A group of 50 and 60-something women came to stay with us this summer. Not children by any means but they were delightfully open minded and they hadn’t lost the desire to learn.
This is how one of them summed it up…
“From the moment we arrived we were pretty smug. We kept telling ourselves that we ‘got it’ and that we felt quite at home,” she said.
“We kept telling ourselves how clever we were to have mastered the tea making, the heating of the water, the cooking on the rocket stove, the sourcing of the wood and even the pizza making.
Then on the morning of the third day we did all those things without thinking about it – without telling ourselves anything at all. We sat down around the rocket mass heater, all freshly showered, to eat eggs and bacon from the rocket stove with our piping hot cups of tea boiled in the storm kettles, and found that this strange life had actually become normal.
In a flash, we realised that we really did indeed “get it” now. And we also realised we most certainly hadn’t “got it” before.
It was like a bolt of lightning and we spent the rest of the day, felling bigger, standing taller, with our heads held slightly higher. It was like someone had lifted us up – even at our time of life. We were walking on air!”