Living in a tent in the Coromandel bush while we build our off-grid cabin provides us with lessons in patience, resilience and humility.

Life here is immersive: you wake with the forest, sleep with the forest, and learn to navigate a world where humans are guests rather than masters.

In this post, I reflect on the experience of becoming one with Shambhala, a place of vast contradictions. Embracing those contradictions requires respect, attention and more than a little courage.

Building an off-grid cabin in the Coromandel bush is teaching us far more than construction skills. Surrounded by native forest, wildlife, and the daily realities of tent living, every stage of the build requires patience, adaptability, and respect for the environment.

From muddy tracks and changing weather to the sounds of ruru at night and kākā overhead at dawn, the bush shapes every part of the process.

In this post, I share the experience of slowly building our cabin at Shambhala while living closely with nature. It is a story of simplicity, resilience, and learning to work with the rhythms of the bush rather than against them, all while surrounded by the untamed beauty of the Coromandel ranges.

The possum trap had been sprung again. I knew before I even reached it. The pigs had already been, leaving only a smear of fur and disturbed leaf litter as evidence.

Fifteen possums in the first month. This is what conservation actually looks like at Shambhala, our off-grid property deep in the Coromandel bush: unglamorous, methodical, and quietly extraordinary.