Notes From The North
A year in review from our first year at Allsta Gård at 63°N
The weather can be quite extreme up here in the north. This week the temperature dropped to -32°C. In late December there was an extreme storm that caused power outages for days. A week later one meter of snow fell overnight.
I had expected the winter to be a time for contemplation and cozyness, in contrast to the intensity of the summer tourist season. This has proven to be partially true, but the winter also has an intensity of its own. Shoveling snow, brushing snow off solar panels and greenhouses, making sure that chickens are warm, and piling wood all take time and attention. Still, as the snow gently falls outside and fire crackles behind me, it feels like a good time to reflect and share a bit of what I’ve been up to over the past year.
We moved into Allsta Gård on December 16th, 2024. Since then, it’s been a wild ride. We’ve continued with the Bed & Breakfast in the beautiful hand-crafted Eco House, which we’ve updated with our own touch. We’ve hosted group retreats, conferences and offsites, a winter café, vegetarian Christmas dinners, a Yellow event, solo weekend retreats, concerts, yoga massage sessions, and held workshops and family constellations. We’ve sold sourdough bread and pastries at local markets. We’ve sown, planted, and harvested vegetables. We set up bee hives with a local beekeeper. We built a mobile chicken wagon, bought 36 chickens, and built up an egg subscription business. We constructed a 52 square meter greenhouse to house chickens in the winter and vegetables in the summer. We made a new website (twice). And we’ve enjoyed the area’s stunning nature, gotten to know wonderful new friends and neighbors across all ages, and received no lack of support from our local communities.
Alongside all of this, I have continued to run my coaching, therapy and speaking business. It certainly gives a nice contrast to the daily rhythm. And it’s the work that feeds my soul. But as you can imagine, doing all of this while also parenting a three-year old can be...quite a lot sometimes.
At a friend’s wedding a decade ago, the mother of the bride advised the wedding couple to “learn to love the everyday chores” in her speech. I think of her words often. Some parts of running a farm and hospitality business are idyllic: harvesting vegetables, collecting fresh eggs, and welcoming excited guests from around the world. Other tasks are less glamorous: cleaning toilets, shoveling manure, and moving chicken wagons at 5am.
After the first few months of idealizing everything, resistance began to creep in. Here I am cleaning toilets, with a university degree and a career working with big companies and leaders...and all of this to end up cleaning toilets and changing bedsheets? All of this to work harder than I’ve ever worked before and, on an hourly basis, earn less than ever? The temptation was to righteously claim that I was better than this. Resistance ran rife. Privilege, spoiledness, and ego-identifications were all right there, staring me straight in the face.
With time and contemplation, these observations morphed into a shedding of layers of identifications and attachments. Like becoming a parent connects you with humanity in ways you could never have foreseen, so has running this place. I have a different understanding of, connection with, and respect for the millions of people who don’t sit in front of a computer all day doing “knowledge work”. You feel part of humanity, part of life in a different way when you’re more involved in the processes of what it takes to actually live in world. When you have to put wood in the furnace to heat your home, when you have to harvest vegetables to feed your family, when you have to empty the urine tank to fertilize the fields...everything just makes sense despite (or perhaps because of) the effort involved. In our case, many of these tasks are choices and not necessities, and we could revert to more commonly convenient methods of living in most cases. But as my teacher Thomas Hübl once said: we are not here in this life to be comfortable.
Convenience can be a trap. It can be a way of separating oneself from life in the guise of having “made it”. Pleasure and enjoyment are wonderful things, but must they depend on a minimum of friction and engagement with life? (Conversely, keeping things difficult for the sake of it being difficult is also a trap, and sometimes a surprisingly alluring one.) Living here is a constant invitation to question and rethink what pleasure and enjoyment can be. It’s a daily practice—to enjoy and wholeheartedly embrace every task I undertake—and it’s one that I don’t always succeed with. But immediate success is not the point.
When people visit us here, they often report of a deep joy that comes with helping out on the farm. Carrying wood, shoveling snow, harvesting food—it all invigorates people in quite profound ways. It’s clear there is an appreciation, and even a yearning, for these types of experiences: to get more in touch with the body and with physical, practical, purposeful life. Going to the gym just isn’t the same as chopping wood. I count myself lucky to be able to live in this way, and I am grateful to my former selves that made the choices that led us to being here. In the near future, we will be creating more opportunities for people to come and enjoy not only the tranquil beauty and farm-to-mouth food, but also the chance to get out of the mind and into the body, hands, and soil.
Our first year’s strategy was to say yes to everything. This second year is about asking ourselves deeply what we want and what we want this place to become. Rather than it being a continuation of what was here before, we will focus on what wants to happen here under our stewardship. What do our souls yearn to do, offer, and become in this context? This is very much a life’s work, but it’s the work of our life this coming year more than ever.
You can follow along with what we’re up to at Allsta Gård here:
Love the update and the insights, Alex.