Downsizing Begins

We have started down the path.  We made an offer on the church bus in Pueblo.  They had another couple scheduled to look at it as well.  We made a fair offer and hope to hear back later this week.  We talked to the pastor for quite sometime while going over this bus.  If we don't get this one, we will find another one.  There is a glut of buses on the market.  It is mostly a matter of just finding the right deal.

We have started liquidating our possessions via craigslist and such.  It is amazing how much we have acquired in just ten years.  This is a difficult process.  We had a hard time at first.  We found that our attachment to things was strong, even though it may be stuff we don't even use.  Many things are obvious that it is junk that just needs to go.  Other things are tougher as we decide what we will want and need with us and what we will put in storage.  Dealing with some of the folks on Craigslist is also a big happy joy.  We will likely have an indoor yard sale in the very near future.

While we have been sorting and taking pics for this process, we have started talking about how we will trick out our bus.  We will have to start with a generator, but are researching possibly building a wind turbine as well as solar panels.  We are trading a table saw for a solar shower and a two burner camp stove.  We are considering building a portable solar oven.  We have a single burner camp stove and a turkey fryer burner to do most of our cooking. We are looking for a composting toilet to buy or trade for.  We will take our queen size memory foam mattress and will build a frame into our overall design.  We are also considering a space for growing herbs and fresh vegetables by using a vertical growing and drip system system and a couple of grow lights.

We are still struggling with the decision to live in a bus.  Sy and I are both intellectually fine with it.  We are both smart strong adults who can list all of the reasons why we should do this as well as the few for why we shouldn't.  Emotionally this has been a trying experience, but we are both growing from the experience.  We are supporting each other like we haven't in a long time.  Overall, this so far is turning into a positive experience for both of us.  

I am kind of anxious to just get on with it, and have to often remind myself to slow down and get through the downsizing process first.  I strive to take life each moment at a time now instead of being caught up in the drama of the past and the worry of the future.  We are only alive right now.  That's all we ever have.  This is the essence of our decision to make this life style change.  Yes other factors make it easier, but we decided that we simply want to live on our time, right now.

Have a Zen day. 

The First Steps to Location Independent

We are now a few days into our decision to transition to location independent living.  We went into high gear trying to find a suitable ride.  We have looked at several motor homes, and even made an offer on one yesterday.  The gentleman wasn't apparently as motivated of a  seller as I thought him to be.  We are fine with that though as we have been considering the bus/conversion option as well.  If I had the money we would love to be cruising around in an older Wanderlodge by Bluebird.

As it stands, we are now looking at purchasing a school or church bus and roughing it while we build our own custom coach as we go.  We are both internet savvy, and Craigslist has tons of treasures if one has the time and patience to find them.  I was surprised that it was Sy pushing me for this option.  She has been camping only a few times and we roughed it in a tent for a couple of nights at a time.  I was the one being a whiner about not having a bed and a shower, the guy who lived on the streets of Colorado Springs for a year as a 19 something.

We are going to look at a Partridge familyish church bus tomorrow.  It is well within our price range and the lady has already volunteered that she is willing to negotiate on the price.  There is a glut of retired school buses on the market in our price range.  We are thinking that we will build as we go along.  We will start with the most basic necessities such as a composting toilet, and a generator, and water storage and disposal.  Our camping setup will need to be upgraded just a bit to accommodate everyday cooking use.

We are already working on a rough floor plan so we have an idea of what we will need to acquire to convert said bus to a nice RV.  We will eventually be completely solar powered.  We are playing with the idea of a gravity fed water system.  By using a composting toilet, we will not need to have or clean a black water tank.  Our gray water can be used to water a lawn.  Down the road we will spend the money to convert the diesel to run on used vegetable oil.  It runs a couple of grand for that conversion, but will save bazillions over the life of the vehicle with the added benefit of  a much lower environmental footprint.

After much consideration we decided a bus is a better built and safer vehicle than most motor homes. We can build it to suit us.  We are excited and scared at the same time.  It is going to be a great adventure, and we can't wait.

