​

I showed him this video from this summer's Working Song ---
as we sing Laurence's song,
   "Busy yourself making beauty,
    busy yourself making love,
    busy yourself making friendship,
    and everything else will work out,"
​--- Mike is heartened. 

​He says, on the ferry, people used to talk to each other, play games, and now everywhere you look people are on their phones. But here we are, building the culture of working together again!
"Keep up the good work!" He says. 

​Seeing these old videos of the Railroad Gandydancers is inspiring, and also humbling. We are doing good work for sure, and we have a ways to go, continuing, as we engage in this work as free people. We can make it the norm for us to work together again, to talk with each other again, to sing with each other again, and with every generation, better than before. With every generation, more just than before. With every generation more beautiful, and more healing. People have always -- long before the railroads, long before slavery -- done this, this work of singing together, of working together, of being together. Sometimes to merely cope with the grief of life and the need to live and work despite the circumstances. Sometimes out of pure joy. Sometimes more seen than others, but it has never died, and it will never die. We can only be carriers, continuing to use these tools we have to create a better world, every day, today, right now. 

We have a long ways to go. Let's keep working.

Here is two more recent videos of some working-and-singing together, as we prepare and install an earthen floor at the Port Townsend Ecovillage. 

​​The opportunity to work on this project came at a turbulent time for me... things were stressful, and I realized I needed a daily practice and could think of only one thing that I really wanted to do every day --- swim in the ocean. Day One of this personal commitment, members of the Ecovillage were also at the beach, at our regular swim spot. They expressed a need for help with their earthen floors. I happened to be out of work for the rest of the month. 

While I was an answer to their immediate prayers, they were an answer to a specific prayer I made back in the spring, for clients who would offer my opportunities within my skillset where we would create something beautiful on their land with people I love. 

The whole project has been full of mutually beneficial expressions. A consistent stream of angels passing through Port Townsend have put their love and song into the mud. Thanks especially to Marlow, Searra, and Liat, helping hands from out of town, Dan for your commitment to helping with what ever is happening, and Gretchen for your neighborly enthusiasm. Thanks also to the crew of a dozen or so friends who helped us harvest clay that had fallen from the high cliffs down onto the beach where we swim (and I'm so grateful we only got a warning and not a ticket for our illicit activities!) Thanks for Terri & Jim for being amazing people, coordinating the whole project and working harder than anyone, and being open to collaboration, and for Bekka entrusting us to work on your room. To everyone who brought and taught and sang songs. It's an honor to work with all of you. This project has had a lot of ups and down and I'm proud of us for persisting and finding solutions through trial-and-error-and-error-and-embracing-the-process-and-error-and-working-and-success. 

The floor is dry and ready for oil this week. 

One more story I'd like to share from this job site. 

Yesterday was a slow day, mostly at spent at home, contemplating, grieving, creek swimming, sun laying. I finally came to work in the late afternoon. I was there about ten minutes, making a whole bunch of noise chopping straw with a weed whacker. At some moment, I looked up and saw a huge heron walking across the lumber pile. Ha! I couldn't contain myself... since the weed whacker was then off, I yelled, "What are you DOING here? You're so beautiful!" It was the closest I've ever been to heron, the pleating dark and white neck feathers, the subtle colours, the graceful movements of its neck. I called Jim out of the house to see, and it didn't pay us much mind as we kept our distance enough.

With my yelling out of the way, I followed silently for some time and my heart felt like it was generating a bubble of happiness the size of the entire neighborhood block. The heron walked the rest of the lumber, back to the foam insulation, across the sand pile (I'm peeking around the big machine of a mortar mixer to see it), around the house, and through the neighbor's garden, finally flying over me toward the swing set... all in hot sunny-September dry-land. How unusual! Earth and its creatures know just the right medicine needed for these kinds of days; awe and a little bit of humour. A heron on a lumber pile. Hearing protection and respirator dangling off my face. Unexpected and odd beauty. Goodness. 

I have been oscillating much recently with the work-track I've gotten myself on or into, somehow, busy with building projects. I often doubt that this - building - is really what I'm "supposed" to be doing. I feel like Jaber Crowe, in the novel by Wendall Berry, who comes upon barbership in his life pretty much by continuous happenstance.

