above photo is the sign hanging at the door of the yurt I lived in from 2016-2019

Loving the Place You Live In

Almost without exception (… and don’t worry, you’re not the exception), I love the people I work with.  Anyone taking any step closer to the earth in any way is beautiful to me.

It’s fine if you’re in a subdivision. If you like it, all the better. Liking and loving where you are brings good things. Planting a garden brings even better things. Caring about plants and soil and health and water is the best thing we can do.

Everyone does it differently and that’s why it works. Almost nobody lives the way I do and that’s fine. We all have our way and our ecological function. I’m somewhat of an early-succession nitrogen-fixing tree (non-native and a little weedy, but please don’t spray me. I’m trying to help and I attract butterflies).

Though I’m opinionated about some things, respect and understanding come naturally in my work. However someone is trying to care about the earth, they’re caring about the earth and that’s really all I need. Plant one tree and you made something better.  My work shows me a lot of people who care. I’m thankful for it every single day.

…and with that all said, here’s a little about how I live, why I do it, and what it’s taught me. It’s one of the roots Silver Branch draws from.

The Life Configuration That Kind of Works For Me

For ten years now, I’ve lived in one configuration or another with between 400 and 800 watts of solar power and in an average of something like 250 sqft of indoor space.

These days, it’s 800 watts (280ah of batteries for any solar nerds out there…), 400sqft of space, and a whole lot of trees.

We use about one-tenth the electricity of the average American household our size. This isn’t a brag, but to say that this is doable and doesn’t feel like lack.

It’s seriously fine. I almost never have a difficult day because of having too little electricity.  We don’t have some crazy super eco house.  It was built low-budget.  Our solar power had a one-time cost around $1,000, not $30,000.  This works because our home is small and we designed it to need little electricity. With one-tenth the total electricity most of use and a modest well-designed home, it’s possible to  live with a lot of comfort.

This is good for people to know and I’m glad I have learned it.  If you suddenly had to live off a tenth of the electricity you do now, if you were smart about it and could make a few changes to your home, you would be fine.

We catch our rainwater and we drink spring water from a local spring. It works well (no pun intended).  In our  first homestead, we looked at how much it cost to build a well and we built a barn with rainwater catchement for the same price.  Instead of a well, we had a barn and water for the same price.  A barn means dry storage and dry storage is very important when you live small and off-grid…!

I spent a few years with no refrigeration and a few with almost no internet and a few years with no electric light at night (other than an occasional headlamp). It was all fine. I’ve never gotten food poisoning from lack of refridgeration. The easiest way to kick an internet addiction is to have terrible service and no wifi. The peacefulness of having only candlelight and what it does for sleep is hard to express if you haven’t tried it.  Many human health conditions can be improved by removing electric light at night.  It’s also crazy romantic.  The poetry of night gathers around the candle.  

I haven’t had air conditioning for the last decade. I don’t recommend that for anyone living in zone 7 or above. The heat is too hard. One of the best parts of living small is that you tend to make the outdoors your living room. When the outdoors is 96 degrees for weeks every year with stagnant humidity, your living room sucks and you can’t invite anyone over. You can put on sweaters but you can’t get more naked than naked.

If I had to start over in zone 8, I’d get the smallest DC powered air conditioner I could find and add two more solar panels. Another option would be a fully earthen building. Instead of doing that, I solved the heat problem by moving to a shaded site in zone 6b with good cross-breezes and big shaded porches. Cold is easy to heat without electricity. Heat ain’t easy to cool.

We have a shower and tub in our attached greenhouse which also keeps our rain barrels from freezing and contributes warmth to the house in winter. Bathing in a greenhouse in a lightning storm or by candlelight is freaking deluxe. Off-grid life can be pure magic when it’s not terrifying.

Our woodstove is like a fourth family member. We cook on it and we bake in it and we sing its praises constantly. Starting a fire can suddenly transform a bad mood into a good one. Don’t say anything bad about my woodstove. I’ll take it personally.

