According to some statistic, in 2009 the world’s population shifted to more than fifty per cent living in an urban environment for the first time in human history.

There was an expert talking on the BBC, a podcast, recently about the ‘Environmentalist Movement’ and how it was lacking a Dr.King style ‘dream’. Most scenarios for the future of an environment that supports humans seem to be apocalyptic. This includes the most ardent climate change deniers.

It’s normal now; visiting our village neighbours along pathways through the woods, how pathways develop , like synapses, when we move to a new pitch. The wonder of the children having a clear space to explore, away from the road, on the earth, by the creek, around the fire.

Kayla, the kids and I went up to the summer lands last week and drove to the snow. We walked up to our spot from the summer before last. The snow is still deep in places and we’re keen to start moving up, as soon as we can get in.

-Ande

Thanks to all of our readers and to all those who’ve left comments. We have plenty of excuses why we’re not writing on this blog much these days, mostly around old slow computers and internet access. We like feedback and if we can inspire others to live a more empowered and accountable life then we will be inspired too.

Somehow it became spring after a mild winter here. Population of the village has gone down and up. This winter we’ve been living close to our last winter spot, on the same ranch which is also the same for the summer spot. Personally I’d like to move as soon as the snow is gone. We’re in good relation with the land owners and in a recent circle one of the land owners expressed that he feels more like a caretaker or custodian. This feels good to us and on a level of basic manifestation means we have all that we ask for.

The Big Lodge is up, and is being used for circles, yoga and general gathering.

Rogue Dwellings has kept busy all winter and this year we had a borrowed wood stove in the shop. It’s been well cosy.

-Ande

July

The sweet scent of cedar. Towering pines. Hollowed stumps where old growth once grew. Bird song. Stillness. Endless vast oceans of mountains. jade, emerald, golden and blue. Ancient medicine, wild and pure. Distant flcikering lights remind us. we are here for our children. we are here for ourselves. we are here for eachotherstay wild. stay free.

-Leaf

Long and Full Summer Days

Post by Ande:

July, days have been long and full and recently it started to get hot, apparently in the high nineties in town and maybe ten degrees cooler at home. We came down last night to see the independence day fireworks, main pretext for the kids, although Rowan wasn’t that bothered and a little intimidated and Isla less so.

The garden is starting to take off, we had a late frost over  the solstice weekend and the tomatoes and peppers had a hard time.

The chicken project is coming along and eggs have started arriving from the big hens, over concerns of a couple of eggs getting eaten by a hen. It hasn’t become a habit and we’ll see how it develops…

It’s been busy in the workshop, sewing and harvesting, peeling poles.

We’ve been having issues with dogs; some people wanting to bring dogs and others wanting to live dog-free. Contention being willingly worked through is an incredibly good feeling and strengthens relationships within the community.

Neither Kayla or I have written much about this but as a community our intention for expansion is to own land, which is a contradiction because none of us feel that owning land is ethical…so, to work with this the vision is to ‘liberate’ land with a few solid principles; the Land Trust will own all community land. Trust land will never again be sold. Land under The Trust will be dedicated to all who are inspired to live off the road in low impact movable dwellings. This is a basic skeleton and will need some fleshing out with important principles like moving twice a year, staying free of chainsaws, tractors and avoiding the laying of foundations, pouring concrete.

A few pictures that can probably say more than my words…

We’ve moved to a new spot for the summer, close to where we were last summer but deeper into the woods and down a really rough track with muddy spots that will occasionally hold on to any unsuspecting vehicle.

Just about settled in now, the village moved maybe a month ago we’ve been working hard moving stuff, getting the workshop going and making beds and planting. There is some really rich looking soil so we’ll see how things grow. Short growing season at the elevation where we are.

Last week, during the rain, the Big Lodge went up in a really beautiful spot.  Big Lodge expands the whole community, gives us a common place to gather and a place to accommodate visitors.

