Women’s Natural Building Workshop on the Horizon

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If you’ve read many of my posts you’ve gathered that there is a strong emphasis here at Full Bloom on the importance of building structures in a way the reflects the deeper values of the emerging ecologically based culture.  These values include: using locally and sustainably sourced materials, staying connected to the rhthyms and patterns of the natural world, and creating a sense of belonging to a place and/or bio-region to name just a few.

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The inside of me and my wife Eden’s Strawbale home.

There’s another value that’s becoming a significant and perhaps understated value in the emergent natural building culture: gender equality.

For quite some time now the art and trade of building has been dominated my the male half or our species and we’re excited about being able to shift that imbalance and see what happens.   How would our structures look and feel like if more of them were designed and built by women?  For centuries we’ve missed out on the God’s knows how many cool ideas by not having women be an integral part of the our building culture.   All I know is that diversity is a good thing for any system/culture wanting to thrive.

So in the spirit of supporting more diversity and continuing to evolve this art form called “natural building”  Full Bloom will be hosting a 10 day women’s natural building workshop given by our friend, neighbor, and master builder Lydia Doleman.  The women will be building a load bearing strawbale structure that will most likely be used as a massage room and healing space.

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Lydia plastering one of the “cob” structures here at Full Bloom

Its all very gratifying to be a part of the unfolding of a building culture that actually reflects my deepest values of equality and natural beauty.  If you want to learn from about the workshop you can visit Lydia’s site: www.theflyinghammer.com.

“We must raise both the ceiling and the floor.”
― Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead

 

Our First Permaculture Design Course at Full Bloom

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We recently facilitated a permaculture design course on the land through the Siskiyou Permaculture Insititute (http://siskiyoupermaculture.com/).  Some of you may not have heard of the term so let’s look at wikipedia’s definition:

Permaculture design emphasizes patterns of landscape, function, and species assemblies. It determines where these elements should be placed so they can provide maximum benefit to the local environment. The central concept of permaculture is maximizing useful connections between components and synergy of the final design. The focus of permaculture, therefore, is not on each separate element, but rather on the relationships created among elements by the way they are placed together; the whole becoming greater than the sum of its parts. Permaculture design therefore seeks to minimize waste, human labor, and energy input by building systems with maximal benefits between design elements to achieve a high level of synergy.

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Tom Ward on a site walk at Full Bloom with design course students.

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Class time in the Full Bloom farmhouse with co-teacher Karen and Tom Ward on the Right

The course was geared for experienced permaculturalists and focused primarily on doing design work for Full Bloom (rather than going over general permaculture principles).  It was taught primarily by Tom Ward who has been designing farms and properties in Southern Oregon for several decades now and is an absolute treasure trove of information and lore of the area.

It was a joy to participate in the course and take in so many differing perspectives of the land here, as well as to recieve some really creative design possibilities such as changing the way people drive onto the land so that we don’t have a road through the central area.  It was also very humbling to recognize how little I really know about all the natural systems that surround me here (geological, hydrological, wind, etc.).

I am excited to continue to hold courses so that we all can be come more literate about how we as humans affect our local environment, and how we can make that affect a positive and regenerative one.

“From where we stand the rain seems random. If we could stand somewhere else, we would see the order in it.”
― Tony Hillerman, Coyote Waits

 

 

 

Inspired by the Leviathan Studio on Lasquitti Island B.C.

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Just coming by from two inspirational weeks at the Leviathan Studio in B.C.  Mark Young is the founder and coordinator of this center dedicated to exploring the form of contact dance.   He has a certain devotional energy around the form as he attributes it to helping him recover from brain trauma.  He built the studio mostly by himself and some teenagers from the island he restled up to keep them out of trouble and give them something to focus there energy into (moving and stacking rock for the walls seen in the picture).    The Studio was built completely into the landscape with large rock and trees incorporated into the interior.  It creates an experience of still being in wild nature.  As a dancer I felt inspired to include the feeling and texture of the place into my dance.

DSCN0703 DSCN0693 DSCN0713Mark keeps the workshops at the studio very affordable through a relatively simple meals, and no frills lodging (camping).  Which was fine by me.  I came to dance!   Through the simplicity of the the place one is able to just enjoy the natural setting of the island with the coastal breezes and beautiful conifer trees.

After the trip I am emboldened to create a center her at Full Bloom that can offer individuals the opportunity to dance, enjoy the natural world, and connect with other kindred souls!
“There is a bit of insanity in dancing that does everybody a great deal of good”.  ~Edwin Denby

 

An Evening with Coenraad Rogmans: How to Create a Sense of Belonging through Natural Building

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A big piece of what we are about here at Full Bloom is creating a sense of belonging through how we design our buildings, our gardens, our lives in general.  Last month we were fortunate enough to host a talk given by our local natural building “guru” Coenraad Rogmans.  His talk a was entitled: “The Ten Principles of Natural Building”.  Ocean, our 8 year old resident artist was kind enough to put the title of the talk on our white board:

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It was an enlightening evening as Coenraad emphasized that natural building is much more than what material you use (cob, straw bale etc.) and more about how you design in such a way as to create a sense of beauty, connection, purpose, health, and belonging in the space you create.  Pointing out that real sustainability comes from people feeling at home, at ease, connnected with each other and the land they are living on or visiting.

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We all appreciated Coenraad’s humility and depth of perspective as the evening progressed.  I was left astounded by how important it is to consider all of these principles when designing a space and how they are often overlooked in contemporary architecture and design.  His site is www.housealive.org.  if you would like to learn more about him and his offerings.

“Everyone is aware that most of the built environment today lacks a natural order, an order which presents itself very strongly in places that were built centuries ago.”
Christopher Alexander

A Walk in the Woods…..

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Every year at Full Bloom we put some work into restoring are surrounding Forest acreage which amounts to over 200 acres.  Much of it was logged quite severely in the 1980’s and 90’s and it has grown back in thick patches of Douglas Fir and Manzanita.  In order to provide reduce the competition in the forest our forester Luke Rudieger of Black Oack Forestry has cut down several of the “weedy” fir and given space for the beautiful Madrone tree behind him to grow unencumbered.  We will use the fire logs for firewood to heat our structures and the wood fired bread oven in the communal building.

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Above is a picture of my wife Eden Luz during a walk through our forest.  It always fills me with a sense of enchantment and gratitude when I come by these special spots on our land.  DSCN0096

 

Above is a picture of the beautiful watershed we live in.  Speckled homesteads and lots of wildland for miles.

It always puts things in perspective to take these walks on our land and I’m so grateful for the opportunity to do so.

“Only with a leaf
can I talk of the forest,”
― Visar Zhiti, The Condemned Apple: Selected Poetry