My biggest regret at this point that I complain about every 30 days or so is having let go of my record collection to be able to fit into a small home. It was so good. Sigh. I hope I can let go of that one before I die (or somehow get a lot of money and a nice record collection again. Then I’ll give away the rest of the money. Third ethic of Permaculture is real).

I moved from a county that is quite hostile to trying to live in any way not classifiable as a McMansion, to one that is overall supportive. Generally, the wealthier a county is, the more it controls how you live. I think this may come in part from an unconscious collective resentment that you’re not as worried about your property value as your neighbors are.  The answer to worrying about your property values is to live somewhere where you’d be OK with being buried one day.

I’ve lived in a yurt and I don’t necessarily recommend it. My family lives in a small cabin now and it feels just right. Insulation and walls are amazing inventions.

Years ago I decided to be “land rich, house poor.” This still feels like the right decision ten years later. Big land is less expensive than a big home, and big land gives you a whole lot more.

I do dream of living in a larger home (700sqft) some day, and that day will wait until I have the time and resources to mill our pine trees for building it. That’s fine with us.  The main thing I want from a bigger home is a large living room for people to gather.  700sqft can give that easily.

Every home needs maintenance. Our maintenance is a little different, and it’s mostly simple. Fix the gutter, patch a 12v wire, cut more firewood. A small house is easy to heat. Shade makes it easy to cool. A low mortgage makes it easier to keep.  Building it yourself or mostly yourself means you know how to fix it yourself. 

We make dozens of herbal medicines each year mostly from our local plants. They’ve kept us out of the doctor’s office and away from medications and their side effects.  

Many local plants have also been excellent therapists when we can’t afford therapy (…looking at you, Gentian and Lobelia). Living in conscious relationship with the craziness of our times and a love for the earth can bring up a whole lot. The forest can help us let go of what’s too big for anyone to hold.

On any given day, the main stressors I experience are almost never not having enough electricity, or water, or space. Thanks to what I’ve learned from others, these systems function well enough.

The main challenge of this life is not having enough other people doing it together, or put another way, loneliness. Living off-grid as a family can put you in the awkward middle of being like a villager without a village. Villagers aren’t necessarily always easy to get along with, but wow would it be nice to tend the forest garden and build the buildings with more people singing along.

 

Why I Moved to the Woods All the Sudden

There’s an old saying / joke: “Everybody complains about the weather but nobody does anything about it.” I decided to do something about it. I may have missed that this was a joke.

I jumped off-grid ten years ago because I couldn’t read another headline about climate change without answering it. Same for wars based on oil, the effect of toxic mining, the poisons in our soil, the drying of the land. Add to it now: AI, data centers, social media, disconnection from the earth, children growing up knowing more corporate logos than plants, and so on.

At some point, it hurt more to read about it all and do nothing than to just do something.

For me, the somethings I do are 1) live more simply 2) trees 3) ???. Those are still the best answers I’ve got. The way to apply those is different in every circumstance.

Another reason I moved is that I’m allergic to anything that lacks what I call Soul. I can hang with it for a while. I have to. I drive on highways, go to Walmart once in a while, fill out paperwork, use the internet. But part of what finally kicked me into the woods was my sense of Soul.

I was living in Durham in 2015 when a condo started to go up next to our almost-affordable, walkable old neighborhood of little millhouses. The building happened 6 days a week. It added endless banging and sawing to the sound of the neighborhood leafblowers which ran ceaselessly even when there was not a single perceivable leaf I could find. I don’t believe in evil, but if I did: leafblowers, leafblowers, leafblowers. Spawn of the wretchedest of devils, I promise you.

