My name is Julia. I live in the country with my husband, my two sons. Throughout my life I have dreamed of a life of self-sufficiency. Fortunately, I met a man with exactly the same dream as mine and together we now build our lives as self-sufficient. Here you can follow me and our journey to a life of self-sufficiency, knowing everything about how we managed to achieve our dream life without any savings or start-up capital. You can also find guidance and inspiration that I am sure will help you succeed in fulfilling your dreams. You will find out tips and ideas on an ecological and healthy lifestyle, how to grow your own vegetables and herbs, knowledge about the animals we have, our possible animal additions and beekeeping. I will also share super good recipes, both food and baking and much more. You are warmly welcome to follow this page, comment, share your tips and ideas and ask any questions you wish. For collaborations contact me via email: lovethelifeyoulivejulia@gmail.com Thank you for looking in :)!
To build a life as self-sufficient and then I really mean to be self-sufficient in everything does not really require so much knowledge many people believe. Of course, you learn a lot from reading how to do and it is incredibly cool when you see it on books, but you have to make it work in practice as well. For me living in Sweden, where winter is long and cold, spring unstable, summers vary in heat and rain and autumn windy and gray it takes to learn how to read nature and how it works. This is something our ancestors did to survive in the past.
Here, too, my journey with different Native American tribes has helped me tremendously. Their knowledge of how nature works and the immense ability to read nature is fascinating. I gained a lot of knowledge about living a self-sufficient life and how to take advantage of what nature has to offer it while not overcompensating nature on anything and living a life according to the laws of nature. This is one of the 7 Lakota, Sioux laws and it’s called humility. Yet another value that everyone in the world can take advantage of, learn and live up to in the best way to take care of our planet called Earth for thanks to our nature and its functions we humans have the opportunity to live.
Well back to life as self-sufficient. The first thing I did to succeed in a life in which I depended on nature’s assets was to venture out into Sweden’s nature and forest to find out what it is that grows naturally in the forests. What animals live here and what they eat, what herbs, vegetables and fruits belong in the forests here. Which of the assets in these forests I already knew and which ones I need to learn. Once I had collected everything I needed, I began to find out how the ancestors lived here and how they cured themselves. Here, the indigenous population still lives, they are Sami extends over large parts of the Nordic region, Sweden, Finland and Norway and are called the Native Indians of the north. Much of their way of life is very similar to the indigenous of America. I have also traveled around Lapland and what a trip! During my life in Sweden I have met some Sami living as before but also those who moved to civilization. Over time, I began to test myself, make my own infusion of the herbs I could naturally pick in the wild but also of the herbs I learned from Native Americans myself, I started making my own spices, picked the well-known berries that grow naturally to make jam, juice but also they dry and use it to flavor the food. All berries contain substances and vitamins that are important for health. I tried to buy the meat and vegetables from the farmers around to avoid the meat sold in the big grocery stores, then I was sure that the animal I ate had a free and healthy life and did not contain any artificial substances whatsoever. While living in an apartment, I tried to live as healthy a life as possible and at the same time learn everything I could to start a life out in nature and be prepared to live a life of self-sufficiency in today’s society.
Now we live in the forest and have for 3 years built up my knowledge from scratch together with my husband and my sons. We only eat our own cultivated, bake our own bread, pick our own fruits, berries and herbs but the meat is still not our own. We get it from my mother-in-law and her husband who has their own sheep and lambs. In sempterber, we took the next one in our lives that provided for ourselves, our 6 chickens and a rooster moved to us and sometime between Christmas and New Year we become self-sufficient with our own eggs. This spring, it is intended that we get our goats for milk and cheese production at the same time we will increase the number of chickens with the help of our chickens that we have now.
To succeed in a self-sufficient life without a startup capital requires a lot of work, but above all it is important to believe that it is possible, to have the ambition and the vision of what you want. It also requires an understanding of everything that grows, how to cook it, have patience, and most importantly, the belief in your own ability to make it.
To succeed in living a simple, self-sufficient life, you need nothing more than to honor and respect our nature, see her exactly as she is, beautiful and harmonious and believe in the character of strength and all of these require great humility.
