It Takes A Village To Live Tiny

In early May after my return from Canada, Catherine told me that she felt our domestic arrangement had come to an end and it was now time for her to live alone. She asked that I move out by September. She said the same to her brother Steve. I was stunned and devastated. 

"Where shall I go? What shall I do?" I wanted to say in Scarlett O'Hara fashion.

"Frankly my dear I don't give a damn," said the the Bay Area housing crisis. I gave myself a month to wring my hands and absorb this shock. I had known my living situation was without a future in the sense that we were no longer in a committed relationship, but I had put my money on the mutually beneficial arrangement of my staying which had been going so well these last two years. That with all the care the two dogs demanded and the shared meals I made, the gardening and household chores I helped with she would want me to stay especially once she returned to working full-time. It was the only option I was willing to entertain because I had been enjoying a $700 rent for so long I would be hard put to afford a room in a house in the Bay Area. Most were double that. Perhaps I should have taken a different path I lamented.

I had been told by our therapist and others that legally I did have the right even in a domestic partnership to sue for half the value of the pooled assets accrued during our 20 years together. I hadn't wanted to do it. I feared that it could get ugly and destroy our friendship. I had opted to see what would unfold if I stayed. Barring her meeting someone else she wanted to live with this seemed like a reasonable expectation. But now Catherine felt this transition period was over. It was time for her to move on, she said. I made another plea on my behalf.

I mentioned that she had, at the time of our break-up, promised to buy me a tiny house on wheels. But when she researched online and saw figures close to $90,000, she said she didn't have the money and she did not foresee selling her house anytime soon (to free up cash). I didn't pursue it since she was allowing me to stay. Maybe something else would unfold I thought.  

"I'll buy you a tiny house," she said just like that as I recalled this discussion. This stopped me mid-argument. It had indeed been my dream to live in a tiny house one day even if I had to build it myself. A very big dream that I knew I would have to do alone for Catherine did not share this vision. The tiny house concept of self sufficient living embodied all the off-grid living ideas that I had been experimenting with for the last fifteen years. To actually live in one would allow me to fully realize my passion for this life. With Catherine's offer of the tiny house my grief and shock were arrested as I remembered the full potential of this vision. And they were not, after all, as expensive as she had anticipated given what I had in mind. A shell that was unfinished inside could be had for $25,000. I accepted her offer gratefully and immediately went to Craigslist to look for such a tiny house on wheels.

My Tiny Life Education

A year ago almost to the day, I had attended a two-day workshop where I had listened to a young woman teach a roomful of would be builders how to build and live in a tiny house on wheels. The workshop was given by the Tumbleweed company formed by the original creator of tiny houses to sell plans to would be builders. The tiny house that our workshop leader lived on was parked on a property out by the coast next to a horse paddock. That she was a cello player with a degree from a university in Europe fit right into my scenario of wealthy patronage hosting such a high end tiny house. The scenario evoked all my experience of negotiating class and racial boundaries in the Bay Area. This was an elitist solution I felt, a diminutive version of a high end house with all the material wants of a Western lifestyle. It changed very little about how one lived apart from having less room to live it in. And it would still require that you had a relationship with land to park it on which implied that you had enough social equity to find a host who would be willing to let you live on their land possibly illegally given city zoning. You could not even buy land and park the house on it because there were laws against "camping" on your land. There were also laws that prevented you building normal houses small enough to afford because most towns had square footage ordinances that prevented such tiny dwellings. Zoning was how the American landscape was divided into economic apartheid. Building the house on a trailer was a way to get around building codes. 

Still I loved the idea of living in such a compact, well designed space that I could custom fit to my own habits. It was an opportunity to design a lifestyle that would incorporate my ideas of how one would live using the least amount of resources possible. In fact I so wanted to experience such a space that I decided to design and build a mock tiny house just to see how it would feel. For this experiment I chose to build a loft in my mother's one car garage which was about the same size as a tiny house being 91/2 feet by 20 feet and was a separate building made of wood resembling a 1920's board and batten cabin. I had in fact already cut holes into the walls for windows when I was enrolled in a construction class a decade ago and wanted to practice my carpentry skills. By returning to this unfinished space for this project I was able to hone my tiny house building skills, practice installing electric lights and outlets, then finish the walls and paint them the white wash I so wanted to see over the OSB strand board I put up for the walls. 

