by Amy Minato
Still, most of my creations have been disasters. The hat that I knit for my first boyfriend turned out square, a giant tea-cozy. He gallantly wore it anyway, much to my chagrin. One night I caught him stretching it over a basketball.
Why didn’t I quit?
It isn’t praise or perfection that I’m after. Something in me craves an understanding in my hands of how things are made. It’s empowering to know the basics of what I use, to feel that I can provide for myself from my environment.
It’s the survival instinct, maybe, or good old self-sufficiency. All my life I’ve been enamored by stories of people making their own utensils, clothing, shelter, from the basic materials at hand. I’m ever compelled to try.
“Do you have a recipe?” Pearl warily asks as she takes colored pencils to a card she’s drawn. The picture is of a small cottage with a large garden, simple but arresting.
“No, but I know the ingredients—mustard seed, vinegar, wine, sugar, salt.”
But ingredients don’t a recipe make. Mustard seeds float to the top of the vinegar like caddis flies about to hatch.
I give up and we go for a walk in the crisp breeze. We talk about life, poetry, friends as I gather horsetail for making a mat. Pearl smiles and shakes her head. The sky shakes a cheery blue cape that we pass beneath.
The Bath
In the upstairs attic of the main house lies the secret chamber where our most hedonistic activity occurs—the bath. A spacious claw-foot tub surrounded by hand-built wooden cabinets and skylights reclines beside a circular window that frames the trees and fields to the west. A dusk bath allows for tear-jerk sunset views, a midnight one for star-speckled bathing.
Baths, alas, use more water than showers and there’s only one tub, so most of us limit them. Our weekly baths are planned, anticipated, coveted. To complicate matters, Jack and Rita, because of their adjacent room, limit our access to the tub god. We decide at tense weekly meetings who can bathe when. The bath quickly becomes a highlight of my winter life at Siesta Lane.
On nights when no one’s home, when the cold damp taps insistently on my shoulder, I pin up my long hair and pour almond, lavender, and rose oil into the steaming water, mineral, and sea salts. Beeswax candles give a honeyed light and scent to the room. Sometimes a cloudpetaled moon peeks through the skylight.
In spring magnolia blossoms float on the silken water that caresses my neck as I relax into it, sipping chardonnay in a chilled glass and humming old love songs.
Time drowses while this grateful body sighs and rolls around. Flickering light plays over the oak walls. Steam sidles my hollows, warm currents swirl between breasts and thighs.
When the water grows tepid I dry off with thick towels, rub oils and lotion on tingling skin, wrap in a soft robe, slide into cushy slippers, and float back to my cabin to read romantic poetry by lantern light beneath heavy quilts and the roof’s lullaby of rain. And almost forget there’s no one joining me in bed.
Love Song of the White Pine
I wait on this green hill cupped
in cloud and ringed by mushroom
where snowmelt gloves
and stirs my roots and wind
trembles my furred boughs
as yellow dust releases
somewhere in the forest bearing
my name. His silk scarf drifts
past spruce and fir to where
my needles flair their skirts and funnel
undulations of pollen that swirl
my shingled cones, and cling
to the rough skin of my scales
for one year before venturing
a messenger to the core,
to spark, to seed, my love
comes to me
in a shower of gold.
Sociality
It’s my turn to host the weekly supper club. Every Friday night, a group of writer friends whom I met in grad school gather to swap exaggerated stories and eat decadent food. It helps us get through rough weeks.
I want to hold the event in my cabin this time so I plan a dinner that can be cooked on the woodstove. Cheese and chocolate fondue. Thick chunks of homemade bread and slices of banana, apple, and strawberry for the chocolate. It promises to be a memorable feast.
And memorable it becomes.
Wind swashbuckles through chinks in my cabin and the woodstove goes on strike. We huddle beside a smoldering fire, trying to dip tough bread into coagulated cheese and mushy fruit into lumpy chocolate. The delectable dinner downgrades to “barely edible” and the cozy quarters to cramped.
With no utensils in my cabin, our fingers are soon cheesy and greasy. The festive mood fizzles and in the country, there’s no nearby take-out diner to save the day.
“It’s better than shoes. People in emergency situations have been forced to eat their shoes,” Gabriel offers.
“Chocolate in any form is still heaven,” Sophia suggests, scraping brown mounds off the sides of the pot. Maggie chuckles quietly and chips at some cheese.
We end up back in the main house, where there’s a gas stove, sharing stir-fry and Scrabble with Luke and Yoko, affirming the value of community. Raul comes home with new drawings to show and we start a robust fire in the living room.
Maggie stretches on the couch and chats with Yoko, Gabriel naps on the rug, and Sophia reads Raul’s fortune in the tarot deck she finds on the shelf. Full, warm, and relaxed, and even though it gets late, nobody wants to go home. The evening has been saved, no, elevated, by my housemates.
Sometimes necessity strips us naked and people pitch in. Being too comfortable and self-sufficient, it seems, may preclude some charming rescues!
Still, it’s a risk. The minimalist lifestyle, however good for the soul, can be a strain on your social life.
