Bookshop Sale Madness

Hi everyone, I've been doing some extra work at awesome bookshop over the past few weeks, called The Book Grocer and there is a crazy sale on for a couple of weeks where all paperbacks are $3 and everything else $5. Come on down and do your book shopping for the next year! We have a really good selection of books too! I hope to see you there! 452 Sydney Rd, Brunswick.

Music Lessons Update

Hi folks, the music lessons are going really well!!

I now teach a bunch of wonderful aspiring singings and keyboard players and I have also just added guitar lessons to the mix. Here's what some of my students and their parents have said about the lessons recently:

“Silvia's not a visual learner, we're so glad we found someone with your eclectic approach.” Susan

“I hope I can sing as good as you one day.” Karen

“The lessons are really helping Brooke with her confidence” Danielle

“You're a really good teacher, my last teacher didn't tell me any of that stuff” Nicola

If you're interest in lessons please phone me on 0415 807 587. I'd love to hear from you!

New Music Studio Opening April 9th

Hi Everyone, I'm moving into a new house in Thornbury soon where I will be opening a teaching studio space on April 9th. I'll be teaching piano/ keyboard and voice. I've been teaching through music shops for over a year and have developed a fun and creative method which integrates traditional, contemporary and creative approaches to music. Please email me on rachbyrnes@hotmail.com or phone 0415 807 587 if you'd like to find out more about my awesome lessons!! I'm $50/ per hour or $25/ half hour.

Watch Me on A Current Affair Singing about Downshifting

About the "Less is More" Blog

Welcome to the less is more web blog! You can listen to my song "Less is More & The Oily Rag" while you read by clicking here. It captures the true essence of this blog and my life as a “downshifter.” Downshifting is the new buzz word for “voluntary simplicity”, that is, deliberately choosing less in some areas of life (typically income) to gain more in other areas (typically time for recreation and family). This blog was inspired by a report released by the Australia Institute in 2003 titled “Getting a Life, Understanding the Downshifting Phenomenon in Australia” The report published the results of a survey which showed that 23% of Australian adults have chosen to downshift in the last 10 years –that’s nearly a quarter of the population! And, they’re not just dropouts who’ve decided to quit mainstream society – they are part of a movement, across the board, representing the full range of age, income and social background. Downshifters change their lives for a number of reasons but the main four include the desire for a more balanced life, clash between personal values and those of the workplace, searching for more fulfilment and responding to ill health. My own personal reason for downshifting was to free up more time for my life passions: songwriting, music composition and performance. I quit my full time job at the start of 2005 and enrolled in a Diploma of Music Performance and Composition at TAFE. This required a huge "downshift" including a drastic reduction in income yet what resulted was a huge "upshift" in my level of personal fulfilment. I now live on "the smell of an oily rag" (click here to listen) as my dad would say but I'm earning half my income now from music related activities, and I'm looking forward to a creative future in this area. Being time rich and cash poor is not always easy, but it's a far better option, in my opinion, than the reverse (cash rich/ time poor) plus it's great for the environment and global sustainability! I hope my journey will inspire and motivate you to find the brilliant, resourceful, sustainable, ethical “downshifter” within. Enjoy.

Less is More and the Oily Rag

I wrote a song a few months ago called "Less is More and the Oily Rag" It's a bluesy/country kind of number played on guitar using a lovely open C tuning. Imagine it being sung with a heavy southern American accent and you'll really get it.

Verse 1:
It's not all that bad
Living off the smell of an oily rag
I'm having the best fun that I've ever had
Infact I love my oily rag

Verse 2:
Time is money and money is time
and you're clever if you've got both in line
If it's only one then I know I'd
Rather time than fancy wine

Chorus 1:
The last job I was in was in gave me a permanent stitch
All the politics made me quit
Now I don't have much money
Or a saftey net
But how safe is drudgery and the treadmill's endless sweat?

Verse 3:
Sometimes less is more, or more or less
Less security, but more progress
Less danger and risk, but more regrets
Sometimes less is more, or more or less

Verse 4
Now the next thing that I have to say
Well, it's rather old and cleche
Don't waste your time doing what you hate
Do what you love, it's better than pay

Chorus 2
I know we all need a certain amount of money
But too much is never enough in this society
Less is more the only creed I believe
and lord how it has saved me
From endless, pointless shopping sprees
No I do not need retail therapy.. No!

Creative Living

Recently Melburnians have been bombarded with media coverage about our current “housing crisis ” and the increasingly inflated property market. We've heard the doom and gloom. Gen Y-ers on an average income excluded from the market by impossibly high prices, destined to a fate of renting rotting inner city shacks, complete with leaking roof (as seen on current affair). Some of us have directly felt the hardship. Perhaps we have spent the last 3 months looking for a stylish flat to rent, resorting to a shabby 70s box in Thornbury, only to be “out bidded” by Mr and Mrs Dr and Lawyer. It's normal to feel totally pessimistic in the face of these harsh realities. Mainstream media doesn't help either as it usually offers no vision of how it could be different. Sometimes it seems as if the system is designed to make us feel oppressed and hopeless.