The project not only improved my building skills it honed my mind to make decisions around all the details of living in a tiny space. Intellectually I was able to investigate practical aspects of spacial design, compact storage and how to make multi-use built-in features that would cleverly transform the function of the space. I experimented with salvage materials to see what could be used that might otherwise go to landfill. Bed pillows for instance made very good insulation for walls. Over a six month period of working a couple hours every other day, I put in 230 hours and the garage was transformed from a rat infested haphazard store room into a pleasant light filled studio space with ample storage in the loft I had designed. And all using wood I had saved over the years (and stored in same garage) and what I found on craigslist mostly for free. How I loved that humble building. And how I enjoyed improving the space and adding value to my mother's property. 

Ever Tinier

In considering what size of tiny house on wheels I would choose to buy I remembered something my cello playing instructor had said when I went to visit her tiny house at the bottom of the horse paddock. If she had to build it again she would go smaller, she said, because even in this small a house of 24ft by 8ft there was still plenty of room to accumulate excess stuff. And this included a boyfriend and two dogs. She would go to 18 feet she said. So when I went to craigslist that night to look for a tiny house I was looking for the smallest I could find. And there it was. It was beautiful being all shingled in cedar and having a red door. The photograph of it was so professionally done that it looked like a magazine cover. But it cost $32,500 and that was just too much I thought for an unfinished house. A few days later I looked again and there was a lengthy description telling the story of why this house had been built. 

Apparently two dads, John who sold things and Phil who was a professional roofer, had decided to build their families a vacation cabin. It was their plan to park it on a friend's land. They put into the project the highest quality materials they could find including high end windows and a wood floor. It was fully insulated and wired with electric outlets and wall sconce lights, but was otherwise empty inside. It had taken them a year and a half to build this much, by which time the friend had sold the land and their plans to use it were moot. As I read the description of the house I could feel the love they had poured into this project and how proud they were of it. The interior was lined with reclaimed salvaged redwood fence boards that gave the interior a soft variegated look. This fooled the eyed into thinking it was bigger than it was. The ladder to the loft was built from heavy beams from an old barn and was sturdy enough for a big man. It was small, only 6 feet wide inside and 14 feet long which was perfect because I wanted a narrow profile to better fit on a narrow piece of land. I had it in mind to park it at my mother's house next to the the beloved garage where I had been building the mock tiny house. 

To express my appreciation I wrote the seller a fan letter admiring the quality of the build. Then since such a letter seemed to warrant a reason for my writing it I explained that I could not buy it because my budget was only $23,000 or so. Ten minutes later John called me and said I could have it for $26,000. This was a considerable discount. I would get back to him, I said. I showed the ad to Catherine and she agreed to buy it if it was the one I wanted. And that Saturday I went to see it taking with me my new friend Tim, a carpenter I had met by chance just before I needed help to patch the leaky roof of my mother's garage.

To make sure I had a place to put this house, I had proposed to my mother that I park it on her property. She was not enthusiastic about the idea, but her boyfriend Bill had been more encouraging. "Think of the benefits of an onsite cat sitter," he said over dinner. When I showed her the glamorous pictures of the tiny house she clearly saw how lovely it was and urged me to buy it before someone else did. In terms of home ownership it was not very much money she noted. This was all the encouragement I needed.

Tim and I drove all the way to Hollister to see it. Once I laid eyes on the tiny house in person the height of it was a little scary. It was almost the height of a two story building, but I ignored that warning feeling for it was the height that made the inside bearable since there was so much space above your head. Tim asked Phil about the methods used to strengthen the walls. All was done to the highest standards. I felt confident to mover forward and put down a deposit of $1000 then set about preparing for the arrival of the tiny house in two weeks. I went home thinking I was well on my way to living my dream, but instead I spent a sleepless night wondering how such a high profile tiny house was going to be received in the neighborhood. For much as they seem so perfect a solution to homelessness, they were not legal to live in. It was legal to park them, just as an RV is legal to park on private property, but if you were living in it and the neighbors complained you could by local ordinance be evicted from your own house. 

