Building Things That Fall Apart

It never fails, ever since we've started building with cordwood and other materials on our place this philosophy and image comes to mind. It also has kept me from strangling my kids.

"In the village, people used to build their houses out of traditional materials, using no iron or lumber or nails, but the houses were magnificent. Many were sewn together out of bark and fiber. Like the house of the body, the house that a person sleeps in must be very beautiful and sturdy, but not so sturdy that it won’t fall apart after a while. If your house doesn’t fall apart, then there will be no reason to renew it. And it is this renewability that makes something valuable. The maintenance gives it meaning.

"The secret of village togetherness and happiness has always been the generosity of the people, but the key to that generosity is inefficiency and decay. Because our village huts were not built to last very long, they had to be regularly renewed. To do this, villagers came together, at least once a year, to work on somebody’s hut. When your house was falling down, you invited all the folks over. The little kids ran around messing up what everybody was doing. The young women brought the water. The young men carried the stones. The older men told everybody what to do, and the older women told the older men that they weren’t doing it right. Once the house was back together again, everyone ate together, praised the house, laughed, and cried. In a few days, they moved on to the next house. In this way, each family’s place in the village was reestablished and remembered. This is how it always was.

"Then the missionaries and the businessmen and the politicians brought in tin and lumber and sturdy houses. Now the houses last, but the relationships don’t."--Martin Prechtel in The Sun Magazine

Mow the Roof?

Yesterday a reader wrote and asked for a cordwood update (For those of you who don't know my family and I built a cordwood house a few years back). Over the years I have considered writing up an essay, or perhaps even a book, about our cordwood building experience. Right now, given how busy I am with the life's demands, I'm going to stick to with the occasional small post on this blog. I have a small window of time to write in the morning, and that's usually a couple of hours before the sun comes up. Perhaps some day I will have more time to sit down and put together some thing more significant.

The question we are most often asked about our cordwood house is: Do you put goats up there to mow your roof? First, all parties involved chuckle, then one of us goes on to answer no. I can only imagine what sort of catastrophe would materialize with such an endeavor. My biggest fear would be a goat falling off the edge of our house and hanging itself. Or every time the goat stepped out to the edge to take a bite of grass we'd lose some of our roof.

I think mowing it would defeat the purpose. The longer grass helps keep the dirt moist. And plus I really don't like to mow grass

Meditation in the Morning

This morning before going out to work on the cordwood house, I chose to turn on the computer and meditate. Whenever I think of meditation or hear it mentioned, I picture a person sitting cross-legged humming for hours on end. Well, not no more. Kurt Vonnegut has offered us a different perspective on what it means to meditate.

"Literature is holy to me […] Meditation is holy to me, for I believe that all the secrets of existence and non existence are somewhere in our heads - or in other people's heads.

And I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found.

By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well.

This to me is a miracle." Kurt Vonnegut

The Earth Roof is Done

A week before the snow fell we finished up our earth roof. It took us about 8 days to complete this. I have no idea how many buckets we hoisted up there. It had to have been thousands, it sure felt like thousands. And we couldn't have done it without the help of family and friends.

Fifteen Panels Done

We have fifteen panels done and one more to go. More pictures coming soon.

Teaching and Building

We're in the process of building a cordwood house right now, and I'm interested in the methods of teaching tracking and nature awareness through mentoring. So, I think this quote by Ran Prieur is absolutely essential to keep in mind for both of these activities.

In hindsight, it would have been better for my hut-building project if I'd never read any books about building, or accepted any technical advice... because instructions destroy motivation. The best teachers understand this, and don't instruct their students at all but seduce them into figuring things out on their own. How-to books, nine times out of ten, are not an aid in doing but a substitute for doing -- the spiritual energy gets burned up in the imagining. And now I'm almost at a dead end, because so many ways of building have been killed for me by reading about them. The only way I can proceed is to do something that (as far as I know) is totally new.