For the first few weeks in England, life did feel bigger. Also smaller. Also wetter. Living in a van turns every minor logistical issue into a family meeting. Where are the socks? Who moved the pan? Why is there chili sauce in the bed?

And then, about three weeks in, we had a less poetic realization: our money was disappearing at impressive speed. Petrol, groceries, an impressive amount of pubs: the romance of mobility came with a receipt.

We also realized something else. Now that we had stripped life back to what fit on four wheels, what were we actually filling it with? Less stuff is great. But less stuff without meaning is just… space.

So we signed up for WWOOF.

If you’re unfamiliar: WWOOF stands for World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms. You work a few hours a day in exchange for food and accommodation. In theory: wholesome. In practice: humbling.

We ended up in Hastings, in an eco garden that functioned less like a farm and more like a tiny ecosystem of shared effort. Raised beds. Compostsystems. Rainwater barrels. Vegetables growing in a mildly chaotic but deeply intentional (at least that’s how it felt) way.

On my first morning, I was handed a garden fork and pointed toward a patch of earth. ‘Just loosen the soil.’

I learned two things that day:

1. Soil is heavier than it looks.
   
   
2. I knew absolutely nothing about growing food.

We weeded. We turned compost. We learned about companion planting and why slugs always win. We ate vegetables that had been in the ground hours earlier. We ate foraged mushrooms from the forest. We shared meals with strangers who quickly stopped feeling like strangers.

And slowly, something shifted. We had sold our possessions in search of freedom. In Hastings, we stumbled into something else: interdependence. Tools were shared. Food was shared. Knowledge was shared. No one owned the abundance individually. It moved through the garden and through the group.

It was the opposite of the life we had just left behind, where ownership equals security and productivity equals worth. Working there didn’t make us rich and it didn’t transform us into self-sufficient homesteaders. But it did reframe something.

Looking back, WWOOFING wasn’t about saving money – though it certainly helped. It was about discovering that meaning doesn’t necessarily expand when your life expands. Sometimes it deepens when you show up for something small and shared.

We don’t live in a van anymore. We’re no longer roaming English coastlines with compost under our fingernails. But every now and then, when life starts to feel overly optimized and slightly detached, I think about that garden in Hastings, about loosening soil, about shared dinners, about learning how little you actually need to feel useful.

And I wonder whether that was the real reason we left in the first place.

Love, Florine