Hello: Andrew Winter | Retreat Owner
Andrew along with his wife Vonetta and their two children Joshua and Eloise discovered Vale de Moses in 2007 and they have spent the years since working together with local artesans to restore the houses and nourish the forest landscape into a family home and yoga retreat.
Envisioning new possibilities for 2023 and beyond:
I am an earthling in human form. (I sense I probably chose to be…) Born and conditioned in the melting pot of London to a social justice campaigner mum and chaplin counsellor dad. Both teachers and activists for equality and community empowerment their whole lives. And gardeners.
While at university in Leeds studying sports and business, I met Vonetta who was studying Anthropology at the LSE in London. (We may well have first met in her island of Barbados as 17 year olds while I was on a school cricket tour there - same beaches same times never spoke.) We married straight after graduating and began a new life together in London.
As students we had no money. Just debts! And hearts full of dreams. Idealists. Romantics. After a couple of years working and saving, we bought an old London ruin with the biggest mortgage we could find and moved in one week before Joshua was born with no idea how to do it up. All that exuberant naievety of youth. But we did it. We made a beautiful home and garden in New Cross, with a yoga studio and acupuncture clinic in the basement level out to the gardens. And we felt very much part of our local community there for 10 years. My professional work was communications, advertising. After Eloise was born, I wanted to be closer to home, so I set up my own design agency round the corner in Deptford.
When the time came for us to consider pastures new for our family to grow, we took a whole year off as a family to go round southern europe in a motorhome with our dog Moses. Maybe we’d find something, some other way of living we could learn. An alternative. We were anthropoligists on the curious search for paradise. For freedom.
Looking back 16 years later I would now say we were Fugitives. Not from war or persecution or famine. But from the colonial project known as London. We were looking for a chance to live outside the system. Less dependent on it for our employment, food, energy, education, health. And more equal. Less unequal. While at the same time, being unsure of what that paradise looked like or even if it could be found. Just dreams. Of what might be possible.
We found it. Actually our golden retreiver Moses found it. 2007. An adondoned farm that had been called Moses for 250 years. Once again, with no clue how to restore a farm. Just an amalgam of scenes experienced and hoped would be possible, overlaid on top of ruins in real time. Vision on top of reality.
16 years on, most of that vision we first saw and played with, has now been built and exists. The future we had imagined might be possible, happened. What we imagine is possible, is possible. For us, we had to sell everything we owned and leave all the people we loved in order to make that vision manifest.
In 2023, we are still dreaming, imagining, planning and nurturing new futures into existence. Our kids have finished their uni studies and have moved back home to Vale de Moses with their partners and all eyes are on our first grandchild Elijah - 1 years old and immediately our future visions are compelled to incorporate a safe, whole, nourishing world for him to grow up in.
It's my absolute pleasure to welcome people to Vale de Moses, to share what is here. What has always been here. A beautiful spinning planet beneath our feet that supports a phenomenal amount of diversity and senstive intelligence embedded in continually cocreating, mutually beneficial ecosystems. Including the ecosystems known as you and me.
We share quite a beautiful and rare spaceship hurtling through the universe with all the very best intelligent, adaptive and resilient life systems - researched, developed and practiced for 4 billion years - already built-in to the spaceship. Built into you.
The earthling in me, sees the earthling in you. Hi.
