To Grandmother’s Homestead We Go

We went to visit my Mother-In-Law & Step-Father-In-Law on their 13 acre homestead in Sonoma County, CA in June of this year. It’s a really special place – there are large Redwood trees in the wooded parts of their land and there is also a big creek running through the property. In the middle of it all is their passive solar hand-built house and several large growing areas for their various veggie gardens, vineyard and greenhouse for my MIL’s lavender growing business. The views are beautiful and you can see large vineyards for miles around.

My MIL spins her own wool on her spinning wheel, has a loom to weave it on and showed my son, Leif how to card the fibers and then to spin it on the wheel. He thought this was great fun.

We did many special things while we were there and since my son likes art projects, I thought it would be interesting for him when we took hikes around the property to collect cool looking items we found in nature to build some fairy houses on the banks of the creek. He loved that idea since we have read a few books about this. I think by the end of our trip, he built 5 fairy houses and we took many pictures of them all.

My husband and I took a day off to be by ourselves to celebrate his birthday and go to some wineries for wine tasting and to see some sights around Sonoma County. One place we went to is an exact reproduction of a 12^th century castle just outside of Calistoga called Castello di Amorosa. It was awesome! Such amazing detail work with actual artifacts from salvaged castles – including the stones of the castle – were shipped over from Europe to build it.

Since our son was hanging out with his Grandma and Papa all day on the homestead, they had some fun projects lined up for him, too. My Mother-In-Law knew in advance that we were taking a day to ourselves so she gathered items from local thrift stores to build a “scarecrow boy” the size of Leif. He LOVED this! When it was done, they staked it right in the middle of a new garden bed.

He did a special building project with his Papa, too. My son requested to build and paint “a sculpture.” So my FIL gathered some scrap wood from his workshop and found some paints and Leif said he wanted to build a tree. The two of them laid out the design and then my FIL nailed it together and Leif very carefully painted it green and brown. He decided before we left to give it to his Grandma to hang in her greenhouse “so she could remember him!”

Later that day, they had to gather up some firewood to stack outside their house and my son had a great time helping to load up the pick up truck from the various wood piles in the woods and then help unloading and stacking the split logs by the house.  They would have gone swimming in the creek but it was a little too cool to do that so they built another fairy house instead.  He had a great day alone with his grandparents and we had fun drinking wine, going out to dinner and seeing the sights alone, too.

Café Gratitude opened a restaurant in their town a few months earlier and I was ecstatic to be able to finally go in person! I had purchased their cookbook last year and I think they craft some of the greatest raw food recipes. We ate there 3 different times! Michael and I went to dinner there after our day out alone and saw local musicians play while eating. Such a perfect ending to a perfect day!

On my husband’s actual birthday, we helped my MIL work in her booth at the local farmer’s market. She sells lavender plants of all different sizes and varieties. She cultivates 38 varieties now and is always testing out new kinds to see how well they will do in her area before she will grow and sell them. There is even a white lavender variety named “Melissa” that she grows & sells.  And out of all the herbs I work with, lavender happens to be my favorite. I even had some sprigs of it in my wedding bouquet.

We had a family birthday dinner that night back at the homestead with relatives that live in their area. We drank lots of great wine and I learned so much more about the art of crafting wine this trip since my FIL has been making his own wine for decades. Michael’s Step-Brother-In-Law gave him a bottle of his own homegrown, locally pressed extra virgin olive oil. It is SO GOOD!! I wish we could grow our own olive tree orchard where we live! We learned more about this process, too.

We visited Bodega Bay and played by the ocean (which is always cold and breezy), went to Armstrong Woods State Park which is an amazing place to hike around the giant Sequoias (can you see me in the tree photo below?).  We also visited “Train Town” in Sonoma which was so fun for Leif.

It’s so nice to spend quality time with family and get a fun vacation out of it, too!

