Sara Saw It
Active Member
Living off the gridand loving it
by rob in the pagé family
Life is about relationships. This was a lesson that I had to learn the hard way. For 30 years I struggled with depression and when I went through the darkest days of my life I found myself mired in drugs, suicide attempts, a broken marriage and no friends. I got to the point where I decided that it was time to change or die. At that point I had the opportunity to join a unique therapy group out of the U of A Hospital where I went through intensive group therapy, full time for 18 weeks, and it changed my life.
I carry with me now many key lessons I learned through that experience and one of them is knowing that my relationship with myself is critically important. After all, how can you love your neighbor as yourself, if you do not first love yourself? Until I learned to love myself I was not able to love anybody else and that was why my relationships with my wife, children, family and friends failed miserably. Since those days back in 2001 my life has flipped completely around. I was able to work on my relationship with my wife Carey and reconcile a three year separation. That took a lot of hard work, painful memories and many tears. However, I learned so much about myself through the process that I would do again if I had to.
Since then, my strong relationship with my family has provided me with the foundation to extend this work into other areas of my life. Over the past five years we decided that rather than complaining about all the problems of the world, we would actually do something about it. After all, I cannot change anybody but myself, so no sense trying.
In 2007 we sold everything. I quit a 20 year career in Information Technology and we moved our family out into the country near Athabasca, Alberta and started to build a whole new lifestyle. We built an off grid, passive solar heated, earth rammed home called an earthship which allows us to generate our own power (solar and wind), collect our own water, treat our own waste and heat our home with the sun and wood we harvest from our land.
To read the rest of robs article from Mosaic Magazine...
http://www.mosaicmagazine.ca/documents/living_off_the_grid_winter2011.pdf
by rob in the pagé family
Life is about relationships. This was a lesson that I had to learn the hard way. For 30 years I struggled with depression and when I went through the darkest days of my life I found myself mired in drugs, suicide attempts, a broken marriage and no friends. I got to the point where I decided that it was time to change or die. At that point I had the opportunity to join a unique therapy group out of the U of A Hospital where I went through intensive group therapy, full time for 18 weeks, and it changed my life.
I carry with me now many key lessons I learned through that experience and one of them is knowing that my relationship with myself is critically important. After all, how can you love your neighbor as yourself, if you do not first love yourself? Until I learned to love myself I was not able to love anybody else and that was why my relationships with my wife, children, family and friends failed miserably. Since those days back in 2001 my life has flipped completely around. I was able to work on my relationship with my wife Carey and reconcile a three year separation. That took a lot of hard work, painful memories and many tears. However, I learned so much about myself through the process that I would do again if I had to.
Since then, my strong relationship with my family has provided me with the foundation to extend this work into other areas of my life. Over the past five years we decided that rather than complaining about all the problems of the world, we would actually do something about it. After all, I cannot change anybody but myself, so no sense trying.
In 2007 we sold everything. I quit a 20 year career in Information Technology and we moved our family out into the country near Athabasca, Alberta and started to build a whole new lifestyle. We built an off grid, passive solar heated, earth rammed home called an earthship which allows us to generate our own power (solar and wind), collect our own water, treat our own waste and heat our home with the sun and wood we harvest from our land.
To read the rest of robs article from Mosaic Magazine...
http://www.mosaicmagazine.ca/documents/living_off_the_grid_winter2011.pdf
