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So we’ve never really done this before.
I mean, we’ve blogged for our music. We’ve over-shared our lives on Facebook. But we’ve never really done THIS before.
So who are we exactly?
We’re Mark and Emily (and our peanut there is Anthony). In the beginning, most of you will already know us. As we build this project, we hope that more of you will come to know us. Strangers are just friends you haven’t made yet, right?
“So what do you DO exactly?”
We’re both musicians. Emily (that’s me!) teaches high school instrumental music (no, not band) and choir, and Mark is a freelance percussionist who performs on a variety of instruments, writes music for himself and others, and teaches students of all ages.
“Wow. You chose really lucrative career paths.”
Ha ha. We know. That’s actually how we came to be accidental hippies. You learn to be really frugal when you both start out working part time as musicians! Before we knew it, we were gardening, composting, collecting rainwater, making detergent, “churning” butter, recycling, reusing, and repurposing loads of things. Heck, our little guy is now almost 10 months old and we’ve cloth diapered him exclusively since he was 3 weeks old (and everyone said we’d quit after a month!).
The point is, all of these things have become such a part of our routine that we think nothing of it, but we get asked all the time, “Hey, how did you do _____?” or “Hey, what do you use for _____?”
And then some of my mom’s former co-workers kept asking, “Does she ever blog about this?” And I said no. And people kept asking, and I kept saying no, which started feeling sort of silly.
My mom has referred to me as an “earth mother” at times, which at first really annoyed me (sorry, mom), probably because that wasn’t what I was setting out to do. We just do these things because most of the time it seems to be the most sensible, or frugal, or efficient, or practical, or _________. And it isn’t like we’re alone in this endeavor, but when it seems like everyone around you is intrigued by what you find commonplace, a little bit of you wants to share it with others and maybe make a few new friends along the way.
So here we are: Mark and Emily on a whirlwind adventure to try to live well with what we have, raise a happy family, and eventually work our way from the suburbs back to the country, with a spot of land and a house we’ve built with our own two hands. We hope you’ll join us!
Beautiful!
Thanks! The hippy-ness runs deep–I’ll be doing a post soon on why I don’t use a clothes dryer anymore!
Emily, I’ve learned much more about you. Would love to hear more