Frederic Laloux’s New Thoughts and Greetings – IEC Keynoter from Integral Europe on Vimeo.
The New Life of Laloux
Frederic currently lives with his family in a unique atmosphere. He says
“We’re not meant to raise children in nuclear families without the support of a community. We’re simply not wired for it. Raising families without community makes the burden of parenting exponentially harder for us all.”
So around a year ago, he with his wife Helene and their two children made a bold move. They boxed up their life in Belgium, crossed the Atlantic Ocean and settled down a a little ecovillage in Ithaca, in upstate New York. There’s an organic farm on the village’s land, which feeds them, plus nice views of rolling hills, ponds, woods, and trails. Their neighbors have become friends and extended family, and there are kids and playgrounds all around.
Frederic in his blog says:
„We loved our life in Brussels, but something had begun to feel off. Like everyone around us, “home” was limited to the four walls of our house. Outside, we greeted our neighbors but we barely knew them. The default assumption was that we should be self-sufficient, that we had to own everything we needed. It would simply be too awkward to ask a neighbor to borrow a drill. Or for some butter to avoid a trip to the supermarket. If something needed fixing, we had to hire someone for the repair. If our children wanted to play with friends, we had to call their friends’ parents or go through a long back-and-forth of text messages to arrange the logistics of a play date: How about Thursday? Can you drop them at 4:00 if we bring them back at 6:00?”
So they started looking for more meaningful relationships and for genuine comminity – where their lives would be closer to nature and they could consume less, so to live a little lighter life on Earth.
„From our stays in the village before our move, we knew that living here would be a priceless gift for our children. Cars are parked at the entry of the village so kids may roam safely and freely on hundreds of acres of meadows and woods. There are two ponds to swim in the summer and skate in winter, and several outdoor and indoor playgrounds. In our previous life, our children’s world was litterally the size of our house. Now it’s extended to hundreds of acres. Children here are truly “free-range kids”.
“Three months after our move, we had to fly back to Brussels for administrative reasons, and it already felt like a past life. ‘Boy, everything feels tense and complicated here’ – we thought. In no time, our new life just felt right.”
Read the whole blog of Frederic Laloux and learn his new experiences and messages!
With Love,
The IEC team
Republished with permission of IEC and lightly edited.
Featured Image/graphic link added by Enlivening Edge Magazine
