We're Moving to Mexico!

Anjali inside the tape that marked the outline of the palapa, which is now built.

Coupla' lunatics on their way back from doin' some work.

Outdoor kitchen bliss.

In the dirt.

Sunset on the nearby La Ribera beach.

Headlamp matched by moonlight.

We're moving to Mexico!

This is the sentence that keeps dancing through my head lately. Not just a dream, though I dream about it plenty; not just a fantasy, though it is fantastic to me; not even a goal, but soon: a goal reached. And when I wake up in the middle of the night to pee or by some noise outside our urban bedroom window, if I don't go right back to sleep you can be sure that I'm thinking about details of that big piece of dusty dirt in southern Baja.

We're moving there in December. And delightfully ~astonishingly~ there is a small band of fellow lunatics who will be joining us for a while to howl at the moon Baja-style. When we get there we'll be sleeping in our tent under the big palapa, while we build an earthbag structure to shield us from the elements at night. We'll be taking solar-heated showers and composting our poop. Adopt a flock of chickens almost immediately for eggs and scorpion duty(!), and soon after, some dairy goats!

From there the list of daydreams goes on and on. Happily, I have returned to journal-writing this year. It has been a fertile time to write. Very often I spend pages and pages visualizing the many (eventual) facets of living there at Lumbini Gardens. :-) Right now it is a flat piece of dust with a hill of cacti. But in my mind it is a thriving permaculture jungle oasis that attracts people from around the world to study and teach and build and plant and harvest, to make and contribute art, lively conversation, music and dance, around a table filled with produce we harvested after a rewarding day of cultivation and tending (Tiffanie romantic run-on at its best, right there!). I see my family thriving from being in a much more relaxed culture, and from simple, Earth-based day-to-day living. Hands in the dirt, skin regularly bathed in bright sunshine, sunsets reflected off the ocean, evenings by crackling firelight and starshine.

And in between are all the juicy, dirty, nitty-gritty details. ;-) Learning to live in a foreign culture. Really use a different language for everyday getting by. Learning permaculture ~ not just the theory in books, but played out on real land with its own particular medley of circumstances. Deciding from deep experience on favorite and least favorite parts of outdoor-based living. Animal husbandry. Living in the desert, and away from American West Coast city amenities. Haha. These are the ones that my mind gets cranking on if I don't fall back asleep at night.

It is at the far-reaches of what I personally consider possible. It is far from the existence I witness around me in Standard America. It is what I've always wanted. Beginning in my childhood when Laura Ingalls Wilder's books and visits to my grandparents' working farm were forever-imprinted on the landscape of my imagination, to college literature classes falling in love with the world and worldview of Wendell Berry, to recent times when all I see is pointing me back to the ways of our ancestors, this is what makes sense to me. This is what I see myself doing.