Twelve by Twelve: A One-Room Cabin Off the Grid and Beyond the American Dream by Bill Powers

Author:Bill Powers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nature, Environmental Conservation & Protection, Self-Help, Green Lifestyle, Essays, House & Home, Sustainable living
Publisher: New World Library
Published: 2010-10-06T04:31:22+00:00

community. I stepped out of the bus in Cabrican, where I was met by Raul, a Mayan man and local schoolteacher who was to be my host. Through my twenty-two-year-old eyes, the lightly touched landscape seemed alive; it was Gaia, the animate earth that philosophers talked about in my undergraduate anthropology class.

I lived with Raul and his family for a month, constructing fuelsaving ovens and lending a hand with house building and even smallscale silver mining. I noticed, amazingly, that folks only worked, on average, the equivalent of half a day. I learned a bit of Mam Mayan. But it was a small detail that impressed me, a child of suburbia, more than anything else: the footpaths.

Like the ones through the Pauls’ property, the Mam footpaths wound through the woods with little allegiance to efficiency. They bent, looped, and curved playfully. The Maya considered the paths to be sacred, alive somehow, and imbued with greater life with the walking. Nobody had cars, and the bus I came in on only arrived about once a week. So we used our feet, onward to the outdoor market, the fields, the mine, the forest; untidy dirt paths, intersecting with other dirt paths. Often a rhythm would accompany our walk: a chanted tune, a kind of a Mayan-language mantra. We’d walk slowly, always, enjoying ourselves as much as getting anywhere.

Later, in Africa, I heard the story of a pair of African porters who were hired by a Belgian trader to walk with him deep into the forest towns in search of one commodity or another. After two days of brisk walking, the porters sat down on the ground and refused to budge. The trader first demanded they walk, then tried sweet-talking, and finally offered them an increase in salary — after all, time was money! No matter what he tried, they wouldn’t move. Finally the porters explained: they’d been walking too fast, and they now had to stop to wait for their souls to catch up.

Along the Mayan footpaths, along No Name Creek, and along the Pauls’ trails, I felt the way those porters did. That slow, considered pace allows your soul to walk with you. At the Pauls’, I stopped on a footpath, their 12 × 12s barely visible through the foliage, to observe a cocoon on a twig. In the organic broth inside a cocoon, the organs of the new creature emerge with the pulse of a new heartbeat. Growth in nature happens not in a linear manner but rather through a series of pulsations. Growth is gentle; it reaches out tentatively into new terrain. This quote from Rumi captivates me: “Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralyzed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds’ wings.”

AFTER OUR WALK, I sat with the Pauls in the middle of a large circular garden beside their 12 × 12s.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.