The year 2013, the first year of the blog was about finding a greener way of living, focusing on some practical keypoints and resulting into this. I continue the search for a more sustainable and simple life, but from a little less pragmatic perspective. Last year taught me and my family a lot about accepting life as it happens (we didn’t want to accept it all, but had no other options), it moved us to a new location, it transformed our working lives and careers overnight, it made us respect continuity as well as the miracle of change.

So this year my view is different and for the start of the year I renamed the blog ‘Mount Rewild’. I won’t be counting the garbage bags or the use of energy of our family, though all that’s in the back of my mind too. I’ll be moving towards – or returning to, if you will – myself, the wild, and the mountain.

The challenges for this year shall be the following:

Finding space for me to be me. Last year I found myself at home with our daughter, much more than anyone in this family intended. The second part of the year I mostly stayed put, spending days and weeks at home with our child, nearly 24/7. While my husband was working hard to make our new life on the mountain financially bearable, I felt isolated and alone. Slowly I began to let go of many things that are important to me, slowly I began to lose some significant ways of being me.

I’ll be writing notes about the widely spoken and argued subject of combining motherhood, family life, career, and alone-time. I’ll pursue to find space and time for myself, hopefully being able to focus also on work again – the mountain lodge, the animals, the writing – and maybe even something new will come along. I’ll be sure to take time to write, read, plan, and dream.

Rewilding the family. We never were the original hustle-and-bustle city family, since we’ve always loved a break on the mountains, woods, or seaside, away from town as often as possible. We get by easily without the busyness of city life. But while living in Ljubljana, Slovenia, we did enjoy daily coffees in town, meeting friends over drinks later, and the market and supermarkets being walking distance away. And after a year of mountain life, especially I am absolutely craving for the sounds, sights, smells, and joys of life downtown.

However, to fully embrace the new and accept being here, we need to ‘surrender to the wild’. The more we spend time outside, under the sun and the stars, the more we share our lives with the animals, our own and the wild ones, and the more we put our hands into the very soil of the mountain, the more we rewild ourselves, we become ourselves, return to ourselves, and learn to  appreciate and love what we’re given.

Settling on the mountain (and Bosnia). The ultimate challenge of the year! For months I’ve said “I’ve got all I’ve ever wanted, but in the wrong country”. I know I’m in the wrong for saying so. I didn’t have a country in mind, but at times when I joked about moving, I talked of Bosnia. I said Sarajevo. I said a small village on the mountains. And here we are!

It’ll take time to feel at home here, really at home. Odds are it’ll never feel as familiar as Finland to me, but that’s not the point. What I’m dreaming of is to feel connected and safe here, to feel rooted, to love it, to get excited for and over it, to smile with the thought of the mountain, and even the country. More than time, it takes actions to get to the dream position. It takes learning the language, making friends, doing gardening, and actually moving our lives here in all its practicalities: sorting out doctors, acupuncturists, kindergartens, maintenance professionals of all kinds, choosing an expat insurance, opening a personal bank account, and getting a post-paid mobile phone. To name a few…

Now, as to how I’ll be going about with the challenges – that’ll all unfold in due time. I’ll list the individual plans and actions here as they come, hopefully resulting to a creative and productive, perhaps inspiring or even amusing process of ‘rewilding life on the mountain’.