A new young couple turned up, expecting, and they spoke about looking for a place to bring  new life into the world. They seem really happy and have been working on poles for their new lodge. It’s a good feeling for me remembering a little over a year ago, living in people’s back yard, tipi living out of context, trying to find a place to just be able to live simply on the earth and realising that, in spite of the amount of wilderness in this country, there seems to be few people who are inspired to live in it. or more like the place wasn’t existing, because it would be incredibly difficult to live like this alone and isolated as a single family. Now we all seem to have found it; the place being the people as much as the land.

The deeper we move  into the woods  the more we learn the difference between isolation and remoteness. As previously mentioned, living in a back yard, in town, in the winter, in a tipi, with kids, surrounded by people in buildings can be incredibly isolating. Tipis are lonely on their own and make little sense out of context. Why would anyone want  to be out in the cold and damp or, moving more into the summer, heat and dry, when there are climate-controlled buildings just sitting there waiting to be used.

We move with intention and it takes intention to get where we are. It can be a lot when it’s raining and you’re stuck in the mud and you just want to go home after a trip into town. But the air is clear, except when there is a pollen storm and everything gets covered in a layer of yellow dust. There is a whole new environment for the kids to explore and it’s incredibly rejuvinating to have a fresh pitch and it’s relieving to know that the place where we just left gets to have a rest and recover from being lived on. It feels good to move twice a year. Makes sense.

Wood is Good

Coming home through shin deep snow with a hefty piece of oak on one shoulder and a bow saw on the other, after walking under one of those Turner skies through gently undulating forests of mostly oak with some evergreen madrone and a few random conifers. The oak is dry next to my face and I can feel the soft moss, usnea, on my face. Deer, rabbit, even mouse trails winding through the snow, and now my big boot prints. The smell of smoke as I get closer to home, the sound of our kids. Kayla chopping some wood, stepping inside and suddenly our den is cosy and alive. A big fat feeder of green oak heads the hearth and the fire steadily and magnanimously provides the centre of our circle, home, lives.

This has been the flavour of this winter for me. As I count, it’s been something like my sixteenth living like this and it is ‘living like this’ because it’s a conscious choice. Daily. And it feels fresh and new, daily. It’s not like I sit down every day and think,’Hmmm, what shall I do today…I know, live in a tipi.’ I’m trying to make a distinction between people born into a simple life and me, born into a complicated (industrialised) life and knowing the difference, a bit.

I’m glad that my kids can see the horizon. It’s important to me, something that I can give them. It struck me in a movie called Mongolian Ping Pong (a great film, highly recommended). The main characters are children, Mongolian, and one scene stays in my mind of a boy sitting contemplating the steppe. He’s probably about nine or ten and it’s only coming from an environment of closed in buildings that I can recognise the longing of ‘my’ nine year old boy to have some stillness, unchanging and expansive distance inside of me.

What we’re doing is radical, it seems. Not because we’re living an aesthetic life, the most incredibly beautiful life we can dream up, more because we’re turning away from the material life that we might be expected to live (a family with two children in the USA).

Before enlightenment- carrying wood, fetching water. After enlightenment- carrying wood, fetching water.

After all these years walking through the woods with (or without) a bow saw I still feel like I’m going out looking for wood for the first time. There is always something new, different to find. Maybe it’s because the wood is always in a different place. I don’t know what I’d do with myself without the daily practice of getting wood. A recent realisation has brought me to the understanding that more than live in a tipi, we live around the fire. The tipi happens to be a really good way of keeping the weather off at the same time as letting the smoke out.

I don’t want to fall into the trap of explaining myself here. I’m trying to just write beautiful and inspiring words. I love that our home is movable but that’s not the point. I love that our home isn’t trying to create a separate bubble from it’s environment; that it works with the water, fire, air and is on the ground. It’s also not the point. Neither that we “sleep on the earth and shit in a hole in the ground”.

Through living a wholly physically accountable life, I can begin to recognise the spiritual in me. It’s easier to know what is real when I’m sat on the ground around the fire with my family. Wood, water, food and then, anything else is a bonus…

Ande

on ground and in circle together

Four bodies moving.

A sacred familial circle dance.

