Slow Living and My Parenting Philosophy Based in Compassion

Hippie in Disguise Shabana Buwalda

Photo by Ottawa photographer Shabana Buwalda

Faire Child has a lovely blog nurturing a culture shift toward more time, more play, more exploration of the natural world. I had the honour of being asked to share my thoughts on slow living and my parenting philosophy, and although they asked for short answers I might have gone a little long. I hope you’ll visit the blog and see all the great resources Faire Child has for parents, teachers and guardians to nurture and nourish a love for the natural world.

You can link to the blog here. And you can read my interview “A couple of moments with Danielle Chassin”.

Here are some of the things they asked me about:

  • What 3 words best describe your parenting philosophy?
  • How have you made changes in your life to ‘live slow’ and what benefits have you seen?
  • How do you try to be a more conscious and thoughtful consumer?
    • This is where I talk about a concept I call ‘extended consumer responsibility’

You can also read more about Faire Child and their amazing zero waste weather clothing for children here. I’m not big on promoting consumption, but I do wholeheartedly believe in Faire Child’s mission, ethos and products. And, I only do genuine, unpaid endorsements.

Ecominimalism and Slow Living: An Interview with Me!

Hippie in Disguise Shabana Buwalda

All photos in this post by Ottawa photographer, Shabana Buwalda

I always prefer to talk about others than talk about myself. However, I get a lot of questions about how we live, so I thought I’d share this interview we did where I talk about how we try to live a slow, minimal family life, in a fast, big city.

The interview below appears in the Rwanda issue (2016) of the Global Guardian Project learning capsules, an interactive STEM-based curriculum and magazine aiming to educate children and families about global environmental issues, animals, ecosystems, and much more. Each issue includes an interview with a family striving to live a sustainable lifestyle. I encourage you to explore their magazines and educational materials, which are beautiful and inspiring, and includes all sorts of activities, art downloads, and other fun projects.

Rebecca Lane, founder of the Global Guardian Project, interviewed me about our family’s way of life in August 2016.

Tell us a little about your family.  Where do you live + how do you spend a typical day with your family?

Hello! We are Matt, Ro, Sen and Danielle, a family of four living in Ottawa, the capital city of Canada. Ottawa has four very distinct seasons, experiencing very hot and humid summer days (40 Celsius / 104 Fahrenheit)  and very cold snow-filled winter days (-40 Celsius / -40 Fahrenheit). We feel fortunate to live in a place with such variety in weather and we do our best to make the most of it, by spending lots of time outdoors in the elements year round. As a car-free family, we live downtown to facilitate our travels by bike or foot.

About us? First, there’s me, Danielle, I do a lot of things. I work outside the home as a Policy Strategist for the Canadian government, where my main task is advising the government on social and economic problems related to supporting vulnerable populations. I don’t define myself through my occupation though. It’s my passions that make me who I am. Foremost I am a mother. But I’m also a creative, a writer, a minimalist, and slow living advocate. Matt, does similar work outside the home, although he advises on ocean health and climate change. Matt is an avid athlete and an ambassador for cycling lifestyle. Ro and Sen are our two children. Ro is our 11 year old girl. She is highly intuitive, deeply loving, naturally funny and the definition of a social butterfly. She loves the arts and is always dancing, singing or drawing. Sen is our 5 year old boy. He is a wild one and highly self-directed. He is head strong, while also being very sweet and calm. He loves inventing, climbing, dancing, cycling, and pretending to be a ninja.

Our children attend public school and we work outside the home, so our family doesn’t get much time together during the week. We’d love to change that, but instead we make the most of our weekend time together and make a concerted effort to slow things down and connect. We generally schedule nothing for weekends so that serendipity can lead the way.

Our typical weekend day involves walking around the city. There’s a lot of thinking behind why I value walking, wandering, and urban adventuring, and part of that thinking is to show my children that there is an abundance of nature in the city. But, if we only ever walked down Main Street or drove to get to the places we visit they would think, as many others do, that our city is a concrete jungle. I also want them to learn that it’s fun to have no plan, that schedules can get in the way of opportunity. So, we usually leave our home, with water bottles and snacks, and have no specific destination in mind, just a broad sense of direction. Along the way it’s a little thrill to find a pocket of wildflowers, painted alleyways, new bakeries, and pop-up art shows. Our favourite days usually involve time by the beautiful Ottawa River and eating all our meals outdoors.

