Connecting

We had a really busy summer.  August, which feels like ages ago now, was almost filled to the brim with camping or getting ready for it.  We had more nights under canvas than at home.  But rather than feeling like it was an out of control frenzy it was all rather relaxed and immensely enjoyable.

In the depths of winter it is really difficult to say no to opportunities that will take us camping.  Despite my best intentions I have often ended up with a really full diary for the six weeks that the UK schools are on holiday in the summer months.  In past years the weeks we were at home would be business as usual, going out to our groups, meet ups and other activities, and in between shoehorning, not very successfully, preparation for going away.  It was all rather stress inducing.

I remember, when I had not long entered the world of work, many colleagues moaning about how they hated their jobs.  My naive twenty something self often wondered why they didn't just look for another one.  But there is something reassuring and comforting about the familiar even if we don't really like it.

I know that I have always had in the back of my mind a time when I was at home so much it became overwhelming.  A very young baby and giving up work to enter our new venture into officially home edding my eldest, I had yet to find my way around the home edding community, it was really isolating.  But tipping the balance the other didn't work for us either.

So when I realised that we had nothing in the diary for the weeks in August we were to be at home I didn't, for once, try and pro-actively fill them.  I went with the flow choosing whatever came up that would work for us all.  That relaxed planning meant that I was able to get ready really slowly and steadily and that when I got to where we were going I was relaxed.  Many a time I have been away on 'holiday' only to feel like I need another one when I get back!

We have visited some beautiful parts of our country.  We spent time walking, talking and admiring the views.  We had one day of rain the whole time, now don't get me wrong I don't dislike rain but when you are camping it can be really hard work.  It didn't matter how long anything took to do, well most of the time, there were a few occasions we had to be somewhere at a certain time.  When we got completely soaked one evening cycling to meet with a group I managed to turn it into an adventure, one which we laughed about later.  We lived in the moment, connected to each other and our surroundings.

Now that is all over I am also glad to be at home.  For the first week I didn't look for activities to fill the diary.  I did worry that the 'we are staying at home today' answer to 'what are we doing today' would be met with frowns but not a bit of it, not even this far down the line.  We were far too busy in our rhythm by end of July, one group has finished completely and another has yet to start yet, this feels so much better, for now.  I am sure it will change as it always does but I do need to gently remind myself to keep space in that rhythm for nothing planned.  It is no good keeping your head above the water if you not able to swim gently but are struggling to remain afloat.

Balancing

This is a reflection of my life at the moment.

A fine balancing act, a support.

I am happy, it is no longer a struggle.

Can I strike that balance here in this space, which I have missed so much, with the rest of life?

Time will tell........

          So here hath been dawning
          Another blue day:
          Think, wilt thou let it
          Slip useless away?

From To-day by Thomas Carlyle

The days are dawning blue with magnificent skies, the sunshine that we have craved all summer has now arrived.

They are full, simple and contented.

What about yours?

Joining Suzy

Pace

I live in an area that is popular with tourists, starting in Spring the roads get steadily busier and we encounter the occasional queue!  For a few weekends in August the traffic through our village becomes unbearable as several large events are held in our village and the next one to us.  The volume in itself would be just about bearable but coupled with the speed it becomes very noisy and dangerous.

We chose to live in a rural area as we love the peace and quiet.  We are situated on a main road which enables us to get out and about easily, it is a quiet road by the standards of many main roads.  When the traffic is heavier I have noticed how much more agitated and on edge this makes me feel.  The noise that hundreds of cars travelling 10 to 20 miles in excess of the speed limit is difficult to block out, coupled with my need to know where the children are at at all times and I am not a good person to be around.

We have speed limits on our roads, in built up areas whether in a village, town or city this is 20 - 30 mph, a limit imposed to keep us all safe in and out of vehicles.  An accident at speeds higher than this could be very serious.  There are some that argue that speeding is not the major cause of accidents in this country and use this as an argument against speed cameras.  I note that they are not arguing about the removal of speed limits.  So why is it that if we break the law by speeding and get caught on camera this is felt by some to be an injustice.  We are lucky as are most people in the world, to live in a country with governance (what we think of that is a whole other post) that enables law and order to thrive and whilst there are citizens who break the law they are very much in the minority (again this could be disputed but is not up for discussion now).  So why is it in a country of (mostly) law abiding citizens so many feel it is acceptable to ignore the law when they drive a car?

