The Whole Big Family

I love alternative building books!  I have always loved building things and dreaming of building things.  For fun, I would spend hours and hours designing "my future house", complete with fountain/waterslide in the living room. 

The first substantial alternative building book I read was "The Hand-Sculpted House", all about building with cob (a clay mud, sand, straw mixture)!  Like I have found is true for most alternative building books, it was not only a book for building, but a philosophical book for life!  I love the things I learn from these books!




Then there are Michael Reynolds' earthships, made out of dirt pounded into old tires.  I love how his book starts out with beings of light finding incapatability with other living things in humans, and deciding to become human in order to influence us.  Beautiful spirituality.  I will never forget the picture I saw of divers in the ocean, completely surrounded by old tires, as Reynolds testified that these were the building materials currently readily available on earth.




Birdwings

  Your grief for what you've lost lifts a mirror
    up to where you are bravely working.
  Expecting the worst, you look, and instead,
    here's the joyful face you've been wanting to see.
 Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
    If it were always a fist or always stretched open,
    you would be paralysed.
 Your deepest presence is in every small
 contracting and expanding,
   the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated
    as birdwings.

  From The Essential Rumi Coleman Barks with John Moyne - See more at:
http://allspirit.co.uk/rumibirdwings.html



And the poetry of Rumi, that I only accidentally found when looking for more books on  Ceramic houses by Nader Khalili.  I love Nader's writing as well, and found it very enjoyable to read "Sidewalks on the Moon" with my son.  It is a book about his life, including his upbringing in Iran.  It was so nice to be able to see into his life and culture (his writing really pulls you in), especially right now with all the people with guns over there. 

        

But my favorite architectural book, as far as spiritual philosophy, is not necessarily an alternative building methods book.  True, it does bemoan the state of affairs that have brought us to unused mowed lawns surrounding suffocatingly monotonous ticky tacky houses.  But it is not about building with mud, garbage, or even underground.  It is about what is built, the way the design of a building affects our whole lives. 

                            

Here it talks of the kitchen as the soul of the house.  How a large friendly kitchen is important for happiness in life.  How preparing food together is just as important as eating food together, and how the atmosphere a home creates around a table can make people want to linger, and turn eating food from a chore that is quickly done, to an experience that changes your whole life.  
Gordon Neufeld goes further to explain how parents being the source of food for their children, strengthens the family relationship.  This is hard in the culture of this time and place to imagine that we are the source of anything for our children.  Food, knowledge, entertainment, is all promoted as needing to be instantly available to everybody.  But missing in it all is love.  I used to think that I was indoctrinating my kids with a love of books and reading, because when I really sit down and spend time with them that we both enjoy, it is when we are reading books together.  But this is no more a means of indoctrination than mealtimes together are.  In the chaos of rapidly changing cultures that is accelerating in our modern reality, family naturally still finds its crevices to hold on to.  And the actions we perform, without need to analyze and judge them as healthy or not, naturally fulfill the roles our children need them to.

Yesterday we all got in the car together as what the toddlers refer to as "the whole big family".  It was just a short drive to the library before it closed for the night, but it was my most enjoyable experience of the day.  When we are all in the car together, we don't have outside distractions.  We talk and laugh and joke together, and a calmness and security settles over even the most begrudging siblings who have fought that day, and we realize how much we really like being together, how much we really love each other.

Toilet Paper Stores

One more Christmas story, even though societal conventions say "It's not Christmas anymore!"

Well, I haven't taken my Christmas decorations down yet.  It is still dark more than it is light, and Christmas is partly the celebration of it being dark and how beautiful lights look in that dark.  Besides, this story is relevant to right now, for much the same reason that keeping Christmas lights up is a good idea!

There are certain stores that sell millions of plastic bottles, cardboard boxes, and metal twisty ties.  Then they package these things all up for you in plastic bags that hurt the environment just as much as disposable diapers, and send them home for you to have the fossil fuel burning garbage truck drive by each week to haul away, (hopefully to be burned at hight temperatures to create fume free electricity or at least to a landfill, but too often to be thrown raw into the ocean.)

