My name is Maryjane.

I yearn to create a world where everyone has enough,

where we live with in loving respect for Earth and each other.

Do you too?

 

I know how the pain of the awful things we do to each other and beautiful Earth can be so overwhelming to the point of paralysis.

But this pain is potentially an incredible power.

It is the wild power of Nature surging through us and I have found a way to transmute and focus the force of these intense emotions into a power for creative good that I would LOVE to share with you!

A power that will uplift you and protect you.

A power that provides the clarity and stability.

Here is my story.

When I was small, I spent my whole time at school, my dad spent his whole time at work.

You know how it is . Life went by.

As I grew up, I knew there had got to be another way.

It made absolutely no sense to me. I wished I lived in a cave in extreme Nature, or was an ant because they always seem to know what to do!

Here we are, incredible, creative beings on a miraculous planet, spending our lives been told what, when and how to learn, followed by years of employment being told what to do, just for the priviledge of having somewhere to live and enough to eat.

Surely, we are designed to be here, exactly right for the planet that provides all our needs, not meant to struggle and strive just to survive.

That is not why we are here!

I refused to swop my valuable time, my life, for a job that was meaningless to me, with an idea that at some point in the future, I would have earned enough to do what I wanted.

Life is NOW.

So, when I was 18, I built a shelter in the woods.  I found ways to live so that I was the boss of my time. I lived in a caravan, as a caretaker, in a boat, in a barn. I learnt how to grow food, to eat wild food and made patchwork leather clothes to sell at markets.

I discovered Permaculture! which was a tremendous relief to my underlying feelings that we were somehow all living in a way that made no sense at all!

Permaculture looks to Nature a teacher and sees every ‘problem’ as a doorway to a solution.

I studied Shiatsu and traveled to rural Senegal and India. I decided that if I ever had children, I would bring them up in a rural community. It looked so wholesome to my young eyes.

At 28, I longed to travel within and lived in Canada at Yashodhara Ashram for a year, studying yoga intensly.

Then I married my best friend, had children and all the rules seemed to change.

I found myself living in a rented house for the first time, paying a lot of rent and large bills, which meant my husband had to work full time.

School was looming in the near future. What was the point of having children if we couldn’t spend our time together? I thought.

I suddenly saw how the pattern of my childhood was about to be repeated for my young family and I could not bear it!

At knee height in the local shop, all the newspapers competed for customers with the most heart-stopping headlines they could think up. Just the right height for my four year old eagerly learning to read.

My Heart knew I had to find another way.

I could not bear the feeling of the disasters of society wrapping themselves around my innocent children.

So, I built a yurt and visualised my dream outcome for my young family.

We left England with minimal possessions, a caravan, a yurt, and two children. One and four years old.

I wanted simple Nature.

Clean air, clean water, the freedom for my children to be themselves and follow their natural rhythms, a place to plant trees and watch them grow.

We followed our intuition and this and much more the universe brought us.

For the last 15 years we’ve lived in a yurt in a field in France, doing exactly that.

Outside is a peach tree our daughter grew from a stone and 3 apple trees our son grew from pip.

 

In many way , life in a yurt is fanstic, romantic and just the best. (For more on ‘Life in a Yurt’ click here)

In other ways it isn’t. 

We lived in the yurt I originally built, 4 meters across, for 3 years.

Then the children got bigger and we built the current one (8 meters across).

Then it seemed that our 13 year old son needed his own space so we thought about building another!

Aaaaaghh!

More canvass to sew, to replace, to care for…Aaaaagh! I longed for solid walls.

 

Then the refugee crisis happened.

Syrians flooded into Europe. 

Families torn apart, homes destroyed, no where to live, no one who wanted them, no food or clothes.

The intense pain of shock and grief floods into me leaving me in a collapsed heap of distraught helplessness.

My canvass home of discontent is transformed into a palace of gratitude for being so well blessed.

 

This juxtaposition for overwhelming grief and knee bending gratitude is an incredibly potent place.

It is like the sun and the rain entering a seed and inspiring it to grow.

You can use these energies within you to feed the seed of your creative work for the world.