But I think I made peace with doing building projects; there is no need to force another way of being in the world prematurely. This is good, how it is, now. I used to hesitate when I would say, "I'm a builder." Am I? I'm a poet. Am I? I'm an astrologer. Am I? I'm an organizer. Am I? I'm a gardener. Am I? I'm a griever. A healer. Who am I? 

And it's clearer to me now: it is much easier to manifest a feeling than an actual thing, a path, a picture. And the feelings of working with people who value song, ritual, deep connection, grief, patience, healing, love... this is coming to me through the building world - to my surprise? Not really, surprise, but sort of surprise. Definitely humble delight. Now I say, "I'm a builder," and underneath my words, I know what I mean. I mean something literal, and I mean that I doubt myself sometimes and that's okay. I mean I build with and share my life with people who value song, ritual, deep connection, grief, patience, healing, and love. And it's maybe just for now, and it's certainly only one part of me. But it is a reflection of all of me, and all of us, and we're doing it well, as well as we can. 

I am - we all are - souls in a body, growing slowly. We are always in a continuous state of becoming. Becoming ourselves. Coming home to ourselves. We are messy and ungraceful and full of boundless creativity. And we're here to grow. To bump into each other and learn from each other, honor each other, let go of each other, embrace each other, be alone, be together, sing, dance, yell, sit, express, silence.

And we absolutely need each other, to hear each other's stories, to work together to protect our Home. To fight for our Home. To stand up for what we know is right of us, right for Earth, right for water, air, soil, people, creatures of all kinds. We need each other to do this. 

​It all reminds me, magic exists everywhere, every day, every way, with every one.
​Singing thanks.

Hey there -- things picked up this summer and I've been working 7 days a week, or traveling away from home. The business aspects of this wild idea of Placecraft are taking off, sometimes running way ahead of me! It has been, at times, overwhelming. Overall, I'm glad about it. I've got a wonderful feeling about winter, sing-ins and craft-ins  with friends, family, and community already bringing us together this autumn. But is is autumn yet? Today it is October 22 and I took off all my sweater layers, it's sunny and hot. Our draught year continues. 

​
Here's some summer photo updates, for a taste of all the clay:

The first set of photos is from a small earthen floor installation just up the mountain from Discovery Bay. This floor cracked a lot and was a good learning experience for me, both because I had to fix the cracking problem, and also because it was the first project I've been the lead builder on in the Jefferson County area. I'm realizing, in a way, this project kicked off my busy summer of mud, and a growth spurt in the business. 

​
The next set of photos is from the First Annual Port Townsend Village Building Convergence.

​
​Can't-stop-us, the weekend after the Port Townsend Village Building Convergence was completed, we jumped right into Cob-N-Straw building series on Marrowstone Island (my new home!). We made two cob walls, two straw-clay walls, and finished the building with an interior clay plaster and exterior lime plaster. The final coat of exterior lime plaster will go on in the spring, after the first coat has has plenty of time to cure. I feel so proud of all of us. Some people came and went only for an hour, others stayed every single work party weekend. Nearly forty different people worked on this wonderful little house, including a few handfuls of kids. This place is full of joy and song. Thank you all so much!

This is the first project in which I took on a workshop leader role as well as lead builder. I feel great about it, and the feedback has been so wonderful as to be quite humbling. I feel thankful for all of my guidance in teaching, particularly from Mark Lakeman of Communitecture, Eva Edleson of FireSpeaking, and Joseph Becker of Ion EcoBuilding. They have grown me so much in the areas of teaching newcomers and coordinating work sites. I learned much of what I know thru years of work parties and I'm glad to be able to share what I have learned and continue to pass on the wisdom of these traditional building technologies. I see no end it to in any time soon.

​
​First heavy rain of the season (and still the only heavy rain of the season) happened the day we finished the Hugelkultur at Song House Sanctuary. Great to see plants go into the new soil! 

