Everyday I am thinking about my exit strategy. My fossil fuel exit plan. It consumes most of my waking hours. You might say I’m obsessed. I say ‘why aren’t we all obsessed?’ We are, after all, living in an emergency. I am mobilised. It’s hard to explain to anyone what this feels like. Those who […]

I made the decision – one of the biggest of my life – in the midst of stretched conversations, planning our future over a whiteboard and black marker, with ‘Special K’ (the man in my life at the time). He had been living with me and my girl, Amy, for four years in the beautiful […]

Here’s a wrap-up of the beginnings of our retrosuburbia experiment – our low-impact, household-based climate action. We all moved into this house in the middle of last year and aim to move away from fossil fuels and our household’s reliance on external, planet-wrecking resources. The first step for me was to build a little sleeping […]

My moneyless life is evolving. While still keeping my own impacts low, I am now living and working with my dear friend, Sharon, to ‘retrofit’ her household, lowering the whole family’s footprint. The time of my relative isolation is over and it’s the dawn of a much closer collaboration than I have tried thus far […]

I am living in my friend’s backyard in town. I call it ‘Kim’s farm’. People often ask about the arrangement Kim and I have made.  There is no formal ‘arrangement’ between us. We simply agreed it was a good move for us both for different reasons. I needed a place to park my wagon, grow […]

Feelings run from frustration to determination. The sense of reward – world domination – when I push through the last millimetres of steel bracket is thrilling. Maybe akin to that sense of achievement as a little girl when I learned to lift my little legs off the ground and ride unaided on my first little […]

No money for a new wardrobe? No problem. Over the Christmas season I have inadvertently undertaken a moneyless wardrobe reinvention.  Moneyless living can be abundant. Again I have proved to myself how easy this is. Or maybe I’ve just proved that I live in a world of ‘peak stuff’. They are calling it ‘slow fashion’, repurposing, upcycling, […]

I feel like a little kid stomping my foot, pointing and shouting about the unfairness of it all! It’s climate change’s fault! I want to scream, rant, wail, rail against the injustice. Why did I have to be here in this time of climate upheaval? Why am I forced to make choices that cause me […]

The story of  independence/dependence is one of contention in my moneyless life. I sit between competing worldviews and internal voices. Below are two pieces of writing created at different times in the last few months. Does the truth lie somewhere in between?   ‘Independence’: I’m feeling bad. I have been too dependent on others for […]