Ok, so I’ve been lurking in here for a few weeks and now I want to formally introduce myself. I am just Jeremy. I am a 47 year old father of 4.

13 years ago, my wife Lori and I left “civilized society” of Chicago behind, bought an old coach bus, and moved to north Alabama to live on family land. We were inspired by the Ringing Cedar Series of books by Vladimir Megre among others. That and we were sure the world was going to collapse😉

We had 2 daughters (at the time), a 5 year old and a 2.5 year old. We had a general plan of what we wanted but knew nobody outside of a few distant relatives here. We parked the old bus in the woods and lived. We showered outside for the entire first year. We built a “bathroom shed” with a composting toilet. Our utilities came from my great uncles nearby cabin. In the meantime, we went to work on establishing our homestead.

It would take 2.5 years to get our Homestead carved out of the dense woods. It took only 9 months and the threat of a new baby in an already crowded bus to get a cabin on the homestead. So we traded our bud for a little off grid cabin. We had our son at home in that cabin, delivered by yours truly. It was amazing and beautiful (and a little scary).

In the meantime we kept accumulating really great people and new skills. We started growing a garden and raising chickens. We also discovered how much we wanted a cob “dream house”. We homeschooled as well.

However, we also needed money, so I chased it with my old city trade as a chef. It never went the way I wanted it, but it always ended the way Universe(higher Self?) wanted for me. My wife also went back to her old city trade as an electrician. We kept trying to do what we had (go to work at a job we didn’t really want to be at) It began to wear on us, straddling two worlds, so my wife suggested we have another child😉 intentionally for once.

That was 4.5 years ago. We had the child, our second boy, also at home, also delivered by me, also beautiful, amazing, and a little scary. That sort of changed everything. It made us really realize that we need to make our home our work. (Yeah we’re slow learners).

There has been so much personal growth and change along this journey and yet we still have so much to glean. It seems like the “money problem” may finally be getting solved. One thing that is certain though, there is a growing number of folks like us that we keep accumulating. It’s so clear that we have a lot of the pieces already around us to put together the puzzle. So as not to keep dragging this out (even though there is so much missing), I guess I’ll wrap this up by saying how grateful I am to have stumbled across Jean and this group. I can tell y’all are “our sort” of folks and I can’t wait to interact with you moving forward. Hopefully in real life😎