Simplicity and Sustainability - Yurt living, Lost Valley, Oregon

We have found a home.

In other words, we have found a place to stay for more than a week, in this sweet yurt in Lost Valley, Oregon, http://www.lostvalley.org/ . This is a permaculture education center, and an intentional community that we had heard a lot about, and were glad to finally visit in early October. We fell in love with the land and made some good friends in nearby Eugene, so we magnetically were drawn back to rent here for a while, at least until Christmas, and perhaps beyond….

I’m enjoying living simply.

We are living with what fit in our car, with a few loaned kitchen and household items from friends to get us started.

Why did I think I needed so much STUFF in my old mainstream life? It was so freeing to get rid of stuff before we moved, and now I’m realizing we are happy using a small fraction of what we had before. It feels good to finally have everything out of our car, after 3 months of travel; seeing it all laid out on our kitchen floor before we put things away, we were amazed it had all fit in our car!

Our goal is to buy little, so we can move again easily. We are modern-day nomads!

We are enjoying our yurt – 30 ft diameter with small partitioned bedroom and bath and a large loft and skylight, less than 900 square feet total, luxury by our yurt standards (and we have wifi and cell phone coverage to boot). Others in this community have a one-room cabin or dorm room with community kitchen use, so we are fortunate to have the full kitchen. We could imagine buying a yurt (for less than 15K), and renting land to put it on until we decided where to dwell permanently.

Here are some other things we are enjoying in our simplified lifestyle:

v     Lower cost – With this type of lifestyle we can retire earlier.

v     Being closer to nature – This is like living in a huge tent with modern conveniences. We are embraced by the forest and sky.

v     Greater eco-awareness – Being closer to nature reminds me to conserve resources and reuse more as well as recycling, and to buy local stuff with low carbon footprint. We are reusing items stored in the junk shed such as lamps and Christmas lights.

v     Creativity – Instead of buying a coffee filter holder, I made one out of an aluminum pie plate, and it was fun to do! We are enjoying decorating our yurt with simple cloths and prayer flags we had with us all along. Jason’s photos are up, as well as our small altar.

v     Less cleaning – A smaller space is easier to maintain.

v     Composting – The land wants our food and human waste, and we are happy to oblige.

v     Sharing community land and resources, and having community meals every other day or so. The vegetarian food here is so nourishing, and we can supplement with meat and other meals in our own kitchen. It is fun getting to know others in the community.

v     Cozy fire – Our woodstove produces warmth in many ways, including splitting and stacking. We need it here in Oregon where there isn’t a lot of solar this time of year, and especially the night we arrived when we had unusual lows in the 20s. We would prefer supplementing with more solar… we will see where we end up…

P.S. Stay tuned for updates, as we watch Michelle starting to miss some of the old conveniences (?), and as we watch Kule building creative things to make our home even more interesting.....