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@@ -106,4 +106,29 @@ That's how you find yourself five feet in the air, strapped to a 27 foot long 19 +## Chapter on Building home +Quote from https://faircompanies.com/videos/meden-agan-small-island-getaway-seeks-old-greek-simplicity/ + +To really live this way you have to strip things back, not just reducing what you have, but stripping back your definitions of what it means to live on this planet, how do you want to do that? What you want out of a home? You have to question everything all the way back to the beginning -- what is a home? + +I ran across an interview with the Greek architect Takis Yalelis many years after I had been thinking about these things that nicely summarizes the idea: + +"home is your surroundings," says Yalelis, "it's not a house, it doesn't mean that it has four walls and a door and window and air conditioning and all that. It's where you live." For most of human existence how you lived, what you called home, was dictated by the natural world -- the building materials you could obtain, what you needed shelter from (cold? heat? rain? snow? etc) and then within those limits people expressed themselves. We no longer express ourselves through our homes and I think that's emblematic of so many of our problems, we have trouble expressing ourselves in so many places because we don't have the opportunity to do it in so many others. + +"Four walls makes a shelter," continues Yalelis, "and then you start making choices about that shelter, whether you want to enter and exit, do you want to stay in there forever, whether you want to get rained in, whether you want to have a view of the outside and what kind of view and why." + +Until I started working on the bus I had never made any real choices about my homes. I had rented what I could afford, purchased what seemed like a good investment (it was) and was reasonably nice, but I had never sat down and though about how I wanted to enter and exit my home (through a door?), but then when I started to think about these things I realized that all these choices I had not made, had consequences. To pick a very simple example, I have always had solid doors with very little, if any, window to the outside world. That has a set of consequences and affects how I'm going to view the world. If I had a glass door, that would have a different set of consequences and so on. + +Arguably even the bus is not really me expressing myself, at least on the outside. On the inside though we did get to express ourselves, my wife and I agonized over quite a few details in the way that I've noticed fanatics tend to do. Two years into our life in the bus, I flew into Denver to meet with company that had started to build computers in Denver. Yes, computers, built by had, in the United States. Their story comes later in this book, but as I sat at the initial meeting listening to the owner of the company talk about how they had spent years designing these computer cases, agonizing over the way the power button clicked, how the wood veneer fit into the metal and all the other details they sweated, I recognized that same fanaticism Corrinne and I had when we designed the bus. Once you start to realize that you can express yourself through the things you create, that you are in fact expressing yourself this way all the time, but once you take charge of that, once you start to bend it to your will, to express your will through the things you make you have make sure you get every detail right. + +That doesn't mean you hve to get every detail right the first time. In fact you can't. Expecially if you're building a home,. You hve to first build it the way you think you want it, then you have to go live in it and learn how you actually use it. I've never heard of anyone getting it right the first time. Even now, after years in the bus I still have a running list of improvements I want to make to make our home both more functional and better at expressing what I see when I close my eyes and imagine perfection, whateverthat might mean to me a that moment. + +That is perhaps the great lesson in building your home, realizing that your home is never done, it is not a thing, it is a process, and that process never ends. It helps to reinforce this lesson when you home breaks down and leaves you sitting at the side of the road, covered in transmission fuild and oil and grease, fumbling in the gravel for a wrench, seating and swearing and wondering what the hell is wrong with you that you can't just rent an apartment like everyone else and get on with the business of living. + +But I can't, it isn't me. And so it goes. + + +Quote from https://faircompanies.com/videos/meden-agan-small-island-getaway-seeks-old-greek-simplicity/: + +"What you call home, your country, the place where you come from, you're probably not going to describe a house. You may describe a tree, the weather, the lighting, the food, maybe the music." - Takis Yalelis |