Yurt Years Podcast # 1 - March 2, 1999

I had this clip languishing on the hard drive for a while. When I recorded it, I also started recording a couple of other entries and got all muddled trying to get the music to work. I was going to just delete it but I’d rather get started on it and improve as I go than wait until I get it perfect (which will never happen).

You can find the podcast here. Apologies for the sound quality. I refuse to record in the closet and am still working on the other quality issues as well. Next one will be improved.

By the way, thanks to Dave of Chub Creek for putting up “Webby”, the background music for this entry on the Podsafe Music Network.

Idea: New Podcast - Old Material

Probably the biggest source of search traffic I have on this site comes from people looking up yurt life or tips about living in a yurt. Occasionally people even write and ask a few questions. A few weeks ago I said to Sage “Wouldn’t it have been cool to have been able to do a podcast back then?” It wasn’t until last night that I realized that I could go back and make a podcast of my old entries (with a few guest entries by Sage). I’m thinking of going from the day I quit my job (maybe some “time machine” entries before that, and ending when we went to Albuquerque and our life got fairly mainstream. Format would be the entry (maybe sound-enhanced) and possibly some commentary afterwards. But of course I don’t want to do it if everyone thinks it is a horrible idea. So let me know? Leave a comment and/or vote in the poll over there on the left and let me know your thoughts!

Yurt Years Photos

I went through a bunch of our old CDs this weekend and came across a number of photos from the yurt years. Not wanting to keep them to myself I made a flickr set of them. Have a look.

Bill Coperthwaite

Today, Cyndy over at Mousemusings (a site, I admit, I found by way of ego-surfing but continue to enjoy), wrote an entry about Bill Coperthwaite. I know I’ve mentioned him here in the past though at the moment I can’t find exactly where.

Anyway, I’d like to say that he was an inspiration in my life and was who helped me to make the choice to live in the yurt our own selves, but unfortunately that wasn’t the case. Instead, I discovered him when a friend of ours, cleaning her house out, decided to give us several copies of Mother Earth News magazines from the early 70’s. In the earliest issues, there were two articles about Bill Coperthwaite talking about the Yurt Foundation which is described as

The Yurt Foundation is a nonprofit educational organization established to gather folk knowledge from the cultures of the world and place it in a contemporary framework, creating a reservoir of ideas for designing ways of living that are simpler, more beautiful and more just. The Yurt, as modified by Bill Coperthwaite, is a symbol of this cultural blending, combining the folk wisdom of ancient Mongolia with the modern materials of milled lumber, glass, and steel cable.

.What he did inspire in me was twofold. First off, in the midst of our yurt life, which at times was very emotionally difficult (ironically the day to day life was not particularly hard - it was my own internal issues about not working, and dealing with the owners of the land that was difficult), I knew there was another person out there who had not only done it, but was now evangelical about it. Having read his articles, I was able to see the things he appreciated through his eyes. More importantly, though, what I got out of knowing of him was encouragement to question daily life and to feel free to go off on my own in ways that didn’t fit with the normal. He said that:

“My central concern is encouraging people to seek, to experiment, to plan, to create, and to dream. If enough people do this we will find a better way.”

. I’d say with at least one person he was successful.

Yurt Years FAQ

For those of you who are interested - I’ve ressurected and updated (a little) the yurt years FAQ (with old yurt pictures). I’ll try to get to a more updated FAQ, Bio and maybe even a yurt years follow-up FAQ sometime soon. The old FAQ, though, is here.

Selling the yurt

Okay - I should be packing or something productive like that but instead I’m writing a quick note to say what we’re all up to. Paul and I are going to leave tomorrow for California in our rented U-Haul. The yurt should fit nicely in the 17 foot one that we reserved. Hopefully that’s the one we get. We were asked if we’d mind a bigger one (at no charge) if they didn’t have a 17′. As the only other ones I saw on the lot were 26 foot trucks I’m hoping I don’t get stuck with a behemoth that sucks gas and is tough to park.

Anyway - we’re planning on basically following I-40 which goes roughly along the old Route 66 route (Kingman, Barstow, San Bernadino…) Hopefully we’ll manage to get to the Grand Canyon along the way - it isn’t that far off our path and Paul is really excited to see it.

