About our journey towards real and green
Alain and I are a husband and wife team with two home-educated children, living in beautiful Far North Queensland, Australia.
We live on a Permaculture inspired farm where we're decreasing our reliance on supermarkets and increasing our ability to take better care of ourselves and our living planet.
On this page you'll find a brief version of the story about our transition away from "business as usual," towards "real and green."
We didn’t always live like we do now
We used to be jet-setting professionals in the Natural Horsemanship world. Our work and training took us around the globe, and enabled us to fulfill all kinds of dreams.
We spent time with extraordinary mentors and experienced tremendous opportunities for self-development. We learned to question the status quo and to take responsibility for our own circumstances.
Then we became parents...
Parenthood brings us all back to ground level.
Parenthood, in my experience, is the great leveler (at least it is if you stay closely connected to your children rather than handing them over to someone else when parenting becomes inconvenient or uncomfortable).
Having children took all the "jet-setting" and all the "professional" out of my life at once, and brought me down to earth with a more-than-painful bump.
Recovering from that bump took a long time. It involved a deep dive back into my own childhood to find heavy baggage I hadn't known I was carrying.
Beginning the work of reconciling my old stuff in an effort not to hand it on to my children took all the breath I had—often more than I had—during most of my early years as a parent. I'd never been so vulnerable or so open to change.
New eyes
As new parents, we're primed for massive transformation.
Besides bringing us face-to-face with unresolved stuff from our own childhoods, parenthood also gives us a new lens through which to look at the world.
We see with new eyes.
Its a time in our lives when we are primed for the possibility of massive transformation.
As new parents, Alain and I took a long hard look at the life we were living and the world our children will inherit.
As if we were seeing it for the first time, we examined the growth economy paradigm—"bigger-and-shinier-is-better," and "growth-at-all-costs"—and we realized it’s not working.
We examined our culture’s reliance on superstores and supermarkets, big industry and technology in every field, and on the institutions of health care, education, entertainment and media – and we found all of it lacking.
Time for a change
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.
We recognized a feeling of impotence, an uneasy background hum that buzzed louder in our ears the more we paid attention to what was happening in the world around us and to what was missing from inside of us.
We knew that if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem. We decided it was time for a change.
We sold most of our stuff, put the remainder in boxes, and moved from where we were based in America—with 6 month old and 4 year old in tow—back to my home country of Australia.
We completely abandoned the industry we’d worked in all our lives, an industry that had given us such gifts and that we had thought we would stay in forever.
We bought a small farm, found a job near it to pay the mortgage, and rolled up our sleeves to figure out how to become part of the solution.
If you're interested in the nitty gritty, About Our Backgrounds is the first in a series of posts that shares our background story in more depth.
Next up
This was the last page in a Series of pages about A Real Green Life. If you think you might have missed some of it, you can find all the pages in the Series here.
Or if you're done with the About Pages and want to read something else, you can chose from my post collections about Empowered Thinking for deep change, Practical Skills for sustainable living, or just pick the latest post.