October 4, 2008

On a commune in Finland


Toni Tanskanen: not religious – spiritual
I’m living in the countryside in a community in Southern Finland. We live in a 150-year-old log house. Our goal is to be as independent of society as possible. This is a life long project for me. We have now 12 square metres land in organic agriculture, and soon we will have two finn-horses and one pony. also two sheep.

Our community works very well. here is three adults, three children (they’re all one person’s of our community), two dogs and two cats. In the spring we’re buying also three base’s of bees.

Read More »

Questions From You

Here are a couple of questions from my wonderful readers, and my answers, enjoy!

Mayberry said…

I’d like to know the background story to how y’all wound up where y’all are. Where did y’all live before, how did y’all get from there to where y’all are now, and how much better is life now versus “the old life”…..


Mayberry

Thanks for your question, I’m not sure how far you want me to go back, let’s see, I do want to maintain privacy, but I can tell you some things… we used to live in the DFW area (Texas), we both pretty much lived there all of our lives. We have both been married previously (to other people obviously), I had one child, Bob had 2, they are now all grown. We met just before Y2K. When we met each other, we had no idea that the other wanted to live off-grid and everything that goes with it. I certainly wanted to but didn’t know that he did, he had his own business, plus his family was nearby and I didn’t expect that he would want to do such a thing. I had been getting “itchy” about the way the world was going and was wanting to get out of Dodge before the SHTF. One of my “secret” pleasures is listening to Coast to Coast am, many of the people who are interviewed on that show talk a lot about the year 2012 and the changes that are supposed to happen then. Good or bad, things are changing, and like many changes, it can get pretty rough before it gets better. Either way, I wanted to be in a safer place, somewhere where we can survive for longer period than we could living in the city. Little did I know that Bob also wanted to get away, not necessarily for the same reasons (he isn’t into C2C am).

Bob knew about the area where we now live since he was in his 20s, had a friend out there and spent many summers exploring the deserts and mountains of west Texas. He was a desert/mountain man in training.

I too had my training, from my early teens, I had been learning about solar cooking, canning, cooking from scratch (really from scratch, like our grandmothers did), organic gardening, surviving, all the things I would need to to survive where we are now.

About a year before we moved, Bob started making comments about wanting to move to west Texas, I didn’t think he was serious, or maybe I just didn’t take it seriously, at first… but once I realized how serious he really was, I agreed to check it out. We looked on line for quite some time to find property and had a couple of likely places lined up. We took a week off and left out for west Texas. …

Read More »
Available for Amazon Prime