Blog Action Day ’09 – Climate Change

Today is Blog Action Day where thousands of bloggers all over the world write about today’s very important topic – Climate Change. I’ve been a big proponent over the years of people being aware of what I’ve always called “Earth Changes” which now is referred to as “Climate Change” but they are both one and the same thing. It’s one of the major reasons I relocated – I had so many dreams telling me I have to move it was hard to ignore them after a while.

I am a professional psychic/medium (as well as other specialties) and I have been guided to learn to live my life in as self-sustainable a way as possible and have lived this way in both a rural setting and a suburban setting for the past 15 years. I’ve been an astral traveling dreamer at night my whole life and I can remember back in the‘80s having the start of my earth change dreams where I could fully recall them and wondered why I was being shown this and what was it all about? It was like fitting pieces of a puzzle together and I started tracking strange weather info in the news. Then in the early ‘90s I came across different Native American prophecies that foretold of a great time of change and upheaval starting to happen on our planet: “Turtle Island will pull into her shell” is what the Hopi have said regarding the USA (Turtle Island). They are the keepers of this ancient and very accurate prophecy. According to them, we have passed “The point of no return.”

One of my recurring dreams I’ve had over the years in my astral travels regarding earth changes is being in New York City (I am a native NYer) and looking out of an office building window down at the street below and seeing the buses driving through water that came up to their headlights. I say to a co-worker, “Why is there so much water in the streets?” and she tells me that there has been water rising around here for some time now. She obviously has gotten used to it and says, “Let’s go check out this new club after work” and I think she’s crazy and feel that we must evacuate ASAP. I get this feeling of urgency and my co-workers think I’m the strange one and go on with their life and adapting to the rising waters around them.

There have been times over the past 15 years where friends will email me photos of massive flooding going on in NY, tunnels being closed, cars submerged (my own mother’s car went under water in a parking lot from flood water). But then it all eventually returns to normal and people seem to forget until the next time. I keep watching the events escalate – a tornado touching down in Brooklyn? I don’t recall any tornadoes in the metro NY area when I was growing up!

I had a very vivid astral travel dream just a few months ago of being in Antarctica and watching a major ice shelf collapse and then all of this water came rushing out with such force. I got so upset over this and kept saying in the dream, “No more sea level rising” and heard back, “This is the way it’s going to be, due to the actions humans are taking.” Two days later, I heard on the news about a huge ice shelf collapsing in Antarctica which scientists said was unexpected and they were surprised about it.

My son, now 5.5 years old, has had some pretty interesting earth change dreams of his own already – he has given us pretty detailed descriptions (in 5 year old terms/descriptions) of being inside a volcano and it was going to erupt. He had a series of these dreams every night for about a week then they stopped. Less than a week later, there were a few volcanoes that erupted in the “Ring of Fire” around the Pacific Ocean.

From what I’ve been seeing both psychically and tracking in the news all of these years is that climate change is REAL and events are happening at an alarmingly fast pace – faster than the scientists have even predicted and mostly due to the choices and actions we humans have taken. I think by now it’s pretty impossible to ignore the increase in frequency of major traumatic climate change events like earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes, rains/flooding/mudslides, extreme droughts/fires. It doesn’t mean the end of the world is coming but it does mean MAJOR CHANGE for millions, maybe billions of people many of whom will have to start over from scratch in a new location or, will cycle off the planet during a major weather event.

So what can we do? We all have to learn new skills (and yes, some you won’t like but learn them anyway), learn to adapt mentally and physically and find locations you resonate with and feel in your gut are safe areas to live/raise your family and to build community in. We all have to work together. And respect the Earth, herself. She’s going through a lot!

We who are aware of what’s going on must step up and DO SOMETHING to help both our fellow humans AND the animals that are so affected by climate change.  There is still some time left to change the laws to end the abusive practices corporations are doing to the planet. Let your voices be heard by your governments! Let’s hope all countries join together to make radical shifts now to law and policy so there will be some semblance of a nice planet left for our kids to live on. As I see it, if we don’t make the changes NOW, our children are going to have to deal with MUCH worse!

