Chapter 4: LISTEN TO YOUR HEART
I met Sandi and Greg at the housewarming party of Jenny, whom I had met in the Knysna library, where I was researching the history of the town and she was returning her library books. In the group of casually clad farmers and eclectically clad hippies, Sandi and Greg stood out like two sore thumbs! Their clothing was stylish and clearly expensive, albeit no longer new, and they exuded an unmistakable whiff of sophistication that spoke to me of city dwellers. My journalistic instincts informed me that here was potentially a story worth investigating, and was I ever glad that I followed those instincts! This, then, is the story of Sandi and Greg.
***
Sandi and Greg were in their early forties when they moved to Knysna from Johannesburg. Sandi had been working long, stressful hours as a corporate management consultant and Greg was a partner in a top IT consulting company. They had plenty of disposable income, expensive tastes, no children and, as they put it, a “work hard, play even harder” approach to life. They owned a designer yuppie pad in a very desirable part of the city, drove sports cars, wore fashionable, quality clothing, travelled extensively, both for work and leisure and generally lived the lifestyle that most people aspire to. But, somehow, something was missing.
As Sandi put it, “I looked at the people who were above me in the corporate food chain - those jobs to which I was supposed to aspire and toward which I was supposed to be working - and I thought, “Is that it? Is that all I can look forward to? Years-and-years of insane working hours and personal sacrifice to achieve THAT!” Yes, they had tons of cash and all of the toys and ego gratifications that money could buy, but none of them appeared to be happy. They all had dysfunctional relationships, unhappy children and poor health. They were sick and stressed-out and miserable. I knew that I wanted something different for myself. Besides, I had had enough of a taste of the so-called “high-life” to realize that it didn’t really satisfy me. The fancy stuff just doesn’t fill the gap inside. I wanted much more than that.”
Greg agreed, “It’s all a trap. Shiny, new stuff is only exciting for a minute before you need the next fix. Increases and bonuses are rapidly absorbed into your lifestyle and you find yourself always adding more-and-more debt. Simply everyone lives above their means so as to have even more stuff to try and make themselves feel better and to keep up with ever-increasing life-style expectations. But, it doesn’t work, of course.”
So, Sandi and Greg decided to quit the rat race, climb off the hamster wheel and try a new way of living. This would be a completely new challenge for them. They resigned their jobs, liquidated their assets and moved to Knysna where they purchased an eight-hectare smallholding in a quiet, remote settlement. They had a big, bold idea that they were going to implement on their land. The idea was to become self-sustaining within five years. Greg had read The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live it by John Seymour and he was looking forward to implementing the ideas in the book. The piece of land they purchased was perfect for the objective, as it had no power supply, and therefore electricity would have to be provided by a solar-electrical system. Greg and Sandi would have to collect rainwater and also clean their own wastewater, as there were absolutely no services or amenities provided on their remote piece of land. It was the perfect challenge for two over-achieving, type-A personalities, neither of whom had ever failed at anything they had set their minds and their considerable talents and energies to.
They purchased a caravan in which they would stay whilst they built their own home themselves. The home would be made of sandbags and they would lay out their fully organic vegetable garden according to permaculture principles. They told their friends and family that they would be like modern frontiers-people, boldly implementing a mix of ancient and very modern technologies to live a completely self-sustainable lifestyle, which would be a glowing example to all of how it should be done.
“Oh, I’m actually SO embarrassed to recall how very naive we were!” Sandi laughed, shaking her head.
“Did things not turn out the way you had planned?” I enquired.
“And then some!” she giggled. “I can laugh about it now, but back then the series of disasters that followed nearly broke us, physically, emotionally and financially!”
The first thing they did was to build a storage dam for irrigation water. But, in Sandi’s words, “We failed to properly observe, or take into account, the conditions on our land during the planning of the dam and so we ended up digging the dam in exactly the wrong place. When the abundant Knysna rains arrived to fill up our dam, we realized that the dam’s overflow was perfectly positioned to flood our home every time there was a heavy rainfall! So, back to the drawing board then on that one!”
