It’s All Happening
20 February 2025
How do you create a rehab that people who suffer from substance abuse can come and heal for no financial cost?
How do you create a place of respite and resuscitation for people who need time out from the busy humdrum of society?
How do you create an offgrid, offline, self-sustaining, ecologically sound, community centered area for the health and wellbeing of all who come?
It’s simple and complicated.
The simple part is to buy a house with some land and then go for it.
The complicated part is the human mind that gets in the way and creates problems where there are none.
The imagined problems, lack of finances, the endless paperwork, meetings and more meetings, the reluctant estate agent, the notaires who get paid for being notaires, the banks asking questions that filled me with fear, the slowness of everything and then one day, I became the owner of a house and the guardian of a piece of land that can be adapted for all of the above.
More imagined problems, centered around insulation, plumbers, electricians, quotes, moving companies, long distances, other people’s fears, the size of the work, the grants available and not available, the different possibilities. Here today I understand all of these tasks in the end will get done, and be resolved. I can do many of them myself.
The Healing Path will be occupied by the end of the month of February. It will be my home. I will be focused on work both inside and outside the house. Some of it cosmetic, some of it around security and most of it dealing with creating the future. Do I already start to collect rainwater? I don’t have a garden planted. Do I plant a garden or the hedges first? Do I secure the boundaries in a place with a very low crime rate?
Sifting through what is essential and what is nice to have, what features are crucial and what are possible is taking some time.
All of these questions are quite luxury questions and a long way from my mindset of when I suffering under my alcoholism.
I had at one point given up on ever owning anything to call my own. I had accepted in a very dour and negative way that I would pay rent for the rest of my life as my best case scenario. I had battled with enormous fears of eviction, and feelings of depression.
I have evolved through prayer and meditation, through 12 step programs, through consistency, openness and healing. Having a dog helped. Developing a vision helped. Listening to intuition helped.
So here I am still in Nice on February 20th learning to accept that it will all happen in it’s own time.
This is my down time and I move in 6 days. There is a little work left to get my apartment back the way it should be to the best of my ability. The movers arrive the 26th and deliver to The Healing Path, 6 hours away on the 27th. The other furniture in The Healing Path is being collected on the 27th by a charity organisation so there is space in the new place. Wall paper stripping has already started. The electric installing should be completed and then it’s full steam ahead.
Looking forward to welcoming you to The Healing Path, in your journey on recovery, or your path in finding peace.
Collie
December 16, 2024 
