"The key words that connect me to Ithaca are very big gratefulness to be here, a feeling of being part of land, part of the island, and part of the people."
"My main motivation for living here is to live in peace, to have a feeling that everything is cool and going smoothly. It's very easy to be peaceful here, very easy to stay in my centre, in my middle, to feel connected ..."
- Ecotopia is a relatively new project spanning across 37,500 m² of land that is for sale under certain conditions: no electricity and water from outside, small housing, no fences ... Rolf Brunner is the initiator and landowner of the Ecotopia project. He is living on Ithaca since 1997: “After a successful career, I decided in 1997 to do something completely new. Since then I live on this beautiful island of Ulysses. As a co-initiator of the well-known Sarakiniko-alternative-project and organizer of its development, I do have a rich experience in this kind of group dynamics. So now, I want to put all this knowledge together. Ecotopia will be a paradigm for a small but solid and sustainable model of living together.”
- Main concept: Good neighborhood is possible. "Our time needs it. If free landowners decide to follow some common rules and are willing to follow them because they created them by themselves, then Ecotopia is real." More on https://ecotopia.jimdo.com.
"We decided to have a farm in Austria because Hartwig was very unhappy at his job, and I was trying to find a solution for my family at the time. We already had our first kid, and I saw farming as a perfect solution. However, we were very incompetent in the beginning, and the idea of how it should be like ... Oh Gosh, there was a lot of flows against us, it wouldn't work that way ... The way it turned out was that we had a lot of people from all countries, volunteers working with us, learning with us ... So, you know, learning was really everything ... From the beginning, it was how to deal with your grain, how to deal with your forest, how to deal with the animals. At the beginning, I only had animals as babies, because I said I had to grow with them and they had to grow with me so that they could get used to us. We also had dogs and cats. So there were a lot of babies running around everywhere. And it's good to grow with them, get to know them in a very deep way, because I believe very much in being with and being a part of the nature and animals and everything ... And it was good for kids. We also adopted a daughter from Ethiopia, it was a good time for her to grow up in the farm. It was not a farm like nowadays, we had to do everything. But Hartwig never quit his job, because we needed money. The ideal, original idea was that he could quit his job as we would have enough money to live on farm, but this never happened."
"Now, there are more and more people like that ... I said, 'back to the roots'. You have to know where your food came from, you have to know how to survive on a farm, or not on a farm, but how to make yourself independent from supermarket and all that stuff. This is what I wanted to teach myself, my children and all volunteers that came. So that means ..."
"However, I take things much easier now, I am much easier going ... It's life, it's experience, it's growing older ... No longer being that dependent on money ... No more stress about the money ... One thing is that Hartwig has retired, he gets money ... And the other thing is, I am very sure that what I have always done, wherever I was, I could earn money with my hands if I need some, because I'm healing, treating, repairing, so I know very well I can manage ... I've been working for twenty years, healing."
"We make our own olive oil ... in a very easygoing way."
"You can pick olives from the neighbors and it's only the work because the traditional way of picking olives here means crawling in the trees and cutting the twigs. So twigs are sometimes very big and they have a special technique to keep the olive trees healthy, keeping them from growing too much in all directions ... In the stones. And the stones on this island are very heavy and the trees break ... It's a pity."
"Finally, as my vision of the island, I would love it if the people kept their trust and got more of it, because I found a lot of trust here. When we were talking to people here, mostly businessmen, you know, small businesses, who say 'Yes, there is crisis, but' ... So this 'but', you know, is very, very important. Live your life and don't give too much attention to this big stuff which is not really ... It has nothing to do with life. It's completely on another level. And I think that the people here have the chance not to go for all this fear and existence stuff, before getting back to roots and trust. I think here it may be possible, because not so much got destroyed, not so much got lost as in so many other places, where people really feel the fear and have lost hope. And are very frightened with what's going on in the surroundings, in the world as a whole. Because when you put a focus on that, you become a part of it. You can invite what you need but you can invite what you fear as well. But if you have a little bit of the idea, of the feeling of happiness, just because of being, you know, being awake in the morning ... Just because it's nice that we can keep what we have ....
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Credits:
MED Land project