Relationships grounded and integrated.

Becoming a mother and a tipi dweller happened synchronistically for me.  I give thanks for this.  I am a better mother because of my home.  We live on the same level and it is because of this that my experience of intimacy with my family deepens further than I imagined possible.

Isla sleeps wrapped in her basket through the sounds of onions cooking on a crackling fire, the chopping of wood and the crashing of Rowan’s tall block towers he builds over and over.  You might think our home is small, only 19′ in diameter, but really it’s much bigger than that.  Our roof is the sky and our floor is the earth.

There’s no “child proofing” a tipi, thankfully.  With fire and jagged hearth stones in the middle, a bow saw and hatchet in the wood pile at the door and kitchen knives on the food box, everything is available to the little ones.  It’s tough to hide something from them (which can be annoying when I want to stuff my face with chocolate).  I think it helps them to develop a strong awareness of their surroundings, a slow and cautious way of moving in the world and a solid sense of trust in themselves.

They get to be a part of entire cycles of things.  We’ll go out amongst the trees to get wood, come back to break and saw it up, stack it inside the lodge, make a fire with it, keep the fire going to heat a bucket of water, wash the dirty dishes with it, bring them inside for food preparation, maintain the fire, cook a meal etc.  They get to experience things directly.  Wood for the fire comes from the trees, water for washing comes from the creek, water for drinking comes from the spring, fire for cooking comes from the wood we gather and so on.  I can imagine it would make sense to a child.

I have heard that our homes are reflections of ourselves.

Kayla

Elimination Communication

I never imagined that being in tune with another persons bowel movements would be so rewarding.  Rowan was completely out of diapers at 18 months.  I can imagine Isla being done with them even earlier than that, if we’re on top of it.  If you’ve never heard of this concept, it’s something like this.  Parents choosing to be aware of a babies need to eliminate waste (pee and poo) and associating cues to these bodily functions.  Eventually a baby will learn the associations and learn to eliminate on cue.  There are many benefits to this practice.  I find that I feel a stronger connection, a deeper bond with my children when I am aware of their bodies needs.  Isla wears diapers on a really cold day at home or when I find it difficult to stay in tune with her like on a trip to town.  It’s times after she’s been wearing a diaper for awhile that I realize how much closer I feel to her when she isn’t wearing one.  It makes sense to me.  I mean no offense in this to the diaper wearers out there.  I am puzzled how children can poo and pee in their pants (diaper) when they are old enough to talk.  “Elimination communication” isn’t a new concept, it’s actually ancient, and not really a concept at all but a practical and wholesome way of being with your children.  The whole “potty trained” diaper culture is the new concept.  And I think it takes more ‘work’ trying to convince a toddler to use a potty than using one from the very beginning.  We’ve been up to our chins in poo but it’s been worth it.  Who knew poo could bring two people so close. For more information on all this visit www.diaperfreebaby.org

Kayla

Big brother

I woke this morning with a child on either side, as usual.  We sleep this way so that I can protect Isla from Rowan’s wiggling about in the night.  We all woke up together laying there in silence, gazing up at the sunlight coming in through the smoke flaps.  Isla let out her first sound of the day, letting Rowan know she was awake.  He sat up, excited to see his sister.  And his first words of the day were “I wanna be next to her, you cook”.  And my first sound of the morning was a good belly laugh, being kicked out of bed by my son to make breakfast.  She lights up in the mornings when he sits up and leans over me to stroke her face.  The two of them are beautiful to watch.  He watches out for her, taking small chokables from her, telling her hot when she reaches for the cast iron, shouting for me when she falls over while they’re hanging out, offering her toy after toy when she is upset, the newest, teaching her sign language.  He cracks her up.  His running around and playing peek-a-boo are what really get her going.  Or maybe it’s the raspberries on her belly.  The other day our neighbor friend Violet was running straight for our lodge, coming over to play.  Rowan ran out to her saying “STOP! Isla is sleeping!”  He wasn’t going to let her in and so the two of them played outside.

Family.  It’s the greatest part of my life.

Kayla