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Leaving Hollywood
to be closer to Mother Nature hasn’t just improved Ian Somerhalder’s life, it has improved his kids’ lives as well.
The Vampire Diaries
alum recently opened up about the benefits he’s found living and working on a farm over the last few years, and how he’s passing the lessons he learned growing up in Louisiana to his own two children.
« What my parents taught us very early is, if you look around, there is a balance in nature. If you give back as much or more than you take, then you will find an enormous bounty of health and happiness and success and all these things that people want and dream,” Somerhalder, 45, recently told
E! News
.
« That’s what we teach our kids and our friends teach their kids, is to be respectful of the balance and really appreciate that balance and live that balance. And with that balance comes boundless harmony and boundless food and energy and fun and all those things that we want, but you can’t just take and take and take. It doesn’t work. »
Somerhalder and his wife Nikki Reed
left their acting careers behind
a few years ago and moved their kids to a farm in California. Though they experienced « a lot of failure » as they transitioned to being farmers, they now produce almost all their own food.
« You learn. Some of the things that you try and plant may not work, but other ones do, » Somerhalder said. « And then you get into this system of when the kids are involved and you and then your community’s involved, and then you find yourself living this really cool sharing, bartering system with your neighbors. »
« People have some corn, and I’ve got beans,” the Covington native explained. “And it’s just very cool. It’s like the way it used to be done … and I’m not trying to sound like sort of incendiary or anything, but to me, it’s far more gratifying and feels way more elevated than being all fancy, which is fun too, but at the end of the day, this is where the rubber meets the road and it’s connective. »