Below are photos of finished interior clay plaster for a client building a house out of train shipping containers outside of Port Townsend. Very beautiful finish work!! It is a treasure to work here. Next month, we start building interior cob walls to enclose kitchen space, and pour a small earthen floor.

Warm Muddy Walls - work parties for interior clay plaster on a Faswall house built outside Quilcene, WA.  The Yeakel and Gunn families have been coming out to get muddy together and finish their house. Nice to work with folks who have known each other for so long in such a beautiful place. Thanks to all of you! The Yeakel family has an abundance of horse manure, so this plaster is very manure-rich, composing of roughly 25% of the plaster body. Manure has excellent fine fibers and the active enzymes in the poop help to create a stronger, harder, more durable, and water resistant plaster (chemistry has a field of study on these kinds of "biopolymers"). So far, we are thrilled with the results. 

I continue to build Masonry Heaters with Jason Temple thru TempleFire and this house features a masonry heater built by us in the spring of 2015. It's fun to come back and finish the walls in the house we built this heater for. Jason and I are currently working on a large Russian double bell heater on Bainbridge Island, and you can watch the progress of that stove -- and others -- on TempleFire's Facebook Page.

Personal update in the land of Making Things: 
2015 is my 5th year at Saskatoon Circle - a traditional living skills gathering outside of Twisp, WA. Under the guidance of Ira Christian, five of us made gourd ukeleles, starting from a cherry stick, a gourd, a deer hide, and a goat hide. Five days of carving, drum strapping, nylon stringing, and collecting ponderosa pine pitch, deer poo, and charcol for the pitch glue -- we made fetless instruments that give off a rounded and rich tone. The curved sound holes on the side of the gourd were carved by firelight during the total lunar eclipse... & I was done carving by the time the moon was full and bright again. I love the way this little uke sounds. It's the first stringed instrument I've ever had and I'm enjoying playing it every day!

​With Love & Mud & Music, 
​~ Hannah

"How long does it take to do that?" 
A common question to artists, tending to be asked by "non-artists". It's really the first line to a never-ending cosmic joke as we're all artists in one way or another and at some level we know that really it took us every moment of our life up to now to be ready to create what it is we're examining this question by. Be it a poem, a clay pot, or a house, there's a level of time not measured when you take into account all of its story and our attentive thoughts to its creation, and all its iterations.

As an example, I will use a poem called "Don't Miss Out" I wrote in October. 

Chapter Style!!!! (You can also use the fancy yellow box on the right side of the screen -->)

Little line pairings start to dance together. 
An overall theme gets stuck in my mind. 
One sensory-rich memory lingers right on the edge of having words. 

The Poem "Don't Miss Out" probably truly started in 2010 when I became aware of the concept "Fear Of Missing Out" -- FOMO -- which I noticed made people I knew arrive late for one thing to leave early for the next, never settling into their experience in any given situation. (I know it is not always the case for attending many things: that one always sacrifices their presence. Only was my observation from that time - when I felt the FOMO notion was ridiculous). 
Parts of this poem started to live in snippets in a document "Don't Miss Out" on my desktop in September as I was traveling in Oregon. 
Parts of it started to live in my now-exposed addiction to swimming in very cold rivers.
I was at a dance in Olympia, on my way back North, and one song actually had the words "Don't Miss Out"; it struck me.
There was another, separate doc called "I don't care about politics" that started when elections began to get closer. -- And the bit about friends being advisors I had woken up thinking about one morning before the Incident with the Tree.

I'm walking along North Jacob Miller Rd. back in Port Townsend, where I live. I had come here to take a photo of a particular signboard declaring "WATCH FOR NEWTS". In the wet season, they do like to cross the road, and yes, people do stop and move them along so they don't get squished. I find this action of honoring slimy, fragile amphibian life to be much more significant than any other action taken by consequence of the other signboards posted in late autumn...

All of a sudden, it's there. A dead mossy tree. It is significant, standing in the throat of a green tunnel that opened up in the forest along the road, and hit me square in the heart. I "knew" instantly that it was a poem, standing there with soft green moss all over it - already its own syllables of rainforest loveliness and eeriness and interest. What I DIDN'T know, which I almost never do when these things hit, was that the poem in this case, was in fact, "Don't Miss Out", the poem that had been rolling around in my mind for nearly six weeks. What I really didn't know, was that this other "don't care about politics" poem was also the same. And it was the moment with the dead mossy tree that made me sit down that evening and write it.

