Reporting Live Ep. 2: We Moved to the Hills
We moved to the countryside.
And for the first 3 days, I was pondering if we had made a terrible mistake.
The house smelled like sewer for 3 days (fixed now).
There was no shower head. Just a pipe from the wall.
No oven.
No bed.
No WiFi (kinda solved now).
No TV.
And no English.
We stood there looking at each other thinking:
What are we doing?
This is ridiculous.
We should leave.
There is not a single touch of western culture here. Not one familiar anchor. No cafes. No yoga studios. No bakeries with sourdough and oat milk.
Just hills.
And farms.
And silence.
But the truth is, we did not choose this place.
We surrendered to the Hand of Life.
Against our preferences.
And suddenly, slowly, we are beginning to see why.
Children run down the dirt road laughing.
Two boys share one bicycle, riding it back and forth between houses.
The neighbours call the kids over to their farm to see the new duck that hatched this morning.
There are five new puppies.
And a pig that will give birth any day now.
The two neighbour boys work on the farm after school. They wash their own dishes. They move with confidence and purpose in a way that feels rare where we came from.
The children here are wildly happy.
They roam the farm.
They climb hills.
They laugh constantly.
And at night, something happens that I had forgotten was possible.
Silence.
Absolute silence.
No cars.
No hum of a city.
Just us and the stars.
Clouds drift slowly through the house in the morning as the mountain breathes.
This is Sacred Oak in real life.
Not perfect.
Not curated.
Not Pinterest-worthy.
But real.
The first learning here has been resilience.
We cannot have everything we want right now.
No oven.
No shower head.
No perfectly designed environment.
But the Sacred Oak Way was never about having the perfect materials.
It was about learning to work with what life is offering.
The second learning has been presence.
Without WiFi, the rhythm of our days is different.
More chess.
More cards.
More conversations.
More sitting together watching the clouds move across the hills.
The third learning is culture.
We are guests in a place with its own rhythms, language, and history.
Spanish is expanding already.
Every day brings a new word, a new exchange, a new moment of understanding.
Learning the language is not just practical.
It is a way of learning the place.
And of course, the Sacred Oak Way always begins with the child.
Rosie is completely captivated by the farm animals.
The duck.
The puppies.
The pig that will soon give birth.
So we follow it.
We deepen it.
She has been invited to create small animal care books for other children.
How to care for a duck.
What puppies need.
What happens when pigs give birth.
Her learning grows directly from the life around her.
Charlie is seeing the land differently.
He is studying the hills.
The trees.
The rocks.
He has been invited to start sketching the beginnings of a warrior course on the property.
Where the rope climb could go.
Where the balance beam should sit.
Where we might hang the silks.
Leadership through building.
Learning through shaping the land.
Sacred Oak does not separate learning from life.
It simply asks:
What is here?
What is alive around us?
What is calling the child forward?
And then we build from there.
When we drive up the hills, people stop and stare.
Who are these new people?
Where did they come from?
What are they doing here?
It is a small local community.
Everyone knows everyone.
We are the strangers.
But slowly, we will anchor in.
One conversation.
One relationship.
One shared moment at a time.
This is Sacred Oak.
Not an idea.
Not a theory.
A way of living.
And we are learning it, day by day, right here in the hills.
Underneath it all, something deeper is emerging.
A kind of sovereignty.
Western culture is gone here.
No convenience culture.
No endless consumption.
Just us.
The land.
And our neighbors.
We live simply in small tico cabins.
Our rent is $400 a month.
There’s 2 more cabins. We can slowly add more if we choose.
Places for children to roam freely and safely outside.
Places for building and creating.
Places for life to unfold.
Thirty minutes from a major center if we need it.
But here, in the hills, life is different.
And perhaps this is the deeper invitation.
To choose a life aligned with our values.
Simple.
Close to the land.
Close to each other.
A place where learning is not something we schedule.
It is simply the way we live.
If you are called to step towards a New Way together, let us begin.
