From creating Minecraft worlds to curating a living ecosystem
Minecraft was one of the ways Mark stayed connected with his son, Connor, while we were living overseas. Mark set up a virtual server that Connor and his mates could use whenever they wanted to play. When we lived in a high-rise apartment in the middle of Sydney, Mark also used to use Minecraft as an escape.
He’d meticulously plan the layout of the villages he created. Thinking about how to make the most of the resources available, and not above using cheat codes to make the game more enjoyable.
At the start of this summer Connor pointed out that the way Mark is developing our property is a bit like playing out Minecraft in real life. Comparing the aerial view of our property when we bought it to what it looks like now, I can see exactly what Connor means.
Square by square, Mark has planned, planted and developed functional and beautiful spaces around our property. There was one point where I honestly questioned the rate at which our sheds seemed to be multiplying. Was he getting a bit trigger happy with the copy and paste?
But as the trees, grasses and native plants have started to mature I’ve been able to see what Mark envisioned all along. An increasingly private, sheltered environment that will regenerate our old paddock and return it to flourishing land that produces a good proportion of our food.
I’ve been thinking a lot about goals this month. I’ve seen some commentary on the need to remove pressure to live up to certain ideals, which I think is necessary. We’re so used to only seeing people’s highlights reels that it’s easy to fall into the trap of setting goals that become demotivating because they’re not realistic. I like that, sometimes I need to hear it.
But then I also remember the times in my life when I’ve written down an audacious dream. Something that feels impossible, it almost seems embarrassing to put pen to paper when you have no idea how to make it happen.
Write it down anyway, because even if you tuck it away and don’t look at it again for a few years, you might be surprised just how close you are to having that impossible, audacious dream come true.
When we lived in Sydney, paying off a mountain of bad debt. Living through one of the hardest years of our lives, Mark played Minecraft to escape.
After we’d made some big changes and taken some huge risks to take a year off to go traveling, Mark and I wrote our dreams on little pink and yellow post-it notes and stuck them to a wall of an Airbnb in Copenhagen. We had been living out of backpacks like nomads when we wrote:
Home base in New Zealand
Water view
Sustainable
Lock & leave
Six years later, that and many of the other goals we wrote down that day have happened for us. So today, we’re getting out a new pack of post-it notes and writing down even bigger dreams.