Hippie in Disguise Shabana Buwalda

It’s obvious that  slow + minimalism are core beliefs for your family. Tell us a little about what that means.

Minimalism and slow living are growing in popularity, which means there is a range of ways people interpret and apply these concepts. What people refer to as minimalism varies quite a lot. For example, minimalism is used to refer to a home aesthetic or a visual signature. For me, minimalism is a way of life, it’s a lens through which we approach our days, our activities, our thoughts, our behaviours. This lens focuses on reducing quantity and increasing quality. Our minimalist lifestyle is motivated by environmental concerns and my affinity with simplicity, this is why I like to call it ‘ecominimalism’.

Minimalism and slow living intersect easily for us. Slow living is really about connecting more with the things we do and the people in our life. Connecting with the present, mindfully, wholeheartedly. To do this, to live slowly, we must do less. To increase our quality of connections, we must decrease the quantity of things we do.

Tell us a little about your family life before your shift.

I have a natural affinity for slow and minimalist living. That being said, our family did go through a few years of living on fast-forward. And while our weeks still include a list of commitments, I approach them with mindful presence, which makes the experience completely different.

Like I mentioned above, I work in government policy. The nature of my work is unpredictable and generally hectic. After working in this environment for a few years I started to notice that I carried this hustled, stressed energy home with me. I would manically clean and tidy all evening, I would speedily move from task to task. On the weekends, I would hustle around doing errands, take the children to a list of activities, catch up on my social calendar, and generally try to pack as much “life” as I could. I had one setting and it was fast-forward.

Finally it hit me one day that I never slowed down. That, ironically, while I did so much I never felt like I accomplished anything. Worst of all, I desperately missed my children, despite spending every second of the weekends with them. I realized that something had to change. I was never going to catch up. Going fast wasn’t working, so I decided to go slow.

At the time I hadn’t heard of slow living or minimalism. But I knew intuitively what our family needed. We needed quality time together, we needed to do less, so that the things we did we could do in a more meaningful way, with presence, and without a need to rush through them to get to the next thing on our itinerary or to do list. We needed to take things slowly, to be able savour the moment, savour the weekend, savour our lives. So, that’s what we started doing. As you can imagine, we’ve never looked back.

Hippie in Disguise Shabana Buwalda

How has the shift to a minimalist life affected your family dynamic?

Approaching life from a minimalist perspective has been immensely satisfying for us. The children can enjoy life at an organic pace and I feel more present with them when I’m not concerned about when our next activity starts. Moreover, it’s great that my children have learned that they can be thoroughly engaged in life, full of energy and curiosity, while doing something simple, outdoors, uncurated and free. I call this minimalist fun. Slow days out in nature.

We no longer accept every social invitation or birthday party. The children only do one extra-curricular activity a week. I worried a bit that they would miss things or feel left out, but in all honesty they haven’t shown concern once about a lack of activity. The benefits of doing less, feeling calm and having a sense of freedom with time, have won over any sense of lack.

In terms of minimalism with things themselves, we’ve never had a bank account full of money, so the children are accustomed to not getting much in the way of stuff. That being said, we now only get them gifts for birthday and Christmas, and it’s one special thing, whereas before they would sometimes get new toys and books throughout the year. They adapted to this fairly painlessly because they were offered fun alternatives, like play time with friends and outdoor adventures.

Overall, our family dynamic has improved. We all feel a little calmer, more connected, and enjoy being around each other. As a hungry athlete, Matt might not *love* that I take a minimalist approach to meals and don’t observe as much of a schedule around meal times, but he’s adapting!

Hippie in Disguise Shabana Buwalda

What are some ways you see your children being positively affected by the shift?

I think that in spending time in nature and living a slow, minimalist life, I am preserving my children’s innate, natural born strengths: creativity, curiosity, connection. I don’t think my children were struggling much from our fast-paced life, but I know that in time they would have shown symptoms of fatigue, so I’m glad I made a change before we started seeing social or behavioural issues. Overall, the children have more time and freedom to just be themselves and not ply to an adult’s will or schedule. I think the typical traits of a child: creativity, wonder and positivity, need to be protected and cultivated, particularly as these traits will be critical in solving the massive global issues emerging today. By letting children be themselves I believe I am preserving these traits in them.