Once we arrive we’ll drop off the yurt and truck and then go hang out with Sage’s dad, stepmom and brother for a weekend before catching a train to Kansas City and a bus back to Springfield. That’s the plan, anyway. Who knows what the trip will hold. A bus all the way is also a possibility but that could be a big pain, not to mention not very comfortable relative to the train. Looks like it’ll be about $100 more for the train, but Paul is quite excited about it. We also checked into the possibility of a sleeping car but I couldn’t believe how expensive they were. All they had were deluxe rooms. And the cost for two days travel in one, which included two beds, private bathroom with shower, was almost $1,300. Who travels in these, anyway?

Anyway - I’ll probably be on the road through a week from next Wednsday at least and probably won’t have much chance to do email so if you email me and don’t hear anything that’s why.

Cedar Dust Tea

It’s been a sort of busy couple of weeks since my last entry with plans seeming to change as quickly as they were being made, and a sort of whirlwind atmosphere all around. It started a week ago last Wednesday when Kite called to say that she and Paul were thinking of sleeping one last night at the yurt and hey, did I want to come? Always one to enjoy (if that’s what I’m doing) a bit of nostalgia I said “Sure!” and packed my bags. We left a few hours later.

It all started quite nicely - we got there and started to carry things back to the yurt. Once Paul got there he stood inside, turned around and repeated “It feels wonderful!” over and over for a bit. Then Kite left to get some more stuff out of the car and Paul and I, being thirsty, headed off to get some water from the spring.

When we got back Paul wanted to read in the hammock and I was ready to keep unloading things. And here was when I really began to realize just how long it’s been since we had been there. Paul was perfectly capable of staying there on his own while I unloaded the car. And that he did.

I have to say, it was more beautiful there than I remembered. Probably I just took it for granted and also it had rained a great deal more this spring than any time when we lived there so it was incredibly green. There was even grass on the ground near the yurt. At that moment I was glad to have come and to be able to remember what exactly it was I liked about living there. Having left the yurt under such horrible circumstances and having lived under a great deal of interpersonal stress there for some time before that I usually have a difficult time remembering just what it was we enjoyed about living there.

Before long Kite started a cedar fire in the fire pit to make her cedar dust tea (add the powder from the red part in the center of a cedar log to water and steep). Paul wandered about the yard by the hammock and I wandered with him. A few minutes later Kite came by to let us know that she had shut one of the yurt windows near the fire since she put an oak log on the fire and didn’t want the smelly oak smoke to get in the yurt. She then brought Paul a cup of cedar tea and he and I sat in the yurt doorway.

Then two seemingly unrelated things began to happen. First off, Paul coughed for the first time in weeks. Second, he told me that he was going to take his tea over to the fire and pour the tea on it. I discouraged him from doing that and we sat around for a few minutes. It was only a few more minutes before Paul began to cough a whole bunch and his eyes got all red. Kite and I spent a few minutes trying to figure out what was going on and she finally asked him if the smoke was making him cough. He said “yes” and Kite buried the fire under ashes. (Since the fire was quite a ways away and we could smell the fire but not see any smoke near us it didn’t immediately occur to us). Then we went for a lovely walk down to the creek and within a few minutes Paul’s cough began to go away. By the time we returned from the creek he was almost completely recovered.

A few minutes later, Kite went off to the house to hang out with a friend of hers and Paul and I stayed behind and made dinner. As it was getting cooler out and the wood stove wasn’t hooked up we closed all the windows when it was warm out and the yurt remained quite warm. So I started some pasta. As it got darker I lit a couple of lamps. Here again, in retrospect, was a point where Paul was trying to tell me something but didn’t quite get through. He said “I’m going to open the door.” I didn’t want him letting all the heat out of the yurt so I discouraged him from doing it. And again, wouldn’t you knoow it, Paul started coughing. You guessed it, the smoke from the lamps also bothered him.

When Kite got back we made a plan that she and Paul would sleep outside. It was only meant to go down to about 50 and we had a ton of blankets and a mattress outside. So they went to sleep outside and I made it an early night inside the yurt. And here’s where my night went downhill. It started when I woke up about an hour later with a slight headache. By the morning, though, it was a horrible headache that made me feel sick to my stomach.

Paul didn’t appear to have had a good night either. While he was hugely jolly, something outside had either bitten him or he was allergic to something out there and so his eyelids swelled to near closed (he looked sort of like Rocky at the end of the fight). Kite made a cedar fire (which didn’t seem to bother Paul) and we sat next to the fire. Then it got weirder - every time I’d go into the yurt (three times in all) I’d have to go back outside and throw up. Someone here suggested something in the air there but the last two times occurred after I had left the yurt open for some time.