The Choice is Made

Sy and I have made the decision to go nomadic.  We were leaning yesterday.  We continued talking ourselves into it today.  We are going to look at a nice motor home tomorrow.  It is taking a new set of eyes to determine how to proceed.  Everything will be a new challenge for awhile as we transition.

We can take a limited amount of stuff on the road with us including our tools to make our living.  We have already sold and given away a ton of crap this year.  We are now going through the process of trying to guess what we will want to keep in storage for future use when we find our five acres of paradise, and what gets liquidated.  The prospect of having the freedom to wake up anywhere we want is actually a little overwhelming.  We are already making a list of places to visit.  This list includes natural wonders and restaurants alike.  We have figured out that our biggest challenge will be downsizing our kitchen.  We are both foodies who love to create new dishes.  We now get to challenge our skills with much less space for cooking and resources.  Our four cats will be re-homed, but we are taking both dogs with us and have to consider space for their food and such.

We are looking forward to eating at local restaurants and finding food at local farmers markets from different areas of the country.  We look forward to seeing family that we haven't been able to see often.  I will be writing about our experiences along the way.  Someday they will be one set of tales out of many from this "great recession."  I hope folks will follow along as we take this crazy adventure into location independent living.

The Road Less Traveled

There come times in our lives where we are presented extraordinary choices and opportunities.  Sy and I are at a point in our lives where we have the opportunity to really evaluate a number of different directions for our lives to take. While we have discussed many ideas over the decade we have been together, we really didn't expect to be in the position we are currently in.

We are knee-deep in the foreclosure dance with Bank of America.   We have a small business which is paid for other than monthly expenses.  Unfortunately, we started a business that in my industry slows down when the cold comes.  We have minimized our household bills as much as possible for our acceptable standard of living, and we continue to be behind on our bills.  We are better off than a large majority of Americans who are still struggling with significant debt.  Our only debt is our mortgage and we had one of those mortgages that is in the news right now.  We should not have qualified, and we struggled to pay it consistently the entire time we have lived here.

We are now faced with the question: Where do we go from here.  As I stated earlier, we have discussed where we want to head in life, what our dream house will look like when we build it,  how we want to live our lives.  We both see a huge economic storm still lingering over the United States for the next several years.  We are prepared to use our various skills and trades to make a living.  We seek a simple life without the corrosion of the rat race.  Our long-term dream is to someday buy a small piece of rural property somewhere and build a sustainable, eco-friendly hobbit hole that is off the grid.  We ultimately seek to be self supporting in raising our own food and ply our crafts and trades for whatever else we may need.  That being said, we are not quite in a position to do that just yet.  We have discussed two basic plans with various options.

I will start with the more traditional plan.  That is, we find a place to rent that we can afford.  We are looking at studio and one bedroom apartments.  They are fairly inexpensive and I have found that in the current housing crisis, more rental properties are pet friendly than I remember  from past renting experiences.  Our overhead would be fairly low.  Some of our options for this plan revolve around auto glass repair.  We can rent and stay in Colorado Springs, one of the most competitive auto glass repair and replacement markets in the world, or we can move to a smaller town and ply our trade in a rural area to make a living.  There is very little competition, but some costs of business are higher.  The one foreseeable difficulty with the rent plan is that we are still beholden to pay somebody else for our shelter each month.  If business is bad, or we get sick, things can end badly, with us not prepared to move on.  Landlords have been known to go into foreclosure as well, leaving tenants high and dry.

The second "less traditional" option we have been discussing is to live location independent.  I put less traditional in quotes here because it is actually the way most of humanity has lived at one time and 30 to 40 million still do.  I am talking about a neo-nomadic lifestyle.  The idea is that we downsize our possessions and buy an RV or coach to live in.  Living Location Independent, is not the same as homeless.  It means we live in a house we can drive down the road when we feel like moving.  The one positive thing I will probably ever say about Wal-Mart is that they are friendly to those who live in RV's and will generally let them park overnight in their parking lots.  We can also park at truck stops and in national parks and forests.  One great advantage to this plan is that we can visit family and friends that live in places we generally weren't able to afford to visit.  With the ability to set up any where and do rock chip repairs and sell our craft goods, we only need to make enough to meet our low fuel and food overhead, and pay for our cell and mobile internet service.  This lifestyle is more common than many think.  The term snowbird applies to those who live in the northern climes in summer and then migrate to places like Arizona and Florida in the winter time.  There are many Technomads, who travel around as consultants and freelance software developers.  There are many who write for a living or sell their photography online.  They may build websites or set up networks.  Often they barter for what they need.  Many Technomads travel the world this way.