To quell my anxiety I decided to ask the nearest neighbor who kept an eye on my mother's house, what she thought of such an endeavor. My mother, however preempted this meeting when she called me in the morning and told me she could not allow me to park the house on her property. It was just too evocative; it would soon attract the attention of the county officials. I had to agree that she was right and so I had to choose to either give up this dream (and my deposit) or pursue it in an aggressive manner unlike my usual low key approach. I never liked to ask for anything. 

I wrote up an ad on craigslist in search of a place to park and listed what I was willing to offer in terms of a little rent ($300-$600) and a lot of skills for home maintenance, gardening and care taking. I used the same beautiful picture of the house that had caught my eye. And I posted the link to the ad to Facebook and Twitter and the Yahoo group of my colleagues. People wrote back words of encouragement and ten of my friends  posted it to their pages asking their friends if they knew of a space. I did get some very nice responses both from friends of friends and strangers, but they were in the East Bay outside of my area and far away from clients which I was not prepared to do just yet. Still I felt enormously supported and loved it kept my heart open for a favorable response.

The purchase of this house with no land to put it on would render my dream an albatross that would cost me money to store it and be impossible to sell since few who have such cash are willing to live in a shoebox. 

I went away for the weekend to a house party where I got the opinion of all those present. My closest friends agreed that this could easily go sour, but one friend who had had many adventures in buying property encouraged me to go for it, because whatever happened I would end up owning something beautiful. I might end up leaving the Bay Area to live in it, but it might be worth it and if I left the country I could put everything I owned into it and still pay the same fee for storage as I would for my stuff alone and I would have something to come back to.

That night I picked up an e-mail from an acquaintance I knew from my Buddhist meditation center with whom I had done some solar oven demonstrations. She wrote me that she had a space in her backyard that might work. This was extremely encouraging. As soon as I got back from my house party I went to see her site. It was indeed feasible and well located being only ten minutes from my present home. I envisioned some fine collaborative eco projects in this garden for we had a shared eco sensibility. The space did, however need a lot of preparation in the trimming of bushes and moving of storage units. It was a tight space with sparse room around it. It was clear I would need a temporary place to park while I finished building the interior of the tiny house. 

There was another possibility that had been appearing in the back of my mind. Only a mile away from this site was my childhood home where there was a two car garage and a driveway down a cul-de-sac that would keep the tiny house hidden from view from the street. I could see myself working from my father's workshop using his tools and workbench. Could feel him helping me though he'd been gone now for 14 years and my stepmother had inherited the house.

My father had been a complex and difficult man given to rudeness and temper tantrums in my youth and a peculiar lack of understanding of human relationships, yet he was a brilliant engineer who had built his own computer in order to stay relevant to his work. He had had in all likelihood what we would now diagnose as Asperger's. The circumstances of his long illness with throat cancer that eventually led to his death had been trying to both me and my stepmother. I had not been very patient or diplomatic in my participation in his care while my stepmother had to contend with the brunt of his anxiety and non-compliance to his doctor's orders. I could not imagine myself asking her for any favors so estranged had we become. But as it happened I had recently spent some time with her and had had a chance to renew our acquaintance. 

While I was in Thailand for my mud hut building workshop I had been in Bangkok at the same time as she was, sharing the house my father built on the family compound which he had left to both of us. She was there with her boyfriend, a doctor who was charming and friendly to everyone in the household. So much so that all the difficulties of our family relationships seemed to fall away. He was warms towards me too. As I contemplated whether or not to ask her I realized that I had for so long put her in the roll of the heavy in my life as the figure who had usurped my inheritance, that she might welcome the opportunity to be my savior if I would only ask. 