My best guess, and a rather crackpot one if I may say so myself, is that it had to do with the fact that across the road from the land the yurt was on was a recently-finished logging operation. Most of the trees there were down. I don’t know if you remember this about me at the yurt, but strangely enough any time I’d cut a tree down, be near people cutting down trees, or even talk about the possibility of cutting down trees I’d get a horrible headache the next day. Who knows why or if that’s it.

Anyway - I was feeling miserable, Paul was feeling jolly but coughing and looking like he’d met Mike Tyson while he’d slept and so Kite and I plotted for our getting out of there. As we didn’t bring our car (we got a ride in from the dirt road as that road is notoriously bad on tires - we had one summer where we had 6 flat tires in a month) we relied on the people who owned the land to give us a ride home. A couple hours later we caught a ride back to town with one of them.

As I was riding home, almost from the moment we left, in fact, I started feeling better. By the time I got home my headache was almost gone. An hour after I got home it was gone. Meanwhile, Paul’s cough and swelling around his eyes was gone within about a day.

So it would seem that moving to town was a good thing for us. Sage wouldn’t even come with us this trip since the last timme she went there last year she started having horrible dizzy spells to the point which she could no longer safely drive (Kite and I asked her kindly to pull over and let me drive). Seems like even when we were there our logic was dulled - I can’t tell you the number of stupid things we can’t believe we did when we were there that seemed like a good idea at the timme. This includes staying as long as we did. To be honest we’d been talking about leaving (for a number of reasons I shan’t go into here) the yurt from about six months after we got there. But it seemed even on that level our judgement was clouded.

I’m sure we were there for a reason and I’m glad we went but there really seems to be something strange about the place.

If that wasn’t enough of a weird time, we also did our taxes. Or rather had a friend do them. And wow - there was a real price to this year’s success. Last year we got nearly $800 back without giving them a penny. This year we owed them nearly $2,500.

As I haven’t been working (for money anyway) lately, we had no large sums of money coming in. Sage, however has been doing a splendid job of supporting us and allowing me to just spend time with Paul and occasionally help her out when he decides to stay at Kite’s. That said, we certainly didn’t have $2,500 in the bank to send off to pay our taxes.

Our first thought was that I could go off to work again. And as if to affirm this choice, I got a call the next day from the people who I usually contract with who wanted me to go back to Michigan for 6-8 weeks. Not ready to give up just yet I called a few other companies who I’ve worked with before (or whose management I have worked with elsewhere) and they, too had a few other assignments. But none of them were work that could be done at home.

We
still weren’t ready to give up just yet, though. First off we asked the IRS for an installment plan. More like a “stallment” plan to buy time since we don’t really want to incur interest but would rather just pay it all off at once right away. And then we thought about how we could do this without my going off somewhere.

It was Kite who came up with selling the yurt. But none of us really counted on just how much interest there’d be. All told there were about four different people who wanted it. As it turns out, the person who finally got it lives outside of San Francisco. So our plan is to wait until there’s a nice day coming, take the yurt down and put it all into a U-Haul, then I’ll drive it out there. If I can figure out car seats and airbag (or preferably lack thereof or how to turn it off) stuff I’m going to try to bring Paul along as well. He’s been asking to go on a road trip for quite some time now.

Sage and I are about to go off to a yard sale now - we’ve been selling lots of our finds on Ebay - particularly Cabbage Patch Kids (which seem to sell really well for the most part) and baby clothes. It’s kind of funny, actually. If people in town talk to each other then some rumours would definitely start. Sage routinely buys prenatal vitamins at the health food store (they work best for her even though she’s no longer nursing) and now we’ve started buying baby clothes. And anyone who knows us knows we’ve had a lot of time just the two of us with Paul’s staying at his granny’s a lot lately. But no - there are no plans for other kids at this point. I don’t really see there being any anytime soon either.

Bye bye, yurt.

