Insulation

I was watching Grand Designs Revisited last night (oh, how I love thee, Grand Designs :)  There was a man who lived and worked in the forest.  He cared for the trees, resold branches and charcoal.  For the past 10 years he had lived rough, under a tarp, or in a leaky caravan.  And now he was building himself a house in the forest.

This man enlisted the help of many volunteers to craft something simple.  Everything to build it was taken from the forest surrounding.  The A-frame was joisted up by hand and rope, with not one large piece of earthmoving equipment in sight.  It was all very hands-on and quite inspiring to me, in many ways.  (Although that's not to say that he was an architectural technophobe:  the clay to smooth on the inside of his walls was taken from the creek at the bottom of his land by a big Tonka vehicle;  the wood for the frame, the walls, the roof and floors was chainsawed down and the floors, though hammered in by hand, were planed and had the nail holes put into them by a drill so as to prevent splitting).

What emerged after seven or so months was something that closely resembled my dream house.  Totally simple, and very beautiful, the antithesis to a McMansion.

The insulation between the outside walls and the inside plasterwork was barley straw bales and pulped up newspaper and phone books.  Something has been resonating in me ever since about those bales.   It's got me wondering (and maybe even contemplating a visit to the paintbox to see what, if anything, my cave spaces think of this) - what is the best process for a sensitive human soul to fortify their walls?

I want the answers to that to all come at once, and to come for good.  A pill to take once, and everything is fixed.  A McMansion solution.  Move your stuff in after the builders have left the site.  The alternative is frustrating, and yet much more inspiring.  The alternative is walking into the answers as they are required. The second way takes a lifetime, the crafting by hand of walls, of roof, of floorboards, of your own habitation.

The fortifying answers come, over months and years, as I make space, make myself quiet, carve it out.  The next step to take.  Or no step to take at all.  The wisdom of my inner self astounds me.  It goes so deep.  I have discarded so much of Christianity (it seems) that sometimes all is left are some choice life-reverberation words of Jesus (sometimes I think the Bible could simply contain a couple of verses - the kingdom of God is within you, love your enemies - and we have our work cut out for us our entire lives without the need for all the other sideline stuff, all those stupid verses of Paul forbidding women to teach, etc etc.

And yet something tells me that doctrine is like a McMansion.  We want prefab.  But Christianity as doctrine has about as much soul as the two-storey monstrosity I walked past on Duke Street last night.  All straight, cold lines, and little warmth.

I seem to have come upon an inability and antipathy to read anything these days which talks about a male God written by a white male.  It's just where I'm at right now, dealing with the next layer of rage.  But there is little space for me there.  There never has been.  And yet what remains underneath all of that is still the very small voice within. It runs so next to and entwined within my Self that I can barely tell the two apart.  Maybe I'm deluding myself and there is no God speaking there.  But whatever it is, it is my experience, and it is part of the fortification I continue to plug my walls with.