Unfortunately I couldn't call her to explain to her the situation or even what a tiny house was because she and the doctor were in Germany on holiday. Time was ticking down so I wrote to her through Facebook explaining what I wanted to do. She didn't respond at first so I wrote again giving more details of my soon to be homeless status which could end up with me living in Bangkok in the house we shared. She wrote back with her cell phone and said to call her. She was sympathetic. Her only concern was that she would be able to get her car out of the garage and that the neighbors be informed. Neither was a problem so she said yes. I was so relieved. I had asked for help from so many people to get this house that I could truly say it takes a village to live tiny.

My Tiny Adventure Begins

The day the tiny house rolled into town, the neighbors came out to see the house as it pulled up and stopped on the side of the road.

"I love your tiny house," said a woman as she drove by.

"Pull it in here, I'll make room," said the neighbor across the way. The neighbor in front of my stepmother's house came out to network with my builders.

The two men had towed the tiny house all the way from Hollister. On the pickup towing it was a ladder strapped to the truck rack. This came in handy. The overhanging trees in the driveway did not clear the roof of the house adding to the drama of its arrival. The 20ft ladder was set up to allow Phil to climb on the roof and lift the branches out of the way while the truck was pulled forward. Then another difficult maneuver to back the house into position in the driveway. Once the house was leveled with the jacks at each corner it was done. All that was left was for me to hand over the cash.

When my stepmother returned she and the doctor welcomed me by inviting me to lunch when I came to work on the house. This offering of food was very Thai and made me feel right at home. It warmed my heart to feel so welcomed. I was eager to help with the chores she asked of me in return — hauling away things mostly, much of it my father's old books and papers. Her friends who came by admired the house in the driveway.

I was buoyed up by the reception to the tiny house. My tiny house. I was suddenly a celebrity with this cute unusual big thing. Thanks to the cable TV show Tiny House Nation and a few other similar shows, the phenomena of tiny houses had captured the American imagination. The compactness of such a lifestyle was a kind of antithesis to the horrors of excessive consumerism and collecting of stuff that had made the hoarding shows so popular. It solved the problems of mortgage debt and provided the mobility needed to follow job assignments. Viewers were charmed by the idea (though most did not want to live so small). There seemed to be no end to the cleverness that could be built into them. And now I was a part of this phenomena. An early adopter of a new innovation. Housing 2.0.

I marveled at how I had gone from homelessness to tiny house ownership in a mere three weeks. The tension in my relationship with Catherine evaporated too for I no longer had to be vigilant about a living situation that was forever poised to change. We would remain friends. I came to see that there are those in your life whose role it is to make sure you fulfill your destiny when you are too comfortable or too complacent to get around to it yourself. The tiny house was my destiny now. One that unfolded so effortlessly once I was committed to it that it elevated me to a new level of manifesting my life. The next few months would completely absorb and stimulate every cell of creativity I possessed. Ideas rolled out of my head and were manifested within the week with components that just seemed to turn up. I envisioned myself giving tiny house tours and tiny house dinner parties. 

To join in with the tiny house community I started a new blog to have a record of this new phase of my life and a blow by blow account of the build with photos. It's called "Tiny Red Desk: Living The Tiny Life". (I named it after the color of my writing desk). There you can join me for the tiny house journey.

Dead Like Me

I wrote my obituary recently and it was strangely empowering to take by the horns my own death. It was part of an assignment for the Death Cafe I had joined, a salon where people meet to discuss death. This emerging social franchise was an idea that a Swiss sociologist started as a way to normalize discussion of death by talking about it. It was then adopted in Paris followed by London before making its way to Columbus, Ohio in 2012. Tea and cake is served and the conversation begins usually with a question. Such as how did you first come to understand death? Or what questions would you ask a dead person? Our chaplain friend Don in Portland told us about it. And in October of 2013 Catherine and I went to one at the Zen Center. That was where I met Barbara, a New York transplant who would invite me to join the cafe she would host with her husband at their lovely home in San Francisco. I invited my friend Stacy to come along too. You can find a death cafe at www.deathcafe.com.

I was drawn to the topic of death because I had come to realize that in America people see death differently from how I was raised. Since the topic doesn't come up very often it took me twenty years or so to see this. In my 30's I had a job videotaping a group of women with metastatic breast cancer and that was when I first noticed that Americans did not take death lying down as it were. They took death on as though it was an enormous responsibility they personally had to fight to keep from happening. And when I remarked upon it someone asked me why I found this odd. Was it because life was considered cheap in Asia? How that comment infuriated me. Didn't they get the memo? That we will all die? So why be so distraught about it I was asking. But it just made me sound callous. 

Once I got talking at Barbara's house I was surprised at how much I had to say on the subject, surprised at what was coming out of my mouth in terms of beliefs and attitudes. The premise allowed me to have a different kind of conversation. Life from the point of view of death was made interesting in ways I had not thought of before. I felt curious, joyful even. So when we gave ourselves the assignment of writing our own eulogy or obituary I saw it as an opportunity to foresee my life by working backward from its end.

And to get to the heart of the matter I visualized the actual death itself:

"Having decided she was too feeble to continue teaching her geriatric exercise classes and cultivating her permaculture backyard farm, Amanda Kovattana 87 went home to embark on her final journey and demise through starvation assisted by her young wife Anastasia 67. During her final hours a gathering of shamanic friends came to assist in drumming to induce the theta state necessary for shamanic journeying. Thus she passed peacefully and happily before becoming a burden to her community as was her wish."

No one in my Death Salon objected to me taking my death into my own hands. They thought it gutsy that I actually gave myself an age at which I would go. (On the other hand no one commented on what a young wife I'd picked for myself. This was after all my first attempt at fiction.) But my mother did object to the idea of this end of life suicide which led to quite a lively conversation. All the spiritual works we had been reading counseled that suicide was a wrong choice and would badly mess up your karma. I argued that it was not suicide. On the contrary what medical intervention could dish out was every bit as unnatural and prolonged the inability to let go. And letting go was the natural cycle of life (as I am constantly reminding my hoarding clients).

Having control of my own death handed me back the reigns of my life. I needed to get a grip on at least some part of it. This year my life was unraveling at such a clip that I no longer had a confident relationship with my own narrative. And thus I could no longer write about my own life unfolding as I had done with near complete transparency and trust in the world for ten years as I shared my adventures with a public audience. 

I had grown to believe that I could control my life with my words and direct it like a movie. But that turned out to be a hubris that blocked me from seeing what was coming. I had a leg up on accepting death owing to my Thai culture, but it did not prepare me for loss.

Death of a Relationship

Nearly a year ago Catherine and I broke up. We were in a negative dynamic that kept us stuck unable to grow either together or as individuals. Catherine realized it first while I was unbelieving that this could happen after 20 years. She did not ask me to leave the home we had created together so it was a slow motion sort of break-up with the goal of transitioning into a friendship. We undertook the process with as much love and compassion as we could muster beginning with the help of our therapist just to make sure we had left no stone unturned in the solving of our relationship dynamic, but in the end there was no turning back. There was too much to overcome.

Released of my reactionary stance of resistance to her ongoing leadership, I was able to sort out what it was I truly valued in our living together. I continued to cook for us to be sure we both ate well. And the more I cooked the more I cleaned. I was claiming how I belonged in this house that did not belong to me. It was a study in impermanence as the Buddhists would say. How to embrace the existence of life while acknowledging that the details I was grasping at were completely temporary and made more so now that we had no future together. Or in the lexicon of Kubler Ross and her five stages of death — denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, I was spending a lot of time in the bargaining stage. If only I could keep this part of our life together, or this I bargained as each piece of our life that we normally did together came up for reassessment.

Catherine was at the same time leaving her job. She didn't intend to go down that path, but it became clear that in that relationship too she was unable to grow or be acknowledged for her leadership. She had felt beholden to the job because she needed it to pay the mortgage. Her brother Steven and I help to pay it too, but she paid three quarters of it and that was a big enough obligation to feel the job was crucial. And thus selling the house became a possible solution to throw into the mix as she crafted her future. I persuaded her that the house was also a resource that could shelter all of us for whatever comings and goings she wanted to include in her new life. So she refinanced it to make it more manageable. We also sold the rental house I had managed in San Bernardino which ended our property management project that had so stressed us out with countless bad tenant issues and hefty plumbing bills. I was relieved that we got back what we put into it. With that money back she could further build her future. 