Read: The moss made me do it.
Read: The newts made me do it.

Three hours.

Confession: I'm kind of impulsive. 
I write the thing and post it on Facebook after little more than a spell check. About half the time - and in the case of "Don't Miss Out" -  I'm actually writing it in my Facebook Status Update. Why? I'm not really sure. Because the header is a picture on the farm I worked in for four years. A place I love more dearly than I can express. It's a consistent "virtual office" that exists anywhere in the world there's internet enough to get to the crazy blue and white Facebook world, and it used to be the only place I published my writing at all. 

I follow the same sorta-slip-shoddy post-and-editing style for these blog posts.

I edit, I move things around, I change words, usually the next day. 
Not much change other than errors. But if you thought you read it differently yesterday, you're probably right. I'm no professional.

I post immediately because otherwise I wouldn't. The next day, sometimes I wake up in the morning wondering if I really "got it right". Second-questioning if it's my story or the poem's story. Second-questioning if the essence is there for-true. If the picture is the right one that matches the Moment. And the next day I wake up, and read it more than once. And as the week goes on, I read it often. And I'm always surprised and honored by the words.

Every now and again, I edit something several months old. 
I'm a little bit of a perfectionist. I keep going back. 

Yet, the essence of the poem never changes, even from when it was felt, before words. I can never change it more than to clarify one word here, a little punctuation there... never big changes. Ever! If I tried, then poem would say, "Nope."

I felt a lot of relief after I wrote "Don't Miss Out". I don't think I'd really held on to an idea for such a long time and truth be told, I felt a little cynical about its origin because in a way it was a retaliation on the life I was witnessing around me during my time in Oregon. I felt like in a way I was bragging, proud of my life, and in a way I was begging, wishing more people felt proud of theirs, and overall I didn't really like it! Ha! 
So there was some editing about my feelings about it that happened in the aftermath too, because I think I feel my own cynicism more than anyone else can. In any case, when it was done, I felt like I could "move on". And it grew on me.

The poem picked itself.
A friend invited me to an open mic at The Boiler Room. Whoa. I'd never read my poetry out loud before. Really, I hadn't even been reading them out loud to myself. The idea had started to trickle in my mind maybe three months prior, and I learned about a few open mics in town. With an invitation? I printed out a few and figured that when I went, I'd feel into which ones wanted to be shared.
I read a short poem about how rainy it had been that day, and then I read "Don't Miss Out", and another one I wrote for my cousins in Bend. People's reactions were very heart-opening. I returned the next week and read another poem. I was getting pretty high from all the sharing, and also from listening -- I enjoy open mics for their diverse swath of community talent. It's very touching. I was excited to share more places. My friend is the coordinator for "First Friday Story Night" and there's a rule about "oral tradition only" for the open mic portion. That means no reading. I asked if there was any exception? She said no. 

Okay. The Boiler Room was easy in a way because I didn't think many people I knew would be there. Mostly strangers? Awesome. First Friday Story Night is a lot of my community. Scarier. Memorizing? Never my forte. Remember the previous chapter about writing? The words come and they go and how in the world was my mind gonna go back and take in their exact order more slowly? I'd never memorized a poem before. Well, I could pick a short one, and I could do that for my first time. 

Guess who wanted to be memorized? You got it, 3 pages of "Don't Miss Out". 
The long poem I didn't even really like. I tried to think of doing others, but they weren't the One.

I recorded myself reading it -- a couple times, so I wasn't memorizing by too many stutters -- and listened to nothing else for a week straight. By the day of, I had it! I did it at least 5 times without the recording. 

Although things did not go so smoothly at the mic, it was still received with a standing ovation, and I was flushed with greater than ever appreciation for the words. 

I'd NEVER done that before.

Now, I read poems out loud when I write them. The Atmosphere seems to like it. 
I read them to friends, too. 