After a while, the condo put up a sign. The sign said: “Solis.” That was the name of the condo, no doubt conceived in one of those everyday tortured corporate meetings that not a single person actually wants to be in. Try saying it outloud. The only way I could think to pronounce it was this: “Soul-less.” That’s what it was, that’s what it is, and that’s what I’m allergic to, so that plus my landlord tearing down my garden because it was round and not square were the final straws for me and it got me to move into the woods in 2016 with a bunch of soon-to-be-moldy Permaculture books and very little real sense of how to do what I was doing.

To move into the woods, I left my best chance at a good-paying job. The only people who would tell you that Permaculture leads to financial stability are probably selling you their online course about how Permaculture leads to financial stability. It doesn’t. It leads home.  Home is better than money unless you need to repurchase your amazing vinyl record collection. 

We all are seeking some kind of security and safety. It’s baked into our bodies. I’m someone who doesn’t see that security in a 401k or a nice benefits plan or a title. Economies crash, insurance coverage gets denied, and jobs disappear. The answers we’re given are ringing hollow for more and more people.

To them I’d say: come join the party. It’s itchy and beautiful out here and we need you. My security is in the trees. My safety is in knowing the plants. I cashed out my tiny retirement account years ago and in exchange, I know exactly what trees I’m going to one day be buried under. That doesn’t change if the market explodes. My retirement plan is backed and secured by the full faith and credit of the soil. This is an FDIC reference and I have no idea if the FDIC will exist in five yearas.

What really matters? One answer I have is that matter matters. Physical matter. Actual tree bark. Actual smells. Actual hugs from people we love, actual warmth from fire, actual clean water. The rest is a shaky proposition. It mostly leads to arguments.

There are herbal medicines that help with arguments. I can recommend some, but none are as effective as throwing your smartphone off a cliff. Even if you can’t do it yet, it’s a healthy fantasy. Take it off of Do Not Disturb right before you do it so you can hear the corporate-cute notifications sounds going off as gravity welcomes it to the solid ground. Thud. You’re free.

Anyway

This is how I live. I type from a tiny office I built out of left over lumber perched on a ridge. Up there, I sketch out designs on a high-tech tablet for strangers who I quickly come to deeply appreciate and like. I charge as little as I can get away with and I feel immense gratitude every time I’m hired or someone shows up to a class.

I drink coffee while coffee is a thing, I go wild shopping at thrift stores, I order a few things online when I need to and can. Neighbors are kind but distant, town is a welcome change of pace. I have a good time there until I see yet another local person I like is using a creepy AI-generated poster to promote their expensive nature wellness retreat, and then I get all confused and go home and try to regulate. I get obsessed with a new plant each week, I forage every season, I sleep in a well-insulated room that I love and helped design and build.

Out my window: Sassafrass, Sugar Maple, White Oak, Red Oak, Tulip Poplar. Raven, Hummingbird, Black Bear, Gold Finches, Woodpeckers, Three Cats, a Family. Sunsets that don’t even make sense. Cold winter winds that help explain some of the fear in our bones of losing our jobs. Summer breezes that sing forgiveness.  A Skunk Cabbage spring valley carpeted in Empress flowers and Violets, talking stones, edible weeds and Black Cohosh along the roadside.

Infinitely more to learn, always something to share, every season a blessing. Do it in your own way. We’re a movement whether or not we know it or care to be. It’s not really important that we agree about anything much beyond clean water, clean air, healthy soil, healthy food, human rights, acceptance of each other, and that leafblowers are evil and new Star Wars and new Star Trek never happened.

Modernity isn’t cool anymore and tech hasn’t been worth it since Playstation 3 and 12v solar and there’s not much dead horse of late-stage capitalism left to beat. Let’s outlive this mess and be as patient as we’re able to, facilitated by as many strong cups of lemon balm as you can safely pour down your wonderful gullet.

Keep your record collection when you move into the woods, and I’ll come share a cup of Sassafrass tea listening to your bargain bin jazz records, and we’ll tell our troubles under the shade of the trees you planted that make the flowers that call the bees that bring the fruit that summons the sun to ripen the sweetness of what was always and never ours, the eternally self-renewing earth.