The power of pie
Gaja’s story
Photo & text: Berit Indset
Its equinox 2012. A feeling that everything can happen from this point on. Its time to set intentions and make a jump into the unknown and see where it leads. She is ready. Listening. Feeling. Touching. Fast and slow, as intentions lead her from Stonehenge to little, sleepy Molkom in Sweden. Welcome to Gajas world, where rocks, the water, the wind and the forest all have important messages to share.
An intention set in sacred ceremony may have started it all, but actually it was one of her delicious raw pies that really is to ‘blame’. As she was working as a raw-food chef at a festival in her home country Holland, one of Gaja’s delicious pieces found its way into an Ängsbackatarians mouth. Ängsbacka wanted to upgrade their kitchen and café to welcome more raw and special diet food and was looking for volunteers that could come stay for a while. She applied and later went up to meet the crew that was supposed to be her family for the coming winter.
“I came there in the middle of this amazing festival energy. People were saying – Oh, Gaja you are here! Welcome! – I was just flabbergasted and wondering how they could welcome me with so much love and theses amazing hugs. I was convinced. Of course I wanted to come back here!”
Gaja talks enthusiastically about the wealth of resources that are available in the community that can offer both practical, emotional, psychological and physical support. Gaja herself does a lot of exchanges where her aromatherapy or ceremonies is gifted back through a massage, a healing or some help with a project.
“If I’m facing something or have a problem, I know who to call.”
There was, however, one missing piece of the giving and receiving loop between the extended community, the volunteers and Ängsbacka as a whole. Gaja explains with passion how the force of motherhood took over in the continuation of her intentions coming to flourish and the questions of how to care for the next generations of “Ängsbackatarians” were really stirring in the community. How could the vision of Ängsbacka as a place to grow and heal become an everyday model for all the children that were now growing up in and around Molkom? When her son was one year old the idea of starting a preschool came up among parents connected to Ängsbacka. Gaja felt called to join this initiative.
“We have several generations now that have been raised to be a part of a market. But what we need now are children that feel connected to nature, connected with the Earth, a new wave of consciousness that will support harmony and life on earth. Life is so sacred.”
And meeting Gaja’s son Roan and his friends, there seems to me to be an extra spark in the eyes of the children of Backa kindergarten and Free school. And also (I have no proof to back this up with,) I feel pretty sure that reflecting upon the ethics of eating meat and how calves are taken away from their mothers at birth is not the average conversation between 4 years old. For Gaja’s son and his friend, this was something worth discussing. The school project stands as a witness of the power of the extended community to evolve in symbioses with as well as beyond Ängsbacka course centre.
Being a course centre, Ängsbacka, of course, has a lot of people coming and going. The extended community has been a great recourse for Ängsbacka’s development as there is a continuation in the ideas and initiatives that flow in. Since we live here the ideas can actually be manifested. Then these people and projects also can support the volunteers.
Gaja speaks about how Ängsbacka is and can continue to grow as a safe heaven to come to honour our connection the land, the water, our ancestors and ourselves and hence lead as a model of how we live our lives, speak our truths and raise and educate our children. As her vision broadens her energy lifts as well, as my mind floats in to fill the empty space created by the expansion of our conversation. We are not talking about Gaja anymore, or about Ängsbacka, nor the extended community. This vision is bigger. It becomes evident that that step into the unknown through a clear intention set in 2012 is still mysteriously unwrapping its gifts to Gaja via Ängsbacka the extended community and the birthing of Backa free school. This story is not over.
