building is 30′ x 30′
sturdy we wanted, especially when you have concrete over your head.
google: flying concrete barrel vault
and you will get the site we used a while ago to find the details on the roof. we have been consulting with steve, the guy who put up the site and makes barrel vaults and domes for a living in mexico.
i ask myself “how can i be so passionate about one idea today and then have it matter so little so quickly?
- today i want to be finished with the structures and infrastructures on the farm, i want to be like tasha tudor and focus on milking my nubian goats, making birthday gifts by my own hands, harvesting from my well tended garden which included flowers as well as food, sewing my own clothes, creating art, holding precious the celebration of the spirit of thanksgiving, writing letters to friends using a fountain pen and homemade paper…
- last week i wanted to actively participate in the building of our main living space, i wanted expansion. i was bubbling over with ideas and futures.
- the previous week i wanted to reread all the tom brown wilderness survival books, prepare a small backpack and walk alone off the land into the wilderness, no structures, no infrastructures…
- another week i am passionate about returning this 22 acre farm to its rightful “owners”, the hawaiian nation.
- later i want to turn this land into a trust and live here in a egalitarian community, tribal even.
- some days i want to give up the phone and internet and other days i want to eat at a restaurant every day of the week or eat packaged macaroni and cheese maybe even the kraft bright orange stuff.
- some days all my ideas are expansive (low hedges around all the orchards with interconnected gates and sheep roaming freely nibbling all the weeds, or a new one acre experiment creating a building totally from the land and off the grid, planted with a staple food garden and orchard which we rent out to give people the opportunity to experience this lifestyle, complete with a homemade cookbook with recipes such as “chayote and taro curry” using only ingredients from the land.)
and i have recurring questions like about the responsibility of my daughter’s education:
- do i home school my daughter and use the current public school model so she can “fit in?”
-do i blow off the formal setting and let learning flow from our days? just trust that Nature and her nature are sufficient to teach her everything a human being needs to understand to live an enriching life.
-what about her interest in being a veterinarian? do i teach her how to listen to a lecture and figure out what the test questions will be?
-do i teach her how to take a multiple choice, timed exam or do i teach her all the things i never learned about managing my money, having a relationship with nature that doesn’t require an SUV?
-can i possibly find a way to teach the history without repeating the story of exploitation (people, places and things)? do i prepare her to fit in to the insanity of mainstream living or do i prepare her to create something sustainable?
-how can i make those choices? how can i ask lauren to make these choices, at 14 years old?
and what about all this i read about menopause? they say i’m loosing bone mass, i will forget my friend’s phone numbers?
i want someone to write a book entitled “my menepause was totally different than everything you’ve heard” with a collection of stories about women who didn’t fit the model of a dried out invisible dithering mess of sag and wrinkles.
how do i integrate the ideas of nvc into my brain pounded for years with concepts of right and wrong, punishment and reward, needs versus wants, obligation versus “selfishness”, responsibility versus authority, victim and oppressor….
lauren just got back from spending 5 days showing her dad the island and our farm. now we have scott’s father, step mother and two (11yr old) nephews for two weeks. it is fascinating to watch the varied reactions to our farm. to some it is an oasis to others we are living substandard conditions. lauren’s dad looked like he came to the substandard conditions conclusion.
all the animals are doing well on the farm. we even have 13 baby chicks who recently joined us (5 fell out of our giant mango tree from more than 20 feet up, the second time a hen has roosted so high, they roos in the birds nest ferns!), 5 hatched in a 10 gallon gardening pot and 3 hatched in the roosting boxes.
we have had the best luck with attracting great interns since we started to post on the organic farmers web site. we have a woman from california and her half brother is about to join her. she showed up the first day of “work” already having spent the early morning learning the trees in our area. it is so fun to have people who are excited and interested and open-minded.
my most interesting current project is designing a permanent main living structure with scott. we are considering a ferro cement vaulted ceiling (barrel) with cement columns. cement is mined on the island (so the a bulk of the materials would be local) and we want to try the pattern language idea of weaving a basket of a roof and then laying a layer of concrete over that stiffened structure.
termites are a problem in the tropics. many houses here need tenting every 5 years and we don’t want that. i’m not sure that a building that looks like it came from greece makes sense here. after all how do you create a 5-6′ eaves with a vaulted ceiling without making it huge?
i am also excited watching the dvd’s we are getting in preparation for lauren’s high school years. some our library has. they are produced by The Teaching Company, which are basically hand picked (the student’s favorite) college professors giving lectures on dvd. we are really enjoying the one on physiology (by a medical doctor), the one on physics (which covers the k-12 science standards!) and the one called the joy of thinking (about qualitative math). they are 30-45 minutes each lecture and they are addictive like a soap opera. our family likes that kind of stuff.
