The End Of The Beginning

2012 is here. I have been waiting for this year. It used to be a dooms day prediction kind of waiting. I sunk into the hype of the end of time, a new culture forming, judgement day. A few weeks ago my best friend informed me the Mayan calendar actually ends at the end of 2012, the historians speculate. This made me somewhat relived that we had a whole year before dooms day happened.

I don't really believe the end of the world is happening but it does frighten and excite me to think this is such a momentous time in history. We as people have the power now to completely destroy our earth or completely radically change our rate of consumption and live in connection with and fostering our planet. We get to decide how much we care. We get to read the signs of global climate change that are affecting all of us. I see this in the 107 degree months of this Texas summer, also the snow blizzards and earthquake in the Northeast. I see the devastating affects of climate change that have happened and continue to happen in Southeast Asia and Japan.

Now is the time that we get to re-learn how to care for our plant families, how to be inspired by nature and love of the place we live. The other day I caught Sweetpea hugging a tree in the park. She was in complete awe of this amazing, living, trunk that stretched up to the sky, towering above her. I wonder if this sense of wonder about nature is inspired by the way I respond to trees? Is she mimicking my behavior? Perhaps, but I also see this action as innately human. Given the chance we will love and care for all living things. We will look beyond the veil of our bothersome emotions, grudges, and over stimulated systems, to really see how lucky we are to be alive and breathing in oxygen these trees give us.

I fear that most children's connection to place will look like a strip mall. That seems to be the paradigm set up for us born in the 80's. In a country where if one is to succeed one is supposed to move anywhere one can find a job and keep moving for work. In this way of life strip malls do look like the closest thing to familiar territory.

In 2012 I want to make a difference. I want to live more by my values and teach them to my child and to other peoples kids. I want to join the Sustainable Food Center of Austin and volunteer to teach organic gardening to children. I want to figure out how to save rain water at my house and use the extra water from my shower to flush the toilet. I want to teach people to see water as a precious resource. I want to build clothes drying racks for people to use instead of dryers. I have always had these values but I see this year as a call to action. I am becoming a part of the adult community of my generation, it is time to live life with the intention I want to see the human race heading in.

This is what I want for 2012, what about you?

On Co-Habitating

Seeking Family Style Home Share

We are a family of three with a wonderful 15 month old looking for awesome people to share a house with. We would like to rent a house in central Austin or join your home. We would ideally like a house with a big backyard, close to a park and has two bedrooms for us. Here is a little description of our family. We are fun, optimistic, and easy going people who mostly do not drink and no smoking. We are super kid friendly, like animals (we have 1 cat) and like creating a cozy home. We enjoy a party but mostly like staying in and watching movies. We are eco conscience and are interested in making a sustainable green house that includes growing some of our food, compost, keeping chickens, buying organic food when possible and eco cleaning products. We like adventures, biking, exploring new neighborhoods and ethnic markets. We are upfront, direct people who thrive on open dialogue and sharing feelings. We are not interested in passive aggressive communication. We have both lived in communal living situations and know how to share chores and work out problems collectively. We like things tidy but are not neat freaks and we eat meat as well as vegetables. Queer friendly. If you are a small family, couple, single parent or kid friendly person and this sounds good to you please contact us. We are looking to move around March 1st.

Daddy and I are thinking about joining in the labor of love that is co-habitation. I just wrote this ad for Craigslist and will send it off this week. I am both excited and nostalgic for all the communal living I have done in my life. The thought of co-habitating meshes with my moral principals as well. It is definitely more environmentally sustainable for folks to live together instead of in individual houses. It is a direct stab at isolation to live with other people especially as a parent, I would love to have housemates to talk to on my long, home word bound, days with my daughter. It is also way more affordable for us to share the bills and rent of a home with other people.

My experience with communal living has been vast and long. I figured out how to happily live with others as a young single woman, I wonder what will be different trying it with my child and partner? I see the difference in being pickier about the folks I live with. I will be looking for people that I actually want my daughter to be connected to as well as me. I want people my partner will get along with and be able to confront in hard situations. I know these folks exist in Austin, I hope they read our ad. We set up collective style situations wherever we have lived. With our neighbor’s in Olympia we shared baking ingredients and their BBQ. We traded our chicken’s eggs for watching the chix and our cat when we went away on trips. In our new duplex we share Internet and occasional childcare with our duplex mate. Daddy and I are communal people; we are actively spreading that value to Sweetpea by making this lifestyle shift.

A Life Story Told Through Co-Habitation

In my young adult life I have lived collectively in 8 different situations. It all started with my parent’s house that I moved out of at age 18. Most of my childhood I remember professing I wanted to live alone in an apartment in New York City and get all my house ware from Pier One Imports store.