We call these stores "toilet paper stores" because they are very good if you want to buy something "disposable" that lasts as long as toilet paper.  They are also actually very good  places to buy toilet paper itself for really cheap if you like getting your exercise for the day by walking over car fume smelling asphalt.  And toilet paper is nice.  There are some times when you just want to have toilet paper around.  Nice soft cotton reusable wipes that actually get you clean the first time, and that you can get wet if you need to, are called family cloth for a reason.  And there are some people that it is probably best if they don't use a bidet.  So when you have company over, and you don't do THAT kind of laundry for company, providing them with soft dead clear cut trees, is sometimes not only really convenient, but a life saver. 



http://hyenacart.com/WindyWillowPond/mt/3343/42503/Willow-Wipes-Family-Cloth-Baby-Wipes-in-Floral-mix

Off subject note here on family cloth for even, or especially for those that know all too well that you can't get toilet paper with food stamps.  I go and buy old big  100% cotton T-shirts from Goodwill or some other second hand store.  Then I cut the front off and the back off, and these are the perfect size and a good shape (though not exactly rectangular) for a flat cloth diaper.  Because it is knit, and because I am good at breaking sewing machines, and because I don't have time, I don't even bother to sew the edges to keep them from unraveling.  I've used them for years, and they get holes in them before they unravel.  These also make good runny nose rags.  No matter how the commercials say they improve paper, soft cotton will not rip the skin off your nose like paper does.  They are almost as versatile as a receiving blanket.  It you get big enough T-shirts, you can even use them for a receiving blanket for a newborn, at least for a couple of weeks depending of course on how big the baby is ;)

And the sleeves left over make wonderful family cloth.  T-shirts without plastic words and pictures painted all over them, work the best.  You can usually get them for a dollar or two, and sometimes stores even will have a whole bag of them marked down as bulk!

One time I was buying a whole bunch and the checkout lady was obviously perturbed.  I got the overwhelming feeling from her that she had seen much better times financially and was feeling sorry for herself for being so down on her luck that she had to work at a thrift store.  She was probably a little more than hungry as well.  I call it skinny.  When you don't eat a lot because you want to save money.  There is a certain tense tired feeling that always accompanies you when you are like this. 

Anyway, she was almost making fun of me for being frivolous and buying so many shirts that she could probably not afford.  "Oh, you're husband will have lots and lots of shirts for work!"  I didn't want to embarrass her so I didn't tell her that "my husband" hadn't held a steady job in years (and years) and that I had saved my pennies to be able to buy these shirts so I would no longer have to end up in tears in the middle of the night when my babies were crying while I desperately tried to get creative in finding something to keep them dry.  She reminded me so much of myself.  I am so like that, thinking only my lot in life is desperate.  Seeing others' lives as easy, and grossly misinterpreting both.

So, the Christmas memory.  It was Christmas Eve and it had been dark and dreary outside all week with lots of biting wind and no snow to play in.  Just no fun.  The small town we lived in had no indoor place to play.  Our house was 800 square feet if you counted the overly drafty "enclosed" back porch.  This, combined with lots of energetic little kids made for bad cabin fever.  We had even taken blankets and books out to the car and climbed all over in it (as it was at least sheltered from the wind), for a change of scenery.  And this is with owning coats and socks to use for mittens.  At times like this, I always wondered what they did in the olden days or in other countries in smaller houses than ours, without modern snow/cold gear.

We had no money, so we didn't have to worry about buying Christmas presents.  So I loaded all the kids up, and took them to the local toilet paper store.  It was large!  It was warm!  It was filled with bright lights, toys, and Christmas music!  It was the best idea I'd ever had.

So we spent all day warm and happily wandering up and down the isles.  Staring at toys for hours as our imaginations filled us.  How many trips to the store have I not had time to dawdle as much as my kids wanted me to?  We dawdled.  We enjoyed every minute of Christmas. 

I started to feel sorry for the other shoppers.  If we had had money, I too would have tried to leave the babies home while I went Christmas shopping "for" them.  I too would not have time to listen to their animated talk as they decided what each doll was thinking.  I too would not have gently touched each Christmas plant, and marveled at the softness of the sleeves of baby Christmas outfits.

It is so much fun to not have any money.  It is so much more relaxing than having a little money.  When you don't have any money, you don't even have to pay attention to the sales, because any price is more than you can afford.

After all these years, that Christmas Eve is still one of our favorite Christmas memories.  

Now when we shop for Christmas, we all go, and one parent feeds the imagination, while the other one plays sneaky ninja Santa's Elf!