Mud Houses and Squatty Potties

..Right View..

We are preparing this week to host an earthen building workshop. Adjacent our little adobe home can be heard daily the sounds of slurps and slushes, laughter and song as our community gathers to dance barefoot in the pool of muddy earth which has for years generously offered us the soupy materials which house us all. It is a joyous occasion, coming together to work, not for pay but for life. How curious indeed is this liminal bardo state within which modern humans now reside where such an endeavor is all but unheard of. Work without pay?! House of mud??? Yet countless peoples the world over have built homes out of mud for thousands of years. Houses don’t need to be expensive. And yes, we don’t always need to work for pay. Hell, Woody Guthrie knew it! During the dustbowl years he strived to promote the lost art of building with earth. Such a simple, cost-effective way to protect one from not only cold and heat and rain but from uncontrollable fires and storms of dust. Wood can’t do this. Wood burns. Dust blows through the cracks. Wood is expensive. Wood takes a long time to grow. Wood holds within Her sprites and spirits of whom modern amnesiacs disregard at their own peril. Whoa! Now I am getting carried away?

In this era of post-truth, late-stage capitalism where we have utterly lost the creative capacity our ancestors had which enabled them to see clearly the myriad forces around us that make life live it is no wonder we can’t imagine a world where life’s essentials are abundantly found and easy to acquire. Well, easy of course, as we discussed in last weeks thought puddle, is a relative term, but certainly less mind-numbing and far more honorable. To be sure, Earth gives freely, but at a cost. And in considering how seemingly “efficient” and “modern” most of our lives have become the cost may have been our very ability to see clearly at all.

How arrogant we have become to label everything as “resource”. We have a long way to go even in our tree hugging community before we properly resurrect the lost traditions of singing the right songs to the dirt we disturb before we transmute Her into bricks from which we will build the homes that house us. Yet how can a real culture be birthed or revived without an honest effort being put forth? So we do our best. And usually, we fail. But we try again. Most of the adults are too cool now to be bothered by such pagan tomfoolery of course. Thailand like everywhere else, is hypnotized by modernity and therefore a bit embarrassed when asked to genuinely feed the spirit homes in a way that isn’t merely habitual motion based in fear and superstition. But the children still hear the laughter of the fairies and can see the bamboo cry when we cut her. They learn quickly that before we harvest corn we must say “thank you” to the mother stalk that is offering her child to us as food. They remind us, as long as we remember to teach them, that one ought not take anything without asking and without giving something of equal or greater value in return. So, we make beautiful little offerings made from shells and stone, adorned with natural paints distilled from flowers and leaves collected throughout our daily adventures as we enter the forest around us with playful reverence to give to the Great Mud Pit before jumping into her inner sanctum where the bricks are formed. We give before we take and ask permission, not only when using our friends’ toys but when we take a stone from the trail. Everything is alive.

Most of my friend’s stateside struggle to afford even the most basic of life’s necessities. Where I come from, monthly rent typically runs between $1,200-$3,000USD. To actually buy/build a home and own a piece of land is generally an unfathomable expense and therefore the idea of pursuing such a path is rarely even entertained. Yet Thailand has shown me that the ways in which societies can manage land are many. No one bugged us here at our little farm about making a home out of mud. They laughed at us and called us crazy but they didn’t fine us or make us follow any “code”. We collect our own waste and use it as fuel. We collect rainwater and share one kitchen among the entire village. By U.S. standards, much of what we do is certainly “against code”, as are most things in nature.

How strange our efforts to manage the unmanageable, how rude to label something as alive and life-giving as Earth herself, a “resource”. With a shift of view, one that reorganizes our understanding of what education is and what it is for, might we be able to stop wasting our energy on finding ways to end financial poverty and instead wisely use the abundance already here, and move beyond an absolute reliance on money? Absolutley. I have seen it not only where we live here at Pun Pun, but in villages the world over. Funny how these villages are so often seen as poor by good-hearted aid groups, the world bank and missionaries from western countries. Alas, we only see what we have been taught to see.

Some come through our farm, dressed in clothes unfit for earthly delights and upon seeing us dancing in mud take selfies from a safe distance, awkwardly holding an iced latte in one hand, iphone in the other, viewing what we do as some fringe art form, not an actual option for housing. Their view has been skewed. When the U.S. ran out of toilet paper during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, countless graduates of modernity’s curious institutions of thought were terrified, utterly clueless to the fact that whatever gets on your hand can simply be, washed off. At our farm we rarely use toilet paper, opting instead to use our fingers and water. No waste at all. Easy. And if you think that’s gross, imagine having shit on your face and only washing it off with a dry paper towel.

I want to see differently. I want to think in ways that extend not only beyond the limits of my own cultural understanding but beyond the limits of my species’ limited understanding. I remember a time not long ago, before everyone sat hunched over their phones in coffee houses, when these caffeinated churches were sacred gathering spaces, where we ignited ideas that often sprouted into real action. Yet those actions weren’t good enough, for they resulted in, well, coffee houses filled with zombies hunched over iPhones. What if we could humble ourselves a bit more, stop placing humans at the center of every story and cross pollinate our way of seeing with views held by birds, trees, the wind? What if we, like mud, could offer ourselves to others in ways that resulted in housing them?

I wonder.