Cold
When you are cold it’s hard to know it will pass, to believe the woodstove will fire, the sun return. It’s the terror of inadequate shelter or clothing, and the dependency on our minds and hands to compensate for the absurd vulnerability of our bodies.
At dinner one night we discuss how animals keep warm; fur, hibernation, migration. Mick mentions the woolly bear, who changes its body liquid into alcohol, like an antifreeze, for the season. Raul holds his fork in midair for a moment. “I have an uncle who does that.”
We share the cost of wood, gather or hire someone to haul and stack it, but we each have to chop enough for our own cabin. Faced with the need to split wood, I flip through in my mind how Mick taught me to do it—how to hold the axe, position myself, aim, and follow through. I can remember—nothing. Of course, this means it’s impossible for me to split wood. Standing here with my fine axe, strong back and hands, good eye, and several hearty logs, I nearly give up ... but I am, darn it, cold.
So in all trepidation I balance a log on the block, swing the axe back and up and down onto it, making a slim wedge in the top two inches. I repeat this many times, slashing and shaving and occasionally knocking the log across the shed. Ceres trots in, pretending to eat from her food dish beside me, sneaking amused glances at me from behind her long ear.
I stumble through the process, bemoaning the forever it takes to chop a single log, getting the axe stuck and hammering the whole thing onto the block until it splinters, somehow oddly attached to the purity of my relationship to this act. Sensing a confidence born of moving from ignorance and failure to, at least, marginal success, on my own resources.
I peer into the woodstove in vulnerability and hope, stacking small to larger pieces of wood, leaving room for air and channels for the fire to reach the top log, admonishing it, in the depth of chill in my bones, to light.
Slowly, almost as an afterthought, the way lights go on in houses across a bay, a few flickers catch. They lick and tantalize and finally flare.
I lean back, squat on the floor, and whisper gracias.
What I learn is respect and patience and my own fragility. How much more profound these qualities would be were I even more directly dependent on my natur
al surroundings for food, heat, shelter.
Sun
As the snow melts I grow soft in my body, gazing through the steaming glass at the flesh and texture of the earth after a week of ice. The landscape awakens, raw, like me, relearning warmth and the green spiriting of the senses. How can I move but from kindness? The grass roughs up yellow and tousled from its scalp of snow. My blood tender as finches quivering on the spruce, unprepared for this sudden thaw, braced so long for cold. I’m wary of the soft opening of soil and what may nudge a pale head up.
In Paris some tourists ask a photographer what they should go look at. “Don’t look at anything,” he says. “Look at the light.”
Today is Winter Solstice, when day and night are equal, and after which days begin to lengthen, the sun returns. To honor this I will move through this day accompanied only by natural light, studying the variations of light and shadow, white nappy bursts in cloud corners, soft shine on wet rock. My body tunes to the slow curl of sun, aware each moment where it pulses, orienting to its path across the sky, shifting my center for its rays.
Christmas Bird Count
Three of us gather at dawn
two varied thrush beneath the laurel
binoculars in reverent rings around our necks
three California gulls hover and circle
winged and beaked in wool scarves
we scratch numbers with stiff fingers
five rock doves roost beneath the bridge
two winter wren twitter the dogwood
away from task and chit-chat
each of us come to become lost
six mallards maneuver on river glass
five yellow warblers dribble gold against grass
to follow the heron’s still gaze upstream
to be caught in the swoop of red-tail, bounce of finch
a ruby-throated hummingbird dives a scrub jay
A towhee bobs a black head as we ponder the pines,
traverse the butte, willing
vessels for birdsong and wingflash,
searching the nimbus, we are Magi
noting the season, and what life
may greet us this day from the sky.
Winter Solstice is my New Year. As Earth tips toward the sun, greeting an old friend, my heart opens to awareness. It’s a time to rediscover self, to strengthen gifts. I vow to write more poems, walk daily, give blessing. Crimson lines inscribe this promise across the late afternoon sky.
At sunset I write on small pieces of red paper what needs letting go—and what to wish for—crumple and toss these in my solstice fire. By morning I sense a softening, a focusing of attention, the directing of light within, already affecting change.
January I look out and see the oak, pine, meadow, and hills. I sit on the deck and want to stay forever gazing at the grass swaying and the mountains turning deeper blue. Listen carefully because that’s the whole story. That grass, those hills, that stare, with time filing her fingernails beside me.
Hibernation
The combination of new moon, winter, and menses is redundant and overwhelming. There’s no hope of action. There’s eating and hibernation and long stares into the fire. There is hot cocoa, sunrise, and sunset.
The call of the body strengthens. When sleepy, I sleep. Hungry, I eat. Stiff, I stretch like a cat on a rug. I curl up and swill with good blood and float through the day, tides in my uterus pulled by the moon. Out go the plans, papers; projects swirl, my boat rocks. My head says finish this, that, call, plan, scheme, scribble, make money, plant seed. Instead I crawl to my cabin to read, doze, and dream, a dumb beast dazed and blush and blooming.
