Thursday, June 30, 2011

8. MAKING A LIVING



The first ripe banana's and we made the most wonderful banana bread !



We had another meeting yesterday. I like these meetings, they are fun and informative and very necessary to keep everybody up to date with what is happening and what is planned for the week. We open and close with a bit of a meditation, close your eyes, order your thoughts and get back to present, it just puts everybody on the same vibe.
  
One of the subject under discussion was the making of Charcoal, from Black Wattle (Invasive species).  There are obviously lots of questions surrounding this and if you do make charcoal, do you just supply yourself or sell it and what is the impact/implications.  At first glance the making of Charcoal  sound like a contradiction to what we are trying to achieve and there are questions regarding the amount of pollution, but it can be a great job creator, it is a way of doing something use full with the Wattle, and it does sound like the two guys proposing the idea have done some serious research and there is a long term plan of restoring the land after the Wattle is gone. We will have to invite them over and go thought the whole story again. 



Kiln for Charcoal making, you can also see the Black Wattle around it, there is nothing else that grows under these trees.

The wind is howling again, this is a bit annoying, because I want to go and potter around in the seedling house, but the wind keeps on blowing sand in my eyes !, but at least I get time to catch up here.


0ne of the people living here (Ole) is a Vipassana Meditation instructor. There was group of people here on Sunday, just for a one day meditation retreat and there will be a 10 day retreat here over the New Year period.  I don not think I will survive just sitting for 10 days, but each one to his own. KD is also busy building a whole retreat area out of natural building materials and methods, they are hoping to have this finished before the Vipassana, 


In the meantime we are also looking at ways of earning income, while living here. Riaan seems to be quite confident about his walking trails, I also think they can work wonderfully well, we just have to work out all the details and set the plan in action. There is also the possibility of training people from the area, to act as guides and get them registered to that they can operate independently.
I was looking at an Internet based business, but right now I am not even getting around to my blog, never mind other forms of networking, maybe I am just a bit tired of the computer at the moment and would rather be playing/working in the garden, but obviously not today, to windy.

We (Riaan and I) have set ourselves a target for end October, to have something up and running. This is really a wonderful and healthy way of life, but we still need income, this is all turning out to be quite a bit more expensive than we expected. 


Niki at the Pema culture course

Niki seems to be quite keen on growing Oyster mushrooms, which is also something that will tie in nicely with the Charcoal making, because you have a lot of wood chip, which you can use to grow the mushrooms on.  The only problem with producing something here, is the fact that you have to get it to East London and to do that, you will have to drive there, so you support the Petro Chemical companies a lot and that can almost be counter productive to everything else you do and the roads are not good, especially the first 20 km, so there is also a lot of wear and tear on your car. 


There is a library here that is quite amazing. I found some books (while cleaning and sorting, with Anne's help). At the moment I am busy reading Brave New World (Aldous Huxley), next on my list is Keys of Enoch and another book I have been looking for, but forgot the name of the book and  the writer, it is called Slave Species of the God, by a South African writer, Michael Tellinger.  That is just to mention a few, obviously there is a lot of books about spiritual development, green gardening, building your own home, alternative energy,  natural medicine and much more...




Part of the library 






1 comment:

  1. Brilliant nice to read you guys are getting the hang of it all now!!
    Happy landings with all the challenges and experiences.

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