I took my children to the cinema the other week, they were very excited not least because it was a film they both really wanted to see and because it was their first time watching a film in a cinema.  Well strictly it was the second time for my eldest but he doesn't remember the first time so that doesn't really count in his book.  The Lego Movie was fun to watch but I missed so much of it, it was so fast paced.  If I tried to watch the visuals, I missed the audio and if I listened to the audio, I missed most of the visual.  I guess this probably deliberate to get you to watch the film over and over again, not that I am cynical or anything.   I couldn't help feeling that it was also deliberate as life in general for most is fast paced.  Rushing from one thing to another, dipping your toe in many things but not with any real chance of savouring any of it or with any real concentration or connection with what you are doing.  Instant gratification is the key.  I often watch school groups in museums who seem to flit like flies from one exhibit to another herded by a harried looking adult trying to stick to a schedule that is difficult to achieve and with no chance for the children to really concentrate and absorb the things that they are really interested in.

Sometimes I look at the world around me and think that I have entered a different vortex.  My life is slow and steady.  I am fortunate that I rarely have to rush about, which is a good thing as I know it would send me to an early grave.  My life is far from dull, it is rich.  I enjoy the simple pleasures, I am happy to wait whilst my children spend twenty minutes absorbed on something, concentration is a useful skill to have.  But sometimes I cannot help feeling that my life is at odds with the world, that I am pushing against a very large tide that is growing exponentially.  It is easy for me to hide away in my own world but sometimes I feel that is not for the best, that I should be out there extolling the virtues of a slower pace.  Somehow I think I could be left behind in the rush.

Sustainable

Welcome to the August 2013 Natural Living Blog Carnival: Living Sustainably. This post was written for inclusion in the monthly Natural Living Blog Carnival hosted by Happy Mothering and The Pistachio Project through the Green Moms Network. This month, our members are talking about steps their families have taken, or hope to take, to live more sustainably. We hope you'll find inspiration for your family's journey towards sustainable living, and share your tips with us as well!

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We humans are a highly successful species, we have utilised the earths resources far more than any other species and we dominate the food chain and the planet.  If we carry on doing so at the rate we are I wonder how long we as a species will last and what it will do to the earth's resources.  If we are to ensure that they are around for future generations to make use of we need to be wise in our usage, but how do we measure what is wise.

Forty years ago recycling was virtually unheard of in the way it is now, there were not recycling banks or places to take materials that could be reused, repurposed or recycled.  Forty years ago consumption was totally different.  Promoting recycling is a great idea in principle, if it means that less raw resources are used up then it should be a winner but is it not actually better to buy less, just what we need rather than what we want. In our consumer driven societies this does not sit well.  We do recycle as much as it is possible to, to the extent that we only put a rubbish bag out for collection every six to eight weeks but we are also mindful shoppers.  We only buy what we need and we are conscious of packaging when we do purchase, especially food.  We don't buy clothes that are only worn once, we make careful purchases which will last many years.

The food we eat is not only purchased with packaging in mind but also the season.  I remember as a child what a treat it was to eat oranges at Christmas time, this was the only time they were available to buy in the shops in the northern hemisphere.  Similarly strawberries were only available in the summer, apples in the autumn now we can buy all these products and more all year round.  They are shipped, air freighted and driven hundreds of miles around the world before they get to our door.  We grow as much as we can on our small patch of land, this provides us with a small amount of vegetables and fruit for some weeks in the summer and autumn.  What we cannot grow we have delivered from a local farm co-operative once a week.  We look forward to the change in the seasons and the new fruit and vegetables that this brings.  The rest of the food we buy is bought in a local town, we use small independent shops as much as possible and buy as locally produced food as much as possible.  I write a menu for our lunches and suppers based on the vegetables we have in the garden and delivered.  Our food shop is based on the ingredients to cook the menu and we have virtually no food waste as we don't buy anything we don't need, we are not tempted by the reduced bargains unless it is something on our shopping list.  I cook every meal from scratch with mostly raw ingredients, we do buy a few processed items such as pasta and mustard.  We are mostly vegetarian, I am but the rest of my family do eat some meat, what meat we do buy is always direct from the farmer at a market.

When we moved into our house over ten years ago it was the middle of a very cold winter.   We had a basic central heating system that relied on a open coal fire being lit to warm the rest of the house which took some heating as it was poorly insulated.  Our coal bill was really high that first winter and we knew we needed to do something about it to reduce the cost and our reliance on coal.  We replaced the open fire with a wood burning stove which we heat with scavenged wood, branches that have fallen from trees, in our local area.  We have installed solar water panels to heat our water, and improved on the insulation in our house in the cavity walls, the loft and under the floors.  We also have a gas boiler which we rarely use.  We have a warm and cosy house and very, very low energy bills.  We would love to take our house off grid one day by installing a wind turbine we are in the process of researching this to work out our options particularly for storing energy for the (rare) windless days.