Much of the cold season I remain under cover. Under several covers. A flannel sheet, two serapes, a poncho, a quilt, and a sleeping bag. One of many respects paid to the season is to put out the next day’s clothes before going to sleep. This minimizes time spent in the cold part of my cabin, below my sleeping loft. Long baths before bed with crushed sage leaves, almond oil, candles, and poems can last me through cold nights. Long walks circulate blood. Hot cocoa in a bowl warms the hands, as songs do the soul.
These small gestures are necessary because cold comes to court us, woo us to numbness, to stagnation, hibernation. If I give in to it, cold can deflate me. I will cry next to a failed fire, sleep early, wake late, eat popcorn for dinner. So when the world is abandoned by the voluptuous eyelashes of the sun and the sky a traffic jam of clouds, I muster a pedestrian courage, the inimitable task of love, and warm the hearth, rub the skin, crack the frozen face into a smile while reaching out for someone nearby to kindle.
Sweat
Raul has decided to build a sweathouse. Everyone is excited to “do a sweat” with him.
For days, he carries wood and blankets, sticks and mud up to a well-hidden spot on the hill behind his cabin. When it’s ready, five of us show up in loose tunic-like clothing, feeling both silly and somber. Rocks, heated in an outdoor fire, are brought in to create heat in the small dome-shaped room. We crowd together around the hot rocks. Raul begins drumming and singing. The sound comes from deep in his body and seems to be speaking to the drum and to the smoke. Rising and falling, louder and softer.
Soon we are in a trance of sweat and song. After what seems a long time, Raul picks up a handful of dirt, which is the altar, and sprinkles it on the stones. He says a blessing for each of us and a prayer for the earth. We are invited to speak. Through the dark and heat our murmurs mingle and drift upwards with the smoke.
“I pray for strength with my work.”
“For my sister recovering from an addiction.”
“Praise to this land.”
“I am thankful that my body has healed.”
“May my family learn to accept me.”
Raul taps us with sweetgrass switches as we leave. Some of us are crying, all of us are sweating. For the rest of the day we are very helpful to each other and tender, speaking in whispers.
Later I reflect on how amazingly comfortable we all felt with Raul’s ceremony. If plopped down on Earth from another planet to visit all the major religions with their holy books and icons and elaborate temples, I would find myself drawn to Raul’s altar of soil. What, after all, could be more clearly, unabashedly, worthy of praise?
Compassion
My friend at the magazine is swamped in submissions so I end my leave of absence and drive out to the truly intentional community where it’s housed, to help.
Skipping Stones operates out of Cottage Grove, a community about thirty miles south of Eugene, up a long rutted dirt road, that’s way beyond Siesta Lane on the sustainability scale. Aprovecho, which in Spanish means “to make the best use of,” is a collection of folk fiercely dedicated to conserving resources. On my quest for simple living, I had briefly considered living here, but as someone who barely survived the small sacrifices of Lent, like giving up candy for forty days, I knew I lacked the stamina.
Most of the scattered buildings have no electricity or water. One’s made of mud, another of straw. One’s thirty feet up in a tree. Aprovecho folks are dreamers and inventors, young people with cold cheeks and old clothes who do things like give classes on cooking with cow patties. They travel across the world to build, alongside villagers, rocket stoves that use very little wood. Rocket stoves help villagers both cook and heat their homes more efficiently, and conserve their nearby forests. At home in the United States, these workers live much like the indigenous people they help.
Hot water at Apro involves stoking a fire first, or waiting for a sunny day to heat the solar shower. Food, almost exclusively, comes from the garden and bread is made by hand. If you don’t like steamed kale and fava beans, you’ll lose weight here. Many do.
Every year a troupe of new interns comes to learn permaculture (the art of enriching soil through farming and ecological building) and to experience living in an “eco-community.” Some can’t take it. Others become enchanted and never leave.
When I arrive today for work, two stoc
ky men with knit caps are designing a solar-powered refrigerator in the shed. One’s laughing loudly and the other grins. Friends for a long time, and bearing a not so vague resemblance to Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, we call them the mad inventors. They’ve already designed a solar-powered desalinator, which a coastal Mexican village now uses to make seawater useable for crops.
Hens run back and forth along one row of the immense garden in their tubular wire cage, dubbed a “chicken tractor.” The tractor gets moved along the rows so the chickens can fertilize the veggies and eat the slugs across the entire garden. Residents in turn eat the chicken eggs.
Gravity carries water through pipes from the spring on the hill to the garden. A goat near the main house keeps the yard trim, and the many compost toilets provide organic matter for trees and shrubs.
Garlic and herbs hang from the ceiling in the main house; sliced pears dry on racks that swing above the woodstove.
I work on Skipping Stones magazine with Asit, whose tiny cabin nests beside the garden. To get there from the main house I tightrope over a rickety plank across a creek and pass below a thirty-foot-high treehouse through a field of blackberry brambles. This gingerbread house is filled with files, magazines, submissions, and subscription materials. The floor-to-ceiling south-facing windows heat the rock floor on a sunny day.
But today we can see our breath as we work, and even though I’m charmed and inspired by Aprovecho, sometimes the mud and chill have me longing for an office with bright lights, thick carpets, and central heat.
True to Asit’s East Indian custom, we drink cup after cup of rich, creamy, spicy tea. My spirit stirs with the writings from children around the world:
