About me
I'm Kate – the writer behind A Real Green Life. My intention is that if you know me personally, you'll hear the same "voice" on this site as you'd hear in a face to face conversation with me.
So, here's some stuff to help you make the connection...
On why I built A Real Green Life
Writing here is a means of holding myself accountable.
There’s plenty to do. Setting out to live more regeneratively is not a life path characterized by boredom or excess leisure hours.
So why did I also take on the mammoth-sized task of learning how to build and maintain a website and blog?
Self-torture
On the days when I'm struggling on this steep learning curve, the first answer that pops up is that I like to make things difficult for myself – and this is my own particular form of self-torture.
Self-expression, play, and self-indulgence
Happily, another answer is that this is a place for self-expression. This is my sandpit and my soapbox. There's an element of play and self-indulgence here.
If I'm not part of the solution then I'm still part of the problem
Besides all of the above, writing is also a means of holding myself accountable. The more clearly I state my purpose here, the more effectively I find myself working toward it. We teach that which we most need to learn.
A Real Green Life is an effort on my part to participate in the solution rather than the problem.
It troubles me deeply when I look around and see how destructive "business as usual" is to everything it touches.
So. In my personal life, in my garden, in my kitchen, and here at my keyboard, my goal is to disrupt business as usual and tell, instead, a more wholesome story.
The people of every generation perceive the state of the ecosystems they encountered in their childhood as normal and natural.
[When ecosystems are damaged or destroyed, communities, languages and cultures wiped out, species irretrievably lost] ... we are unaware that the baseline by which we judge the decline is [already] a state of extreme depletion.
[And for most of us, ecological loss is rarely at the forefront of our awareness, because] ... the infrastructure of marketing and media helps us not to see, not to think, not to connect our spots of perception to create a moral worldview upon which we can act.
Most people subconsciously collaborate in this evasion. It protects [us] from either grief or cognitive dissonance.”
~ George Monbiot, "The Unseen World"
On who I am and what's important to me
Home education
From when our children were very small, we knew we were going to be a home educating family. We do not separate learning from life, and for us the role "education facilitators" as a natural extension of our role as parents.
Being with our kids 24/7 has turned out to be the single biggest catalyst for my own growth that I’ve ever experienced. My children deserve the best mother and mentor that I can be, and I'm challenged each day to grow into that person.
Growing food and connecting with nature
Growing and harvesting food provides a direct, gut-level connection that nourishes our spirits as importantly as the food nourishes our bodies.
I like growing things. There’s something incredibly satisfying for me about bringing food directly from our garden to our table, complete with caterpillars, clinging soil, and visceral memories of all the steps and connections it took to grow that food.
I also like being with the animals on our farm. Something good happens in my insides when I’m with animals. Time slows down or stops, and the world feels right.
I think the truth is that we are really not as far removed from nature as we’ve been led to believe, and a connection to nature in any form is very therapeutic for us – it certainly is for me.
I can’t think of a more direct and gut-level way of connecting to nature than through the practice of growing and harvesting food.
Real food, eating ethically, and boycotting supermarkets
I cook. Everything. From scratch.
When I don’t want to cook, I still cook, because there is no pre-processed food in our house.
I’d often rather be out gardening or playing with animals or in the office writing, but I cook, because I believe real food is important, and most of what can be bought at the supermarket is not real food.
About half of what we eat, comes from our own farm. Some of it comes from farms within 100km of where we live. And the remainder comes from locally owned and operated supermarkets and from co-ops.
For the things I can’t get in my local area, I try to buy from suppliers who take good care of their own local community and ecosystems.
I have a goal to completely eliminate shopping at supermarkets from our lives.
Horses
I struggled to reconcile horsemanship with parenting.
Horses have been important to me all my life.
While I was growing up, the horse was a warm presence I relied on in an otherwise lonely world.
As a young adult, I built a career around helping people with horses.
In my thirties, my personal study of natural horsemanship became an avenue of spiritual development for me.
I needed horses, all those years and in all those ways, to help me grow.
But I found it hard to reconcile motherhood with horsemanship. After my second child was born, my life path took a turn that led me away from horses for a while.
It’s been a long, long wait, but finally we’re in a position to have horses in our lives again, and for that I'm grateful.
Spirituality
I don't tell my kids that God sits on a throne in the sky, judging your worthiness.
I’m in an ongoing process of defining what my “religion” is, partly to find a bedrock for myself, and partly so I can share it with my kids.
It’s got something to do with loving and revering Mother Earth, and with trusting a Great Big Spirit that is all around us all the time, that we came from and will return to.
Sometimes, I call that Great Big Spirit, “God." I don’t define it as male. I most definitely don’t describe it to my children as a kingly white man, sitting on a throne in the sky and judging your worthiness before drafting you off to heaven or hell.
On being opinionated, and deciding for yourself
I have an opinion about most things. It’s taken me a long time to begin to learn that sometimes it would be better if I kept my opinion to myself. I still slip up a lot on that one.
I’m a reading addict and a research junkie, but an entirely homegrown one. I left school at the earliest opportunity to play with cows and horses, and listen to the voice of nature; I have no pieces of paper that say my opinion should count for anything.
You’ll have to just read my stuff and decide that for yourself.
Which pretty much sums up what I think you should do with most things:
- Read/listen/watch.
- Consider deeply, on your own terms and in your own time frame.
- Decide for yourself.
- Take action.
- Learn from your actions, and repeat the process.
Next up
This was part of a series of pages about A Real Green Life. The next page in the series is "About You."