What can we do to turn it around? Some people get political, join social lobbies, write letters, join voluntary boards or anything else they can dream up to try and improve the system. Meanwhile their personal lives, their own inner systems are totally inflated, out of control and imbalanced. Its a common pattern I have encountered during my years working as an administrator in various environmental organisations. Sometimes incredibly good willed people spend so much energy trying to clean up other people's mess that they neglect their dysfunctional self.
Until I embraced the idea of downshifting and voluntary simplicity I waisted a lot of my energy on movements that were trying to change the system by force; though PR, lobbying, telemarketing, hassling people on street.

Voluntary simplicity offers a much gentler approach to these issues and it is radically changing the system, but you may not even notice it. It's a subtle and silent power that is changing the way we live from the ground up. Its not about making people feel terribly guilty about the way they live. There's more than enough outlets for that, programs like Carbon Cops on the ABC are good examples of guilt driven, change by force. Downshifting offers us a way of becoming better managers of our lives so that we get to experience more of what we truly want in life. It's about shedding the shallow skin and the shadow self by accessing something deeper and more authentic.

How does this deeper authentic downshifting self respond to the housing crisis? What creative approach can we dream up and apply NOW without having to wait for the system or the economy to become more friendly? Firstly, it may be necessary to change our thinking about the so called “crisis” and see the situation in a more positive light. It may be time to remind ourselves that incredible shifts in perception can come out of hard times, and that this shift works to our advantage. The Great Depression is a good example of this. Most of us think of the Great Depression as a terrible time of hardship and desperation. Whist we shouldn't trivialize the suffering and loss that people experienced during the Great Depression books like “The Myth of the Great Depression” by David Potts,
http://www.amazon.fr/Myth-Great-Depression-David-Potts/dp/1920769846
highlight that the struggle to survive provided many with a sense of purpose, even a happiness, absent from more affluent times. The loss of wealth encouraged a kind of downshifting by default where people experienced a flowering of the human spirit; the joy of sharing, of growing and collecting food together and the joy of authentic comradary where keeping up with the Jones was no longer relevant, where the idea of owning and possessing more and more material things became obsolete.

I'm not saying we should all celebrate poverty and never aim for anything more, but what I am saying is that difficult times do not prevent us from being creative and dreaming up new ways of living.

If you're a young person like me on a low-middle income, then you are in a great position to challenge old ideas about the way we live and create new ways that will empower us through this time of economic imbalance. I'm actually very excited about what I call the new wave of creative living: where people find creative living models which strengthen the community spirit (and their personal bank accounts).

One model that is emerging is cooperative housing, where multiple people buy into and manage a house or development. Whilst many associate cooperative housing with the hippy communes of the 60s, new working examples are demonstrating how this model is being embraced by the wider community. At the time of writing this article, I received an unexpected email from a friend containing a link to a recent radio national article on cooperative housing (what a synchronicity!)

You can view the article here:
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/saturday/stories/s1471720.htm

Alan Saunders interviewed Mark Snell, from Equilibrium Community Ecology Incorporated who has researched many aspects of affordable housing. To get an idea of how housing cooperatives can work the article uses the example of Moora Moora, a successful housing cooperative in Healesville Victoria that has been running for 30 years.

“Moora Moora is a co-operative which owns 600 acres, and I use acres because there are 60 people there, and so that there’s a notional ratio of one adult to every 10 acres. And fortuitously, across the road there are 10-acre blocks in a sub-division, so there is a cost comparison that we can make. The shareholding in Moora Moora to buy in, and this is for land only, is $14,500. If you look across the road, properties there sell for anywhere up to half a million dollars, depending on what is on the property. But certainly the ratio is somewhere between 10 and 20 times the price that it costs to buy into Moora Moora"

I was fascinated by Moora Moora and had a thorough look through their website. It's a great inspiration. http://mooramoora.org.au/
Drawing inspiration from the Moora Moora community, Mark Snell is currently part of an eco-housing coop in progress on the central coast of NSW. Once the cooperative receives full council and planning approval 100 adults and their children will cooperatively purchase100 acres and build a development with private and shared facilities. The property and development will be collectively managed by the people.

Coops need not only be in rural areas. There are many successful coops in urban USA, see
http://www.americanculturalexpress.com/subpageCCcon3.html
http://coopvillage.coop/index.html
http://coopvillage.coop/hillmanHC/index.html
These coops are mainly apartment buildings owned by all where members have their own apartment and access to a number of shared facilities such as recreation rooms, laundries and gardens. Although the return on investment may not be as high as a commercial building, members at least get their money back if they decide to leave, unlike renting.
I also found a great example of a student housing coop in urban Sydney see http://www.stucco.soc.usyd.edu.au/

These cooperatives demonstrate how people have empowered themselves by setting a vision for how they want to live despite monetary or economic limitations. Housing cooperatives are just one way people are creating affordable housing opportunities but there are many other possibilities. I encourage you to send me your ideas, comments and feedback. Here I hope we can continue to dream up new creative ways of living.