Wednesday, November 20, 2013

SOUL & ADVENTURE: Eva Goes Organic 2013- Experiences after a year of volunteering on organic farms and much much more


You might remember my friend Evi from the Eva Goes Organic blog. She was the one who left her HR-job at a multinational company, and went on an "volunteering-tour" approx. one year ago to learn more about the topic she became interested in: organic agriculture.


I did not edit the photos or over-design the format of the text, because I think the content is speaking for itself.


1, What can you win, when you start over and leave everything behind?


When I was „leaving everything behind” 1,5 years ago, it didn’t really feel like leaving everything behind. Although now I know, it was a completely new start, a big turning point in my life. And still people who are really relating to my story and -so to say are admiring the decision I took- are telling me how brave I was and I guess, they would really like to get their courage together and change something in their lives, too. But I have the same feeling about this as I had with taking the decision of a homebirth. If it were only courage that it takes than it would be the most stupid thing to do. It is true that I was relying on my instincts in both cases, but I also did a lot of research and thinking before I made the jump.

What I have won from all of the new start and the journey is a different perspective, the feeling or maybe the illusion of my own power, that you can solve everything, and the will to keep chasing my crazy dream. Also I am still in contact with all the people that I have met on the way and I think I can call them really good friends, I have gained a lot of inspiration from their stories and lives.

If I would start again, and who knows, maybe I will sometimes , I would go even deeper, I would also travel South America, or Asia, Transylvania, sleep on the street, hitchhike more, go dumpster diving, meet really poor people, or people who are living very very different lives than mine, join a community maybe and ask even more questions.


So what you can win, I think, is to open up your heart to the world, to give yourself the chance to be more vulnerable, and see and experience some real things.


Perec keeps on rocking on
2, Now that you are the proud Mum, if Boldi, your son, would do the same one day, would you support him?
My first gut answer would be yes, of course! But it is still hard for me to let him out of my sight even for a moment, or go out of the room, where I don’t hear his breathing so I have no idea. But I will try my best.



Boldi

3, Why do we need organic agricultural methods?
Uh, the list is as long as life is… but let’s see. When I think of organic, somehow always the Spielberg movie Avatar comes to my mind. Without going into all the Greenpeace stuff of saving the rain forests and responsibility for the Earth and how really sick industrial meat production is for example, I would say, for feeling connected. These big macro ideas and the green blah blah are really tiring for people to hear, though they are true and very important, but everything is full of global warming, and still it doesn’t matter to us, even if Al Gore or Gandhi or the Pope are talking about it. But we all feel that we are disconnected. From each other, from what we eat, from where our poop goes, from everything. And as far as I see, organic agriculture or better permaculture gives a lot of answers to these questions, if we get the courage to aks them. The solution is to slow down, take the time to just look and see. As they say in Avatar: I see you. It has a really deep meaning.

4, Is it a lifestyle or will there be a time when it will get mainstream and we get most of our food from organic places again?
This I really cannot tell. I think we need a big slap in the face, as now life on Earth looks, to get this mainstream. Now all this still seems kind of a hippi thing to do, or a crazy lifestyle, but more and more people move from cities, gets off the grid, starts something alternative. But it is still alternative, not in a bit mainstream.

5, How were the people different who you met during your volunteering from those who surrounded you before?
Well… nonehow. If I think about my ex-colleagues, bosses, university classmates, all made of flesh and blood and hopes and dreams. I just didn’t take the courage or the time to ask them about it, and get to know them as I maybe did a bit better with my people on the way. But a lot of those people also had big changes in their lives after our ways have separated, at least the ones I know about and have some follow up on. Maybe the difference that I have felt, that my volunteering was about getting closer to nature, out of an office, so people living like this are worrying a lot less about things, living more in the present and taking all the good and bad as it is. Maybe. Not all of them, though. And not all the time. 

6, You became a Mum recently, congrats to it! Was it changing something in the way you think about life, general values and the future?
It is a strange feeling, sometimes I still don’t believe that I’m a mother. How can you be a parent? You have parents, it is so natural, you have important people in your life, people you feel responsible for, but still not similar to anything, it is a very unique bond. Me personally, I feel a lot more safe, secure, although being a parent rationally is scary as hell, but I feel very grounded from it. So my values are more or less the same, but now I catch myself thinking in more long term, that I see a personal connection, a continuity of my own DNA in the world. 

7, Why does it matter what we eat and how we live?
This is a very philosophical question. It doesn’t, really. We could live on pills, or just some sauce which contains everything we need biologically and if you see yourself as a little piece of dust in the universe, it doesn’t really matter how you live. But it is really human nature to try to believe it still does. This is the only reason, I think. 

8, What is the conclusion of your volunteering? Future plans related to organic agriculture?
The reason I went off volunteering was to have an adventure and to have a trial period. To see if this lifestyle and me can fit together and I discovered we can, totally. And in the meanwhile I have got my own family, as you said, so now my plans for the future are mixed to our plans. We have the land, where we will start our own farm in the next spring, I am very excited about it. Before my baby’s birth we still had some time to start to discover the area, to have a first meet with our future home. I have asked the permaculture „guru”, Béla Baji, to come and help us for one day to see what are our possibilities and which are the first steps that we could take to fit into the environment, and start a life there. So with every step we get closer to Vértesboglár. All other things will figure themselves out on the way.



Evi in 2013 with her family



You find the previous interviews here:

http://packyourluggage.blogspot.fi/2012/05/eva-goes-organic-interview-1-part1.html

http://packyourluggage.blogspot.fi/2012/05/eva-goes-organic-interview-1-part-2.html


http://packyourluggage.blogspot.fi/2012/08/eva-goes-organic-interview-nr2.html


And this is Evi`s blog about organic agriculture: http://evagoesorganic-en.blogspot.fi/

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