After 32 years of hard work (at times, seven days a week), Jennifer and Mark Ludeman are retiring, closing their store, Ludeman's, and farm in Beaverton, Oregon, and heading for Bali. That’s right, Bali, the island province of Indonesia.

Sounds appealing, doesn’t it? Exciting? Romantic?

Yes, and it seems much more interesting than buying a home on a golf course and walking around those 18 holes day after day.

The Ludemans plan to leave for Bali before the end of November.

They’ve never been there before.

These folks are free spirits; they go where their intuition takes them.

Let’s rewind the clock to 1984. The Ludemans own a house in Lowell, Oregon, and Mark is working as a probation aid at St. Vincent’s Hospital.

“I decided to buy a rototiller,” he says. “I had two kids, no money and my wife was opposed to the idea. While she was taking a nap, I bought one on time, then I started rototilling gardens.

“I bumped into a guy who was cleaning chimneys, so I started doing that. About that time I bought the house next door and needed a wood stove. So I started selling wood stoves out of my house. I thought I could make a living doing it, so I quit my job, moved to Beaverton, and rented a building that we’re still in.

“I had a fireplace department, a patio store and a large Christmas store; I’ve done bar stools and I’ve done toys. I had three buildings next to each other and a few other buildings. I built the business to 25 employees doing $4 million a year.”

Some years later, around 2010 or so, Ludeman decided he wanted a farm. So he downsized the business a bit and started Healing Ponds farm. Jennifer and Mark and one employee run the farm. They still begin each day milking in the morning before going to work.

Healing Ponds farm is on 40 acres in Buxton; the Farm & Garden supply store is in Beaverton; both are owned by the Ludemans. Today, the fireplace, stove, patio furniture and barbecue business is nowhere near as large as it once was.

“Part of the reason is the economy,” says Mark, “plus it’s getting harder and harder to be in retail. Customers will get on their phones and price shop on the Internet right in front of you. They don’t think you’re a person. We purposely shrunk the business down so we could do some other things.

“We decided just to close the business down after doing some investigating. We found that it was going to take a long time to sell it, and we wouldn’t get a large amount out of it.”

The Ludemans have been to India seven times and to Thailand once. “I’ve always called India home," says Mark. “I’ve never felt like Oregon was home. When I tell others that I’m moving to Bali, they think I’m nuts, or brave, or they’re envious. Those are the three responses I get.”  

Mark calls himself a mystic. The dictionary says that’s “a person who seeks by contemplation and self-surrender to obtain unity with, or absorption into, the Deity or the absolute, or who believes in the spiritual apprehension of truths that are beyond the intellect.”

In Bali, 84% of the country’s 4 million people are of the Hindu faith; in India, 80% of that country’s 1.25 billion people are Hindu. The Ludemans undoubtedly will feel right at home in Bali.