Of Visionary Women

My report of the next leg of my farm making adventure in Northern Thailand as it unfolded with all its gifts and surprises during my recent trip earlier this year.

Mae Taeng Province

The district of Mae Taeng is still largely undiscovered being but a stop between Chiang Mai (the Northern capital of Thailand) and the mountains of great beauty at Chiang Dao. Getting off on the side of the road here feels like the middle of nowhere. That’s what I like about it. The existential-ness of it. You have to have a reason to stop here. Nobody is going to crowd you with a ready made program of must see attractions. So our first questions to each other was how to get there—rent a car, rely on public transport, ride motorcycles or start building a network based on our needs. The train station in Chiang Man took care of our immediate needs to get breakfast and buy clothing for the cooler weather which Clasina set about to do at the shop adjoining the restaurant. And soon I too found items to round out my wardrobe—a jacket, pants with cargo pockets, a shirt to shield from the suns rays. Then we looked around for a taxi truck willing to drive us out to Mae Taeng for not too much money which we soon found.

And as there wasn’t really a town center or landmark destination we just got off at the one place we already knew—the government land transfer office. Clasina and I were on our next leg of our farm adventure together—the matter of a lease that would allow Clasina the legal right to develop the land while maintaining my legal right to own it. So we stopped in at the land transfer office to see if they could help us pick such a lease. The woman at the desk who was very helpful and had various leases we could use remembered my name from seeing it on the documents I had signed last time I was there. She had wondered if it was the name of a flower. It means to be loved I told her and then I thought to ask Clasina what her name meant. “The shining one,” she said, “one who would be a leader.” That was very promising for our joint adventure I thought.

Now that I had more time to get to know her I asked Clasina how she came to be in Thailand. It wasn’t exactly a plan she revealed. After Apartheid ended in South Africa the laws were changed to favor the hiring of black South Africans to government positions in all but 5% of jobs and virtually all other industries followed suit. Only family run businesses held any future for young people who were not Black. Clasina explored a number of overseas options including living in a kibbutz in Israel and going to England for training in food services. While in England she tired of the winter climate and asked a travel agent where she could go that was warm. Two options were suggested—Mexico or Thailand and it cost less money to get to Thailand so there she went. 

Before this trip I had listened to Trevor Noah read his book Born A Crime which told me everything I needed to know about Apartheid plus had a lot to offer me in terms of cross cultural navigation. Apartheid wasn’t exactly a history one could be proud of as a white South African and what came after sank into corruption and mismanagement. Clasina hadn’t wanted to stay, she said, because it was too sad. Her parents though remained in South Africa. 

The Thai government isn’t exactly pro welcoming either; they sometimes harass her to test if her marriage to a Thai was bonafide. They found it suspect that she and her husband Ya hadn’t wanted to have any children. She is still awaiting the Thai I.D. card that would grant her land owning rights. I had the necessary Thai I.D. card for land owning while Clasina had fifteen years of experience living in Bangkok and navigating life in Thailand that I was missing not to mention that she was so outgoing she would talk to anybody. She knew how to talk to people here in the North I realized. My high society manners and formality did not play well here. People addressed each other with homey familiarity using terms to designate family. 

“Hey uncle” or “hey mother” Clasina would call out in Thai if she needed directions or information while I was left to wonder how to determine who to call what being so old as I was. The farm family we had bought the land from saw me as aloof and snobbish I felt as I waited an introduction or some clue to gather my words together. No introductions were made as everyone already knew each other. I would have to create a more outgoing persona to navigate this I concluded.

Clasina had already booked our accommodations for the night at a guest house quite close to our farm and made friends with the Thai lady who had created the pleasant compound of guest houses. Clasina also had the phone number of a man with a motorcycle with side car to take us there. We had a hot drink while waiting and a local woman dressed for work in Western clothes asked to take our picture. The sight of a blond caucasian woman was still quite rare here. Soon our uncle with the motorcycle side car was there to take us to the guest house where we got comfortable at our little house on the corner of a rice field. Someone loaned us a motorcycle and so it began this building of a network. We were soon at our farm snacking on string beans from last year’s crop.

An English Woman’s Vision

“You must meet Maggie,” Clasina told me and rang her to ask when we could come. Maggie turned out to be an energetic English woman who had settled in Chiang Dao where she had built herself a charming cluster of guest houses with her own hands. She came to pick us up at the bus station in Chiang Dao an hour an a half by pick up truck from Mae Taeng. Maggie had lived in Thailand for 40 years and now at 73 was looking to sell her Chiang Dao guest house which had taken her 7 years to build. She didn’t have quite the energy for the work of a B & B now she said and would go on to build her final home down the road a piece as a co housing endeavor with friends. She was asking 8 million baht for this property—$250,000. That didn’t seem like much compared to California prices. What a gem of a property just to have as a home base. Perhaps money would fall in my lap I joked to Clasina.

The hand made buildings were round and as soon as I looked at the original one that had not been plastered over I recognized the technique from one developed at the Cal Earth Institute in Southern California which I had opportunity to visit when I managed rental property in San Bernardino. And indeed Maggie had hired a teacher who had studied at that institute to come to Thailand to show her how it was done. 

Built with sand bags filled with earth this technique didn’t quite breath well enough in the tropics so Maggie had devised a method of her own filling the sandbags with rice chafe and tying them to a metal structure made from rebar bent into a dome shape. The entire structure was then plastered with mud. This seemed to suffice until over the years the dome roofs started to crack in the monsoon season so she was in the process of putting roofs of thatched coconut fronds on all the buildings as if to give them hats. She now had a charming group of round thatched roof huts scattered up the hillside facing a spectacular view of Chiang Dao. During the high season a steady traffic of travelers seeking a unique experience kept her fully booked.

I liked Maggie immediately. She had missionary parents and had grown up in India. When she told me she had come to Bangkok in the ‘60s I realized we wouldn’t have to dig far to find a connection as that was the decade of my childhood in Thailand. She said she had come at the invitation of her aunt to help out with a school for the children of expats and that the aunt who had helped start this kindergarten had gone on to open a school for older children called Mrs. Clayton’s school.

“I went there,” I nearly shouted. All sorts of memories flooded my brain as I told her how Mrs. Clayton’s school was my first introduction to the West via British culture. I was struck by the serendipitous coincidence of this connection and saw also a kindred spirit. She reminded me of another English woman who had long been a model for me.

“Have you ever been to Cornwall?” I asked her. She had. “Did you visit the Minack Theater,” I asked. She had. The Minack Theater was built by a single woman with a wheel barrow and the help of her gardener as she toiled up the side of the cliff with bags of cement. She had built it for her grandchildren to stage plays during their summer holidays. The result was an outdoor theater with a spectacular backdrop of the open ocean. I took in this site when I was 18 and the story of this one woman vision stayed with me for life. It is still in use as a theater today and is a much loved local feature. Maggie said she had been much influenced by this visionary woman just as I had been. She was such a model of what could be done with simple hand tools, some day to day determination and a vision. I recognized in Maggie’s round houses a similar visionary spirit.

As we were talking a Japanese man and his wife came down the path in full admiration of what she had created here. He said he lived in Portland, Oregon and was himself a designer of gardens for he had designed the Japanese garden in Portland. Indeed I had visited this very Japanese gardens on several occasions. That park was no small feat, covering many acres and was striking in attention to detail. How strange to now meet the designer in Thailand. That he was now admiring the efforts of my new best friend spoke volumes. It reminded me that places like people can be a magnet for like minded spirits as though we were connected by Ley lines to the high energy spots around the globe. 

Clasina was meanwhile taking in our shared conversation and would later ask me what I thought about building our first structure in the style of Maggie’s round house and asking her to be our teacher for the build. Why not? Clasina had been sending me drawings of what she wanted in a farmhouse and they had all included a round tower as an anchor. She had also taken a workshop from Maggie already. Maggie said yes.

The guest house we stayed in was spacious with its high dome ceiling. The round building had character and a great deal of charm. Maggie had also designed wonderful outdoor bathrooms for each one. Her own bathroom had a mosaic tiled bathtub and a squat toilet—a white porcelain one set into the earthen red floor. Clasina tried out the tub laying in it and posing for a picture while I remarked on the toilet style being my favorite. Maggie proclaimed the virtue of the squat toilet for digestive health. She then demonstrated squatting over it and popped up and down with such ease that it was clear that this activity had also kept her spry. Clearly a woman after my own heart. We in the West now know how this position aids in elimination due to the cleverly marketed Squatty Potty, but this work-around would never come close to the benefit of so much squatting.

I told Maggie I would help her get the word out about her property, yet I could see it would call for a very unique and specialized buyer. If I were to devote myself to just one location this one would certainly be spectacular. To see more of my pictures of the Chiang Dao mountain and round houses click here and continue to the right.

The Mud Hut Sisterhood 

While we were in Chiang Dao we only had to go down the road a bit to visit the women’s build in progress that week. The same event where Clasina and I had met last year, but at another location where I had built a house the year before. I had timed our visit to Mae Taeng to coincide with the build so we could visit with our mud hut teachers and a couple of friends I had made at previous builds. 

“Melissa” I called out as soon as I spotted my friend from Portland. She looked up ready to take orders, then saw it was me and gave me a mud specked hug. She was already acquainted with Clasina from my FB posts. As I told her of our plans to build a house she was all in and said she had a list of friends who wanted to come to Thailand specifically to take part in a build. Another woman, Robyn, who had been there last year with us had come again and brought a friend to this build too. She also said she had people she could bring. 

This was all unfolding so easily I wondered if we could pull it together by next January to accommodate such a team. We would need bricks to be made, a place to house people with a dining area and kitchen. The building site would have to be prepared and a cement foundation poured to ward against termites. Clasina certainly seemed eager to begin. When we got back to Mae Taeng we talked to our new friend at the guest house near our farm to see how many people she could accommodate. Sixteen she said if we bunked 3 to a house. Ten more beds would be good for a full team. But she did have a lovely dining pavilion and had once been a cook. So far so good. We had our network. It was almost as if everything we had done on this trip was designed to set in motion the building of our house.

We finished off our trip with another reunion with three mud hut sisters who were attending a four day music festival where they had helped prepare the site by building bamboo structures and sculptures. Attended by young people from all over the world it was a celebration of community that is now a global phenomenon. This built environment providing space for workshops, yoga, natural healing, Thai massage and numerous food booths of international variety while the river running through the park offered a refreshing place to hang out. We slept in rented tents and wandered from booth to booth. At a Ayurveda healing booth a young Indian woman offered to read my fortune with a set of cards each with a photo of an object. I wasn’t sure I needed a reading from such a loosely structured deck, but I consented and drew five cards. One was of a teddy bear, one of a child holding the hand of an adult. I forget what the others were. 

“These three cards indicate that you are entering a time that will fulfill a childhood dream,” she said. That might well be true I thought and nodded in agreement. “You won’t have to do anything. Just let it come,” she concluded. This was even better. “You have something to teach,” she continued. Yes I was all about teaching stuff. My head was a fact collecting synthesizing machine. “Something from your own life experience; about relationships,” she finished. What? What did I know about relationships? She looked up at me as if she herself would like to learn from me. 

“I am writing a book,” I offered “about living sustainably.” She smiled encouragingly. “I can make shoes,” I said showing her my Celtic sandals laced up my calf. She was duly impressed and asked me to come by again, then gave me a hug. 

This easy connection with so many women builders and visionaries was exactly what I was hoping for when I opened the door to this farming adventure with Clasina. I had led a life of long projects considering it had taken ten years to write my first book. I knew well that the journey had to be the fun of it, had to sustain you and teach you your craft. But now I had a partnership and a community. This was new. I felt lucky. I wouldn’t have to do it all. 

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.

