Pregnancy has been very different from what little expectations that I had of it, like strange cravings and a healthy glow as if I should be on the cover of one of those magazines (I shoulda known better, right?). I’ve learned a lot and have had it pretty easy compared to many other people, though the hardest part has been the exhaustion that comes from my thyroid having taken a huge hit. When I had to continue my daily 2-hour naps after I was well into the second trimester, I figured that I’d just have to make the most out of it. The kitties have supported me and have kept me entertained through this process.

In planning for the arrival, Trace looked in to adding me and the little one to his insurance plan since I am currently on my own and have terrible coverage. Even though his company and Blue Cross Blue Shield honors partnerships, the group plan vendor does not. I cannot be added to his plan.

In 2007, Trace and I sealed our relationship with each other by celebrating with friends and family. However, we choose to forgo legal marriage in order to stand in solidarity with our queer friends and family that don’t yet have that privilege.

And it really is a privilege – a HUGE one.

To me, love is love and that should be enough to argue for marriage equality. But there is more.

The barrier to health insurance is just one piece. When Trace and I file our taxes, we have to file individually as single, so we miss out on a huge tax brake that our friends estimate to be around 1K a year. When Trace was sick and had to go to the hospital, we were worried that I would not be able to accompany him to his room. Fortunately, I was able to. And a few of our queer friends that I’ve talked with have also been allowed to accompany their partners. Though, the uncertainty is utterly nerve wracking.

In talking with a friend that shared a homestead and farm with her partner, she told me that when her partner passed she had to pay $7K in inheritance taxes for the land that they co-owned as a family. Since they had no legal option of marriage, they were not legally recognized as family and thus she had to incur a tax that blood relatives or married couples do not. I assume she’s also not able to benefit from any social security benefits like my mom does.

I was adopted, and I was very interested in going that option (and still am for the future), though, without being married only Trace or I am able to legally adopt a child. Could you imagine loving and caring for your kid and ending up not having any legal rights to share custody if the relationship falls apart?

And, if one of us were to go to prison, we would not have the same visitation rights as if we were recognized as a family.

I’m sure there are more things that I have not yet run across that make it clear that not allowing certain people to marry is unmistakably discriminatory.

These are reasons why ALL PEOPLE need to fight for marriage equality – and we need to fight hard. Not only should we vote down the proposed amendment here in NC, but we should work to make marriage legal on the state level while working on our communities, workplaces, and agencies to better support every family’s needs.

“We’ve all seen enough now it’s time to decide
The meekness of love or the power of pride
It doesn’t matter if you’re good or smart
Goddamn it, things fall apart”

This year has been full of unexpected twists and turns. It seems like in April everything collided and demanded for me to make a change. Since then I’ve been swept up in the whirlwind of “what the fuck do you do when the last five years were just spent pouring energy into a dream turned nightmare?”

Trace and I left Circle Acres. Let’s just say things weren’t working out. There are multiple layers to this, many of which deal with lack of communication, mutually beneficial relationships and responsibility. These are often the tricky parts of a collective.

This year I will not be building our strawbale home, nor will I be homesteading on the same scale. I will not be living in a rural community that doesn’t care much about superficial things. I am, however, ready to work on the I will be’s.

It’s been an interesting experiment, though I wish I would have gone into it viewing it as an experiment. Instead I was totally dreamy about spending the rest of my life there with good friends and food. I’ve gone through a number of emotions about this, from total relief to deep sadness, but at least I feel like I’ve truly tried so I don’t have many regrets.

Trace has written two beautiful posts about this as well: About My Disappearance  and Outline.

We’re now in Durham in a cute neighborhood on half an acre, for 2 years or forever. Time will only tell. Silk Hope will always be in my heart. There are many homesteaders there that I admire and have learned from.

I look forward to closing the last chapter of my life and starting the new one, falling in love with new projects and continuing to work towards a deeper and more fulfilling life.

photo by Trace

The first day of Spring really snuck up on me. I had hoped to have the foundation and framing up by now, but I seriously underestimated the time it would take to demolish 1450 square feet of the old house and find an engineer that is down with the program (strawbale) and is willing to keep it real (natural).