In terms of positive effects, our children certainly notice that we live differently than virtually everyone we know. They ask a lot of questions about why we “can’t go places fast in a car?” or “have a big piles of presents?” or “buy something packaged in plastic?” or “go to two parties on the weekend?” But these questions always lead to great conversations about choice and aligning what we care about (values) with what we do (behaviour). Children have an innately strong sense of right and wrong and so talking about what we care about, for example healthy oceans, and how our behaviours are linked to these, makes it easy to opt-out of single use plastic. The positive effect is that the children are learning a lot about how everything is connected. We are not islands. We are embedded. Living like that everyday, they are understanding from an early age, and developing the necessary habits, they need to make sustainable choices, for the health of the planet, but  also sustainable choices about how they use their time and energy, for their own mental health.

Hippie in Disguise Shabana Buwalda

What are your hopes for your children by allowing them to be more connected through nature.

The benefits of time in nature are many and there are many great thinkers writing about this. Creativity, independence, mental and physical health, are just a few of the direct benefits. For me, I focus on time in and connecting with nature, for those reasons, but also to instill an understanding of impermanence and our embededness in nature. I also think that if my children have their fondest, happiest memories out in the wild, then they will be motivated to protect it.

Understanding impermanence cultivates a sense of appreciation and presence. Knowing that each path we walk will never be the same twice, we learn to make the most of each experience, we savour the temporary nature of a field of wildflowers, the leaves on the trees. Through experiences like these I hope to keep alive that sense of living in the moment that children are born with. Our innate mindfulness. Our innate presence.

Understanding embededness is key too. Spending time in nature, in the wild, we learn about the abundance of life outside our own. We, more intimately, understand our connection – our embededness – to the systems of life on this planet. We are part of nature. Nature is not out there. We are nature. While I don’t think we should be self-motivated to protect wildlife, if understanding our own precarity through connection is what motivates an interest in conservation and protection, then that’s a good thing.  The more children (and we adults) have life experiences with living plants and animals, the more we can empathize with them, the more we feel a part of their world, and us a part of theirs. Our interconnectedness becomes embodied.

Perhaps most importantly, spending most of our time in a natural setting, we are keeping our impact on the planet light, developing a deeper connection to it, and fostering a sense of protection and compassion for the earth and its inhabitants. All this while making memories and strengthening our family bonds.

What would one piece of advice be to families who want to make the shift to a slow, minimalist lifestyle?

Just start. Make one change a day. And go slowly! There is no sense in rushing toward slow, minimal living.

***

Update, November 2018: In re-reading this interview, I can see that we have evolved and changed somewhat from this way of life. Matt has been totally won over by minimalist meals and now thrives on this approach! We aren’t perfect about avoiding single use plastic, still. And our children do sometimes get gifts, like a new toy or book, on occasions other than Christmas and birthdays. I guess that’s a reflection of our financial situation, we can actually afford these things now. But, we continue to be very limited in the amount of new things our children bring into their life and us into our home.

Danielle Chassin Hippie in Disguise Shabana Buwalda

Unpacking, Owning and Leveraging Privilege

Danielle Chassin Hippie in Disguise Shabana Buwalda

Photo credit: Shabana Buwalda

I have the privilege of Caucasian skin tone

I have the privilege of Canadian citizenship

I have the privilege of roof and shelter

I have the privilege of mental health

I have the privilege of physical health

I have the privilege of a conventionally abled body

I have the privilege of literacy and language

I have the privilege of education

I have a privilege of geography

I have the privilege of stable employment

I have the privilege of 5 physical senses

I have the privilege of stable family

I have the privilege of heterosexuality

I have the privilege of species

I have the privilege of not knowing my other privileges

I want to say that I have the privilege of being a woman and mother, but these are not privileges in the sense of the word ‘privilege’ here.

