Independence, freedom and choice

I was feeling relaxed and focused as I went about my work yesterday. I pottered around the house doing this and that, and then worked on Shane's quilt in the afternoon. Hanno went to the dentist in the morning so morning tea was had, just me and the dogs, on the front verandah. It's my favourite place to sit and stare into the trees and think about life, the universe and our place within it.

We are fortunate people, we are happy living here. Just breathing this air fills me up and I know that if we continue living as we are now, working away at lives that are home made and filled with work and the satifaction it brings, our happiness will continue. We don't need the frills and trappings that have become part of modern life. I find the simple things we surround ourselves with and the work we need to do to live this way brings us the kind of contentment we never felt when we visited shopping malls and paid for our happiness. Like most others, we were conned into believing that work was a bad thing, something to be avoided, but since we discovered that work brings its own joy, we have never looked back nor regretted leaving behind lives that took but never gave back.

I look around our home and see a space that is easy to live in. It's beautiful here. The weather is lovely, we grow food all year round, we can keep our chickens, dogs and cat, we enjoy the many birds that visit us. We have a driveway a fair distance from the one lane road that leads to our house, we can close the gate on the outside world and feel content here. It's quiet. We sometimes hear children playing, a train going by at night or the whip birds and sacred kingfishers as they fly by with their strange screams. Otherwise is the gentle clucking of the chooks, Hanno hammering on one of this projects or the sewing machine buzzing away constructing fast stitches for me.

Just at the end of the front verandah a tomato is growing. It's a red cherry pear tomato and it's growing, against all odds, in a crack between the end of the verandah and the driveway of the garage. I have no idea how it came to be there but it has come to symbolise for me the way we live our lives. A seed planted in a hostile environment, going against the pattern of what has been before, and yet it thrives, bears fruit, and shows every day that difficult things are possible. We know that despite what is told to us by the media, and the example set by mainstream Australia, we can live well on $342 a week and we are happier now than we have ever been. When "they" tell you you need to have more to be more, don't believe "them".

How could you not love this life. No, we don't have a big TV or pay for the viewing of it, we don't have the latest fashions to wear, we no longer fly off to far away places for exotic holidays. But what we have is far more stable and significant than those passing fancies. We have built a life here that gives us enough work to fill our days and makes us sleep well at night, we are independent and we have the freedom to choose whatever we want to do each day.

The photo below sums up our day yesterday, and, I suppose, our lives as well. It's a gentle scene in the afternoon sun, showing that tasks need to be finished and the animals fed before we eat and relax inside. Yes, that's Hanno handfeeding Rosetta, our golden Hamburg chicken - naturally, Rosie and Alice sit and stare because food is being moved around and a crumb might fall.

Just to the side of the above scene, bean vines are weaving their slow path around upturned pots. One of the simple pleasure we'll be enjoying soon will be sweet baby beans pulled from the vine and eaten raw in the garden.

And over on the back verandah, fruit ripens naturally, a few bananas at a time, just enough for the two of us.

But the sum total of this life is much more than the individual parts because it adds up to give us independence, freedom, choice, security, joy and the comforting knowledge that we make our lives what they are. Like any good organic system there is a cycle created that shows us that what we put into our lives is returned to us ten fold. There is beauty is such a system, it is created by taking small steps, by using less rather than wanting more and by knowing that, at the moment, the work we do enables us to make whatever we want and need.