Hey - so I forgot to mention this plan. Kite and I (and Paul) all were planning on spending a night or so at the yurt as soon as it got warm enough (the stove/chimney need work so we can’t use it). Anyway - we’re leaving this afternoon for a sort of goodbye to the yurt time (it’s going to be taken down and moved soon it looks like - the latest plan is Kite’s going to live in it but who knows where at the moment - lots of ideas though). Sage is staying here (she hates nostalgia and figures that being there might bring up bad feelings) and thinks she’ll be lonely - send her lots of email to keep her company, will you? I’ll write about it later. I’ll be taking the camera too so probably I’ll get a few pics while I’m out there for those of you who miss those sorts of pictures.

The owner seemed a little weird and lived too close…

Hooray - we’ve finally made some progress. Since I last wrote I looked at a few more homes. One was a trailer which was yet again too close to another house.

I think that the trend here may be that a parent owns a home and when the child gets married a trailer is purchased for them and the parents put it on their own land. When the new family grows too big for the trailer they move out and the parents then rent the trailer out. One piece of land had two trailers, a large home (maybe 3 bedroom and very big) and a small one bedroom home all on the plot of land. They all seemed just too close to the landlord. A couple of nights ago we looked at a home in the country that was $300/month. The owner seemed a little weird and also lived close (but not too close). There was a hole in the wall in one spot and he looked at it and said “This looks like they kicked the wall. There was no furniture here that would have run into the wall and that’s what I’d do when I get mad.” So while it was a cute house with an excellent view and a large lot we had to pass just because we were rather creeped out. Also he told lots of stories about the previous tenants and the house itself had a weird sort of bad feeling. If we moved in we’d have probably had to have someone come in to perform some sort of exorcism lest we wind up in the next Amityville Horror film. Despite all that we still were thinking that perhaps we might rent it as it was indeed the best place we had seen yet and we were getting tired of waiting and didn’t want to have to spend another $200 on this place that we could better use towards our own rental with all the utilities. So we persevered another day or so and while Paul and I were in Springfield at the Discovery Center (a really cool hands-on museum that I have to get to adding to the Baby Tyrtle pages - perhaps more later on that one…) Sage made a few calls one of which was to the landlord of one of the people who works at our local health food store. We told her about the cats and she was unfazed which was encouraging to say the least. And she made an appointment to look at the place. When Paul and I got home from Springfield and picked Sage up we all went to pick up the key and look at the house.

Adorable doesn’t begin to describe the place. The landlord describes it as “A 1 BR home with two living rooms or a 2 BR home with one living room” and so by most standards it’s pretty small. However it is still about triple the size of the yurt which felt absolutely enormous. And of course there’s the added bonus of electricity, phone, Internet access (we’re literally around the corner from our ISP which will pretty much ensure a really high speed connection around 49-50KBPS as opposed to 24KBPS shared 2-3 ways which is what we’ve had for two years here). Add to that the fact that there’s air conditioning and soon new carpet and paint and we’re thrilled. And add to that that we’ll be paying $190/month for it and we’re absolutely ecstatic.

Oh, and I forgot to mention. The house is actually in town. Sure it’ll be a bit of a culture shock to be living in town but Sage and I are really looking forward to the idea. After all, the town, while the biggest town in the county, is still well under 3,000 people and is a huge area. It’s so small, in fact, that people still graze their cows in the “city limits”. But despite it’s size we’re still really going to enjoy being so near to everything. We can walk to most of the stores we shop at (no more 27 day incarcerations due to snow!), as well as the library, a few restaurants (bad thing, that) and so we shouldn’t need to use the car nearly as much even if we were to drive in. Kite is even pretty thrilled as it’s really easy for her to find a ride to town whenever she needs to so we’re likely to see a bit more of her too. We ran into someone we knew at the grocery store last night who also lives in the neighborhood who says that it’s a really nice quiet street with good neighbors.

So it looks like if all goes well we’ll be moving in sometime next week. We’re both really excited and ready for a change and this one feels really like the right one. I know it doesn’t seem like it but it feels like we’ve been looking around for a place to move to forever and so it’ll be nice to get moving on it. It’ll be funny, though, as we’re going to have to look for a few furnishings that we’ve lived without here at the yurt as we had no space for them but will want when we’re there. Desk, tables, etc. Oh, and a stove and fridge. I figure we can wait on the fridge if money’s tight as we’ve lived this long without one and now we live so close to all the stores that we can let them keep our food cool and fresh for us and we’ll just go and get it every day or two. Ironic, huh, that if I asked any storekeeper in town if I could keep my groceries in their fridge that they’d say no as long as I had paid for them. One disappointment, though, is that we have to get an electric stove. I am really happy with the gas one we’ve got and am going to miss it.