Instead, I will cast them this way: I have the immense benefits that come from being a woman and mother, of mixed ethnicity and Indigenous descent. While these are not privileges in the contemporary sense and certainly not in every space, place and forum, they are gifts for the awareness, compassion, understanding and open-mindedness they cultivate and require to survive and thrive in spite of these dimensions of being that are unjustly devalued. I own and cherish these aspects of myself that bring challenge and struggle, but I also own my privilege. I have to admit, own, and dismantle the unfair benefits I reap from my many privileges. I have to leverage my privilege to the benefit of others, not myself.

Unchecked privilege permits us to look the other way, to be silent, to be too tired or too busy to act. Please understand that if you feel as though you can dismiss this, then you are privileged.

I am privileged. Let’s stop being afraid to say it! I am privileged.

But, let’s be afraid, ashamed and embarrassed when we do nothing with our privilege but serve ourselves. I can’t change most aspects of my privilege, but I can change how I use and leverage it.

Privilege is a form of domination. While it is impossible to exist outside domination (power relations) – and, all of us, in one way or another, dominate someone or something — we need to recognize, call out, and awaken ourselves to domination. We need to dismantle it whenever we can. We need to shift and share power. (For those of you afraid to share power, please remember: Power is like love. When you give it away, you don’t have any less of it, in fact, sometimes it grows.) Don’t be afraid to share power, be empowered to.

The fact that we can’t step outside domination, does not validate any and all forms of domination. Do not let anyone persuade you to think that because domination is ever-present that it is also necessarily right or justified or that it can’t be diminished. I dominate grass when I step on it. I dominate flowers when I pick them for art-making and home décor. I dominate pears when I choose to kill and eat them for my own survival. These are not the same as other forms of domination, but they are domination and I have to admit and own that. (And, one of them is absolutely unnecessary). I have to ask myself how I can shift, share or relinquish power in these and other instances? My relationship to the pear, should awaken and inform me about my relationship to all others, human and non-human.

Once you’ve checked your privilege (is it white privilege? it is religious privilege? is it gender privilege?) please remember this is only the beginning. Acknowledging privilege is step one. It’s not a test you pass and then you’re done. It is ongoing: it is daily work, attention and care. Does that sound exhausting? It can be. But you know what? When we all work together, we can do hard things. Let’s support each other in the work of unpacking and dismantling privilege.

So, you’re working on deconstructing your white/male/religious/… privilege? Great. You’re not done. Next, please acknowledge that you have many dimensions of privilege and work on the rest of them. One of the biggest blindspots in discussion of privilege is species privilege. We must as a species acknowledge and dismantle the unfair advantage we take from nonhuman animals, plants and ecosystems. We are not better or more important than them. We simply aren’t. If that makes you uncomfortable, sit with that. Privilege isn’t all fun and games.

Finally, please don’t wait for the perfect time, place or way to start talking about privilege. Perfection is an illusion and excuse. We need to challenge cultural expectations of perfection and flawlessness, so that we can move forward, do the work and make important, overdue changes. Please do not let perfection paralyze you on this topic, or in life in general.

What are your privileges? And will you leverage them for the benefit of others?

And, please, feel free to tell me which privileges of my own I’ve not woken up to. But it’s not your job to educate me, I know.

Danielle Chassin Hippie in Disguise Shabana Buwalda

Talking Work-Life Balance on Roasted

image

I was recently interviewed by Michelle Little of Roasted about how I bring balance into my busy life. It was a great opportunity to reflect, thank you Michelle.

Below you’ll find an excerpt, to pique your interest, but make sure to click over to Roasted to read the whole article, or to surf around her cool website all about raising kids and getting the most out of your city, being creative and entrepreneurial, all with a special focus on one of my favourite cities, Montreal.

Michelle: Do you have any time for yourself?

Danielle: I don’t have what is commonly considered “me time”. This is mostly my own choice. I am very happy to give my free time wholeheartedly to my children. I think the notion of ‘me time’ comes from a need to restock our energies and do something for ourselves. As mothers and parents, some of us are not good at giving this to ourselves. For me, what restocks my energies is being with my children. I have never, honestly, ever had the feeling of needing a break from my children. I’m not a high maintenance person, I don’t need to get away to have my nails or hair done or to shop. What fulfills me is being in their presence. Learning from their perspective, being reminded of how simple happiness and fulfillment are for a child. All I need is that childlike wonder to remember that no object or time alone will ever be what I need to feel complete.

