makes me feel like this world has gone completely off track. There is one ad that gets to me the most - it is for a shop called Gifts for Guys and the things they advertise are competely useless and unnecessary (not to mention ugly in the extreme) and I think about the people that buy this stuff and what they get out of it and if they even think about where it came from (what resources were used to make and ship it), whether they really need it, whether they really want it, even.

I am by no means perfect. I make some terrible food purchases that I wish I didn't. But there are issues there that go way deeper than wanting to make a difference to the world. But I have stopped buying other things - books for one. After selling my 500+ books and enjoying the freedom that that has given me I now try not to buy books and if I do (I read a lot and sometimes it is unavoidable) I always give them away. Plus, my paper usage at school can sometimes get way out of control. I do try though.

But I don't buy other things. I spend my money on living stuff - the basics; food, petrol, rent, bills and then I save. I would like to try to do more though. Perhaps that can be my first project in this life change - don't buy anything new or at all if possible (not counting essentials). There is a social movement that supports this way of living. It is called Compacting and follows the idea that we don't need to buy things, especially new things. There are all sorts of supporting 'groups' too like Freecycle and Really Really Free Market. I'm going to look in to these things a bit more. My biggest decision is to not buy any new winter clothes. I have all the clothes I had last year and surely I don't need any more to get me through (although a new spencer might have to be an exception - it is cold, cold, cold here!). I feel bad that I just went to Singapore with Mum and bought a (more than a) few things - clothes and shoes mostly. But that is done and now I just have to look forward.

No more buying!!

...a start

We have a plan. The plan is flexible and changable, but the world we want to create for ourselves has some key features that won't change: Sustainability. Happiness. Life.

I guess the way it is panning out at the moment is that we will be moving to a lovely part of regional Western Australia (currently we are in regional Victoria). We have a date for that: 20 December 2008 (that's when our current lease ends - this reality is both exciting and terrifying). The journey to WA is a little more up in the air, but ideally I want to take a year off teaching and we will travel across Australia in a year while we WWOOF to learn sustainable skills and experience a different way of living so we can make an informed decision about where we want to end up and how we want to live when we get there.

I know a lot more now than I did when I first left an urban life about five years ago to move to a little farm I bought where I lived on my own. Perhaps I'll get into this story in a future post. But, now with my partner, we have a good picture of what we want out of life - the only thing we have to do is find the balance to make it happen.

Is this very cryptic? I apologise if it is, but all this seems so very far away from my current life where I drive an hour to a small town to matyr myself to teaching (as much as I love working with kids) and in these winter months, barely see my love and my dog in daylight hours.

I have lots of thoughts for this blog....stay tuned!