Pushing my oversight on the scale of the demolition aside, we’ve really accomplished a lot in the past few months – shit, we’ve accomplished a lot just this month, as shown below. It’s also felt really good to have people pitch in from time to time. It makes everything feel like it moves 5 times faster, probably because it’s a lot more fun. Matthew, Ben and Kathleen came to help smash the roof, Julia threw caution to the wind to help us get the ceiling down in the second story; Nick did the same for the flooring. Matt and Kat lovingly mule-d rubble with us this past weekend, Adah smashed the piano. And the beautiful weather and increase in the sun keeps me going throughout the week. Not to mention Trace tearing ass every day after work. Somebody please call him and try to get him to take a break!

I think the next few weeks will bring clarity to what the hell the rest of this year is going to look like.

I’m trying so hard to grow my patience. This weather is doing a lot to help in that department. We took Sunday off last weekend and I spent the afternoon plastering with Danielle and Greg on Danielle’s home (which is gorgeous!). This weekend we’re going to spend a little less time cleaning up, and get back into the garden and hang out with the chickies.

I’m a bit obsessed with having things organized and orderly. Ask any of my co-workers and you’ll get a love-hate response about me putting all staff “spring cleaning” dates on the calendar (probably with a big eye roll included). They still call sometimes to ask me if I know where something is – I moved to Chatham County over two years ago.

It’s a good thing that I have a knack for tidiness as my past month has been full of ripping nails out of boards and stacking them perfectly so we can put them to use in our new house.

By my habits you would think that I grew up in one of those sterile houses where you have no idea what the inhabitants are into because there’s never anything left out. It’s almost the opposite – my parents are pack rats. So bad that I used to dress everyone in my band with their old clothes from the 60’s and 70’s. Yeah, we were hilarious. And yeah, my parents hang on to everything.

Valuable lessons learned: take care of stuff so it may last forever; almost nothing is trash. The unintended consequence is my insatiable need for order. Just the other morning I swept the sawdust and rusty nails into a pile on the tarp that sits below my sawhorses. It was my eye of calm in the demolition storm. Then I ripped nails until the sun went down.

Four years ago, with our good friends Noel and Danielle, we bought 12 acres of land. The land includes an old falling apart house, a shed and a lean-to barn. About a quarter of the land is cleared with rest in young forest. Trails wind through the forest onto adjoining properties, running along the property lines to streams, rock outcroppings and sections of older forest.

We came to this land not to escape or drop out from anything, but to further a desire to connect with what sustains us. Two years ago we moved to the property and began several farming and homesteading projects; growing greens, beans, tomatoes and potatoes; raising chickens, pigs, and turkeys; establishing perennial tree, fruit and herb gardens. We gained inspiration and know how through several neighbors, folks at the eco-industrial facility where we both work and Crop Mob.

Building our home is the next project in our evolution, and we hope to use the skills we have developed in building community in order to create this home – kinda like Community Supported Housing.

Just this past weekend we had about 20 of our friends help us with our homework, taking two and a half roofs off and totally gutting the back addition. This could have taken at least a month to do on our own and was so much more fun to do in the company of friends. We hope this is just the beginning.

We will reconstruct the existing house using natural building methods. This is somewhat like green building but quite a few steps closer to total sustainability. After we gut the house, we will rebuild with lumber and strawbales harvested nearby. From the materials gathered from the existing house we’ll re-use whatever we can – even if it’s just for trim or for some other project on the land. When the strawbale walls are constructed, we will seal the bales inside and out with a plaster mix made of clay, sand and straw.

We’re lucky that the house already faces south. We can take full advantage of the solar gain in the winter. There are also large trees that block a majority of the sun in the summer. This keeps the inside cooler without relying on air conditioning. For heating we will use a wood stove and also incorporate radiant heat in the floor using water pipes hooked up to a solar thermal water heater. In regards to the size of the house, we’re reducing the footprint to 1100 square feet – about two thirds of what currently exists. On the outside, we will eventually have a back patio with an earthen oven and rocket stove for summer baking and canning.

