with Ianto Evans and other guest speakers
No more mortgage, no more rent! Life is brief, don’t waste it doing things that are uninspiring, ugly or at odds with your conscience. A weekend of practical tools, techniques and tips from lifetime experts. This will transform your life! This course will include financial advice, philosophical insights as well as hands-on experience of practical skills for improving self-reliance.
Date: 20/21 September 2008
9.30 a.m. - 5.30 p.m.
Fee: € 180
Please pay in full when you are booking. If you cancel 6 weeks before the course, we refund you except for an administration charge of € 25. Later cancellations can’t be refunded. Save 10 % if you book at least 2months in advance. Concessions for group bookings are possible.
Read a report of the experience of last year’s course at The Hollies
written by course participant Klaus Harvey
Ianto Evans, the Welsh cobmaster, who runs the Cob Cottage Company in Oregon, held this excellent weekend workshop at the Hollies in mid-September. The basic idea was to explore ways in which we can become more self-reliant and less dependent on consumerism and the industrial growth society for some of the basic tools and skills required for survival.
After the initial go-round of introductions by the participants, Ianto talked about himself, some of his own experiences, personal philosophy and how he lives today. He said that he had taught hundreds of courses but that these were his favourite as they got to the heart of the matter. A note he made to himself on this issue was: ‘Stop consumerism.’
He emphasised two aspects of getting off the treadmill:
• Allowing people’s conscience to align with their activities
• Making it easier to stop running so fast.
In other words, we need to find a way of creating a life for ourselves that doesn’t jar with what we believe in and we need to slow down. So how do we go about this? During the weekend we explored many issues, such as money, health, food, and took part in small workshops such as tool maintenance, mulching a vegetable garden and baking bread and pizza and making a hay box cooker.
Firstly, we need to stop thinking that the more money we have the happier we will be. This obviously goes against the grain for many people living in today’s capitalist culture, but Ianto told us that even though he doesn’t make a lot of money (about €6,000 a year) he couldn’t imagine being wealthier. ‘The more I’ve used money, the less happy I’ve been,’ he said. So we need to move away from equating wealth with money.
Wealth can come from many other sources such as friendship and finding contentment in doing what you are doing. Part of his personal wealth is that he doesn’t do what he doesn’t like doing. He has organised his life in such a way that he has that freedom. He has no mortgage, no health insurance, no pension, no dole and no worries and he feels fitter than many of the twenty-somethings who come to his courses. ‘The point is,’ he said, ‘I ‘m happy. I don’t feel I want for anything. I find security in the community in which I live.’ So we need to find whatever it is that gives us the strength of feeling wealthy in our own life.
Personal freedom is an important part of living off the treadmill and living within your means is one of the tools for personal freedom. Many of us who still think we will be happy with more money get into debt in order to find that happiness. But Ianto’s advice was to get out of debt. Debt means you are enslaved to a bank or other lending institution. If you need to borrow, try to borrow from family or friends as opposed to banks.
Money, Ianto told us, is a block to creativity. For example, imagine you want to bake some biscuits. In our consumer culture what we usually do is find a recipe in a book, make a list of the required ingredients, go out to the shops to buy them, return home and bake the biscuits following some else’s recipe. The other way of doing this would be to look in the food cupboard and see what is already there and bake what we can using our own ingenuity. The first scenario doesn’t challenge us to use our imagination. Instead we take the easy option of just spending money, and we follow someone else’s instructions. Scenario two means we fall back on our own resources and use our creativity.
One way many of us get into debt is by taking out a mortgage on a house. House buying or building is fraught with such fears and again we are relying on the institutions of the treadmill: we borrow from the bank, we seek planning applications and pay builders to build it for us. We are dependent on so many keepers of the system that we live in a state of stress and fear that it could all fall apart or that we will be caught doing something we shouldn’t have done. We believe in the rumours about planners watching from above in helicopters and arriving with bulldozers at our house built without proper planning permission. This was roundly dismissed as we were told that it rarely comes to this and Ianto knows of many people who have built their home without planning. As soon as you let banks and insurance people into your life you are on the treadmill and these institutions are in collusion with the planners. He said it is important to take courage not to believe rumours that might prevent us from fulfilling our dreams.
Tool maintenance, vegetable garden mulching, pizza dough, bread baking and yoghurt making were three of the sessions covered in the afternoon of the first day. These workshops were all about skills that can help us save money and become more self-reliant. The less we depend on others for our needs and the more we become expert at these skills the further from the treadmill we move.
The next morning, we did some brainstorming on what we thought getting of the treadmill entailed. The ideas that emerged were:
• Resign if you don’t love your job
• Grow some of your food
• Become aware of consumption patterns and start to reduce
• Reduce travel
• Get a bike
• Learn about wild food
• Only use what you need
• Choose quality over quantity
• Take care of your health
• Make time for reflection and/or spiritual practice
• Live consciously
• Choose media carefully
• Learn about good diet and nutrition
• Use wood for heating
• Community networking
• Stop using banks, credit cards, money
• Have a creative outlet
• Relax control over nature
• Remember you always have choices
• Identify existing skills and learn new ones
• Arrange life around family/community and not one’s job
• Support local ethical businesses
• Let go of unnecessary possessions
• Experiment and dare to make mistakes
Clearly there are countless ways of becoming less dependent on consumerism and many of these tools also enable us to live a far more fulfilling and sustainable existence.
Then it was time to go on a wild food walk. This is an excellent way of reducing our consumption by learning about food that we can get for free. Despite the drizzle we eagerly set off and on a small patch of ground that looked to me like it was covered in weeds we learnt that we could pick and eat almost anything there. I tried things I never thought I would such as sowthistle, nettle leaves wrapped in dock, groundsel and even bramble leaves with the thorns on which are easier to chew than you’d imagine. We brought them back and added them to a huge salad which we ate for lunch along with the bread baked the previous day and yoghurt that had set nicely overnight in the hay box.
The next session was on healthcare and we each made a list of what steps we take individually to deal with illness and to stay healthy. Many useful tips and ideas came out of this session such as eating well, reducing junk food, getting plenty of rest, laughter, avoiding too much travel, especially by car at night, getting exercise, getting as much natural light as possible, love affection and sex. Then as a group we made a list of non-financial satisfactions, such as appreciation of nature, having friends round, making music or creating something.
This was an inspiring weekend and we each came away full of ideas and armed with creative skills to navigate our way through the industrial consumer society. We found strategies for creating for ourselves a simpler life involving less dependence on consumerism. Ianto Evans is a remarkable man and we’re eagerly looking forward to next year when he returns to The Hollies.