So anyway, it’ll be good to be moving on. Are we disappointed to be leaving the yurt? Probably on some levels though in many ways the life in town may be simpler and cheaper than the life here. Much time will be regained by not carrying our own water (but I’ll miss the spring water), more time still will be regained by not gathering wood (we actually bought wood this last time and spent about $120 for a bit more than a month’s worth). Possibly the most money and time saving thing will be for us to actually be in town. After all, it’s a 30 mile round trip from here to get to town and so we can save the gas and wear and tear on the car. And perhaps one of our most unexpected expenses will be gone and that’s tire repair and replacement. Since we got our car last summer we’ve had seven flat tires of which three were of a severity such that they needed replacement. Most of that has been due to the great deal of flint in the rocks on the road that seems to pierce the tires like a hot knife through butter. Of course I am aware as I write all this that I’m a terminal optimist and not only that I adapt easily in the face of change I think. I can get enthusiastic about almost any change and find the good in it. However, I’m also terminally nostalgic so I might be writing entries a year from now about how we miss the yurt terribly.

In other rather funny news: I have a chest cold. This in itself isn’t a big problem until you hear the whole story. Last night we had a celebratory taco bell dinner at the yurt and I don’t know about you but I find it hugely salty and always wake up in the night tremendously thirsty when I eat it for dinner. Anyway, this happened last night big time on top of the fact that my cold got quite a bit worse. So when I woke up I had literally no saliva in my mouth and my tongue was rather irritatingly stuck to my left cheek. So I got up and got a drink and as I was drinking I noticed something disturbing. My throat had swelled up a great deal and it was hard to swallow and a little hard to breathe. So I took some cough medicine and lay back down. Let me say now that I’m a huge hypochondriac. A bad migraine with stomach upset is almost always spinal meningitis (to my credit I know three people who died from this). So I figured that one of two things had happened. I either had a horrible cold and my throat was at that very moment closing down until it would soon be the size of a straw for a juice box or it was some sort of anaphylactic shock as a result of our having had a great deal of trouble getting a fire going and lots of smoke poured into the yurt. (As an aside: I blame my hypochondria almost entirely on the fact that as a result of an early interest in medicine I know words like anaphylactic, meningitis, ebola, and peritonitis). So I woke Sage and wrote to her on Paul’s magnadoodle (I had no voice) that I thought I was in trouble and might need a ride to the emergency room. She was so groggy that she was jus
t crabby and confused. After a while, though during which she got me a laptop to type on (she couldn’t read my frenzied handwriting (which I almost wrote as handwringing)) she made me describe my symptoms. Difficulty swallowing, mild sore throat and no voice. It was then she started laughing and she realized that this was what happens every time she gets a chest cold. And in fact, after more water the swelling in my throat went down and the cough syrup kicked in. We played a game of You Don’t Know Jack and by the time it ended I felt a world better and went back to sleep. When I woke up I was a world better and had no trouble breathing.

And in still other news, our cat Habanero is now exiled from the yurt. Why? He stinks too much. He bothered a skunk that was visiting the yurt (I heard it chattering and then smelled it’s stench) and when Habanero came in it was unbearable. This was not the smell you smell as you drive by a dead skunk on the road. This was something more evil and disgusting. So we put him out two nights ago and he’s smelling a bit better - good enough that last night we let him in to hang out by the fire and eat some. The weather has been quite warm lately though which is fortunate as that allows us to keep him out. Today we may try the tomato juice bath but I’m not sure. After all, there couldn’t be a worse cat to try this on. Habanero is very gretzy and will claw and bite if you push him out of your chair. Years ago we stopped trimming his claws because he would rip us to shreds after the first or second nail. As you can imagine the idea of trying to actually bathehim in tomato juice is pretty distasteful. We’ll see how he does just airing out outside.

Okay - I’m almost out of battery so rather than be interrupted I’ll end it here…

We decided to leave…

I know, I know I should have written much sooner and kept everyone in the loop and all, and admittedly I have to some extent kept the notify list people in the loop but what can I say?

I keep thinking that I should just wait and have some sort of resolution to what all’s going on so that I can tell the story in one big lump. I realize that that’s not really how a journal’s meant to be but as you hear what’s been going on you’ll also see the challenges I’ve faced that make it more difficult to keep up with a regular journal.

