Our marriage as a cornerstone
Shortly after Nathan and I married in 2010 we started our lives as many young couples do- nearly broke and working apart from each other for most of the day as we jumped through the hoops at entry-level jobs. Nathan was working odd jobs with a restoration contractor and I was serving a year in AmeriCorps. We laugh now to look back. We lived on less than $15,000 that year (and we didn't know many tricks for frugal living yet). Thank goodness our parents were willing to help us out during those months when we were a little short on rent!![]() |
Our marriage is the foundation that we build our dreams and our goals on. |
Perhaps Nathan, and I are just old fashioned, or perhaps we just don't mind doing things our own way, but we view our marriage much more as a cornerstone than a capstone. It is the foundation that we build our dreams and our goals on. I am very grateful for that first year. In it we not only began to build the foundation for our marriage, but for what we wanted our life together to look like.
Tired of the status quo!
Before long we knew that we weren't satisfied with the status quo! We knew that we were happiest when we were together or with our families. We knew that we enjoyed the simple things in life, and that we were content living with very little money. We knew that when we had children we both wanted to spend as much time with them as possible. (Because as everyone always tells you…they grow up so fast!) We knew that spending the majority of our lives working apart from each other and half-way across the country from our families wasn't what we wanted. We knew that we didn't want to spend 40+ years working in separate careers, so that we could retire one day after our children had grown up and our parents had passed away. We knew that we only had this one life, and we wanted to live it in a way that was meaningful!That is not to say that you can't have a fulfilling career and family life, but for us we wanted a life that integrated all of our values: nurturing family, community, and the natural world.
During that first year we began to think about alternative ways to live our lives. I really started to realize that other paths were possible after I read the book Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture.
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Picking up some useful skills. Making my first batch of jelly!) |
The plan materializes
I think that our plans began to crystallize after we read two books: The New Sunset Western Garden Book![]() |
A beautiful landscape from our most recent visit to one of our possible new home communities. Can anyone guess where this was taken? |
Making the dream a reality
As soon as this dream became the goal, I sat down to crunch the numbers and realized that for this dream to become a reality anytime soon, we would need to cut down on our living expenses and start saving quite a bit more. We started to take steps to start saving in earnest. The biggest change included leaving our rented home and moving into an apartment complex…but the best part was that this apartment was part of the Kailash Ecovillage. Not only are we now saving quite a bit of money on rent and utilities, but we are living in a wonderful community where we can continue to garden and learn additional skills.![]() |
Our new home: Kailash Ecovillage! |
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