The next disaster was in the building of their home. The idea was to use materials that were abundant right there on the farm and so the soil that was removed to build the dam would go into the sandbags to build their home. Unfortunately, the soil on their smallholding was thick, heavy clay and not at all suitable for sandbag building. They also underestimated the magnitude of the job of filling the bags and stacking them to build their home. It was backbreaking, unrelenting work and apparently required a certain level of skill that they just didn’t possess, despite all the books they had read, as their first attempt caved in, just a couple of weeks after building was finally completed. For their second attempt, they were able to access telephonic input from someone who had built using this method before, and the result therefore remained standing. However, the clay they had used to fill the bags absorbed water during an intensely rainy season and the bags began to split. Sandi and Greg realized that the method was called “sandbag building” for a reason. The bags needed to be filled with sand and not with clay! In addition, the clay they had used to clad the outside walls of their home cracked and fell off, thereby exposing the waterproofing membranes and layers beneath, which soon degraded in the extreme weather. After months of effort and ever-mounting costs, they were still living in their caravan.
“The veggie garden was yet another disaster,” Greg admitted, with a grimace. They followed permaculture principles and prepared raised beds, using the double-digging system. This was another massive, physically challenging job and Greg freely admits that they were hopelessly overambitious about the size of the garden they had planned. But, eventually, after much blood, sweat and tears, their garden was ready and they optimistically planted their first heirloom seeds. Within a very short while they realized that the clay soil was extremely unfavourable for the planting of most vegetables, with root crops appearing to be out of the question altogether. The soil required a huge amount of compost and they would have to dig in (literally) tons of sand to lighten the soil mix before they would be able to grow pretty much most crops. This was yet another huge expense and an even bigger job.
Then, once their crops got going, they soon realized that there was going to be plenty of competition for their succulent produce. If it wasn’t the neighbour’s horses, then it was porcupines, bushbuck, monkeys, baboons or bushpig raiding their garden. It was a delicious all-you-can-eat buffet for the local wildlife! And, in addition, there were rodents and birds and a whole multitude of different insects, snails and even fungi, all of which wanted their share of the bounty. Our intrepid, would-be frontiers-people discovered that organic gardening, although wonderful in theory, is extremely challenging in practice.
Greg and Sandi eventually erected an electric fence around their garden, which proved to be too much for their solar-electric system to handle throughout the night and so they had to upgrade that system, at yet additional expense. However, once the fruit trees and berry bushes starting bearing fruit, they discovered that the baboons were willing to risk a large amount of discomfort in order to access the delicious treats. The baboons were scaling the electric fencing, shrieking all the way as they were shocked, but finding that it was all worth it once they were inside the garden and enjoying their sweet treats. Sandi and Greg had to put up a roofed cage made of gum poles and bird wire around their vegetable garden. Yet another unplanned expense.
Greg and Sandi had decided to clear their wattle-infested land and return it to pristine condition, but no-one had told them that the backbreaking work of clearing needs to be repeated over-and-over-and-over again. Every time they cut down a big wattle tree, millions of tiny wattle seedlings would germinate all around it, causing the couple’s courage to sink into their mud-bespattered boots. And, just as one part of their farm was cleared, they would realize that the adjacent portion was due for re-clearing.
“There were just SO many other challenges as well,” Sandi recalled. They had erected a plastic sheet between poles in order to collect rainwater to be used for drinking and washing, but they rapidly realized that it didn’t provide nearly enough water for even their basic needs. They had to build an open-sided shed with guttering and pipes leading into tanks in order to collect enough rainwater. And then, their solar geyser just didn’t heat the water to more than lukewarm and so, even after a long day spent knee deep in thick clay mud, they would only be able to have, at best, a very short, very lukewarm shower.
Their SUV, which had seemed like such a good idea back in the city, kept getting stuck in the thick mud of their driveway. “In fact, it felt as if we were chronically up to our eyeballs in mud,” laughed Sandi. “I would probably have given my right arm for a long soak in a hot, fragrant bath at that point!” she joked.
“And those bloody baboons…” Greg reminded her. It seemed as if every time they left their land, they would return to find some damage. “I started to believe that they had a personal vendetta against us!” exclaimed Greg. The baboons killed their baby chicks and stole their eggs, uprooted their young trees, ripped off guttering and even broke into their caravan and trashed it. “The buggers even pushed the microwave oven off the counter, broke all of our crockery, stole our food and ripped open pillows to scatter feathers all over the place,” recalls Greg.