I was 4 years old the first time I saw a Native American and still today I remember that meeting as if it were yesterday. It was a hot summer evening, my family and I were sitting in a restaurant where we were having dinner. The air was warm and very comfortable. There were a lot of people, families with children and it was quite loud. almost all the tables were occupied, but at the bar there was only one man. I remember being fascinated by his long hair as he sat with his back to us. I had no idea that he was a Native American, he was dressed just like everyone else and for a four year old who had seen Native Americans on books and television wearing headdresses, the clothes he wore didn’t match the image I had. We sat for a long time and ate and the evening became darker. From one second to another, the man sitting at the bar was gone, I didn’t think about it anymore and kept eating. Suddenly, the entire restaurant shut down and a big fire appeared on the beach and a few minutes later the magical melody followed by flutes. The music that was played I recognized, so I ran out and there he was …. the man sitting at the bar, with his traditional clothes and the big headdress full of feathers. What happened inside me was something so strong that only now when I write about it do I get it back and my eyes are filled with tears. Can you understand that I was only 4 years old but remember it so well? With tears running down my cheeks and a sense of peace, freedom and admiration, I sat down by the fire for the rest of the evening to enjoy what I both heard and saw. The magic aura that shone around him is something I still can’t explain today, but what I can attest to was that I was suddenly in another world. After a long while, it was time for me to head home, and this is where I acquired my first knowledge from a Native American. My parents came out to give me some money that I would put in some kind of bowl he had in front of him, but when I stepped forward to put the money in the bowl he took my hand and closed it while looking at me and said .. .. ”Never forget that the most important thing in life is not what you get, it’s what you give.” This knowledge came to help me through my life and today I understand what the wise Indian meant with the wise words. He gave me something that cannot be bought with money, he taught me the most important key to live a life of peace and that is to meet everthing that surrounds me whether it is a human or a leaf with kindness, compassion, humility and respect.
First of all, I would like to thank everyone for your time reading my blog. I hope you can enjoy the readings of my journey, my studies, my knowledge and my life as self-sufficient in my forest and hopefully you will get inspired as well. The first post is an introduction where I will tell you the story behind my attraction to The Native Americans .. so let’s get started:)!
Through all my upbringing, my mother always told me…”Julia, you are my Pocahontas.” When I was 20, I asked my mom why she always told me that, she smiled and looked at me, then she said I just knew you were different, a pure soul with a true warrior strength within you, it was the first thing I said when I saw you for the first time after the long hours of giving birth to you. When I think back to my childhood she was right, I was never like any other child, especially not like the girls in the neighboring yard. I never played with dolls, or used dresses, I was always out in the wild playing cowboys and Indians for myself and I was always Indian and once I played with the other children, I ended up pulled me away, for the injustices that arose. When she asked why I was playing alone, I always said that I would rather be by myself than do something unfair. My mother once told me about the first time I saw an Indian, it was on the cover off a fairy tale for children. She told me that the attraction to the book was so strange, I was barely two years old, but the fairy tale came to be my best asset as a child. I remember my parents always met by the words, your daughter is weird. I didn’t care that much, but of course that word put a trace on me. I always felt misunderstood in many ways, my personality did not fit into the society I was in. Well, time passed and I grew up and so did my passion for Native American Indians. The feeling of not belonging to the humanity of my time grew the older I became.
I started to study The Native American Indians history, culture, philosophy, way of Life and way of thinking. The more I studied and understood, the more I recognized myself and my way of being, somehow it explained my personality. That personality no one understood but thought it was wierd. Everthing in their way of life conformed who I am and what I believe in. All I wanted was to live simply, out in nature, away from society that wanted to shape me into something I was not. So by the age of 18 my journey with Native American began and today I’m ready to share with you all that knowledge I acquired in my journey and studies. It didn’t just gave me knowledge about them, what the huge knowledge it gave me was the knowledge about myself, about a way of life that everyone deserves. It gave me what I really was missing and that was to always believe in myself, to be proud of who I am and what i believe in. To live in peace, to share kindness to all life on Earth and most important of all…to feel that I’m the same significant as everything on our Mother Earth and that I’m here for a reason.
Let this journey begin …. exactly as the headline says … welcome to my forest! I’ll tell you how it all started. Almost 3 years ago, I was finally ready to leave civilization behind me, I took our pick and pack and our lives came to change in the right direction. The dream of pulling myself out of civilization finally came true, everything I had been struggling for was the result I had long been waiting for. I was a child when I one day was sitting on a mountain watching the civilization I lived in. I remember how strong the feeling was within me, I wanted to go away. At that time, I couldn’t understand why I never felt like at home in the environment I was born in, all I knew was that I felt trapped like an animal in a cage and that day I understood why I always chose to go up to the mountains. There I felt free, calm, satisfied, harmonious …. there I felt at home. Even though I was too small to understand what I do today, my attraction to nature and the meaning of it, I made the promise to myself … ”When I grow up I will live in a small house in nature”. Of course it wasn’t so easy, it took me 25 years to come here but I succeeded, I fulfilled my promise. Today I live my life in peace of mind, I am free and happy. To settle my life out in nature has taken me almost 3 years but now everything has fallen into place and I am more than ready to welcome you into my life out in my forest.
