Down to Earth

by Rhonda Hetzel

  About the Author

  Rhonda Hetzel is a retired journalistand technical writer best known for her award-winning blog, ‘Down to Earth’. Rhonda lives with her husband, Hanno, on the Sunshine Coast, where they happily tend a food garden, gather eggs and occasionally look after grandchildren. Rhonda is a keen volunteer worker and is often found presenting simple-living workshops in her community.

  Contents

  LIVING SIMPLY

  A change of heart

  What it simple living?

  Moving towards simplicity

  Living deliberately

  AGES AND STAGES

  Decade decisions

  Simple living in your twenties

  Simple living in your thirties

  Simple living in your forties

  Simple living in your fifties

  Simple living in retirement

  Simple living throughout your life

  SAVING AND SPENDING

  Reclaim your life

  Step 1: Track your spending

  Step 2: Reduce your spending

  Step 3: Take control

  Step 4: Start an emergency fund

  Step 5: Pay off debt

  Family finances

  HOME

  Finding home

  Building strong families

  Growing up

  Modern living with an eye to the past

  Learning traditional skills

  An open invitation

  HOUSEWORK

  Housework never ends

  A clean sweep

  Homemade green cleaners

  Safe and simple cleaning

  Cleaning you

  ORGANISING YOUR LIFE

  Finding your rhythm

  Decluttering

  Routines

  Organising your belongings

  HOME-GROWN SELF-RELIANCE

  Gardening grows the spirit

  Enriching your soil

  Choosing what to grow

  Growing vegetables from seeds

  Saving vegetable seeds

  Fertilising

  Harvesting your crops

  Growing food in containers

  THE SUSTAINABLE BACKYARD

  Garden maintenance

  Bugs and insects

  Keeping chickens

  Composting

  Worm farming

  Harvesting your rainwater

  NOURISHMENT

  The heart of the home

  Organising your food

  Storing your food

  Preserving food

  Shopping for food

  Cooking from scratch

  The hierarchy of food waste

  Kitchen checklist

  RECIPES

  Baking

  Dairy food

  Fermenting

  Simple everyday recipes

  Dressings and stocks

  Let’s begin

  Resources

  Acknowledgements

  Had I known what profound and beautiful changes were awaiting me, I would have had a change of heart much sooner. About ten years ago I eased myself out of shopping, fashion, eating out and other non-essential spending. I felt like I was taking a giant leap into the unknown and everyone was asking me, ‘Why!?’ Now times have changed. There has been a worldwide financial crisis, a grey tsunami of retiring baby boomers is beginning to influence our lives as they leave the workforce and many move towards government pensions, and many more people are worried about the economy, the environment and the future. Clearly the time is right for a simple change. But it’s not just for those who are facing difficulties. Even if recent years have treated you more kindly, simple living will have something to offer you. It’s not just a refuge in a sea of environmental and economic calamity, it’s a beautiful and significant life choice in itself.

  I was pulled into simple living before I knew what it was. It crept up on me using the smallest of steps and didn’t reveal its true beauty and real power until I was totally hooked. I was searching for a way to live well while spending very little money. What I found was a way of life that also gave me independence, opportunity and freedom.

  I live with my husband, Hanno, in the hinterland of Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. We’ve been married more than thirty years and have two sons, Shane and Kerry. They have both left home and settled down to build lives with their partners, Sarndra and Sunny. We’ve recently welcomed our first grandchildren. Life, as we move into our later years, looks pretty good.

  I guess you would say we’re ‘retired’ but we still work almost every day, making bread, jams, relish and soap, cooking from scratch, growing vegetables, recycling and mending what we use in our home. We aim to live productive lives, so while many of our contemporaries are travelling in caravans or planes we’re pleased to be homebodies, finding satisfaction in our simple home, and excitement and adventure in a backyard full of fruit, vegetables, chickens and wildlife. Rhythms, seasons and daylight rather than clocks, calendars and investment portfolios guide our days. We are in a fortunate position to be able to live this way and we both find it very satisfying to be active at this stage of life and to feel enriched by what we do.

  Hatching a new life

  After many years working as a journalist and technical writer I was burnt out. I’d just finished a major contract for a big company when I realised I didn’t want to work for a living any more. I wanted to stay at home and rebuild my spirit. I wanted to look after my family, slow down, collect eggs and honey, and sit and dream in my garden. I also wanted to feel more alive.

  What I had been doing was working in a job I didn’t like so I had enough money to pay for a lifestyle I didn’t want. I was shopping for clothes and shoes to make me look like everyone else. I was buying things for my home to make me feel comfortable in a place I didn’t take the time to feel comfortable in. And I was buying food to comfort and nurture because I didn’t feel at ease in my life and I didn’t have the time or energy to cook the food I liked. This destructive behaviour seemed to be quite acceptable and, from what I could see, my family and friends were doing a similar thing. Continuous consumption was even encouraged by our government, who told us that shopping was good for the country and we were ‘growing the economy’.

  We live on a limited budget but I am richer now than I’ve ever been in my life.

  And the strangest thing is that when I was living in this way, I didn’t think about the sadness I was feeling. I didn’t realise I was unsatisfied and I didn’t see the need for change. I believed I was the queen of my realm, that the more I had and the more dollars I spent, the more power, strength and independence I had. When I stopped spending I realised how pathetically wrong that was. I had actually been giving away my independence.

  Now that I look back on it, I must have been a bit crazy to believe that I could just stop shopping without changing the way I lived too. I thought I would just stop the mindless spending while finding satisfaction within my own home, and that would be that. I didn’t know then that the charm of living without shopping, and of making do with what I had, would open up a whole new world for me, where independence and opportunity would live side by side and lead to a kind of gentle liberation.

  Luckily, at that point, I discovered that others had walked this road less travelled before me. I found a group of writers who had been explaining their philosophy to the world for many years, so I started reading. I found Walden by Henry David Thoreau online and devoured it within hours. I ordered books from America that were not yet available in Australia – The Simple Living Guide by Janet Luhrs, Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin, the Encyclopedia of Country Living by Carla Emery, and The Complete Tightwad Gazette by Amy Dacyczyn.

  I also discovered blogs. Here was a
world I had never known about, where real people were writing about things that interested me. I could see into their lives, get to know their families, understand how they lived and be part of a community that supported one another. Once I found blogs, it didn’t matter much that I didn’t personally know anyone who was doing what I was doing; I felt comfortable in the company I kept online. In those early days I didn’t find many people blogging about living my dream life, but I really enjoyed the blogs about family and frugal living. I also found blogs about global warming, lightening your footprint, going green and peak oil, but none that wrote about what I wanted to do – change how we live in the most fundamental and practical way.

  I started my own blog and called it ‘Down to Earth’. Instead of adding my voice to the fast-growing group of people who were writing about environmental disaster and post-peak survival, I decided I would write about our ordinary daily lives and how we were simplifying, and let that be my manifesto. I believed where radical change was needed was in the business of day-to-day living which, if done mindfully, could hopefully lead us to a good life. I hoped that writing the blog every day would make me accountable and give us a clear record of what we were doing.

  I realised that many of the things I spent my money on I could do or make myself: I could make clothes, I could cook, I could do my own housework. But once I started doing those things I found that I’d lost many of those skills. I’d forgotten how to sew and knit because I’d been paying someone else to make my clothes. I’d forgotten how to cook from scratch because I’d been buying food that didn’t require me to exercise my mind or spend my energy on making my favourite dishes. When it came to housework, all I knew was to get products from the cupboard and start wiping. I was a grown woman and I didn’t know how to look after my family or myself properly. I’d forgotten the skills that had been passed on to me and I was almost completely dependent on others to help me live.

  You don’t have to be a genius to shop; all you need is money, or a credit card, and some time. Not shopping, on the other hand, requires a multifaceted strategy. You need to know how to create, cook, clean and sew; you need to make do with what you have, to reuse, recycle and repair. You need to barter, grow, store and preserve – and it helps if you like doing it. You have to discover for yourself the true beauty of being able to look after yourself, your family and your home with a minimum of outside help. The beauty is there if you look.

  We live on a limited budget but I am richer now than I’ve ever been in my life. I know how to live. I have the skills to survive a crisis. I have the strength and knowledge to produce my own food and to store it. I can clothe myself and others. These are life-engaging and self-empowering skills. But the real skill here is to do it and love doing it day after day. Relearning those lost skills, and then using them, are acts of subversion because you’re not doing what women and men in our times are supposed to be doing. Nurturing your family and yourself with cooking, gardening, repairing, dressmaking, knitting, creating, recycling and all the other things you learn to do in your post-consumerist life not only enriches your spirit, but also makes you an independent force. May the force be with you.

  So what is simple living? There are many answers to that question, but for me it’s about living a life that’s not complicated by wanting or having too much. It’s being satisfied with enough, whatever that may be. It’s a way of reigniting the excitement of everyday living because you throw away the rulebook and live according to your own ideals. It allows you to discover the significance of home life and how your home can nurture you. It’s a lifestyle that allows you to live well on little money, thereby enabling you to build a family and a home that is based on authenticity and love, rather than on fashion or what is expected of you. It helps you regain power and independence by making you stronger and more self-reliant. It builds sustainability into your family life and home. For me, simple living has allowed my husband and me to live every day to its fullest and to grow and prosper at a time when we thought we would be doing the opposite.

