Flowing

The water tank has been empty for the last couple of days with no rain in sight.

We've been able to get by with bringing up county water in seven gallon containers and spending the weekend at Karen's. Running low on water is not dire for us, it's more inconvenient than anything else. It's actually been pretty nice to dry out a bit on the land. A couple of days ago the trade winds returned and blew out the vog that has been hanging around, the sky was clear with a few wispy clouds.

It's getting pretty close to Kim and I needing to build another compost heap for our humanure. Jim suggested that we build it next to an avocado tree growing on the land. That way, even if we don't do anything with the compost we create, it'll slowly feed nutrients to the avocado tree for years. Good idea.

The saw dust toilets continue to serve us well. Bodhi sometimes asks us why we don't have a water toilet, but for him the system seems pretty normal. A few weeks back we ran out of saw dust and we knew that it would be a few days before we would be able to get to the mill to get more, so the substitute we used was grass from the lawn. I grabbed a five gallon bucket and a rake and gathered up as much cut grass as I could. The grass was a nice substitute. It had been cut a few days earlier so it was all dried up, but I gathered it in the morning so it was covered with dew to add some moisture to hold down smells. After doing our business, we would just grab a handful of grass and cover up our stuff. One night when Kim was sitting and doing her thing, a very familiar, "KOH-KI!" comes from inside of the five gallon toilet bucket. She gets up and grabs a flashlight to see what was going on. Sitting on top the mound of grass was a brown frog. The light caught his eyes and he dove deeper into the toilet. What we surmised is that the coqui frog must have been in the grass I raked up. No one was going to dig in and try to find the frog, and Kim couldn't muster it up to use the toilet with the little guy in there. Lucky for us, we have a bucket set up downstairs as well. We actually have more toilets at the cabin than we did at our cottage in Honolulu. I never heard the coqui in the toilet, but the next morning I took off the toilet seat on the bucket and lidded it up. It has since been dumped into the compost heap. Maybe he's living out his life in the heap or maybe our collected human waste was too much for him.

After almost five months out on the land, I'm still so grateful for the experiences that living off the grid has brought to me. It's little things like hearing a coqui in your toilet that make me think, "Wow! How cool is that?" If I had a regular flush toilet I wouldn't have such a fun story to tell. Although, I have heard stories of people coming home and finding a huge rat sitting on the toilet seat just hanging out. Now that would freak me out to no end.

During this past Christmas Season, Kim was on a rush to finish some DVDs she made. She would be working on our laptop for hours and our 12 volt battery would start to run out, so she would run off of the computer battery and that would run out. I ended up running an extension cord from our car battery to the laptop so we could charge it up. In the meantime our rechargeable lamps started to lose steam, so we worked in the dark with only a few flashlights. It's fun to think back to that night and the scramble to get our projects done.

So we're building a little bit of resilience out on the land and some of it has been a lot of fun. I think of the lesson of the flowing stream. The lesson goes that when the water flows and it hits an obstacle, it simply finds a way around or over it and continues on it's way. There is a good World War II story about a Tokyo University Professor after the bombing of Tokyo. His home was completely destroyed. As he walked through the ruins, he could pick out different areas of what used to be his house. There were charred remnants of the rare books and scholarly works he had collected over the years. Amidst all of this devastation, he reached down and picked up a handful of ash, "This," he said to his wife, "will make fine tooth powder."

The power to move on.

We'll make it through this drought and have fun doing it. Life flows and so do we.