“And, don’t forget Greg, my remaining baby chicks, after the baboons had done their worst, were taken by the forest buzzards. For me, that was the final straw,” Sandi admitted, deep sadness still evident on her face, despite these events having occurred years earlier.
At the end of the first eighteen months Sandi finally fell apart. “We had no home built, no properly productive veggie garden, no operational dam, no decent amenities and we were living in a mud bath. Our land was a money sink and I was physically and emotionally drained. I had completely reached the end of my tether,” she recalled. “During a bout of hysterical sobbing, I told Greg that I was going back to the city, with or without him!”
Greg smiled wryly, “I was nearly in tears myself! But I finally convinced Sandi to give it one more month and we would find a way to turn it all around. In my heart, though, I had absolutely no idea of how we were going to do that and I knew that I was simply postponing the inevitable,” he admitted.
That night, just before he fell asleep, Greg was suddenly struck by the realization that he had never, even once, asked even a single person for help on this project. He had just assumed that he and Sandi would easily accomplish this goal, just as they had accomplished everything else in their lives up to that point. “I wasn’t used to asking anyone for help,” admitted Greg, “But that night I did. I sent a plea for help out into the universe to anyone who might be listening. I said, ‘I really don’t know what I’m doing here. If this is right for us to do, please could I have some help and guidance?’ and then I guess I fell asleep.”
That night Greg had a dream that was to change everything for the couple. “I dreamt that I was standing knee-deep in mud in our veggie garden, looking at the shrivelled leaves of my cabbages that had been decimated by aphids. I was feeling absolutely despondent and at the end of my tether, when I caught a green flash out of the corner of my eye. Looking up, I was astounded to see a very tall, slender, beautiful, naked green woman standing next to me. At first I thought that someone was playing a joke on me, but when I leapt to my feet, I could see that she was very real and that she was smiling gently at me. ‘Who are you?’ I asked, my heart pounding with fear.”
“‘I’m the Deva of the forest,’ she answered, ‘And I’ve come to provide you with the assistance for which you have asked.’ I realized that her lips didn’t move when she spoke and that I wasn’t hearing her words with my ears, but rather through my heart. Then she said, ‘This is always going to feel like pushing water uphill and you will never accomplish what you want to accomplish until you first start with the question, What is my heart telling me to do? At the moment you are pitting the desires of your ego and the ideas of your mind against the rhythms and harmony of Nature. You have had ample evidence to prove to you that you will never, ever prevail. Discover what your heart is telling you to do, and then do that, always seeking to find your harmony with all that is around you. Stop resisting using your will and your ego. Acceptance is key. Accept, first yourself, then all that is around you. Then you will find yourself in the flow of life and everything will become easy and joyful’.”
“I had so many objections and questions and fears,” recalls Greg, “But when I looked into her emerald-green eyes, I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that she spoke the truth and that this was the only path open to me now. And then she disappeared and I woke up. I rolled over in bed and shook Sandi awake.”
“Before I could say a word, Sandi said to me, ‘Greg, we’ve got it all wrong! We’ve been trying to do it all ourselves, and we need to ask for help. We need to invite others to co-create this dream with us. We need to share our toys!’ Apparently Sandi too had had a visit from the Green Lady!”
Sandi and Greg completely changed their plans for their piece of land after that. They approached like-minded friends in the city who also desired to find a new way of living and these friends eventually helped them to create an intentional community of five families. Different people brought different skills to the party and the work, which had been overwhelming and exhausting before, became fun and manageable when shared with others. Sandi and Greg had to learn to compromise on several of their ideas, but the result, after almost five years, has been a testimony to shared vision, co-creation and love-in-action. There are also several community projects, which generate income and all share in the work as well as in the benefit.
“It’s completely different from what we had envisaged, and we’ve had to change our ideas about ownership and control,” admits Sandi, “But, somehow, it really works very well and we’re happy, healthy and have plenty of leisure time to enjoy this beautiful place in which we find ourselves. Now the community is considering purchasing the adjacent piece of land and providing an opportunity for another ten families to join us. And so we grow in love and in scope,” she enthused. “And, somehow, as we listen to our hearts, we also find ourselves listening to the rhythms and harmonies of our environment and everything just seems to work out really well for us.”
***
Sandi and Greg’s story had provided me with much food for thought. If the Green Lady was able to appear in dreams, what could be her true nature, I wondered. Now I was even more anxious than ever to meet her for myself.