Community is crucial to our success, as it always is. Two good friends with carpentry and natural building skills are helping us along the way. We also plan to hold workshops at key points in the process in order to support people who are interested in learning how to build with earthen and natural materials. A handful of friends and family are providing micro-loans to help with the financial support.

We want to live in a world where food, homes and relationships are healthy and sustainable. We want to live in a world where we can rely on our friends and family for support – not institutions like Walmart and Wachovia. It may seem radical or unconventional, but Trace and I really enjoy the challenges of developing new ways in which to make our lives more fulfilling and our connections to each other and our immediate community deeper and more nourishing. We’re working to make that happen in our professional and personal lives, hoping to set an example for others who want to use and improve on our ideas.

If you’ve ever felt like there is more available than what is conventionally provided, we invite you to join us while we navigate this new, yet familiar, terrain. Seriously, what are you up to this weekend?

In July I biked from Seattle to Portland with one of my most favorite people in the world – Alicia. She has deeply influenced the way in which I see and approach the world. She has a love for life that is contagious.

I’ve always wanted to do a bike tour, so I couldn’t say no when Alicia called me and asked me to join her for a leg of her trip from Vancouver to San Fran. I was dying to be in a more urban area, and the terrain looked the most forgiving for the stretch from Seattle to Portland. I had about a month to gather my stuff, ride my bike around the neighborhood for “training”, and make sure that it was ready for the road.

In packing my bike the night before my flight, I naively took apart the headset instead of just removing my handlebars, which made for a sketchy, yet hilarious, start. Lesson 1: it’ll take a few days to put a bike back together correctly and make adjustments.

The first night we got lost after we decided to try to keep riding along the bike trail that held a wall of sandbags on the path. We started around 5pm with high hopes of a punk house with a bonfire at the end of the line, though into the dark of the night we grew tired, lost, and ended up retracing some steps. Long after my body had shut down, we had climbed 2 mountains and collapsed by the Walmart. Of course, there was more than one Walmart in the area on that same road, so Ben, one of the punks we had met earlier, wasn’t able to find us. As the sun came up, we made camp behind the store in the woods.

Finding a place to sleep was the highlight of every day. We camped on an Army base on the 4th of July – throwing our bags and bikes over barbed wire and playing commando to take them piece by piece into the woods. Along the route we also stayed on the side of a highway, beneath a gigantic tree outside of a town with a bunch of creeps, on the gravel of an old logging road, and at friend’s houses. Lesson 2: no trespassing means there’s likely to be flat land to pitch a tent out of sight.

In the 10 days, 240+ miles, and over countless mountains that I was riding with Alicia, my mental pace slowed down significantly. Yeah I was tired, but I seemed to find a natural rhythm. As we moved from place to place, we mostly stumbled upon what we were looking for (with the exception of the punk house in Tacoma, dang). Maybe my expectations were different –  I was hoping for good food and coffee – or maybe I allowed for space so that everything didn’t have to be so immediate.

They say life isn’t about the destination – it’s all about the journey. I find value in placing the moment in priority in a culture that seems to only be moving more rapidly and mediates tangible interaction. If you know anybody who rides a bike as their main mode of transportation, doesn’t have a cell phone, and isn’t on Facebook, you probably know what I mean.

Trace put his project up on Kickstarter days after he decided to participate as a guest artist at our friends’ Hotel Hadley Studios in Siler City. A social media friend of mine, Morgan Sully, used this tool to raise cash to travel abroad and explore how media and communities are supporting global social change. A film I worked with about a year ago used this same idea of crowdfunding to raise cash for their film, The Age of Stupid.

Crowdfunding and crowdsourcing is nothing new to a DIY-er like Trace, where oftentimes creativity and community can go a long way. He estimated what it could cost to make his prints and purchase a few local goodies to serve at the show. It only took five days to reach 100% funding on his project, so he set another goal of 200% funding, and then a third goal of 50 backers. Overall, he came out well supported, though the important piece is not the cash in hand – through this process he has built a base of people who will attend the show in Siler City, and they will likely tell their friends about his work.

If capitalism kills Trace, then it is community that sustains him.

The New Blood for the Old Body opening kicks off at 6pm this Friday. Hope to see you there.

Here’s a video of Trace and Tennessee before the pig panels: