I just spent two weeks with the Mud Girls up on Denman Island, BC. We were building an earthen house at a co-housing property, for a woman who is an graphic designer and a tattoo artist. The weeks were an intense learning experience in learning the building technique, and also a uniquely empowering experience to be on a construction site run entirely by women. Denman is a semi-rural island with many artist, farmers, and also much of the typical small-town troubles. In an email to a friend, I had these thoughts after returning home:
'Ready to go back to normal life?'.
I missed home, and I was ready to be home and reconnect with friends at the end of the week. I did not miss my job one bit, nor even think about it at all, and now I'm here again, fiddling at my desk in a government cube farm, doing paperwork and feeling all of the collective computer EM radiation, spiritual complacency mixed with unconscious despair, and temptations to dick around on the internet all day and eat peanut M&Ms from the vending machine. And I remember that the main benefits of my current job are that it is non-challenging, low-stress, reasonably well-paying (allowing my to save-up money for building The Bicycle and Other Things), and most importantly temporary (because I'm a temp). It is still energy auditing, and I'm happy to be doing it for a low-income weatherization program, but the whole system of things makes me itchy. I feel like the time I spent on Denman was falling into place in another life, as a different person that I've always meant to be but never figured out how to. Cognitive dissonance. Coming back to the city feels good, like to fitting back into a well-worn jacket, but maybe comfortable because of it's familiarity, not necessarily because it's the right fit. But just leaving here and moving somewhere new (somewhere like Denman), doesn't feel right either. Somehow I've got to figure out how to more fully be the person I am when I feel free like that... within the structure of the city. Creating my own reality. Re-making the city, or at least some small corner of it, to feel like Co-Ho landing... But such things take time to manifest. I've got plans for making it all fall into place. I dunno if it'll work, but I gotta try, because not trying would be just going back into the despair and dissolution and complacency that I've only recently managed to pull myself out of.
The more I think about these thoughts and make my plans for the next year, which involve spending the entire summer 2012 living on or around Vancouver Island, doing an earthen building internship, the more I wonder if my life will take me out into living in some rural area. Being away from the city, away from internet, and movies, and media just felt so damn good. I don't know whether my future will be in Seattle, or near my sister in Bellingham, or even somewhere around Vancouver Island or some other rural area looking for organic farms in need of earthen buildings. What I do know is that right now I am walking the right path, learning earthen building, doing more art. I feel very strongly called to spend time on Vancouver Island. I'm just enjoying the beautiful things in my life this summer, and incubating the ideas of Awesome Projects percolating in my head.