  This way of living is not about deprivation or being thrifty. It will help you get rid of many of the harsh chemicals you live with by replacing them with simple household cleaners you make yourself. It will encourage you to cook from scratch, so you and your family can eat food that is not weighed down with preservatives or artificial colourings and flavours. It will show you that your home is your personal shelter and the one place you can rely on to nurture you and your family. If you let it, I believe your home and what you do there will shape the person you become. It did that for me; it can for you too.

  ‘Simple’ tends to describe the nature of the activities in this kind of life, not the amount of effort involved.

  Overall, simple living is about finding peace, joy, beauty and satisfaction within ourselves and in that place we’ve been told it never is – our homes. It is about regaining the power to direct our own lives and become doers rather than buyers. It’s about becoming independent and discovering that happiness is not bought; it is developed gradually in the day-to-day activities of life.

  But what about the name: ‘simple living’. Is it really simple? People tell me that I do more work than they do and that my life is therefore far from simple. It’s true that it generally requires more effort to produce what we need than to buy it. But ‘simple’ tends to describe the nature of the activities in this kind of life, not the amount of effort involved. I know now that simple doesn’t mean effortless or easy; it means plain and uncomplicated. Sometimes it just means simpler than the more common, commercial way of doing things. For instance, it is perhaps easier or more convenient for me to buy my bread from the supermarket, but if you consider the plastic bag the bread is packaged in, the preservatives that allow it to sit on the shelf for days, the artificial flavourings, and the oil and transport chains that have delivered it to the shop, then the bread I bake at home is simple. I buy my flour in bulk bags made of paper, and the yeast in large aluminium bags that last me six months. Is making a cotton tote bag to carry your grocery shopping simple? It might require more effort, but it’s simpler than using plastic bags that kill marine life, clog up our oceans and contribute to landfill. Is staying at home to work simple? Compared with working to earn money so you can buy everything you need, yes it is. Yes, sometimes I curse and carry on about things I don’t want to do, but most of the time this work is enriching and satisfying and, in our lives, significant.

  Home is where I want to be now. I want to spend my time living quietly, giving to my community when I feel I have something to offer, and working in my home so I can live in the fine style I have come to know. It may not suit everyone, and it may seem like a lot of hard work and sacrifice to some, but I love it, even if at times I don’t understand why it resonates so deeply within me.

  A simple life can manifest in many ways, but generally the lifestyle varies depending on the stage of life you’re currently at. Hanno and I are older folk and we had the delightful opportunity to give up work completely, to grow food in our backyard and to produce a lot of what we need to live. If you’re at retirement age, I believe there is no better discovery than this. If you’re middle-aged and have some form of debt that you’re working to pay off, living more simply will help you do that. If you’re younger, the possibilities are endless. If you are debt-free you can move through your twenties and thirties creating a life that doesn’t centre on excessive possessions and debt. However, if you regret some of the lifestyle decisions you’ve already made, it’s not too late – you can now work towards sustainability and the elegant sufficiency of ‘enough’.

  The path is different for all of us. My way of living won’t suit all of you; you have to define for yourself what you want your life to be, then slowly move towards that life.

  No matter what your life becomes, it will probably involve some of these changes:

  thinking about what kind of life you want to live – this is a deliberate choice; you don’t have to stay the same
as you are now

  controlling your spending with the aim of being debt-free

  saving for important things you believe will make your life better

  reskilling and learning how to look after yourself and your family

  shopping in a different way

  eating healthy, local, and possibly organic food

  growing some of your own food

  disposing of disposables

  cleaning with green products

  managing your time and establishing routines

  cutting back and making do

  looking after what you own

  making home your centre

  connecting with your family and community

  changing your definition of success

  becoming independent.

  Today, when you finish reading this chapter, I want you to think about how you want to live. Find a notebook and write down all your ideas. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t make sense; you can edit it later. Just let the ideas flow. Your first task is to write two lists.

  This is the first list I wrote all those years ago. I add it merely as a sample that you might find helpful when creating your own.

  I want my life to provide me with:

  a reason to get up every morning

  interesting and productive work

  contentment that occasionally explodes into happiness

  a framework in which to live simply

  the opportunity and continued ability to learn skills that facilitate our lifestyle

  a strong and generous family circle that supports every member of our family – during the good times and especially when it’s tougher

  opportunities to express generosity, kindness and empathy

  the strength to be a role model to the younger women in my family

  the enthusiasm and perseverance to take charge of my home and make it a place of comfort, welcome and warmth.