How Time Flies

I feel like such a lucky person – I am living the life I want (even though it’s not necessarily in the location I envisioned) and I am supported 100% by my partner.  It’s been seven years now living back in suburbia and still every October (which is the anniversary of us buying this “temporary” home we’re in) I am still amazed that I’m here and liking it! Granted, if we didn’t have a child, I’m sure we would have moved on already but I feel all things happen for a reason and we were strongly guided to buy this home over and over again when we were searching for a new place to live in the valley.

The main thing about why we bought this house is that it mostly fit my certain criteria I had in my mind for moving off of a self-sustainable compound high up in the mountains: we live next to a source of water (a creek that originates near where we just moved from) which is next to a bike path so I don’t have to use my car if I don’t want to and I can always get water (that I would filter) easily if something were to happen to city water; I have 2 fireplaces in my home and while I don’t think they are as good as a big wood burning stove like I was used to, they are very good in case the heat doesn’t go on for some reason or to just warm up the room we are in. We are across the street from a big park, 3 playgrounds & a public kid’s pool which is great for playing with my son and my dog (and happens to be where my son plays his soccer games); our yard was big enough for us to put in a large (and now even larger) fenced in garden area and a greenhouse as well as various other garden beds, 4 chickens & a movable coop, 2 huge compost bins area, a full cord of dry wood neatly stacked and a large shed. It also happens to be right across from an elementary school that is really great and the easiest commute I’ve ever had to do twice a day, 5 days a week! We also really didn’t want an HOA telling us what we can/cannot do (even a clothesline is illegal in many HOA’s). My husband also really wanted big trees which are all over my neighborhood and we have an amazing view out our window of the snow-capped Rocky Mountains and even the Continental Divide. And so far, I’ve been able to easily do both my healing work and my herbal products crafting out of designated rooms for them both in my home.

Even though originally I hated the idea of living in suburbia again after being off the grid with our own photovoltaic system, amazingly pure water source (which I now buy & have delivered every month), clean air and lots of land, I made sure we could still live as self-sufficient even on a quarter acre as we were used to on 35 acres. We could successfully grow lots more of our own food, too since we came down 4,000’ in elevation. Such a major bonus for us aspiring farmers!

Another great thing is that we live close to others who have much more land with their own little farms so I can bike over and buy fresh produce, eggs, etc if ever we needed that. We are pretty close to our town’s ever growing farmer’s market, too and have biked there several times this past summer using the bike path. We live close enough to major roadways to easily commute for various job locations, events, the airport and close enough for a quick drive up into the same mountains we moved down from. We are very close to shopping, too which really came in handy when my son was a fussy baby.

So as I re-evaluate our situation once again this October, I see how we made the right choice for buying our home that is almost completely renovated now. We just completed a kitchen renovation that is really rocking my world. I’ve put it to the test this harvest season and I’m in love. While it’s not as huge a kitchen as I have dreamed about, it really is very efficient, well-organized and PRETTY for getting the job done. Six years ago we installed a tankless hot water heater, whole house humidifier, whole house air filter and we buy 100% of our electricity from a wind farm (through our power company) and installed double paned windows all over our home. Its energy efficient and warm/cool as it should be. We also divert our roof water run off to the various garden beds and now that rainwater collection is legal here, we will set up some barrels for that, too. Who knows, now that we know we’ll be here several more years, maybe we’ll do photovoltaic solar panels on the roof, too.

One day in the future we will move onto our own few acres again into an alternative home we design/build but until that time comes, this place is really suiting all of my family’s needs so well. We have made our carbon footprint as small as it can be for living in suburbia. We also try to eat as much vegan food as possible – especially homegrown – and buy our dry goods in bulk through my co-op. I’m really working on introducing my son to more plant based meals now that he’s not as hyper-picky anymore and I’m so proud of my hubby for changing his diet so much! It’s better for our health, the environment and our wallets! We make very little trash since we compost and recycle the majority of everything we use. I love that!

I truly am a lucky person and am so grateful for my great life!