Welcome, Anam Cara
“A friend … awakens your life in order to free the wild possibilities within you.” John O’Donohue
Anam Cara is Gaelic for Soul (anam) Friend (cara). I stumbled across the phrase one evening while mindlessly scrolling on my phone. It immediately resonated with me, describing how I feel about a group of women I have worked, played, laughed and cried with over the years.
I want to expand that feeling more consciously into other areas and relationships in my life and that’s the reason I want to name our new adventure, Anam Cara.
While on our honeymoon, many moons agos, my new-husband (but partner of nine years by then) announced that he wanted to live in the country. I nearly spat my rum cocktail across the table. Where had this idea come from?! We had escaped our small town together, heading straight for the centre of Edinburgh and been living happily there, ever after I had thought. I promptly put the idea to the back of my head and we got on with our lives, moving around a bit over the years but always staying within the Edinburgh city boundary.
What did change somewhere down the line was the decision to become a multi-generational household. This idea evolved through regular brunches and Sunday dinners at my parents’ flat stretching back to my pre-kids, university days. By pooling our resources, we could buy a lovely house with a big garden, in a nice area with good schools that we couldn’t separately afford. With the bonus of in-house babysitting (when kids came along) — result.
Ten years and two children later, something that began as a bit of a joke (as did the nickname “Mafia House’ — ‘it’s all about the family’) developed into a serious idea and we bought a big house for the six of us to live in.
It has had its ups and downs but overall our experiment has been a raving success, coming into its own especially during COVID. But after saying I would never move again, we have all come to the conclusion that we want a change in our lives. To take what we have learned living together and try to live even more closely aligned to our values and beliefs. We acknowledge that we can’t keep living the way we have been living, and by “we” I mean individually, as a family and as a society.
Recent years have demonstrated crystal clear to me that those who work the hardest and contribute the most are often the worst supported. Consumerism is eating us up, creating need and greed inside of us and causing such deep harm to ourselves and our planet that I genuinely worry about our future and the impact it is having on my kids. Don’t get me wrong, my husband and I have a lot of unlearning to do too but we’ve at least experienced life with boredom and excitement from only having two hours of kids tv a day.
Just like those boozy brunches and Sunday lunches that paved the way to our current multi-generational home, the family conversation about how we want to live our lives has carried on evolving. Other elements such as me undertaking a diploma in Permaculture and my parents buying a piece of woodland has seeded and kneaded further ideas into the mix: our over-extended and toxic food systems, a school system that isn’t working for our kids, stressful workplace cultures, combining with a realisation we’ve been shying away from for years. That humankind is hurtling towards the brink of extinction of, if not us as a species and taking many others with us, then our current unsustainable way of life. No matter what the tech industry tells us, we can’t AI our way out of this.
Instead of pouring our hearts, time and energy into trying to reduce our ecological footprint and create more meaningful work where we are, we realised — quite shockingly — that we needed to think and act bigger. To design and develop a vision that would enable us to integrate many different aspects of ourselves, our beliefs and our aspirations.
So…. we decided that we are going to sell up, pay off our debts and buy a field we can live on and cultivate into some kind of community.
In three to five years.
Or so we thought. This vision of our future came from years of personal and collective soul-searching but crystalised really quickly — over a two week period over Christmas 2020 in fact. We were about to head into a second national lockdown. The kids had been back at school for a quick sniff and were learning at home again. My mum had retired the first week of Lockdown 1.0 (terrible/awesome timing), my dad had been made redundant not long afterwards and my partner and I were working at home.
Then two things happened. One was already in-train. After returning to school after the first lockdown, my daughter came to us asking to be home educated. Cue head explosions. Firstly, because she had always loved school and secondly because if anyone was going to ask, we thought it would have been our younger son. So after long conversations (we talk through things a lot in this family) and some exploration, we took her out of school on the last day of term in December 2020. Good timing, right?!
Over the years, I had softened to the idea of moving out of town. Even more astoundingly, my mum had floated the idea of Mafia House mark 2 being in the country or a small town. But realistically we thought the kids would never go for it. They wouldn’t leave their friends. Mischa leaving school however and realising she could make new friends and keep up with friends online, opened up everything.
So our three to five years became more like two to three years.
Nope. Next, my partner’s health took a nosedive after months of trying to cope with work-related stress and had to take a leave of absence to focus on recovering. The focus of his recovery became this idea of buying land we had put on a high shelf where we could still see it when we needed to sooth our battered souls, but where we wouldn’t have to actually do anything about it… yet.
Suddenly, the crack that had been wedged into our imaginations by Mischa leaving school got blown wide open, developing into plans, coaching, frameworks, movement. Quicker than anticipated but needed more than ever. The terrifying knowledge that this has to happen; that in some ways our lives, certainly our sanity, depend on it.
So we are now on a 9 to 12 month schedule. And we invite you to join us on the way as we figure out what we are doing and why.
Welcome, Anam Cara.