This dream bubble helped when I had to share a small house with my brothers and all their friends and mostly wanted a place where I got to actually take up space. Through a series of events including a sense of adventure and falling in love, I headed for the Northwest to check it out for a little while.

My first collective house where I paid rent was with a sassy & sweet older, working class, lesbian and a younger, Minnesotan, hippie lesbian, in the Central district of Seattle. Our house was lavender and on the side of a hill. My older housemate watched kids upstairs during the week and I had a basement apartment. I heard the trampling of little feet over my head as I crafted my next artistic project. I started work at a pre-school while living there and would come home exhausted and fall asleep on the couch amongst the squealing 2 year olds waiting to be picked up from their parents. I lived in that house for 2 1/2 years, sublet my room to friends when I went on vacation, and lived through 2 housemates beside the Minnesotan. One was a thieving performance artist who only lasted two months and the other was a sweet, Irish, rock climber from upstate New York with the middle name Clover.

I decided to move out when I wanted to go travel and be gone for an unknown amount of time. I boarded a plane in June to Greece via Italy and did not see the gray shores of the Long Island sound again until that September of 2001 a few weeks after the world trade towers fell. After a brief stint back East with my family during that scary time I decided to head out West again to continue my life in Seattle.

I moved back right when my best friend was about to leave for a trip to India and Thailand and would not be back for several months. We shared a room at a collective punk house called "Spokanarchy" for one month before she left. The house was technically a 5-bedroom house that we made into a 12 person living situation complete with folks living in closets and cubbyholes in the attic. You were lucky if you found one clean dish a day in the house. There were often bags of half rotten vegetables on the floor from dumpster diving the night before and huge political discussions happening daily on the large, moldy, couches in the living room. It was a perfect place to start out communal living again. It was temporary, alive and politically passionate, the way I felt at the time.

I was still interested in being an artist and was really looking for a space to make my work. This could not happen at “Spokanarchy,” a house named for the majority of anarchists from Spokane that founded the house. One evening at the arts walk in downtown Seattle I happened upon a rag tag bunch of artists, with brightly dyed hair, sharing their work on the brick streets of Pioneer Square. One of them was a lady with bright blue hair, I thought was awful cute, who knew my best friend at the time. She took us back to her loft, an old rubber stamp factory with a whole wall of old windows overlooking downtown Seattle's International District. After talking with Blue Hair for several hours, staring out at the skyline of our pretty city, I was hooked in more ways then one. Blue Hair and I started dating and I soon moved in down the hall in my own loft with her best friend and one of my good friends.

The romance of living in a loft was cut short by the intensity of being their day-to-day, sharing one large room with 2 other people. There was no running water in the place; we did our dishes in the hallway, a drying rack full of paintbrushes and sweet potato encrusted pans. We ate a lot of Ramen and whatever we could find for cheap at the giant, Asian, markets in our neighborhood. I created wood and photo collages and sold them on the street. I was a part of performance pieces and had spontaneous singing sessions down the halls of that crazy place. I slept in a tent in the middle of the room and tried to be quiet with my new sweetheart (Blue Hair) as we stayed up into the wee hours of the night getting to know each other s bodies.

It was a wild time that came to a crashing end as my roommates and I realized this was not working for us. I moved in down the hall temporarily with my sweetheart and ended up living with her for the next 3 years. In the new loft we tried to make a happy living situation. We called our place the overpriced squat; we would pay insanely high bills trying to heat the place with little electric heaters. We had a huge loft built inside the bigger space for sleeping. It was really glorified bunk beds. We moved in my best friend, her partner and we were always looking for the 5th roommate to make it all affordable.

Who would want to live with two couples in glorified bunk beds in a freezing cold loft trying to make art in-between dealing with day to day living rituals? Well, you should have seen the view. The romance of the place just made people think they could handle it. My best friend and I had a garden in a pea patch, community garden, up on a hill a few blocks from the loft. This was our tiny green oasis in the downtown concrete jungle. Did I mention the crazy coke parties my landlord held who lived next door to us? Or the downstairs neighbor who blared her television, would get high on meth and start banging a broom on the ceiling telling us to quiet the f*&%k down or she would come up there and shoot us?

At some point we had enough and my sweet heart and I decided to get a two-bedroom apartment in the heart of the Central District. The place looked perfect, affordable, clean, and quiet, less drama. That is before we realized after moving in we lived next door to a crack house. The nightly commotion out one of our bedroom windows was a real nightmare. People screaming, strung out, prostitution, drugs and violence held that place together. We liked our apartment but got tired of the drama and feeling of being unsafe in our home. We started scheming for a trip together. We wanted to go to Ecuador and knew we needed to live cheaper in order to make that happen.