We live in a small rural village which has a bus service.  The village has good services such as a small library, a shop, a post office, an outdoor pool in summer, a sports hall and a school.  We are home educating as a family and there are no other families, known to us, in our village who are doing the same.  All our home educating friends live some distance away, none on our bus route.  Currently we have two cars, one my husband uses to get to work the other we use to get us out of the village.  If we are going some distance we often use the train.  I would love us to only own one car but it would hamper our ability to get to home ed events, there are six buses a day and if we miss one it is often a two hour wait for the next!  We have home ed friends who don't have cars they all live in big towns with really good public transport networks, we have a train line at the end of our garden but the three train stations near us all fifteen plus miles away.  We try and mix our use of the car and public transport as much as we can as a compromise.

All our decision making in the past and in the future has been and will continue to be mindful.  We carefully consider our options, the impacts they may have, the cost to the environment and our bank balance.  We have not made them because they are what we should be doing but because we believe in them and we hope will leave the world as a healthy place for our children's future.

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Visit Happy Mothering and The Pistachio Project to learn more about participating in next month’s Natural Living Blog Carnival!

Please take some time to enjoy the posts our other carnival participants have contributed:

Green?

Welcome to the April edition of the Simply Living Blog Carnival - Going Green cohosted by Mandy at Living Peacefully with Children, Laura at Authentic Parenting, Jennifer at True Confessions of a Real Mommy, and Joella at Fine and Fair. This month, we write about going green and environmentally friendly living. Please check out the links to posts by our other participants at the end of this post.

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When it comes to labels, those that apply to people that is, I find them difficult to apply none more so than that of being green or environmentally aware.  This is not because I don't agree with it as a principle but rather that I fear that some choose to apply it to themselves because it is what they think they should be doing.  But should I be critical?  If it means that more people are recycling is that not a positive step, well of course it is, but if we are truly signing up to being green should we not extend this further and look at other areas of our lives.  That does not mean that it has to be an unreachable goal, it is about paying more than lip service and thinking mindfully when we make decisions.

We do recycle, we compost food and garden waste, we buy products with little or no packaging and we have reduced our rubbish and put out a bag for collection every eight weeks or so.  We grow some fruit and vegetables in our garden, those that we buy are locally grown, where possible, and seasonal.  We have solar water panels to heat our water and have insulated our house to reduce our fuel bills to a minimum.  We used washable nappies, I breastfeed.  We are considering ways to reduce our water consumption and would like to install a wind turbine in our garden to take our house off grid.  Does that make me green, perhaps it does but all these decisons have been made because they felt right to us, we were considering the impact of our behaviour when making them. We own a dishwasher, take baths rather than showers and we have two cars.  Two cars is there anything wrong with that, or a dishwasher or taking baths not showers?  Some critics might say there is.

We made a conscious decision to become car owners.  They are cars with low emissions but cars they are nonetheless.  We recently had to make a decision concerning one of these cars, it failed a test that is required by law where I live.  It needed a considerable amount of work doing to it before it would pass, money that we were not sure we wanted to spend.  So we tried to sell it, unsurprisingly no one wanted to buy it so we ended up selling it for scrap.  I would like to believe that it will be stripped of its parts and recycled completely but I am not sure if that will happen.  I have to take it on trust that that will happen in the same way that anything I place for recycling is actually recycled rather than placed in landfill.  We had another decision to make and that was do we replace the car or just have one.  We live in a rural area it would be difficult to live with one car but not impossible.  My husband is self employed and his work takes him all over the place, often at short notice, it would make planning our lives much more difficult.  It might mean that we could not join in with many of the home educating activities that we currently go to as we could not get to them on public transport.  We had to strike a balance and we decided that for now, we wanted to continue to own two cars.  We wanted to continue to be able to do what we were currently doing.

As we negotiate our path through life we can choose many routes.  We must make decisions that feel right to us, that are mindful and fit with our own beliefs and practices.  But to be green or environmentally friendly or whatever you wish to call it we must care.  It is not about offsetting one set of behaviours against another we must care that packaging is wasteful, or that using less water or energy is a positive step.  When we live simply I believe we have the capacity to do this.  We are not tied up with meeting our own unmet needs by filling our homes with the latest must haves for example.  We have the capacity to consider the impact of our decision making and leave the world as a place for our children's future that we too would want to live in.

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Thank you for visiting the Simply Living Blog Carnival cohosted by Mandy at Living Peacefully with Children, Laura at Authentic Parenting, Jennifer at True Confessions of a Real Mommy, and Joella at Fine and Fair. Read about how others are incorporating eco-friendly living solutions into their everyday lives. We hope you will join us next month, as the Simply Living Blog Carnival focuses on Daily Lives!

• Green Renovating: A Lot, A Little, Not So Much - Laura at Authentic Parenting ponders about the many things that have an impact on eco-friendly renovating
• Growing Native in My Flower Beds - Destany at They Are All of Me takes the guilt out of her flower habit by switching from high maintenance flowers to native plants which not only lessens her gardening load, but also benefits the local wild life.
• Baby Steps - Kellie at Our Mindful Life shares how her family became more sustainable, one step at a time.
• A Greener Holiday - Sara from Family Organic discusses the overwhelming amount of "stuff" that comes with every holiday and talks about how to simplify instead.
• Forcibly Green--Obligatory Organic - Survivor at Surviving Mexico talks about her family's evolution from passive to active green and sustainable living.
• Giving It Away - Juliet Kemp of Twisting Vines writes about the role of Freecycle, the giant karmic lending library, in her simple and green living.
• Simply Sustainable - Mandy at Living Peacefully with Children discusses her family's attempts to live in harmony with the earth by living simply and more sustainably.
• How Does Your Yarden Grow - Alisha at Cinnamon&Sassafras writes about an ongoing permaculture project, converting her grass lawn into a mower-free paradise.
• Green? - Is it about ticking the boxes? sustainablemum shares her thoughts on what being green means in her life.
• Using Cloth Products To Reduce Household Waste - Angela from Earth Mama's World shares how her family replaced many disposable household products with cloth to reduce their household waste.
• Going Green in Baby Steps - Joella of Fine and Fair shares some small, easy steps to gradually reduce your environmental impact.
• Are You Ready To Play Outside?! - Alex from AN Portraits writes about gardening, and playing in the dirt, and how it's O.K. to get dirty, play in the dirt, play with worms, for both adults and kids.

Water

It is the time of year when we start to receive some of the bills we will have to pay for the coming twelve months, one of these is our water bill.  We live in a small terraced house which does not currently have a water meter fitted, this means that the bill is calculated on the rateable value of the house which is fairly low.  The rateable value is the amount of money we pay to a local council to provide services such as libraries, road maintenance and swimming pools.

We have worked hard over the last ten years to reduce our gas and electric bills to minimum but have never really given any thought to our water bill.  The size of this bill got us thinking about ways we could reduce it.  As we don't currently have a meter we researched whether this would see a reduction.  We found a few water calculators online whereby you input various details and it gives an estimated bill.  The estimate was higher than we currently pay.

The completing of these calculators highlighted to me the staggering amount of water we use in a year.  It made us realise how lucky we are to be able to turn on a tap to receive it rather than having to walk to collect it, or devise our own methods to collect water and it made us think about ways we could reduce our consumption.

Our very reliable washing machine (perhaps I should not say that!), is fairly old and therefore uses a lot more water than those you can buy now.  I would not consider replacing it just to reduce our water bill but when the time comes an important consideration will be the water consumption.

The other massive use of water in our household is the toilet.  Again it is old we have a volume reducer in it, some old household bricks, but still it uses about 10 litres a flush.  We are at home most days so based on 10 flushes a day this amounts to 34 000 litres a year!  This seems such a waste to me and got us thinking of how we could reduce this.  In the long term we will at some point replace the whole bathroom suite, it was in the house when we moved in ten years ago.  I have long wanted to replace the toilet with a dual flush one, even better one that uses rainwater like my parents have installed in their new house.  This would be a huge but not impossible project.  Our other thought was a waterless toilet.  We have no idea whether these are available, how much they cost or whether they could be installed in a first floor bathroom.

This will be a long term project but, much like our gas and electric bills, we will work towards reducing our water consumption and reduce our bills.

Stuff

Over the last few weeks I have been slowly going though cupboard and baskets to give away stuff that we don't use, have out grown or no longer make use of.  I have not been particularly methodical at doing this but I know where I have and haven't been through.  When we have, in my opinion, too much stuff it feels overwhelming like it is threatening to take over, it becomes difficult to manage and keep on top of.  Don't you hate it when you go to a cupboard and can't get to what you want without unpacking most of the contents?

I grew up in a house that was full of stuff.  My parents seemed not to notice the volume of it, how it covered the surfaces and filled the cupboards and, after my siblings and I left home, the rooms.  My bedroom was an oasis from this, a room with relatively few things.  I carried this on when I left home, I moved around a lot and everything I owned had to fit into my car to move from a to b if it didn't, it was passed on to someone else.  But since buying a house, and settling, my possessions have grown in number especially since having children.  Our house is not particularly big and there is little opportunity to expand.  I love my house and am not keen to move so we have to fit into the space we have.

Whilst I have been going through this decluttering process I have mulling over the whole idea of what I actually need, to live as I want to.  I don't think I could ever live as minimally as the people depicted in these pictures but I am not sure that I would want to.  We have a small garden at the back of our house which we garden, to achieve this we have a small collection of tools, we enjoy camping, canoeing and walking, all activities which require particular equipment to take part in them.  To cease to continue these activities because the equipment they require needs to be stored seems to me to be cutting off your nose to spite your face.

This week I came across this interesting post on this insightful blog.  It celebrates moderation, a state of enoughness about not having too little or too much but somewhere in between.  That is what I am striving to achieve,  I've not reached it yet but I am on the right road and now I know where I am trying to get to rather than floundering along the path.