Anyway - about a month or so ago Sage and I decided that we were going to leave the land here. It is definitely time to have our own access to things like water, electricity and telephone. As our business grows we need to spend more and more time online and would really prefer to do so in our own environment without worrying if we might be waking or bothering someone in their own home. It is simply a collision of incompatible lifestyles. In the interests of pursuing our own independence we’ve stopped relying on the resources of the house at all. Our water which we are now using for not only cooking and drinking but bathing as well is coming from a nearby spring that runs as long as there is ample rainfall (which there has been), our power for our computers and internet connection are now obtained by Sage driving over to the womens’ land across town where there is a building, not anyones’ home, that has heat, electricity and telephone.

I won’t say it’s all been easy - it’s been far from that, in fact. Once we decided that we would be self-sufficient here and that we would move towards having our own place, we got caught up in a sort of whirlwind of trying to make it all happen as quickly as possible. In the beginning before we figured out Sage’s working at the womens’ land, we first started working at the library center an hour and a half away. It worked but was difficult not only because it took so long to get there but also because that was 3 hours of our day that couldn’t be spent trying to get ourselves into our next situation. So the next thing we tried was to rent a motel room by the week in town ($100) - it worked okay but still wasn’t quite it as the motel had a party line telephone so internet access wasn’t always available. The room was also pretty dark and dismal. The positive part of that was that we realized that once we had a sort of office to do all our doings at we were able to settle down a little and not so worried about getting out of here in great haste.

Throughout all that the question of how would we fund our exodus back to the working world was something of an issue too. Fortunately that one was quickly solved. For a while we flailed about wondering if I should go back to work back east or if one of us should work here in a “real” job or if we should just keep going with the web design business. The first thing I did was to confirm that there was, in fact, a job available to me if I wanted it back in my old industry - pharmaceutical validation. A phonecall confirmed that there was one if I wanted to either be away from home for all but 2 days every 14 or if we were to move to NJ, PA, NC or FL. The pay would be more than I’d made before and would allow us, if disciplined enough, to save up enough to buy a house outright back here in a matter of 2-5 years. The downside is that I would be back at work with potentially crazy hours.

Then another opportunity presented itself - a job for Sage to work for a nearby web design firm. The downside there would be that she would have to work away from home and we’d have to make a small relocation away from this area. Further investigation also showed that this job probably wouldn’t pay what we’d need to fund our lifestyle so that idea was dropped.

Finally, an answer came up on it’s own. Business for Nesting Tyrtle Web Design started picking up dramatically - and the timing continues to be uncanny. Any time we despair about the possibility of being able to stay here we get some sort of lead for another web design job.

In the realm of actual house hunting things are going a little slowly but we haven’t been as dilligent as we could be partly owing to the fact that Paul and Sage are both down with colds. It is quite heartening, however, to see how inexpensive the housing market is here. For about $200 (what we’re paying to have the yurt here so we have no worries about being able to afford that as we have been doing fine with that for some time now) a small trailer or home in the country may be had. The most expensive places we’ve seen have been way more than we require. For $450/month you can get a 3BR home with central air and 3 car garage on 15 acres. For $600/month we’ve seen a house of similar size on 40 acres. We looked at one place yesterday that would have been really great. It was a 2BR trailer on a relatively large lot (maybe 5 acres?) and a small pond nearby with lots of lovely pine trees for shade all about 2 miles from our favorite swimming hole in the area (which is now about 20 miles away). The only downside was that about 20 feet away was another trailer - probably the landlord’s (we were just given directions to the trailer and not a real “tour” where we met the landlord). We’re going to pass on that one I think. The only other one we looked at was too scary for words. It was actually quite a ways from here next to a big tourist trap of a lake (we should have been suspicious already). It was advertised as “Cabin - $225/month”. We should also have worried as it’s been in the paper for several weeks. When we actually went there we saw why. It wasn’t a cabin in the sense we expected (a la Grizzly Adams) but rather one in a sort of motel-like sense behind a package store in the tourist town. It was smaller than the yurt and had no shower even. There was a handyman there with his family fixing the door to the place who said “The last tenant kicked the door in…” It was made literally of plywood and was surrounded by about a dozen other similar ones. I swear I saw this place on an episode of Cops with a scary drunken guy in it with no shirt on (why don’t the people they film ever wear shirts? Is it some bizarre ritual? First we take off our shirts and then we drink and then we beat our families and then call the police and TV crews?) We left there feeling pretty dismal and drove back to a store to get another paper and try to call some places (no luck). Then, posessed by curiousity and hope we drove down to northern Arkansas to see what we could find. Not a whole lot there but then we got there late in the day. The places for sale down there are even cheaper than here if you can believe it. A decent place there can be had for less than a new car.

