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Larry L. Dill's
New Hope Journal
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Letter From Rabbit Rock
The Zen of Personal Architecture
March 28, 2004
Dear Reader,
I awoke this morning to the low growl of the dog and looked out the loft window to see a wild turkey hen scratching through the leaves outside the cabin. It is the last Sunday in March and spring is bursting forth even in these mile high mountains. The wild onions and grasses are greening out, the purple flowers of the humble heal-all or gill-over-the-ground poke out of the dead leaves. We’ll make and infusion tea later for what ails us. Would that it could. The trees are still mostly leafless so it is possible to watch a pair of tiny downy woodpeckers, no larger than sparrows, flit from tree to tree, so tiny and quiet that their pecking sounds can hardly be heard beneath the drum beat of a much larger pileated woodpecker high in a walnut tree nearby.
I’m starting to build myself a small writing studio a few hundred feet away from the main lodge (a friend visiting for the first time said, "This isn't a log cabin. It's a lodge!"). My intention is to build this new cabin as simply and as quickly as possible, creating first of all an open pavilion of locust logs and a tin roof (the tin roof another concession to civilization for efficiency and fire safety). Later the pavilion will be closed in with salvaged doors and windows and granite rocks which lie in profuse heaps all the way to the top of this mountain.
There is no electricity here. The water supply is a trickling spring high above the house. We pipe it in from April to October. We have a claw foot tub and we heat water for baths. We have an outhouse. And an antique Amish commode (a cleverly crafted little piece of furniture that hides a chamber pot). I’m affording myself the luxury of a chainsaw to build my studio, just as I used one to build the lodge. I wish I had the physical energy and the time to cut house logs and firewood by hand. I wish I was not so tied to the grid of social consumption --beer, and books and internet connections-- that I could give up my place in town. But I can’t and I’m no saint as my friends all know. It is both penance and ecstasy to me to create this retreat which we have dedicated to the preservation of a natural, or at least a primitive, state of peacefulness and harmony with a fast receding natural world.
Building this studio for myself is a way of focusing my meditations on the brief time I have left on this earth. My prayer today is that I might devote as much of the rest of my life as I can to studying and writing about social and environmental justice. There is no shortage of material. The poet in me will draw me forever back into the web of my own emotional self-absorption. But the world out there beyond the TV towered Mt. Pisgah that lies in the distance before me at Rabbit Rock, cannot be retreated from except in death.
The human experiment has been both glorious and terrible. The damage we are doing to the planet and the other species we share it with may be so great that some might say it is already too late. But I believe the solution is still at hand. The exponentially increasing scientific wisdom we have acquired in the past 500 years may well be enough to provide the human race with a way of saving ourselves and our planet.
But there are no guarantees and no time to waste. A little Carolina wren sings out this morning for spring and for salvation. The woodpeckers, large and small, keep rhythm like clocks ticking away the time. Human aesthetics, human ethics, and human science must be nurtured in “consilience”—E.O. Wilson’s word for a unified scientific knowledge base. Such a consilience of economics and ecology, Wilson argues, may take us through the environmental “bottleneck” into which humanity has presently driven the planet. Human over-population and human over-consumption of the resources of the natural world are the twin evils we face. Ignorance, greed, violence and xenophobia are the obstacles we must overcome even before we can fully face them. Not a promising fight.
But let us get on with it. And let me get out of this chair and get on with my humble hut building. The sun has already peaked on me today and my meditations must now become more physical and more focused. Post hole digger, the smell of the dirt, the rocks that must be pried from the earth by hand to make way for my cabin, the trees that must be cut, their stumps laid barren, their tops left to rot in the woods. The Zen of personal architecture so to speak. We must go on. Humbly. But we must go on. You too.
Stay in touch,
Larry L. Dill
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