We are living our second summer from our wheelie home VardoForTwo. Together Pete and I have learned, and continue to learn what it takes to make "home." For those who have followed the journey, the process of building a chemically-safe haven filled this blog for many months. My other blogs, Sam and Sally, Makua O'o and the fairy tale Woodcrafting helped me sort through the tangle and jumble to make some sense of the losses/dead-ends and challenges. Blogs sprouted to satisfy my writing calls and for that time because I had the help of my Ruby the laptop and access to the internet I did write and write and write. The blog world was a godsend and I used that world to explain and interact with others who are and were unsure of the affects of environmental triggers on the reality of life as they'd known it.
Now I live with a different sort of writer's deadline, working at the local public library for 59 minutes at a time, I prioritize my hour and decide how to spend it. Do I search? Do I write? Can I do both? Sometimes the answers are No. Yes. No. Other mornings, I Search a little to get answers I need then move to my write something here mode. So, the third answer is Yes. I have 41 minutes left here at my favorite window computer seat. And with some luck I will be able to spread the thoughts I came with onto to post: Stages of growth and the journey back to innocence. Working backwards from now, 'INNOCENCE' is the first stage --- the beginning in a soul's journey, as in the innocence of babes, there is only the joy of possibility and the openness of all possibile good. The runes have influenced me with their oracular insights. I pulled the rune of Innocence yesterday and how light that insight felt to me. Light, as in it's been a long-time since I've felt innocent. Ahhhh, the sensation. I took time as I fondled the stone in my hand, first the right and then the left-hand, and recalled other times when I did feel that innoncence. A time of clothes-pinned tents hung from the clothes-line in my neighbor's yard came. Aunty Lilly embraced my innocence, and fed it with her view of life. Under sheets and blankets strung from those clothes-lines, I felt freed up from the heaviness than stewed in my own home just the other side of the hedge. How long back was that? Fifty and more years yet there there were.
The journey in VardoForTwo has included clothespins at many, many stops along our nomadic way. That childhood innocence did bubble up within me when I needed to create safe-sense while we slept many places in our car. Clothespins and curtains, like the tents created by Aunty Lilly in that old backyard, were the basics for transforming a nomad's car into a home for the night. Clothespin ( bag full of them) are part of our early day essentials today. We use them to peg laundry that is wet from a simple wash, and use them to peg bedding or clothes that must be washed and washed and hung with Nature's cycle for months or years to ready them for a safe-wear. If you were to peek into the vardo you're likely to see the wooden clothespin clicked somewhere ... just because, or just in case.
A year ago, we finished building and investing in a dream of faith: most of the money we had we used to build a stainless steel interior walled, white oak exterior, milk-painted single axle trailer home that is used mostly for sleeping. We had many other needs to address a year ago, and yet the priority of safe sleeping place was met. We are grateful every night and every morning to be inside VardoForTwo. That dream built with hard work and faith is now the foundation for building the rest of our life on the Planet. Once a safe wheelie home like ours is built, the challenges of growth from the kernel of goodness show up. Rebuilding a life at any age includes being with the flow of Nature's stages of death and rebirth. Without compost, a new seed will grow differently and at the other extreme, will die, to become part of the compost for another seed another opportunity.
Today, mid-July, 2010 we are learning to live on our different resources of income and community-exchange. A monthly social security check gives us money enough to pay a regular rent. The rest of that check needs supplementation and resourcefully creative approaches. Pete's diverse talents for work work are being tapped. He is Pete the Tinker and the Care-giver and the whatever else needs to do sort of guy in town. Together we talk through the ways we can make what we have into what we need. We drive the vehicles less, and are working on a plan to create that sheltered kitchen and living space for the winter that we know we need. The exact nature of that shelter is in the hands of Faith, and our footwork sometimes needs to include a bit of standing still while all the facts come to where we are.
That journey back to innoncence has seemed impossibly inaccessible for many moons. Driving with Crisis will do that to a soul, and it must be part of the process of denying that something has died that keeps innocence at bay. Whidbey Island and the friends who rent space to us as vardo dwellers offers us space to tap into innocence again. It takes practice to feel innocence and that's the truth. With a little imagination, I see how a clothespin might be just the tool to hold me to the moment of new beginnings.
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