Know your why
Where to begin on your slow, simple, seasonal living journey
Welcome to Splendid to be.
Love letters that celebrate the many little measures of slow, simple and seasonal living.
Stories, photography, recipes and book recommendations from my heart, home and garden to you.
This weekend whilst spring cleaning the %^& out of our house, I opened up my old wallet and found this little dream I penned close to 5 years ago.
This Ted Baker purse I once coveted, formerly shiny and glamorous, is now well worn, tattered and its contents are redundant. I handed it over to my daughter to be reunited with my Ted Baker dresses amongst her costume collection. Relics from another life.
8 years ago, my husband and I ditched inner city Melbourne in search of the slow life on the Mornington Peninsula. I closed the door on both my twenties and my all-consuming career. We leapt into the unknown, leaving all certainties behind us, with no plan or vision of what we wanted the future to look like, only knowing what we didn’t.
Many people leave the city for a tree or a sea change, we felt called to the vines. We wanted to live as close to our beloved liquified grapes as possible and spent our inaugural Year of the Vine hopping from one cellar door to the next. Half way through our 50+ estate bucket list, we fell pregnant and naturally our priorities shifted. Suddenly the gut impulse to flee the city and our jobs started making sense. Imagining what life for our family could look like, our vision for the future began to take shape.
Since becoming parents, our why behind all of our actions and choices has been time together. No fancy clothes, vin extraordinaire or career is worth more.
So we kept slowing down and simplified continually. We went without buying what we could have a crack ourselves at making.
I educated myself, book after book, on money management, backyard food growing, permaculture, homeschooling, radical homemaking, health & nutrition, frugal hedonism, garment making and simple living.
As the years passed we continued to narrow down what we truly valued and our vision for our dream life.
We bought our first house and like most millennials, were up to our eyeballs in debt. After reading Meet the Frugalwoods by Elizabeth Willard Thames, I signed up for her Uber Frugal Month challenge. Day Two of the challenge read:
“Be bold and write down where you want to be in 5 years, 10 years from now… and then put that piece of paper in your wallet. When the choice is between buying something you probably don’t need or living a life that’ll bring you fulfilment every day, that becomes pretty darn easy.”
And here I am now, 5 years on.
Living the dream I dared to etch on a scrap of paper and carry with me through multiple house moves, a pandemic, a second child born during a pandemic, many more books read and new skills acquired.
Living simply on our land in our forever home, growing, learning & loving together whilst adventuring big & small.
That short, simple sentence is riddled with questions I had to get clear on.
How much land is enough to live comfortably now and into the future?
What are the requirements of a home being suitable forever?
How much space do we need to grow a large portion of our own food and potentially house our adult children and elderly parents in the future?
How do we want to educate our children in order to raise them connected deeply to the earth beneath their feet, their home, family, community and ecosystem?
How can we centre love in all that we do?
How can we set up ourselves up to spend more hours in a day and days in a week together than apart?
How do I reconcile wanting to live a localised, home centred life and wanting to adventure and explore?
Where can we set down our roots so that all of this is possible?
Two years ago, our forever home appeared on realestate.com.au and it was as if its previous owners had been shaping and stewarding it just for us. All those nights I’d spent writing down what I one day dreamed could be ours, unbeknownst to me already existed. But I wouldn’t have found it, if I hadn’t known what I was longing for.
So we leapt again. Turning what began as a scrap of paper into a contract of sale on our forever home where we’ve been living, and hope to always, ever since.
We dove into growing and consuming food from our garden from the very beginning and continue to mature and evolve as gardeners and cooks.
Our kids have never been to and we don’t intend to send them to school. All of us learn together, all of the time, through books, nature, play, curiosity, creativity and community.
We love spending our days and nights, weeks, months and years - together.
We explore and soak up the beauty of the Peninsula regularly with friends and family, and occasionally venture a little further afield.
My 10 year vision is tracking well. It’s exactly the same as my 5 year, possibly with a little more adventure.
I want my future to look like my present.
I wouldn’t change this humble, little life for any other.
If, like me, you have felt or are currently feeling out of touch with your life's trajectory, know this: small acts, like writing your deepest desires on a tiny piece of paper, walking your food scraps out the back door to the compost heap, patching a hole on a torn jacket or casting parsley seeds with wild abandon are investments that over time compound and appreciate.
From little things, big things grow and with time one sprout can yield thousands of seeds.
Start small, keep it simple and go slowly.
Seasonal Eats
Wild garlic, spinach & herb quiche
The warmer weather has lulled our girls back into laying so eggs are plentiful again and I’m making a lot of quiche. Although we’ve been slow to get our summer crops in the ground, we are still harvesting winter greens such as kale, chard and perpetual spinach, which I used for last weeks quiche. Wild garlic, or onion weed as it is known here, began cropping up all over our orchard recently and I’ve noticed it growing abundantly all over the Peninsula, so it’s a great time to go out and forage this completely edible and delicious weed!
Slice up the stems to use in lieu of spring onions as the base of the quiche (reserving the delicate flower heads for the salad to accompany), and lightly sauté them in a frying pan and season well. Add your greens and once bright and wilted down, add this mixture to a lightly pre-baked pastry lined tin. You can use frozen shortcrust pastry sheets or whip up your own from scratch. On top of this layer sprinkle fresh soft herbs (I added fresh fennel fronds and a lot of chopped parsley as both are in abundance in the garden at present), pour over 7-8 beaten eggs and sprinkle with cheese of your choosing. Goats feta works really well. You can also bulk out this recipe with peas or broccoli by throwing them in the fry pan between the garlic and the greens.
Bake in the oven at around 200 degrees celsius for approximately half an hour or until golden on top and egg completely cooked through.
I serve our quiche with my husband’s homemade blood plum chutney and a whatever-is-on-hand-in-the-garden salad. On this occasion I used roquette, lettuce, more spinach, more parsley, and onion weed flowers. Dress with extra virgin olive oil and freshly squeezed lemon juice.
Book recommendation
Meet the Frugalwoods: Achieving Financial Independence Through Simple Living by Elizabeth Willard Thames
Elizabeth and her family were motivated by the FIRE movement (Financial Independence Retire Early) to simplify their lives and whilst this isn’t the path our family chose, I still garnered plenty of inspiration, tips and ideas from her book which have stayed with me since I read it 5 years ago.
Thank you for reading my musings on the many little measures that add up to a slower, simpler more seasonally attuned life.
I hope my stories, photography, recipe and book recommendations help gently guide and encourage you on your own journey.
My writing is free to read, and always will be, so don’t be shy about subscribing and connecting with me and other likeminded souls in the comments.
Food for thought
I will leave you with two things to ponder that I would delight in hearing:
What vision for the future do you carry on your person or in your heart?
What little (or big) life changes have you made to live the life you dream of?
What a lovely read, thank you. My husband and I have done something similar. I hope for a future where my children understand how to and value growing and eating real food, that they grow up loving to learn and expand their minds and that in 20, 30 and 40 years time they continue to return to my kitchen to chop veggies, laugh, drink tea and eat. 🌿
Love this post and the latest one. We actually just moved to a farm (living in our friends basement) so the home grown loving and community feels more like a l reality now than we were living in our urban apartment. So excited! Also what is your pizza recipe? That sounds like a fun Friday tradition