Of Mind And Mud

In which I find everything I need in the mud pit — an international sisterhood, a shifting paradigm and a cure for cancer. Here I offer my report from a ten day adobe building workshop with 30 women in northern Thailand.

Stories From The Mud Pit

The earth that would build our house was so red with iron it stained our feet like red betel juice and could not be washed out of our clothes. Behind us the mountain of Chiang Dao earlier masked by the morning mist was now revealed in massive peaks. And just to the right the golden spire of a pagoda high up in the hillside reminding me that we were in Thailand. 

In this orchard of mango trees watched over by dragon flies hovering overhead, a space had been cleared at the rear of the property for us to build the first of many tiny houses. Houses that would provide a retreat space to rejuvenate the activists of IWP (the International Women's Partnership for Peace & Justice).

My first clue that this was going to be a unique experience was the revelation that one of our American members was an amputee. Her boyishly short haircut having already set off my Gaydar. Nattily attired in backward baseball cap of local fabric and a tie died t-shirt over jeans she looked all of 19 and struck me as slightly cocky and sure of herself having been to Thailand before. But her radiant smile as she showed up at our morning yoga class in day glow green shorts won me over. Actually it was her leg that did it for that was the first glimpse I had of it in all it's steel and fiberglass novelty. Anyone going through life explaining that detail over and over had to have an interesting take on life I figured. 

The prosthetic leg made a rubbery farting noise as she popped it off for one of the yoga poses. The noise startled the woman to my left who said "oh" audibly as she looked over. I partnered up with Val for one of the exercises. In studying the leg I could see that it was a birth defect being shorter in the thigh bone than the other so not a result of an accident.

"I like your leg," I told her.

"Thanks," she said. 

"It's different," I said which was all I could manage in the way of scintillating observations.

"Yes it is," she confirmed. Val was 24 the youngest of us save for our mighty girl builder Ailsa (pronounced Elsa) the daughter of one of our instructors.

Later when I asked her if she was out about her leg she said yes, why would she not be and told me her story which she began with a question.

"Have you heard of Chernobyl?" she asked me.

"How could I forget," I said suddenly aware that I had over half a century of history embedded in my memory and at 57 was likely the oldest woman present. She continued with her story.

She was born in Russia along with a number of other babies born with deformities soon after the meltdown of the Chernobyl nuke plant though the authorities never admitted a correlation. Her Russian parents immediately put her up for adoption. An American woman with a birth deformity herself (an undeveloped hand) had adopted her and with her husband had brought her to the states. Decisions were made that led to Val having her foot amputated and several operations later a prosthesis fitted. This gave her the most options for mobility. Val had a maturity and cheerfulness beyond her years possibly in part because of this journey. I found myself wondering what missing pieces, what traumas we had all sustained that were not visible to the eye. 

Photo by Melissa Mulder-Wright

The missing pieces of my life were soon soothed by the mud. Making cob gave me time to process while doing something useful. Cob, a mixture of mud and straw, would be in much demand for the build. The doors and windows as well as the wood beams upon which the roof would be built were all attached to the adobe walls with mud. Plus two of the bathroom walls were wattle and daub, a similar idea to lathe and plaster only with cob filling in a lattice of bamboo splits. We would also include in the walls a pattern of bottles embedded in cob which would let in light and provide decoration.

The cob pit team sat on piles of dry straw and rubbed a handful of straw into the softest part of the mud in a motion that reminded us of washing clothes. The color of the mud prompted comparisons to poop, diarrhea and coffee.

"I like to put coffee up my butt," said Sherrie to amuse Val who had started the conversation.

"You did the coffee enema treatment?" I asked her eager to hear details. Sherrie was my roommate for the duration of the build. On the first day at the building site I had glanced at her t-shirt and was startled to recognize a profile as familiar to me as what I saw at home everyday. There where her left breast would have been was a flat space. 

"This is a wild coincidence", I told her in our room at the end of the day, "but I live with a one-breasted woman." She did not seem particularly surprised being possessed of an even tempered demeanor. At first impression she had struck me as a very nice woman if a little mainstream in her presentation. Someone reliable with no surprises. She had just turned 50. My respect for her increased tenfold with this additional revelation. No one is left unchanged after such an experience I knew from my own still fresh memories of Catherine undergoing treatment for her cancer two years ago (not to mention my dad having died of cancer at 69). That Sherrie did not hide this absence of a breast impressed me even more. 

She also happened to be a molecular biologist which made her the perfect person to explain how a coffee enema worked to both detox and revitalize all the cells in the bloodstream while also de-stressing the liver. She had followed the Max Gerson protocol for her cancer she told us because there was no cure for triple negative breast cancer 8 years ago. They offered her a clinical trial of a new drug, but as a scientist she knew better than to take that option, she said. Nor did she accept radiation; she didn't believe it would help. Her doctor gave her 6 months to live. And her family ostracized her for refusing the conventional forms of treatment. Only her husband stood by her.

I was now no longer in the realm of mere coincidence. Triple negative breast cancer was not all that common, but it was the same cancer that Catherine had had two years ago only she had taken the clinical trial option and when that nearly did her in was given treatment with two more chemotherapy drugs. The experience was so horrific it scarred us both. I was still angry at the cancer narrative perpetuated by Western medicine. The whole story about pushing the body to the brink of death in order to kill the cancer as if cancer were an alien virus and not something the body fought off regularly never sat well with me. It reminded me of the defense industry, so eager were doctors to use these pharmaceutical weapons to fight the noble battle against these terrorists cells.

Sherrie told us about how the cyanide in seeds attack cancer cells while leaving healthy ones alone. Apple seeds for instance were worth eating for that reason; she ordered apricot kernels online. The substance found inside an apricot kernel, the key ingredient of her treatment protocol also known as B-17, was a controlled substance in the United States, the FDA having determined it was a harmful toxin.

"I've read that testosterone is also a controlled substance;" I said. "Perhaps it should be more so," I added referring to those in charge.

 "We're working on that," she said good humoredly. She was lucky that she had the background to do her own research because even in this retelling I cannot remember all the details. I had heard of many of these alternative cancer treatments that were offered in Mexico and elsewhere. They had sounded hoakie and too good to be true. Recently an internet video series called The Truth About Cancer had surfaced on my FaceBook feed. It had an overdramatic narrative reeking with conspiracy theory rhetoric, but the information on alternative treatments was intriguing and I thought worth perusing. Sherrie confirmed that the series interviewed many of the doctors and treatment options she had researched. Two of them had recently been found dead. They were just about to publish a paper on their cancer treatments Sherrie said. So you see how the plot thickens. 

Every member on the board of The American Cancer Society is a representative of a pharmaceutical company, Sherrie told me. This was why there was nothing in the organizations literature that spoke of finding a cure for cancer. They only talk about treatment, preferably pharmaceutical treatments. Conspiracy or not, Western Medicine is being controlled by the pharmaceutical industry. But we live in such fear of the dreaded disease that there was no way people were going to disobey their doctor at the very moment they were most frightened. We had to believe something else first before we would be able to say no to this self flagellating narrative. Nothing like hearing a personal story to bolster confidence. And this was the second one I had heard regarding triple negative breast cancer.

I asked Sherrie if she had considered sharing her story. She had thought of writing a book she said, but in the end the retelling of her story took her back to that dark nightmare time and she wanted to move on. I could certainly understand that; other survivors probably felt the same way. So that left me, the side swiped bystander. I sat in the cob pit after everyone left mulling over this confirmation that there were plenty of alternative treatments to cancer. Later I would ask Sherrie if she would mind if I shared her story. She kindly offered additional information which I've put at the end of this post. I also asked Val if I could share her story too because sometimes you just need live confirmation that man made disasters did indeed have the impact we predicted though authorities are loath to admit it. 

Of Mind And Mud

As Sherrie told her story others too spoke of using coffee enemas. And drinking their own pee. Was there no end to these interesting 'home brew' treatments? I had come to the edge of the world to meet my people and they were pushing me where no one had pushed me before.

Meanwhile Rebekah our Goddess of Yoga whose statuesque physique and lion's mane of blond hair made her stand out like a deva, was having us do a yoga breathing exercise while compressing our stomach that she told us would cure constipation and indeed I can testify that it worked. This healing vortex along with the ongoing building of our mud house was beginning to make me feel I had arrived in a utopia, an alternative universe of peace and healing. 

The next day in the mud pit Simone the young woman from the Netherlands told me how she had suffered from job burn-out at a high tech start-up. The Dutch had a word that described a pre-burnout condition so she had been sent home by the company doctor to rest. Ah, the Dutch, they are so civilized. 

"We need that word," I told her. 

During her time off she had participated in a rocket stove building workshop which encouraged her to seek out more off grid type solutions. And so she had quit her job to take time out to seek a more fulfilling vocation. Many others too had the same story about quitting their job after burnout. It was sort of a recurring theme of the group.

"I don't want to quit my job," said Penny from New Zealand, "I like my life." She was a nurse and was currently taking a 9 week holiday to use up her vacation time. (Nine weeks! Think of it, what poverty of time off we live in in the US.) I sort of felt the same way about my life though I was intrigued by all these options of dramatic change and relocation.

I was very curious about the Chinese women, three from mainland China and one from Taiwan plus MayMay who was 12 who spent the time reading a Harry Potter book in Thai and could speak at least four languages including Karen. The Chinese women were networked into the group by Sylvia, May May's mother, a woman who lived in Mae Sot and had learned about earthen houses in that busy border town of cross pollination. Sylvia was in charge of preparing the food for our group. Many had gone to Mae Sot just to explore all the various helping professions offered by NGOs camped out there. Yu Yin had met Sylvia there and heard about the workshop, posting it on Facebook for others to find. (And yes Facebook is blocked in China, but you can buy a workaround black box to access it.)

Xiaoou (pronounced Sho-A), a mainland Chinese woman who had majored in gender equality studies at the University of Ireland wanted to know how I identified my nationality when I had two parents of different nationalities. I wrote a whole book about it I said acknowledging the complexity of my life as we sat in a hot tub together at the day's end. At the nearby hot springs, hot tubs had been fashioned out of cement culverts just big enough for four to sit in. Xiaoou asked the same question of Gioia (pronounced Joy-a) sitting across from me; a stunningly beautiful woman of mixed Japanese and Italian blood living in Rome, she had chosen to document the workshop with a video camera having just finished a degree in filmmaking from the UK. We both spoke of having many skills with which to relate to our different nationalities, but not feeling completely at home in any one place. A fourth person in that cement culvert was an Australian who lived off grid and had completed a few building projects of her own. Dhaniella said she didn't relate to her nationality, but more to various sub-cultures within Australia. This sentiment was easily shared by those of us from North America. The problems of the US in particular stood out this year.

"The whole world is wondering why America can't just get rid of guns," said Tracy at dinner. She was English living in Bangkok and married to an American with whom she could not discuss this problem America had with guns.

"You can't take guns away from Americans because they are afraid they'll run out of food and they'll need their gun to shoot squirrels," I said, "It's the same reason you can't take cars away from Americans because they might have to sleep in them if they find themselves without housing." This made her laugh. But there was a kernel of truth in the absurdity of the U.S. being the world's wealthiest country while its inhabitants lived in a psychological state of impending scarcity. A sort of ongoing pre-apocalypse mindset.

Others from the US (and Canada) commiserated with me about how nuts our country had become. It seemed to help to get that off our chest right away. 

Val said to me that she didn't know what to plan for because the world seemed to be so imminently ready to end that she didn't expect to see 30. I had felt that way too I told her.

"But then another ten years go by and the world still hasn't ended," I said, "except that the rich have gotten richer and the poor poorer." 

