Money-Free
THE BOOK
What if money was no longer the driving force behind our choices?
In Money-Free, Evi Maes takes you on a radical, vulnerable and wondrous journey. She shows you what it means to say goodbye to financial security, to surrender to the undercurrent of life, and to reconnect with nature, community and yourself.
This book is not a manual, a success story or a spiritual trick. It is a lived testimony of trial and error, of abundance and scarcity, of deep silence and inner freedom.
Money appears along the way as a character, a shadow and a mirror - until it finds its place.
With clear insights, personal stories and sharp questions, Money-Free invites you to feel for yourself: What determines your choices? What is really of value? And do you dare to live beyond what the system dictates?
210 pages - paperback - printed on quality sustainable FSC/PEFC paper - with beautiful illustrations and poetry.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Evi Maes
Evi runs the nonprofit organization In line with nature with her husband Matthias. Together they are committed to a new economy in southern Spain, where people are more important than money.
They grow some of their own food and make Spain a little greener again by applying natural farming. They support young people and local projects, and they inspire others. By their own way of life, they are an example that another way of life is possible.
All their projects are offered on a give what you want or minimum donation basis.
All proceeds from the book go to In line with nature.
BEAUTIFUL WORDS
From Matthias
Reading Evi's personal story stirred up a lot. Questions that I recognized and that also lived in me. Some consciously and some unconsciously. At one point there was the question “Why is there even money?” Not like a question that goes through your mind for a moment and to which you give a mental answer and then move on. It felt like the question hit me somewhere, but I didn't know exactly where. That this question was there implied that there was something deeper. Beyond the fleetingness of everything and everything I took for granted.
I got into a conversation with Evi about it. We talked about how you can be a slave to the system and that you can resist it. But also that something else is possible. Something beyond the promises of suddenly becoming rich, suddenly being free, suddenly ... one day ... But what is that? “I can feel it when I talk about it,” she said. “But it's hard to put into words.” Then what is it?
Silence. When everything falls away for a moment and is still there at the same time.
Evi's story describes how, as a child, she assumed that everything was possible for everyone. A knowing that flooded with time, but was still there.
Starting in 2018, I became part of the adventure Evi describes. We experienced what it is like to make choices together about the basics in life. We thought alike at the core, but in the execution we ran into ourselves and each other. We wanted to break free from the system and at the same time we discovered how much influence it had on us. Fighting it was no solution. Surrendering to it was not a solution either. Following ideals in the hope of finding an answer was replaced by sitting in silence daily and seeing what emerged in ourselves. Plans and ambitions were replaced by what was happening in and around us in everyday life.
The conversations we had about those deeper things of life, or actually the basic things of life, but which no one talked about anymore, helped us in staying the course. Persevering and not giving up.
Matthias Arentsen