Read the whole interview here…

Special thank you to Amanda of Luv Mother, our mutual friend, who connected me with Michelle.

You might also like my post:

image   Mindful Picking, Making a Flower Crown

Processed with VSCOcam with t1 preset   Inspiring Mother: Bree Galbraith

Processed with VSCOcam with g1 preset   The Mathematics of Love

image   Love Your Mother in Luv Mother

The Mathematics of Love: My Love More Story

Sen and Ro Chassin by Natasha Moine

Around this time last year I was asked to contribute to a collection that would be titled “The Love More Stories.” I don’t often write about myself or share personal stories because I tend to shy from the sort of attention this could bring. However, over the last year I’ve had a nagging feeling that I should share this story more broadly. The story captures a number of key themes in my life and the tension between them. The desire to have a large family and the desire to be responsible in our family’s use of the earth’s resources. The pull between personal interest and the greater good.

***

Growing up I always knew I wanted children. In fact, I knew I wanted a big family. Seeing my mother skilfully raise the three of us, knowing she always wanted a fourth, I thought to myself that four was the perfect number, at least as a minimum. And so, my heart was set on having four children. As I later learned, these were certainly the idealistic musings of a young person who hadn’t put thought into what their life partner might want and who didn’t consider the environmental impacts of raising children in the first world.

Today, I am a mother to two children. First, there’s my kind-hearted daughter, Ro. She’s the creative type, always dancing, singing or drawing, and usually doing more than one of these at once. Ro is highly intuitive, deeply loving, naturally funny and the definition of a social butterfly. Then, there’s Sen, my wild little boy. He is head strong, while also being a very sweet and calm child. He loves climbing, dancing, and pretending to be a ninja. Together these two are the best of friends and siblings. Most days I dream of having their level of connection with another human, their love for each other is so fierce and all-consuming, it has taught me so much about the powers of love.

Processed with VSCOcam with g1 preset

I am always a mother first, but I am also a wife and friend, and I work full time outside of the home. I work professionally to provide for my family, but my passions lie in the arts, in writing, in photography, in adventure, and, of course, in nurturing my children. My aim is to develop deep and genuine kindness in my children, not only toward their family and friends, but toward all humans and toward all life on earth. This is why we spend most of our free time outdoors connecting with each other and with the abundance of animal and plant life around us, cultivating a love and reverence for the earth.

image

And then, there’s Matt, my husband and partner in life, a highly rational and deeply principled person. These two things I love most about him, but they also make life with him hard. There’s no being flaky about your values around Matt, principles should be lived by. Fun or not. Easy or not.

We knew soon after we met that we were a perfect match; we didn’t share any hobbies, but we agreed on the big stuff, like politics and ethics. We married a few years later. We both wanted to have children while we were young, at least by today’s standards, and so soon after we  married we had our first, Ro. It was like a cliche seeing my child for the first time and having so much intense love instantly, and over the first year seeing my love for Matt grow and mature seeing him become a parent, and seeing his love for his daughter. When Ro was nearing one year, I felt ready and excited for a second child. I talked to Matt about having our second, we were both in graduate school at the time, and so the timing of the birth was not inconsequential.

And so, I started the conversation on a very practical point: timing. Since the question of having a second child or not, was already answered in my mind, and presumably in Matt’s too. Now, Matt is someone whose heart strings are perfectly aligned with what he believes, with his principles and ethics, and so he replied with “We shouldn’t have a second, it is not responsible, it is not right to take more resources from the earth to satisfy our own cravings to have children. One child is the right number.” Now, as you can imagine, I didn’t accept this without presenting a few counter-points, strongest among these was that “surely, the world needs more children like the ones we will raise, they will be role models in caring for the earth.” But, to be honest, I knew in my heart that this was pretty presumptuous of me and motivated by self-interest. In this instance, loving meant not only loving our kin, not only loving humans, but loving all life. If I were to truly act lovingly toward all life, toward the earth, then I wouldn’t have a second child. So, I accepted, very reluctantly, that Matt was right.

