January 2025: What I’m building for my future
Me: I wonder if a nearly 50-year-old incest survivor can manifest miracles?
Lisa A. Romano (life coach and creator of the 12-Week Breakthrough Codependency Program): Yes, because your sacred self knows all and is within you. You must learn to turn to that part of you.
Selling my organic food and drinks at local car boot sales in 2022 and 2023 enabled me to remain self-employed - though not gainfully right now, but I did my first official busk in years on the fiddle in Claybury Woods on Christmas Eve. It was blissful, and I’m now able to receive card payments through my busk.co QR code sign (you can see this session on my YouTube channel, Gem in the Mud). I’m also accepting in-person music students again.
Through the Diggers & Dreamers (podcast), I found Low Impact Living Communities in Britain that might be worth exploring. Preferably, however, I’d have the money to do the Permies Bootcamp at Wheaton Labs in Missoula, Montana which would help me decide if communal living is for me. If I did this right now the move would have to be permanent, however, and would mean sacrificing my family - which I don’t want to do.
liveoffgrid.co.uk is a really comprehensive website about how to live off the grid on your own land in a tiny home, which I’m hoping could be possible in Aberdeen, Shetland or Orkney in Scotland (Shetland is very near to Norway, which would make European adventures more possible). I’ve made contact with Business Gateway in Aberdeen and Shetland and have acquired information on how to set up a new business (Incest Survivor’s Roar: working 1:1 as an all-round artist with survivors of incest to explore the self, society’s attitudes towards this still worryingly taboo subject, and individual artistic expression). To this end I’m deeply loving studying to become a Sylvotherapy Practitioner (Forest Therapist) and am thinking of further building on my counselling qualifications by doing an Expressive Arts Therapy course.
The Green Building MSc taught at the Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales really appeals to me and I’m looking into funding options. Or / and I could simply take the most direct and practical route to building my own cob house by doing one of Kate Edwards’ four-day cob courses (she trained with Ianto Evans; my cob building hero).
I’m contemplating writing my fourth book about my self-directed healing journey from incest and domestic violence-related OCD / PTSD.
Things are coming together like a hand-molded, warm lump of rough cob and it’s about not allowing anything to make me drop it.