Michelle Garforth-Venter discusses how peaceful living starts from within, and through our brief encounters with Mother Nature
I ’ve been on the road for 20 years, living in hotels and out of a suitcase. Fortunately, my travels have become bush and marine-oriented, taking me into the calm, yet unpredictable, world of wild spaces and ecological settings.
I believe that our base instincts become more finely tuned by spending more time in the wild, and once we know and understand our inner selves more clearly, we will discover that peaceful living comes from within, and radiates into the things and people around us.
But with a busy, buzzing home environment, how does one create the calm we so need?
Building our own bioclimatic family home this year has been a positive step in this direction, keeping the environment foremost in our minds as we built sustainably, and specifically removing the stress of price hikes by taking our home off the electricity grid and becoming completely self-sufficient.
In my new home, the PVR has revolutionised noise levels, making TV a controllable household item, allowing us to record what we want to watch, and not being subjected to whatever mindless nonsense happens to be on. No landline at home and living in an area where there is extremely limited cellphone signal buy some peace of mind!
Developers who make green choices and offer eco-friendly alternatives are not the way of the future; they must be the way of Now, otherwise we have no business with the future.