Danielle Chassin Hippie in Disguise

But my heart still wanted that big family, so I began to talk about adoption, which I thought Matt would agree to since it wouldn’t bring new people into the world. And this is when I got an answer I never ever expected. “Danielle, I love Ro so much it hurts. I love her so much there is just no way that I could ever love another child this much. I would never forgive myself for having a second child in the family that I didn’t love as much. That child would know, they would feel the lack of love. And if by some crazy stroke of fate I did love that second child as much as I love Ro, then I would certainly have to rob Ro of some of my love.” I could see the calculus of love floating in thought bubbles above his head. Like any resource, there is a finite amount. In a family you only have so much time to share among its members, there’s only so much food in the fridge and bedrooms in your home. Who was I to say, naively, that there would be enough love to go around? When I thought about the woman living in the apartment below us, who had 19 children, I thought Matt’s right, there is no way she loves any one of those children as much as we love our one child. This was without any poor judgment of her, it was pure math, pure logic. And so, once again, I conceded to Matt’s view. It would be one child for us. Logically, I knew he was right, but I’d be lying if I said my heart was happy about it.

Processed with VSCOcam with f2 preset

And so, for the next four years we carried on pouring all our love and energy and resources into our one child. Then one day, as I carried Ro on my hip to go downstairs for breakfast, the same as I did every morning, she excitedly said something very peculiar. “Mama, you have a baby in your tummy!” To which I replied “Oh no, sweetie, there’s no baby.” And she replied with complete confidence, “Yes, there is. I know it. You smell like mummy milk, you smell like you did when I was a baby.” What a quirky thing to say, I thought to myself, and with that we prepared breakfast and carried on with the day.

A week later, having forgotten my conversation with Ro,  I started to experience symptoms of pregnancy. I ignored them for a few days, and then decided to take a test just to rule out my worries. Worries because I believed in Matt’s reasons not to have a second child.  I was in complete and total shock when the test came back positive. And then like a tidal wave, Ro’s intuition washed over me. She had known. The sensitivities and keen perceptions of a small child are truly astounding.

Now, for us, while we had agreed one was a responsible number of children for us to have, there was never an option to not carry a pregnancy through. We respect all life and couldn’t end a life prematurely, and so eight months later we welcomed our son, Sen, at almost 10 months gestation, into our family, born at home into his papa’s arms.

Matt Surch and Ro Chassin by Natasha Moine

Living life, living in a family, there are many lessons in love. We learn that there are all sorts of love: love for a child, love for a partner, love for a friend. We learn that love evolves and matures. One of the great lessons in love we learned from our second child is that love is not a finite resource, as we had naively thought. When we saw our son for the first time, we had that same overwhelming feeling of love, of the biggest, most intense love, the same feeling we had had with Ro, and that we still had for Ro. There was no diminishment in our love for Ro or for each other, and yet we had as much love for Sen. In fact, our love grew. Seeing Ro love her brother instantly, our love grew for her. Seeing Matt hold his son, my love grew for him. Even though everyday I think that I can’t possibly love my children more than I do, I somehow love them more than I did the day before. Of all the lessons in love, the one I think of most is that love obeys no rules of math or logic. Love does not diminish when it is shared, rather it grows. You can always love more. Love is infinite.

***

You can find the full Love More Stories collection for purchase here

You can also read an interview with Amanda who started the Love More Shop, where she talks about her motivation for starting a shop focused on loving more and how she gives back to the community.

***

If you liked this post please consider sharing it or subscribing to my blog or both (!), your support helps me continue to write and share.

 

Let’s be friends! Please come find me in other places:

Hippie in Disguise ro and sen Chassin Rideau Canal Ottawa

Talking Motherhood and Minimalist Fun with boy+girl

Processed with VSCOcam with f2 preset

In the news! I was interviewed by boy+girl as part of their series on motherhood. I loved doing this interview, because they asked really great questions that got me thinking more deeply about life and career and pushed me to open me up more on the topic of motherhood and my own struggles. You’ll also hear about my personal style, the aesthetic of my home, where I want to live internationally and lots more. Please check it out. And a few excerpts to whet your appetite…

On motherhood:

“Feeling in a deep and embodied way what unconditional love means: it is a gift. The challenge that comes with that is the vulnerability you feel knowing that unconditional love ultimately means loss. Motherhood has given me the gift and reason to live life fully.”