lauren and scott are out at the tide pools snorkeling with our guests.
a few days ago scott gave me some undivided attention (NVC empathy) and it was so fundamentally insightful. i was able to process and explore what is going on for me. at the end, scott summarized it as: “we have done some serious transformational medicine journeys, we have immersed ourselves in NVC, couple’s council weekly, worked with the Soul Without Shame material and created a safe and enduring relationship with our “no-exit” marriage commitment so there will be difficult times trying to integrate.”
i have spent a lot of my life putting on the front that I am a strong powerful force to be reckoned with. and as i do more work with moving my rage i am confronted with a sense of fragility, insecurity and fear that it is at times unbearable. to have to face the reality of what is behind the facade has been a slow process for most of my life, a slow uncovering. but recently it has been anything but gentle. i see how much i cling to enemy images, how much i rely on determining who is the good guy and who is the bad guy, desperate to come out “squeaky-clean” and retain some sense of dignity. its nothing new, its just been more like a freight train lately than the merry go round i am familiar with.
i realize how much i have abandoned a part of me that was truly(?) powerful in exchange for a chip on my shoulder raging bitch. but then again this powerful protective part seems just as desperate and inflexible in many ways. yet it also feels like a real part of me that has been stifled and has never had a chance to evolve. i have an ongoing sense that i need to just to away and pull myself together before i am fit for human companionship! the old “fix me first and then one day in the future when I FEEL fixed I will join life” strategy i have been following for as long as i can remember
i just got back from a long talk with lauren. how funny it is to be listening to the wisdom of my own child!
i was sharing with her my struggles with trusting myself (actually, what is more true, is that i only struggle when i don’t trust myself!).
i believe that this life is like a play and i am at all times the character (karin), the actor (karin in the cycles of life) and the script writer (the god of karin). and sometimes i take a snapshot of incidents in my life and look at them as if i was interpreting a dream.
what a difficult time i am having
i am so confused about whether to trust my intuition or not in terms of interpreting the action of others. do i go with my inner story, my physical response, my gut? isn’t that a story? or do i switch my focus on what i am needing? i am addicted to my story.
when is my intuition trustworthy? once i’m healed and whole? what do i do in the meantime. trust what other people are telling me? their stories?
i believe people can hear more than the words being said. we can read energetics. i believe that. but what do i do when someone’s words and the energetics i am “hearing” don’t match up?
i had this idea that maybe its impossible to feel confused. that maybe confused is not a feeling, its a thinking. i know my head can spin me in circles weighing pros and cons, assessing shoulds and shouldn’ts. but my gut, my heart can’t be confused. it knows. the only pain is when i don’t believe or want to believe.what it knows.
i have been in a state of inner turmoil for the past month. i realize how much work i have been trying to accomplish in this life. i have been trying to create a life, a home, a lifestyle that i am finally realizing takes generations to create.
i looked at a photo recently of an ariel view of the terraced hillsides of china. i thought “if i had to build those thousands of terraces in my life i would go crazy, but they were created bit by bit.” i am acutely aware of how much my life lately looks like the impossible task of doing many generations worth of work. i wish my ancestors worked this land before me. somebody’s ancestors did. but they have been gone for too many generations to have anything to show for it. or maybe that was the idea. to live in a way that you leave the earth as if you have nothing to show for it.
and yet i want the trees to be mature, the systems and infrastructure to be complete. i want to begin to live my life, not keep getting the stage ready for my life.
i feel too tired to only get this far. i don’t want to be planting endless seedlings without being able to sit back in my completed house with my completed infrastructure and harvesting my grandparents mature trees. will i ever taste that?
and…. i don’t even have an inner sense of how to build a building. not the way birds know. the way tribal people know. they never expected to build a house to last for generations. otherwise the skill of building would be lost. they built mud houses like the pueblo, or thatched roofs or bamboo structures. yet my culture tells me i am too tired to remud every year or rethatch over and over. with all my years exploration: adobe block, cob, stawbale, post and beam, earthship, tarped screenhouse. i still don’t even know how to eat or build within my nature.
this year has brought some sad times on our farm. we lost 3 beloved goats unexpectedly, we have had 2 serious injuries with our 2 horses, there is a gall wasp that is attacking the trees we have planted and use for living fence posts on our acres of pasture. we also lost the roof on a building during a serious wind storm.
