After my post-Central America rest stop in San Francisco, another month worth of overland travels via train, bus, and car, to Eugene, briefly Portland, then Seattle to paint the inside of my folks' house, Twisp (in Washington's NE Cascade Methow Valley), Seattle again, then finally last Thursday back to Portland and the Kenton Compound, er, urban homestead. The strawberry bed is coming along great guns, but I think the late spring cold weather affected the germination of peas and beans because only a few have come up where there should be many more. Debbie D. constructed a nifty creative-reuse fence of old water pipes and various gadgets along the front of the front yard, for decoration and also to discourage the ingress of neighborhood dogs who run loose in the night and shit wherever they please.
I've been attending several events of the annual Village Building Convergence, a natural building and permaculture hoo-ha that local org City Repair puts on each May. My sense is that this will be the last year of a discrete 10 day May conference, and that VBC type activites and projects will become more year-round. Which is good. People undertake (and can use volunteer labor for) natural building and permacultural projects lots of other times than mid May.
It brings to mind that it was exactly 2 years ago that I was beginning work on the urbanite foundation of the cob house here in Kenton NoPo. I read earlier today that some researchers and analysts have pinpointed the exact time that the world went past "Peak Oil" (the highest ever point of worldwide oil production, after which it will only and inexorably fall, with many and deep consequences for the world economy and the modern way of life) as July 2006. I note the coincidence that I (along with the friends who came over to help me that day) layed the first cob on the foundation of what became this house on July 4, 2006.
My life is at a transition point and I cannot say with any certainty at this moment that I will be living in this delightful casita this time next year. I may be, or I may be working and learning in a more rural permacultural context, or traveling, or in Twisp, or who knows. But building this place was a definitive step for me on the journey from the non-sane world of petro-commercial consumer society to the thing that is aborning. I never intended it to be my singular lifetime abode, but a place that a. serves as a positive example for others (and there will be many others in the new strange times we are entering), and b. continues to serve as housing for whoever comes to live here. In my periods of being away, it has already hosted two longer term tenants and one short term visitor. In the future I myself may be the visitor or sub-leasee, we shall see. The point is, the project serves. It already has and it will continue to do so.