Hello,
I am a dry stone mason and artist. My beloved helps with the stone work sometimes, does
gardening and has her own artistic works, we collaborate on much in life. We've both been applying more and more
permaculture principles to our life, over the years--and really wanting to truly live the life for quite awhile now. How to get from here to there? Save up
enough money, buy
land, invite friends, build strawbale/log/cob/stone houses, create gardens and do all of that. We're both natural builders and artists, so we have a lot of ideas along these line, a lot of
plans drawn up....it can be tricky though--had enough money, a year or so ago, but then that fell through and now we're broke again and looking at other options.
For a living, I build landscapes using natural materials, and environmental
art installations/dry stone sculptures as well. Currently, I'm contemplating just finding
permaculture communities that maybe wouldn't mind having some access to our skills, and could host us for 6 months or so. For us, that would be ideal, to live at different communities, for 6 months at a time, move twice a year. I have toyed around a bit with
cob and similar building methods, read a few
books, and would love to wed my natural outdoor construction styles with earth building. To this end, I'm just about to fill out the form at
wwoof and see if we can find the sort of situation we are looking for there.
Our long term goal would look more like this: get land and create a public park/retreat center. Workers could stay at lodges they help build, there would be extensive gardens and of course it would also be a kind of sculpture park, a place to have many examples of my work all in one place, and room for others to create their own stuff. Aside from living off the land/bartering and making ends by hosting workshops and retreats and weddings even (I plan on building the sort of place where
people would love to get married at) another part of the financial model would also be my already existing business. In addition to building stuff at our own location, we'd take on contracting gigs every once in awhile and gets paid.
So that's my life story, in three tight paragraphs. Hi everyone!
1
I began dabbling with lime mortars a few years back, but still have not gotten deep into it--but I shall. One of the things distracting me from lime was cob....and of course cob will eventually lead me back to lime. I certainly will have things to ask a guy who knows stone, timber and earth building.