It is at this part of our story that people want to know how my financial future will shake out. In the language of divorce did I not contribute to our relationship in so many intangible ways that by law I had a right to sue for half the value of the house? I knew I had this power, but I couldn't morally bring myself to do this. It had never been my intention to take Catherine's wealth away from her unless she died and left it to me (or parts thereof). If I did demand what the law was able to give me under our domestic partnership I knew it would destroy our friendship. We would never speak again, let alone live together. American style divorce was basically a garbage disposal for failed relationships, shredding them up and flushing whatever was left down the drain. Catherine was a valuable person in my life and I did not believe in throwing people away like that. I had my own wealth just not right now and my mother would also help me out. I would not take this destructive road. This decision halted the wounding.

Which is not to say that it didn't hurt that she was redesigning her life without me. It hurt a lot, but just as death shows us what we are grateful for in life so did this break-up show me what I valued in our living together. Once we could agree that we had both contributed to our failed relationship and that it wasn't just my fault for being unable to be intimate or her fault for being so harsh in her judgements of me, we were able to enter a common narrative again. Getting to this point had been the most painful, but I knew that if I just embraced the pain as much as I could the healing process would begin.

Shortly after this I intuitively adopted a gratitude practice. If death was a way to appreciate life then it made sense that gratitude was a way to alleviate suffering. 

So I walked into her room one morning and said "I want to be in gratitude so I want to thank you today for introducing me to the shamanic path." She smiled, surprised and said "It seemed obvious." Catherine had given me a book on shamanism and told me that I needed to study a spiritual path so we would have something to talk about and having not had any luck interesting me in Buddhist studies she realized that I was more a shaman than anything else. I devoured the book and it launched me. I chose that particular gratitude that day because I was going to lunch with a friend I'd met through a shamanic circle. 

The next day of my gratitude practice I told her that I wanted to thank her for the trip to Italy which I had resisted because it was going to be expensive, but she had made all the arrangements and in the end paid for the accommodations. And it was fabulous. Who wouldn't want Rome and Florence in their memories. Such iconic places.

She did not return my ritual of gratitude in kind, but each time she lit up and gave me a hug. It sweetened the day and fortified me for anything we encountered that might cause us grief by the end of the day. Sometimes there would be something that stung, but it stung less. 

The day I left for a conference in Nashville I thanked her for her support when I started my business; how she had believed in me and gone to my first out-of-state conference with me in DC and sat through awards night with me when I hardly knew anybody. 

When I came home from Nashville I thanked her for insisting that we get dogs because now they are the one's who make a fuss when I come home. And in this state of gratitude the positive memories flowed and I could reframe the sticky parts of resistance and troublesome passages we navigated. 

When we sold the rental property and went to deposit the check I thanked her for having put up the money to buy it sight unseen; it had been my idea and she had trusted me to look it over and make the decision. "See I did love you," she said in response, "I bought you a house."  (Two houses on a single plot actually.)

The gratitudes allowed me to pay off a debt; the debt of my resistance to her ongoing vision. I did not want to look back on our memories and think of the disagreements we had mixed in with the good time we had anyway. I didn't want to remember that I never thanked her for those times. Bringing the past forward in these acts of gratitude repaired something of our relationship and allowed me to embrace my grief and move through it into the present. 

I had come to that final stage of the Kubler Ross paradigm—acceptance. Our friendship, I saw now, allowed us more emotional connection than our actual relationship had done. I was more frank with her because there was less at stake. I had already lost the relationship and the future that entailed so I could stop trying so hard. I could see now how different we were not just culturally, but inherently. We might have been able to overcome those differences (with difficulty given how stuck we were) but once released of me Catherine's growth accelerated so rapidly I could see how much we would have had to overcome as she explored the things I had held in check; this new lease on life revived her vitality. In turn I was now to plan my own life; something I had shied away from.