The most common question I get about this poem is, "What is a crag?" Which I would not have known without my introduction and induction into the world of rock climbing in 2008. [Wiki Crag.]

In College, my 2012 thesis was titled "Placemaking and the Ripple Effect of Community Organizing and Sustainable Culture Building" ... and in those days I was astounded continuously by how widely and deeply Placemaking projects effected people, and these days I am astounded still by how widely and deeply our little every-day actions give us tools and inspire others. 

May 2014, it's two days before Portland Village Building Design Course and I need paints for our rock painting exercise. My friend Cait emerges from the basement with this gem: 

created by our friend and stellar natural builder, August "Auggie" Mann. I've done the rock painting a lot of times with acrylic paint... these are even better. Straight up clay and pigments, in an egg carton painted on the interior with beeswax. The paint will exist on the rock until it rains. It will inspire the student to check on it, wonder what's happening to it, as the weather washes it. Their art is ephemeral. Lovely while it's there, inevitably melting. Forever reverberating with their care and attention. The perfect pair to my paintbrushes, added to the VBDC-teaching-toolkit.
(As a side, I notice no difference in the level of effort put out by the students if they know the paint is clay or acrylic -- whether it will wash away or not, students always make them beautiful.)

Fast forward, November, I'm passing through Portland and it's my mentor, Mia Van Meter,'s birthday and we go out to coffee, walking in the cold-cold to the nearest neighborhood corner-shop. We spend a bit of time talking about her "Solar Returns" astrology chart -- which is a planetary map drawn up for someone's birthday giving a tone for the year -- generally catching up, singing songs back and forth to each other. Somewhere along the way the bit in "Don't Miss Out" about asking your friend for advice comes up. I ask, "Do you want to hear the whole poem? (since now I have it memorized!) it will take me 5 minutes to recite it." She does. I do.
And she wonders, "You don't like it??" 
I grin, "Well, I do. I feel hot from the inside whenever I speak it. And it makes me all jittery."

This week, Mia declares that she has a wonderful Solstice present for me, however, it requires my help. I say I'm game. The vision: very light watercolour background, blueish-green, "Don't Miss Out" printed over it. Mia's bought special thin watercolour paper that will fit in a printer. She's inspired.

I brought Auggie's clay paints with me to use for another purpose. Now, we tried them as watercolours. They worked! Neither Mia or I had watercoloured much at all. For about an hour, we painted over each others' brush strokes and filled in spaces.

[Editing, Part 2]: 
For the following hour, I lightly coloured the white edges.

How do the words fit? I like the idea of hand-writing it. 

We let it sit for a couple days.

Mia's oldest son suggests we measure the paper and count the number of lines in the poem and be more mathematical about how it will fit. This is eventually how we come to the layout, 
and how I come to be on the floor of a former City Repair co-conspirator's office, before lunch on Christmas Day, with a drawing pen in hand (a summer gift) and the watercolour background taped to the floor. 

It takes me exactly two runs through Emancipator's album "Safe in the Steep Cliffs" to write it all. 

I gave away my only printed copy of the poem to the first person who asked for it -- the Storyteller at First Friday Story Night in November. Now this is the only copy I have on paper. I'm happy with how it turned out, Mia is thrilled, and our Christmas lunch hosts read it for the first time. Even without reading it, as it is rather long, the colours covey a story too. What if we did this for more of them? I'm inspired.

This poem, all the poems, live and breathe a life of their own. Some of them want to be shared more widely. Others come and go quickly. I read them all over and over again trying to understand my experience in the world, always feeling so grateful for the array of emotion they each Remember for me, and share outwardly. 

There are many stages to this story, full of things I'd never done before. In writing this post, I also learned new things. I had never made navigation like I used for this blog post. Never made a floating menu to the side. Living, breathing, learning system, all depending on what is inspired.

Mia and I look at each other and smile. I walk around, waving the page like a flag or a cape. The poem feels pleased -- maybe even more pleased than either of us -- about the Way of Things. Hand-written on its very own watercolour.
A thought strikes me, "You know that funny question people ask about How Long it Takes to make something? Like how long does it take to do the watercolour and write the poem?" 
We banter a few moments on the topic, covering all the bases I outlined in this post:

Within each chapter of this post, there is a measurement of time. But... does it even make sense to add them? What do you get when you add four years, plus an instant, and fifty+ rounds of 4 minutes and 56 seconds? This post took five hours, and I know I'll edit it later. Never mind the age of rocks and forests that retain themselves as characters within the poem. 


...and she finally concludes, "So, about four hours."
"Right!" I pretend to calculate, "Now, twenty bucks an hour and... done!"

We laugh. Can't measure Love.

[[The Poem: Don't Miss Out]]

In the last one month or so I've been working with Jason Temple of TempleFire building masonry heaters. I've wanted to learn how to build masonry heaters for years, and I feel so blessed my work as a natural builder has brought me to this chapter of learning fire and brickwork. Yay!

Actually, I made this wish on my birthday in March of this year: we stopped by a large building site that included a German style double-bell masonry heater and I thought, "I want to help work on this!" Bychance months later, Jason asked if I would help with a project, and when we arrived to the site - it was this stove! We've since built the benches, plastered another heater that Jason already built, and now...

Last week, we and Anthony Richards AR Stonemason started an oven build from scratch in the countryside of the southern olympic peninsula. 

There's a few different designs for masonry heaters that come from different places in the world, namely Europe, but very basically, this Swedish 5-run style of oven will work like this:

We're going back out to the countryside to work on this one this week, and we'll probably finish everything but the plaster. 

It is such a gift to have a relationship with trees where we experience their life as such a comfort in the form of fire when they are no longer living. Particularly stoves which are pleasant to use and utilize the heat with exceptional efficiency, storing it in brick or clay or stone, become an anchoring tool for a home because they are appreciated and used often. Even if the people move on from the space, the memory of such a sturdy and warming presence will be carried with them forever. Radiant heat has a magical quality of persistence that seems to stick around, not just in the house days after a fire, but also in the heart, years into the future. 

Cheers to building lasting systems!

Thanks to everyone who made this a success! From the prep party to this first workshop.

We sing in the morning, and we speak from our hearts
We share in the work, and balance 'plans' to 'just start'
What language is common? 
What purpose is ours?
No matter uncertainty, we can find work for hours.
Find work in appreciating the texture of wood
and work in no more idea of what 'should'.
We make home for the mushrooms and termites and ants
to let the wood decompose into humus for plants.
All we do is just gather logs and bury them into ground
As my friend Chris used to say, "Humans: We Move Stuff Around."

We didn't get to sowing any literal seeds, but we sure made a big pile of logs together. :)

We decided not to add soil for a few reasons: 
1. We consolidated our efforts into making the pile pretty much full-height, but only building half of it, so ultimately it wants to wrap into the property and therefore needs more building - and more wood than we had. 
2. It will be better for the plants we have (native donations from someone met at a seed swap, plants from the dump pile at a local nursery, and divisions from friends around town) to transplant in the fall rather than in the draught and heat of summer. 
3. "Weeds" will not grow in unplanted soil in the mean time. 
4. We haven't yet found a source of clean fill dirt.

We did have a great donation of a bit of deer fencing to protect plants in the fall. Thanks Tinker!

We adjusted our plans for the weekend's goals when everyone who signed up for the workshop canceled. 

An astrological note: I usually check before I schedule workshops, but forgot this time, and Mercury went retrograde the very day we started. Mercury is the planet of communication, when it's retrograde it's a time of reflection rather than a time of more usual "outward" thinking - often "plans" don't go as planned. It's a great time to study, reflect, organize, for new opportunities to arise... but not great for thinking things will go the way you thought they would. 

In any case, different people than expected came and helped with the pile in wonderful and timely ways. A neighbor down the street donated an additional truckload of wood when she learned what we were doing. We ran out of wood at the end of the second day, and used all the small stick piles around the property, which is what we wanted. Overall, we felt the volume of work accomplished was impressive (we still made a huge pile!) and well-paced (easy going). 

Stay tuned for 'round two' when we build the rest of the hugel pile and plant into it!