but all the big and important stuff remains good. scott and i celebrated our second anniversary yesterday, lauren is growing into a very fascinating person. I just can’t get over how funny she is, how reliable she is, how dedicated she is to her animals and friends and family… we have a very successful intern program on the farm which brings to us new faces every few months.
the vegetable seeds we planted together are coming up. even some of the ones i thought were not viable. they look like chia pots with all the sprouts.
we had one somewhat overcast day yesterday but last night was without rain and this morning is sunny. it feels a bit cooler though. remember how much you wanted rainfree days for your last week here? careful what you wish for, we have been in a drought! take note of how successfully you can manifest.
if I were landing on the continent the first thing i would eat would be corn and fried ripe tomatoes. maybe some melons.
what i would miss most from here would be bananas, papaya, pineapple, breadfruit, spices, and coconuts.
lauren and i have been to a linda tellington-jones workshop on kona side. she lives there and also in santa fe. she seems like a horse therapist to me. she is not interested in the recent horse training ideas about humans communicating to horses using horse language, humans being the alpha horse in a pack. she said she doesn’t want to be a horse.
she worked with horses but i learned a lot about being human. from her i learned that no one ever resorts to uncooperative behavior unless they are hurting. to see her infinate compassion for horses that are big and mean is profound. she doesn’t even seem able to assign negative motive to anything a horse does. she sees only a horse in pain and confused. wow.
we now have all her books. she might be doing another workshop in our neighborhood!
if you can imagine, we had an intern on the land who turned out to be a missionary in training here to save the hawaiians from pele. i had some serious conversations with him about the arrogance and destruction caused by the christian missionary. i told him to go after the ice heads and leave the hawaiians alone unless they come to you.
in home schooling on friday lauren and i talked about the ideas we are fed by our culture that don’t sound right. like the one about only using 10% of our brains. hmmmm. nowhere else in nature do we see that kind of inefficiency. how do you measure magic, telepathy, creating your future…
i notice often lately how droopy i look and feel when i slip into the old habit of “figuring” and fretting and repeating montras like “our partners either make deposits or withdraws from our emotional bank account” which has always sounded true but upon further exploration is leaving me in a less than powerful position, at the mercy of another’s deposits and withdraws.
when i worked at dupont i was shocked by their environmental practices. dumping chemicals down the drain. it especially shocked me because they had a safety program that was so strict that you couldn’t bring an exacto blade into work unless it was one of those blunt ones. i guess they weren’t concerned about safety, but with dollars.
have you seen the movie The Corporation? sounds like it explains clearly why we are in this pickle. the way corporations are set up creates a system that becomes like a beast. it must be fed. it’s all about dividends at any cost.
don’t you love the emerging email shorthand? we are constantly amazed by the emails lauren gets from her friends in taos. lol, sys…. i also love that modified alphabet designed for palm pilots called graffiti. so clever. in home schooling we are creating a timeline book from pre-humans to the present and we are just a the time when a phonetic alphabet emerges to replace symbolic language. we are in the midst of that kind of change right now. i love teaching history because it grounds me. it makes this crisis we are in seem reasonable and survivable.
have you read daniel quinn’s Story of B? this is to religion what Ishmael was to agriculture. we will be reading it next year along with campbell/moyers Power of Myth. I told lauren that i consider it my job to present the basics so she can interface with the “real” world AND i want to present alternative viewpoints so that she never gets too invested in the party line. we are studying the ancient sumerian civilization and we did the standard stuff but then i read to her the sumerians creation myth from the cuniform tablets. its the story of the 12th planet. fascinating. i don’t know what is true, but i want her to stay open-minded.
at this moment, in her free time, lauren is looking at an anatomy of large animal book, has a medical dictionary beside her and her journal and i guess is taking notes. she is like a sponge. she has such an aptitude for dealing with the animals on the farm. with our recent horse injury we have gotten so much time with the vet that we hug and do the cheek kiss upon greeting. he loves working with lauren. he has taught her to do these complicated procedures and she just eats it up. she remembers everything.
we have friend coming for brunch today. they are bringing a ham they cured (hunted, butchered, brined and smoked) and we are supplying the eggs and the breadfruit home fries with a coconut milk/cream, jak fruit, banana, fresh vanilla smoothie to start. i can’t wait until more of our trees here are mature enough to fruit. we have lemons and limes, avocado, a handful of sweet fruits but just a small percentage of what is planted is fruiting. our latest favorite is cacao. we ferment it and roast it in the solar oven and grind it up. we either mix with banana and mac nuts as a dessert or add to our coffee. growing our own taro is one thing but the thrill of making coffee, or chocolate or harvesting cardamom or allspice just tickles me.
