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I Quit my Life and Moved to an Intentional Community
We couldn’t afford to buy into modern life, so we opted out — and we love it.
‘Family’ can’t truly thrive unless we start viewing the rest of the world as family too
I wouldn’t call myself a hippie, but here I am: living in community, among people who care about our planet, about living green, sustainable lives whilst interrogating what it means to be human, and what it means to live in relationship with one another.
It’s not so much idealistic, as it is realistic about the deep need we humans have to be social, and our very real potential to extend a care for ourselves and our immediate families beyond the limited scope of the nuclear family. The intentional community I live in is grounded in a belief that ‘family’ can’t truly thrive unless we start viewing the rest of the world as family too, and committing ourselves to looking after all of it.
We live close to forests, beside mountains, a beach, rivers and creeks — even a waterfall. Every day I set out into this world with my three year old daughter, saying hello to some of the 35 people who make up the community which is now my home.
How did we get here when just six months ago we were living in a densely populated city: just me, my husband and our daughter in our own little world?
It started with a sense of impossibility: about to return to my home country, with some of the most expensive real estate in the world and sky-high rents, I had a sense of impending doom about trying to reestablish our lives in a way which would give me and my husband time to be with our daughter. We certainly couldn’t afford a house, and even doubted our ability to rent without going into enormous debt.
It was in such a state of panic that I googled ‘intentional community’. Wikipedia defines it as “a planned residential community designed from the start to have a high degree of social cohesion and teamwork.” I’d come across the idea before, and it had sat at the back of my mind like a curio for a long time — something intriguing that ‘other’ people do. Unlike communes, intentional communities are usually made up of separate dwellings for…