There were two things that eventually changed my mind about the world ending I told her. One was the mushroom people. Paul Stamet the mushroom man I'd heard at Bioneers had been developing mushrooms for mycoremediation, developing strains of mushrooms to break down oil, nuclear waste and possibly even plastic he said. Mushrooms seemed to have an intelligence, a caretakers mission; the vast mushroom network could reach out to the far edges of the forest and bring back nutrients needed by the trees living in the dark regions of the forest. I was happy knowing that mushrooms could also detox the planet. 

The second promising thing that changed my mind was meeting a Canadian psychic on my Stonehenge trip who told me she and other intuitives got together to broker deals with Gaia to ease up on things like earthquakes in populated areas. Saying this out loud I realized I sounded a bit wacky, but my point was that that there were unseen forces at work that we have no idea about that are trying to help us. 

Women Building Community

Meanwhile here on the edge of the forest we had managed to build a house in seven days with a group of untrained women. Women who individually had had no idea they could accomplish this. "I don't see it is possible," Xiaoou had told me on day two. But we had done it in community, with kids playing by our side and one 8 year old as able to swing a bucket of mud as the rest of us. Ailsa was half Scottish and half Karen and looking at her I saw myself at 8 not just in her mixed blood, but in her spirit. How able she was and eager to contribute to the build, cutting bricks with a machete and climbing up on the scaffolding with the rest of us. There was something that felt so intrinsically right about women building a house together with children being cared for in our midst. Perhaps it harked back to the origins of communal living in small tribes. Or it was the egalitarian-ness of it, something I longed for and when it happened left me feeling deeply satisfied.

The mud had worked its magic again as I knew it would. What fascinated me now was seeing what intrepid women would be drawn to this experience. Who would make visible to me the new paradigm that each of us were embodying in our own way.

That we were an all women build had been commented upon by both outsiders and within our ranks. The purpose of an all woman build was to demonstrate that women could do every part of a build. If a job needed muscle the job was broken down until it was manageable. Four bags of cement to mix became half a bag. No one need compete to show how strong they were. We more preferred to be useful to the whole, pitching in and supporting one another compensating for any shortcomings. 

By the sixth day I was in love with everyone confident that no one was judging me or misunderstanding my motives. By the final day we had not only finished building the house, we had plastered all the walls inside and out and created three dimensional vines and flowers to decorate the exterior walls. The experience of this accomplishment profoundly affected us all and comments at the wrap-up expressed some of these revelations.

"I've always wanted  to build my own house, but I thought I would need to find a man first," said Cheyanne a young woman from Australia, "now I know I just need a few friends."

 "I will be a seed," said XiaoV another of the Chinese women as she explained that she would go home and give a presentation so that those in China who were beginning to be interested in sustainable living could benefit from her time with us. Like the mushroom people we were bringing needed solutions from the edge of the forest back to the center where convention and fear had kept people in the dark.  

"I feel healed," I said. Healed from my fractured life of keeping up with my tribe in three different time zones all on Facebook. Healed in the knowledge that cancer could be cured with coffee enemas and seeds. Healed by the door that had opened to greater control of our lives. Healed by living in community for ten days harvesting the stories of woman I met. Stories of seeking a better life for ourselves, stories of self-healing, independence and free thinking. I could spot us now, see these women at airports traveling alone all over the world bringing home new skills and ways of thinking. 

And so was I, for all of these new gleanings would go with me into everything I did and talked about as I too wished to push the old paradigm through to a more enlightened understanding of how we could live in harmony with the natural world and in turn enhance our own well being. In telling this story I hope to bring to you some of these gleanings.

Wishing you all the best for the holidays and for 2016.

For more photos of the build click here to my album on flickr.

A useful site about alternative cancer treatments. Sherrie also wants to share the fact that there are many resources available, but she does not believe any one of them to be 100% accurate. So ask who is delivering the information and judge for yourself how credible they are. Any information or topics that resonate with you as an individual is an invitation to learn more, she says. She believes that the best chance at success is to participate in our your own healing because no one knows you better than you. So it's important to scrutinize many sources and consider what might work best for you.