This is the story of one family who shares their observations about family relationships before and after moving to their kin’s domain.
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“When we moved, everything immediately changed, and because of that, it was very noticeable and easy to compare with the previous stage of our relationship when we still lived in the city. These are very valuable observations.”
My husband and I moved from the city to the kin’s settlement Lesnaya Polyana. Of course, we actively prepared for the move and studied life on the land: we read forums, went to festivals, visited kin’s settlements, and, of course, earned money.
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Everything revolved around the same questions: “How to make a living?”, “What kind of house to build?”, “Where to educate the children?”, “How to organize our daily life?” Right down to installing a washing machine in a house without running water and getting high-speed internet at our kin’s domain. But no one talked about how important family relationships are for creating your own kin’s domain.
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We made a very clear distinction between life in the city and life in a kin’s settlement. We thought that by moving to the land, we would greet the dawn every day, walk on the grass, listen to the birds singing, and naively believed that by moving to the land, we would automatically find ourselves in paradise. It turned out that building our own paradise is exactly what we have to do. And this is serious work, first and foremost on ourselves.
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During our first year living on the kin’s domain, we discovered that we had not been a family in the true sense of the word before. Yes, we lived together, spent weekends and went to the dacha together, had dinner together and sometimes (if our work schedules allowed) breakfast together, watched movies together, but we did not really know each other. Life in the city did not allow us to be ourselves, did not allow us to open up, and, most importantly, did not present us with the challenges that the kin’s domain did. After moving to the kin’s settlement, we were alone for the first time. And we had to show ourselves as we really are, because life on the land does not accept city masks, and I am immensely grateful for that.
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There were certain difficulties associated with the fact that we changed our lifestyle, place of residence, quit our familiar city jobs, and gave birth to our first child, and all this happened at the same time, literally within six months. It was through these difficulties that we realized that we were not perfect, that we did not have mutual understanding on many fundamental issues in life. We also realized that the reason lay in our different upbringings, in our families where we grew up, in our childhoods. Most importantly, we realized that we needed to learn to accept each other. Each of us decided for ourselves that we would become better people. This opened the way for us to an endless and fascinating process – the path to self-development and self-improvement.
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Living in the city, working 10-12 hours a day, we simply did not have time to reflect, no time to look inside ourselves, no time to delve deeply into our past, to restore family traditions, or to consciously raise our children. Only now, after long, hours-long conversations in which we discussed and resolved issues of responsibility, trust, and upbringing – in other words, the fundamental issues of family relationships – have I begun to truly enjoy the sun, water, and spring.
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I want to welcome each day, I want to communicate, sing, create, share, walk barefoot, dance, listen to the birds. I am full of energy and strength! I have realized what I live for. I know what I want, and I have faith in a bright future. Now our life is similar to the one we dreamed of while still living in the city. We achieved it after a year and a half of serious work on ourselves, but we did it consciously. Now I can say that we have become a family. We have passed this test that life has given us. Thank you, the kin’s settlement Lesnaya Polyana, we are happy to live here.