We moved a bit south of the drug, apartment, complex to a neighborhood with kids, and into a collective queer house called the "Sweet Potato Shack." There was a huge sycamore in the yard and a big garden started by our new sweet housemates. The feeling was warm and inviting, we shared a room off the kitchen, it all seemed to work out nicely. We were saving money, had a nice, mostly clean house with folks that cared about politics and art. I started photography school again, which was an easy bus or bike ride from the house. We started to make the preparations for our big trip.

"The Sweet Potato Shack" was a really eclectic house. My one housemate that played the viola gave lessons out of her bedroom, she also would make crepes and scones for everyone in the early mornings. There was a huge tangle of houseplants that blanketed the front windows of our living room. Unfortunately we never could arrange to garden together, so the two that started the garden ended up doing the most work. I only remember weeding once but often helped with watering. I left my cat with these housemates when we left for Ecuador planning to return back in a few months.

After we got back from Ecuador, my sweat heart and I started to break up and life fell into chaos. We tried living on the East coast for a little while before our break up but soon realized all the resources we had built in our young adult lives were back in Seattle. We boarded a plan and headed for the wild Northwest again. The break up was gradual, and we decided to not live together anymore once we returned. My good friend had a room in a big old, bright, blue, house on top of a hill and there was an opening for one of their tiny rooms.

The room had a buckled floor, was only a little bit bigger then a closet and had a floor to ceiling window facing a parking lot. It was $425 a month for everything, all bills, including phone. I took it. My friend lived in the best room in the house that was almost the size of an apartment. She often slept in my little closet room saying, “it was more comfortable then her place.” She was quirky like that. She would make a huge mess in that big, beautiful room and then stay in my room for days on end instead of cleaning it.

I was living with men and straight folks again which actually felt like a welcome break from all the queer, women centered houses I had lived in thus far. I wanted a different feel from the circles I was used to running in.

“The Big Blue House” was not communal. It worked out because, folks were clean, mostly quiet and I had a good friend down the hall to snuggle up with and grieve over my failed relationship. She had also had recent heart break. We were each other’s rocks. I ended up living in that house for 2 years, working down the street, saving money and studying to get into college. The house did get more communal as the years progressed. New folks moved in, one awesome guy from Minnesota who wanted to have potlucks every Thursday and the tradition still lives on in the house to the present. My good friend moved out and I moved down the hall to a room with floor to ceiling windows facing a giant apple tree in blossom. The blooms were amazing and I would sit on a pillow by the window for hours in reverence. We also planted a huge Garden of Eden next to the parking lot and had bushels of abundance one season.

My final cooperative living was in Olympia WA, where I moved to go to college. My best friend, the one that got me to move to the NW in the first place, decided to go to college with me so we both moved to Olympia and into “Terra Down.” This house was an old, green rickety home on the down of a hill. We moved in with a new housemate and three cats. “Terra Down” had one of those gorgeous claw foot bathtubs in the upstairs, the perfect remedy for student stress. The kitchen was huge and painted a fantastical crayon box mix of colors by ancient housemates past. The house was a queer women’s space, which I was ready to be around after two years without. We had our dramas and our strife, fighting to make it work and stay close. We all were involved in peer counseling and this made our friendships adhere longer. Unfortunately we were all busy students and sometimes the house was a second thought to mountains of homework and school activities.

After three years in Olympia I found the love of my life and after a year and a half of togetherness we decided to move in together. At first we wanted a housemate too but we couldn’t get my best friend to move in. We couldn’t think of anyone we both deemed the right person, so we just moved in together. We started a beautiful home, all painted walls, chickens in the back and a studio attic space for me to create in. The rent was just right for us and we were in a new neighborhood to give our small, college, town a fresh perspective. I was on top of a hill again and living with my love.

Through a series of simple twists of fate we decided to commit to each other and soon after had Sweetpea come along. With all this transition and a whole new little person to join us, two becoming three, we decided we were ready for a life style change. I had some karmic, unfinished, business and some historical, place based, artwork to do in Texas. We had a brother here, multiple cousins, aunts and uncles, and loving grand parents just a state a way. Grand parents that agreed that if we moved, they would visit every month we were here. This and a new job for my dear daddy sent us packing for Austin TX where we have landed today.

Our first place has been a sweet, small, community of duplexes in central Austin. We like the people and the location but the rent and bills are to high and we miss having a yard to grow things in. We are ready to start anew and make collective living a part of my family’s life together. Wish us luck.