On personal style:

“My style is classic with bohemian mixed in, and, as much as possible, sustainable. I avoid fashion trends because fast fashion leads to waste.”

Advice to my 20 something self:

“Follow your passions and don’t worry about being practical!”

I hope you’ll skip over there to have a read.

cha_9836

Processed with VSCOcam with f2 preset   You might also like my post: The Love More Stories

Processed with VSCOcam with c2 preset   You might also like my post: Hippies on Nordstrom

Instagram Book   You might also like my post: Confessions of a Minimalist

Hippies on Nordstrom

As Mother’s Day approaches, Nordstrom is publishing a series of interviews with moms on what motherhood means to them and what they’ve got on their Mother’s Day wish list. When Nordstrom initially emailed me I assumed they had the wrong person or had accidentally sent a bulk email. Oops. But no, after I had a few conversations with the lovely Nordstrom Blogs team, I realized that they wanted to represent a range of moms and perspectives in the interviews. The series does have one common thread and it has something to do with children’s art…I will leave you with that teaser, in the hopes that skip over to the blog and have read.

Thank you, Nordstrom, for including me in your mix! I love an opportunity to talk about my thoughts on fashion and acquisition, and, of course, my kids and their art! Link to my interview here.

Processed with VSCOcam with f2 preset

On doing things imperfectly

Danielle Chassin Hippie in Disguise
Quality is important, but seeking perfection can lead to paralysis. At least it can for me. I have wanted to start a blog for a long time, but the perfectionist in me prevented me from actually doing it. It had to be perfect, if I were to do it at all.

Perfection can also paralyze people from pursuing change. That is, some people won’t try something if they can’t do it purely or perfectly. Myself included. I’ve heard this excuse many times in response to people telling me why they couldn’t be vegan. “I would totally  go vegan, but I just love cheese/sushi/lattes.” To which I usually respond, “Well, why not be a vegan who eats sushi?” It might not be purist or perfect veganism, but it is a lot closer than not trying at all. I encourage others to find comfort in imperfection, that is, to permit themselves to do things imperfectly. (After all, there are very few things anyone can do perfectly, all of the time or ever.) And yet, I rarely afford myself this same latitude.

And so…after many rational, and many more irrational reasons, for delaying the launch of my blog — yes, mostly related to getting it perfect — I am going ahead now, knowing it will never be perfect and that is perfectly  fine.

For the past two years, I have shared bits and pieces of our family life through my Instagram account @hippieindisguise, and while I think Instagram is an excellent social media platform, I have often wanted more space to write and provide greater detail on our activities, based on requests from my kind and curious friends and followers. On this site I will document the moments I share with my children adventuring around our city to rivers, fields, parks, and pools, visiting galleries and museums, seeking out public and street art, crafting with natural materials, drawing, painting, and cooking — the everyday moments that make up a childhood and connect our family.

I will also share interviews with people who have inspired me as parents, as artists, as entrepreneurs, as people. I think it is really important to honour our inspirations. I want to create a space where I give people credit for the good they put out into the world. Stay tuned, I will post my first interview later this week!

Finally, while I am pursuing a minimalist lifestyle, paring down my possessions to the essential, I will from time to time share products here that I believe are worth choosing, if you are in need, because they are organic, fair trade, or handmade, for example.

So, that’s the plan, it’s not perfect, but I’m okay with that.

***

Let’s be friends! Please come find me in other places:

Have you subscribed to the Global Guardian Project yet? These are monthly learning capsules for children and families to learn about global stewardship. Each month features a different country’s wild life, landscape and challenges, and includes art projects, activities, meditation, recipes and more! Use my discount code: HIPPIEINDISGUISE for 10% off, you can read more about it here

…in development…

Danielle Chassin Hippie in Disguise
Welcome! I am currently developing a blog about my adventures with my husband, Matt, and two children, Ro and Sen, pursuing a minimalist lifestyle focused on collecting moments rather than things.

I hope to have the blog live January 2015, so please subscribe or come back soon. Thank you for stopping by.

If you are interesting in collaborating with me please email me at hippieindisguise1@gmail.com. Thank you.