By negotiating through the death of our relationship I had regained my equilibrium. Like the martial artist I was I now had a firm footing. And while there was nothing about the future I could take for granted good footwork would help me face it head on.

Rebirth Of The Future

Given the impermanence of our living together especially as Catherine talked about and tried out her plans for her future I realized that I also had to have my own contingency plan. So I gave it some thought. All I really needed I thought to myself was a room of my own (to borrow Virginia Wolf's famous paradigm). Painted yellow just as my room was now. And I could build this room as a one room house on wheels (or buy one ready made). It was a long time dream of mine to own the craftsman style house on wheels known as a Tumbleweed and thus escape the whole real estate dilemma of housing in the Bay Area. I would just park my rig at my mother's or anywhere else I could negotiate. When I told Catherine this plan that I would embark on should she sell the house, she offered to finance it for me and that I felt was generous and fair. Meanwhile she had already given me the Prius which I had been driving since my car went to the junkyard post crash earlier this year. (For herself she leased a new Chevy Volt.)

And thus contained in this new future I could proceed with some peace of mind. I would manage the house we shared that Catherine no longer had time for, so busy was her schedule that she would soon spend much of it away from home as she pursued her spiritual practice, her relationships with new people and her course of studies that would train her to be a Buddhist chaplain. 

Having gone through her own brush with death during her year with cancer she now wanted to spend time talking to others and helping them to face their death. This I thought was a very beautiful and meaningful outcome of her illness; one I wanted to support. And in fact she was doing this chaplain work already with a friend she knew from work who had liver cancer and whose difficult dying process she would be involved with to the end. And so Gil our dharma teacher ordained her as a chaplain to show that he stood behind her. She also started her own Death Cafe at our meditation center and took her place in the teacher's chair. Her salon would have a different tone from the light hearted one I was involved in, but it suited those who came for it and helped me integrate my own grief with Catherine's path.

As for my own future I wrote that into my obituary as well in a leap of fiction using my essay writing for a peak oil site called the Energy Bulletin as a springboard. (It was on this site, now called Resilience, that my essays enjoyed the biggest and broadest readership.)

"As one of the forerunners of the farsighted peak oil writers, her book "The Girls Guide to Off Grid Living" was followed by a speaking career. Her contributions as a member of the community of teachers and guides who shepherded the global population through the transitional times of petroleum depletion were characterized by inventive costumes and performances. Her shoe designs were in much demand and offered extensive travel when few could afford it as she was hosted from town to town making shoes for high end clients competing for her services. She also taught courses for others wanting to make their own shoes so that everyone would be equally shod. And she gave Tarot readings as part of the evenings entertainment offering many insights that became a source of inspiration and practical solutions as the population struggled to establish a broader community model of problem solving using the deeper democracy of consensus practices we enjoy today. Her chronicles of her travels, hand printed on vintage letter presses and delivered by carrier pigeon during those crucial years, were one of the most popular written documentations of the era.

A commemorative e-book of her life will be available for downloading during the next available energy cycle."

In this somewhat apocalyptic foretelling of our collective future I was reminded once again that my life would not be directed in a vacuum, but would evolve as most artistic collaborations do, in community with others and with the geo-socio-political events of our time. And so it would be counter intuitive of me to fix for myself any given future beyond the minimal structures of housing and survival, but I await with baited breath for further input for I am after all still very much alive. And having broken open the too small love that Catherine and I needed to shed like an old skin, I was now ready to meet the world with a bigger love.

I read this piece to Catherine before posting it and she liked it, liked hearing my stories again and it occurred to me that these essays are in themselves an old skin that I shed periodically, in turn leaving something of myself and where I've been for others to find and wonder at.

And with each too small piece of my life that I shed I grow larger to embody ever more of the great Cosmic Love. So that I can then meet the world and everyone in it with love. And in that rebirth become love itself.

With all my love to all of you,

Amanda