Spirit of the Time

So much of life at Cob Cottage is about process so its rare that I can share photos of finished, or at least somewhat finished projects.  Here’s a follow-up on the last post showing the sculpture that I did on the mantle of the big dining room fireplace and some photos of the finished rumford in the Ridge House.

My first ever photo with Ianto!  Here we are celebrating the inaugural curing fire.  This rumford was built mostly during the two-day “Pyromania” course that we put on at Cob Cottage Company.  I went back for another full’s day work to bring the whole shape to completion and will go back for a half day to do final shaping on the main volume.  The project has served as a great inspiration to me and left with me with many lessons.  Amongst them: 1) Believe when you’re laying your first brick, as insignificant as it may seem, that great things can happen. 2) Never underestimate the capacity of a group of people, all headed in the same direction, to create beautiful things all-of-a-sudden.  3) Engage in processes actively and be present as they evolve.  4) Materials and shapes speak to you.  Listen.  5)  There is a moment in a natural building/cob project where the object you are are making takes on a life of its own and then you are much more at its service than it is at yours’.

Another in a series of Rumfords that I have built at Cob Cottage.

After a year and a half of living and working at the Cob Cottage Company – initially as gardener and then mostly heading up maintenance and acting as lead builder, I have moved into journeyman phase.  Here are some photos of my time there – hopefully they will reflect the magic of the place!  I am so grateful to Ianto Evans and Linda Smiley for all that I learned during my time with them.

The work of many hands and hearts created this building, the kindergarden of a parent-cooperatively run Waldorf school. It was born from a 10 day workshop that we put on with Janell Kapoor from Kleiwerks in the summer of 2005. A few of us, along with the help of many volunteers and curious passer-byers, continued working on it until one fine autumn day its doors opened and the sound of kids laughter filled it….

During a weekend workshop we built this oven and then filled in the walls and put in the window during the following days. It is part of a slow but exciting transformation of the “ranchito” into our community center.

We didn’t have any idea how much building this oven would change our life! There’s the obvious luxury of now being able to bake bread, pies, cookies, etc., – we’ve also discovered that by shortening the long fire box by placing bricks just inside, we can transform the oven into an open fire place. This oven is built around a modified metal oil drum (hinges, shelves inside) and combines both cooking from the direct heat of the flame into the barrel tempered by a layer of the sand and the slower cooking of the entire mass as the whole oven heats up (like the traditional hornos)

The process of building this oven and recently another one at our neighbors´ reminds me of what a great addition to community living an oven offers. Both the process of building and the weekly or semi-weekly firings are events that bring us together and feed us in one way or another.

These are photos taken by an angel, Ryan Daly (ryandaly1@yahoo.com) who came, lived and worked with us for two weeks. More photos from his trips and other adventures live at http://www.geocities.com/ryandaly1 .

Sculpture on side of the one little shed that we inherited from the previous owners of our community land. This is an earthen plaster on a bamboo weave over the old boards. Long live wheat, the noble seed that accompanies us and sustains us daily.

This is the cabaña that Alex, Denali, and I lived in during the summer. The horses are our neighbors’ and are as much a source of awe and inspiration as they are a source of frustration. The mix of big animals and old traditions with aspirations of orchards and green growth can sometimes be difficult. The cabaña now has a chimney spewing smoke out of it and Alex has set it up really nicely to be able to spend the winter there. What vision and dedication the young lad has!

Our solar oven…. quiet conspiracy with the heavens. We were cooking brown rice and beans almost daily during the summer in this little box of alchemy and always had water ready for maté in case someone came to visit.

Ines’s unfinished house up on the hill. We just found out she’s pregnant…. another member of the tribe on the way! Let’s hope the house is done by this coming summer to shelter the new family.

A view from Ines’s house down on our gardens, the shed, the river and the forest. We thank god for such beauty and dedicate our lives to manifesting this grace in return for all that we have been given.

The first post of Alex’s house in place. Wow, what a long time things of true and lasting value take time to come to be… and that is not even to speak for the millenia that have formed these mountains, rivers, valleys… and the song of the stars? How long has that harmony been composing its self? (This is a good shot of the layout we used to figure out where to put the posts)

Eva, the fiddler on the fence. One of our many blessed visitors this summer who brought their song to the choir.

Om shanti, shanti, om. Till the next fire circle.

Whew!…. life times pass by in so little time. But I guess that isn’t out of the question if one, looking into the reflection of a pearl of dew on a squash plant, finds that it also contains the whole world. And then there’s the fact that not only one cabbage can come from that small black speck which is a cabbage seed, but also the truth that saving seed from the cabbages that have the most vitality by simply letting them go past the point of harvest so that they may flower and be genetically woven by bees amongst each other to then mature and give forth into this material reality thousands more small black specks like the first one. Everything tightly folds into the compact nothingness from which everything is born again- and so the end of some things slips into the beginning of others like one patch on a quilt is sewn to the other.

My brother and I have realized that basket weaving is one of the great metaphors in life. We start with a simple, but solid framework. We add cross-pieces to fill in that structure, and then continually add smaller pieces as we give it more and more structure and beauty. The process is infinite, like jumping into a fractal… until we say we are finished and what we have made can hold ingredients for the next baskets we want to weave.

Well, what to say?… building a house is like giving birth, it is quite a consuming process. That’s mainly what we’ve been up to as of late. The building enters into your dreams and I have been discovering that dreams can be a really interesting place to learn – to receive teachings. Sometimes they are very specific – a dream describing how to resolve the next step in the carpentry that we are doing – and at other times they belong to that incredibly nebulous mix of memory and things yet to come that intersect in a puzzling place of fantasy.

Having plotted with my mom behind the translucent veils of internet cafe computer screens, we were able to pull off the grand event for my brother (Alex) of her arriving wrapped in her orange tent tarp as a surprise for his birthday. It was amazing to see how large a gaping mouth can get when the realities of time and space are bent to bring our mother from Singapore to a Patagonian homestead in the amount of time it takes to unwrap a present…. and very lucky that the present was out of earshot when Alex asked with a befuddled excitement if we had brought a stripper all the way out to the land!!!!! (Thanks to Sal for all the logistic manoeauvering to get her there).

Anyways, it was amazing to be an even bigger family on the land than we already are, and especially to come back from working on the building to find incredible food with spices brought from the “exotic Orient”.

Ma reminded me of that section of the feminist activist, Betty Freidan (who passed away last month) writings where she says something like with a paraphrase of a paraphrase: The more attention you put into waxing your floor, the more beautiful that floor will become to you. My interpretation: Whatever we put out heart and attention into will be filled with our essence of life and in turn reflect vitality, in other words beauty. It is for this reason that I find so much beauty in the joints we are making in the wood to weave Alex’s house together. I’ll be damned if I don’t find beauty in them after spending all day working on one connection after the other.

There’s so much to say about the building process – it obviously taps veins of archetypic experience probably not expected by even those who have been through the process even many times before – but I will not bore he or she who is equally immersed in a completely different task and is similarly polishing away at his or her floor. We will find beauty yet in everything that we do.

The weather is just too good to be able to justify writing for too long and my mom´s going away dinner is soon upon us. I will try to pick up next time with thoughts about the “corn people” that arrived from the travel tales of a friend in the cold, candle-lit darkness.

(I´ll have to upload images another time)