A couple good things have already come out of this whole experience, though. First we figured out how we’re going to arrange our lives work-wise. Sage really wants to be the primary worker in the family and I will spend the majority of my day just being a dad. It’s funny, but I think that’s what I’ve wanted to do all along but through some sense of duty or routine I figured I had to bring in money. Now that I no longer have a direct responsibility for that I feel sort of relieved like I can really pay attention to what I want to do - being a dad. Funny after all this work to try to figure out what I feel my purpose is and worrying about how to make it pay for itself the answer came to me this way - I’m here to be a dad. And it’s been an interesting experience - particularly on the few days when I’ve been home with Paul without a car while Sage went to the womens’ land to work. I now have a much greater respect for my mother’s strength. It feels extremely isolating to be somewhere alone with no other adults and no real means of getting in touch with them for support or companionship. Fortunately we figured out that I can drop Sage off some days and Paul and I can go on our own adventures. So far we’ve been shopping, to the library in Springfield, t
o an art museum (his idea if you can believe it!) and had a great time exploring an asian grocery together ending in our sharing our first moon cake either of us had ever tried and finally buying a bunch of those finger-sized bananas to share. It’s almost like for the first 10 years of my adult life I spent getting a feel for my dad’s life in the working world and it’s difficulties and joys and now I get to spend the next 15-20 years getting a feel for my mom’s life. Well, sort of like that except I have way more support in the form of help and praise than she ever did. I’ve grown more to understand my mom and how her life was in the past month than I ever have.

Meanwhile it has been extremely stressful for me. I’m someone used to having a difficulty and then having it resolved one way or another - new job, new house, new car, whatever. As you might imagine, then, it’s so hard for me to stay in a sort of limbo. Repeatedly I find myself thinking that I should just take the job I was offered as it’d pay for relocation and give us lots of money to get us out of limbo fast. Not because I think that’s the best way to go but rather because that would make this situation be resolved. It’s been helpful, you might imagine then, to have been doing a bit of reading of Buddhist psychology - in particular When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron. Instead of being the usual “everything’ll be alright” this book takes a whole different tack. It talks a great deal about expectations and how it is our expectation for quick resolutions and even the possibility of a life free of suffering that makes situations like this so hard for some people. And so I find it helpful just to bear in mind that much of what I’m feeling - the restlessness and crabbiness that we’re not in our new home having our happy perfect life - is purely fabricated. It’s fabricated that this time is not being pleasant as it’s not meeting some standard that I alone made up, and it’s fabricated also that everything’s going to be perfect when we’ve moved. It just isn’t so. I think much of that comes from the media - that in no more than 2-3 hours a conflict is resolved. Also from consumerism - the idea that there is some perfect product (in our case a sort of package deal consisting of a home, business and social life) that can make us all happy and our teeth gleaming white at the same time. Ideas like that only serve to make it more stressful and more unpleasant when in fact it doesn’t have to be that at all. We’re fed, clothed, moneyed and have clean water to drink. We’ve got a car to get us to the library and lots of great books to read. We’ve got tons of family and friends pulling for us. The only thing we don’t have is an idea of what’s next. And truly we never do. Tomorrow we could go visit a house, put a deposit down and pay the first month’s rent only to find that it burns down before we even get to move in. Staying in the moment and not being judgemental of it - not assigning blame or it’s relative: hypothesizing how things could be if only one thing worked in a particular way is just self-torture. Which isn’t to say that planning is a dumb idea so much as our getting attached to a particular outcome of the plans. Certainly we’re clear that it’s a good idea to stay here and have the home business and that’s what we’re going to pursue. However, it’s treacherous for us to attach to that some sort of expectation of how things should be as a result of our going through that decision.

Anyway - that’s the short version of where things are and now I have to go to town to get Sage and Paul some cough syrup while they sleep. Hopefully more later and I might even get around to typing in an entry I did at the end of January on paper when I didn’t have a battery or a net connection…