Robyn - a life story that inspires

My name is Robyn and I consider myself a refugee from a lifestyle that is being perpetrated world-wide.  I grew up on the peak of it: the United States of America.  Born in New York to more recent  immigrant and longer-term settler lines of ancestry.  My father’s people landed in New York around the turn of the 20th century from Hungary, and my mother’s people had left Scotland (or been forced off of their land, as is more likely!) and repatriated overseas some centuries earlier.

My parents were lower-middleclass students at University when I was born.  The year was 1971 and they were part of a movement aimed at “making love not war,” experimenting with consciousness-altering chemicals and listening to consciousness-enhancing music.  I was conceived in the town of Woodstock, of the famed music festival.  Growing up within a counter-cultural context nourished my already free spirit, helped my open mind stay that way and fed me an ideology of inclusivity and nonviolence even as the reality outside of our small bubble was quite opposite…

The “Caterpillar Pillar”

Some of my more idealistic aspects may have been damaged when, at the age of 30, I accepted a job as a counselor in a women’s prison, but by then it was too late to undo them completely as I was already walking on a spiritual path begun with a deep immersion into Buddhist philosophy. I went to expensive private schools and graduated with honors.  This was all new territory for my family; I am the culmination of generations of European farmers and peasants who went to America to find a better life, to “get to the top,” and I was the one who has seen the view afforded from there as I was for many years of my life consorting with people in and near the 1%….And, I am truly grateful that I did not get stuck there!

When I was young I had a book that I read over and over called “Hope for the Flowers:”  

My parents were lower-middleclass students at University when I was born.  The year was 1971 and they were part of a movement aimed at “making love not war,” experimenting with consciousness-altering chemicals and listening to consciousness-enhancing music.  I was conceived in the town of Woodstock, of the famed music festival.  Growing up within a counter-cultural context nourished my already free spirit, helped my open mind stay that way and fed me an ideology of inclusivity and nonviolence even as the reality outside of our small bubble was quite opposite…

Caterpillars who are longing to become butterflies...

Lars is born in Holland and one of his brothers had lived and worked in Romania during university when he set up a project to help clean the gold mining disaster in Baia Mare of 2000.  Lars visited his brother many times over the years and he also did an ethnoveterinary study about how the small peasant farmers treated their animals for disease before the advent of the pharmacy.  Trained as a Veterinarian, the system of farming he saw still in place here in Romania impressed him so favourably that, along with a marriage proposal he asked if I would be willing to live (for a time!) in Romania and begin a Gospodarie.  Of course I said “Yes” to both him and Romania.

 

After 11 years here, we still live without a washing machine.  Even though we raised our son Carsten here and washed cloth diapers by hand for many years…We have only one spigot where cold water enters our house.  No Shower. And especially no flush toilet.  This is all very conscious; we do not want our house to be hooked up to a sewage system that encourages us to treat drinking water with abject disrespect.  We are working on issues of Water Sovereignty, Food Sovereignty and Seed Sovereignty.  We grow all of the food we need to eat.  We keep the company of goats, chickens and horses, one dog and one cat.  Many birds have built their nests in the roof of our house.  We respectfully collect plants for teas and medicines – all from what grows abundantly and locally.

 

After 6 years we did leave for a time, just to see if we felt a pull to be back in France where we had both lived and worked over the course of many years.  Where we speak the language…. But no, our roots had gotten too deep in this ground and we chose to allow them to stay.  Besides, there is work here for us to do.    

What is that work?  Mostly it is about telling our story.  It is to say that we have been to the top of the caterpillar pillar and that the view from there is not so beautiful as the view of the ground under our feet here; the wealth of plants growing out of rich soils of Romania that support so much wildlife and biodiversity, still…  To tell about the many researchers who have come to our door here at Provision – our farm in Transylvania – and been touched by all that exists in this region; the birds, the bumblebees, the water from the mountains.  The mountains themselves.  Now all of us so woefully under threat from that very thing that I was running away from…  

 

I came here as a refugee from a lifestyle that taught me to consume: to take and to hoard life.  To expect a life of ease and comfort.  Now we are here to support life in all the ways we can – Human life too, through our courses on NonViolent Communication, Permaculture and AgroEcology, but MOSTLY and with a preference for our natural world, for Gaia as a living planet, because without the whole of creation, we Sapiens will be no more.  We are here to live life humbly on the ground.  To show that it can be done.  To let others know that there are tried and true ways to grow wings.  We are here to support all caterpillars who are longing to become butterflies…

 

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