I can build with meaning and purpose

With my Higher Power’s help, I can build with meaning and purpose.

It has been 3 weeks since we returned to our build after a week’s break, had a late semi traditional Seder supper, and reintegrated into our house and housemates.

This past Friday, we poured the earthen plaster for the 2 smaller houses on Locust Lane. This process looked like transforming the uneven rough floor of a barn or an unfinished basement into what is an almost-finished relatively level, flat, beautiful adobe floor. When you walk on it, your feet remember their love of the earth and a little bit of the shape of her. I must tell you that I trusted, but was skeptical that we would be able to do this in the better part of one day. While we re-wet the stamped earth floors we had created a while back, one team of us mixed the earthen plaster—a combination of straw, clay slip, sand, and water—we then began to spread our brownie-mix mixture from one of corner of the house to the other with wood floats. Slowly ones of us would peel off, as we ran out of room for all of us to be inside the house, until the last person had worked themselves out of the front and back doors. Of course, then there was the incident with the dog running across our newly perfected floors—apparently a feat said dog has done before. By Monday, we should be able to walk across them barefoot. Things dry incredibly quickly here. I can leave a pair of denim overalls in a windowless dark corner overnight to dry with no heat or air on and in the morning they are basically dry. Ho ho, not in Tennessee. As soon as the floor is dry enough, we will saturate the top layer with linseed oil until we are ready to put the final 1/8th inch on it.

The earlier weeks of April, we have been installing windows and doors, cursing at them and feeling empowered by our new skills alternatively. As well as installing solar panels, prepping the inside and outside for our plaster base coat…filling in the gaps of the straw bales with a different ratios of straw, clay slip, water, sand…whether it goes by the name of light clay straw or slip or cobb. We have stuffed our interior walls with straw and mud. And we have tried to outsmart the mobility of water by using things as unfortunately named as bitchathane and less offensive drip edges, j-channels, paper, silicone…

I am falling in love with this work, with the community of it, with the possibilities and hope of what might be possible from it.  Probably like nearly all of us, I didn’t grow up with an idea that builders could be women. Or that women could be builders. I understand that buildings could always be sacred spaces and that they could be of and within nature in a way that promotes our sense of being part of it, rather than separate from it.

Last weekend, a friend/housemate and I travelled further West and South to Grand Escalante Staircase to do some simple volunteer tasks to promote keeping the borders clear between the designated “Wilderness Study Areas (WSA) ” of the BLM (Bureau of Land Management) and the BLM that is available for more recreational use. This meant doing basic practices such as getting rid of the traces of illegal fire pits and racking out tire tracks where people have driven into wilderness. For the WSA to officially become protected wilderness (they’ve been in this bureaucratic limbo since the 1960s) will take an act of Congress and proof that the land has no trace of human use. The BLM ranger we were working with told us that if “we do our work well, no one will notice.” He also told us how the dead wood juniper trees here remind him of fire—a representation of their life force. Among these trees, are also the ancient petrified trees that are scattered about against a backdrop of colorful purple, green, yellow, red clay, mesas, slot canyons. At night, the new moon was on the horizon and the stars were visible in every corner of the sky. There is so much to fall in love with in the world. And so much to grieve (see Ai Wei Wei’s movie Human Flow) I am so eternally grateful to all the beings who have taught me to not be afraid of love and grief which seem not at all different. The beauty here makes my heart want to explode. Some day I will let it.

With Higher Power’s help,

We can build with meaning and purpose.