Sy and I have been through hours of discussion about this and we are both in favor of the location independent path.  With the advent of the internet and cell phone technology, it is easier than ever to be a nomad and still stay in touch with family and friends.  With the lower cost of living a nomadic lifestyle, we would be able to put away for our future plans.  If we do this we know that we are giving up a certain level of comfort, but we are prepared for this.  With the looming economic and social problems piling up in this country, we almost feel as if we can weather the storm better if we have a shelter we own and can move if we need to make our ends meet.  We are both struggling to overcome the modern American consumerist mindset, or the idea that home ownership and possessions are what's best for us.  It is deeply ingrained, and as one goes through the foreclosure process, allows for depression and anger to manifest because of feelings of failure.  It doesn't matter that the system and our mortgage was designed to fail so that Wall Street speculators could rake in billions.  It has been a long arduous process of breaking free from the failure mindset and setting out to determine our next best course.  We have done a lot of research and as I said are in favor of location independent living.  As we have been doing for a few years now, we will make sustainability and eco-consciousness a focus in our lives.

We ask readers of this blog to share any thoughts you may have about location independent living in the comments.

Consequences II

It is often the tragedies in life that help us evolve into better beings.  After I lost my job, life was kind of scary for a day or two.  As Sy and I began to develop a business plan for our new business, we settled down and laid the groundwork for the rest of our lives.  It has been a liberating experience for us that will allow us to shape our destiny.

Many spiritual traditions teach that endings are also beginnings.  We see in nature as nothing is wasted.  When life ends it recycles into nutrients for new life.  In life it is the same.  The loss of my job has opened up new opportunities that otherwise might not have been taken.   But with endings and beginnings comes change and learning.

When you have the security net of a regular weekly pay check it is easy to get caught in the pay check to pay check rat race.  It is easy to get caught up in the drama of day to day life.  In this state it is near impossible to live in the moment and be mindful of our thoughts and actions.  The resulting actions and consequences can cause suffering and further cycles of bad choices.

After the liberation of losing my job,  I find I have time for things like meditation, yoga and reflection.  I find that I am less stressed and angry.  I find that I can balance my life out instead of dedicating so much time to the corporation to go nowhere.  With this liberation came a wake up call to clean up the rest of our lives.

Sy and I have been fiscally lazy over the last years.  With the creation of our new business, and with the realization that we and we alone are responsible for our fiscal well being, especially without the security check each week from the rat race job,  we had to account and reign in our fiscal laziness.  It has been difficult, and we may lose our house, but it sets us on a path to a more sustainable and financially sound life.

There are other areas of our lives I could discuss in much the same way.  Sy and I are both stubborn.  Especially when it comes to communicating with one another.  Since I have lost my job,  we have had to work on our communication.  We communicate better now than probably any time in the last five years.  The trick is to be mindful of the moment and then the next.  If we get caught in the drama of the past and the worry of the future, then we aren't living right now.

Easier Said Than Done

One of the biggest obstacles we have in our journey to transcend suffering, is not living in the moment.  To be focused on right now.  When we choose to live in the moment, we can think and process the world around us with greater clarity.  As humans experiencing  suffering, we tend to lose track of the moment.  We often get stuck in a past moment with unresolved emotions, or thoughts.  At the same time we can become stuck in the future.  All of these unresolved moments add up to our suffering.

My biggest moment sticker is anger.  My anger often stems from my ego.  If I take slight at something that someone else does, I hold on to angry thoughts.  It is OK to be angry, but to holding on to it is the folly of suffering.  For instance if I am driving and somebody turns out right in front of me, and cuts me off, I get angry.  The problem is when I stay mad for the next ten minutes planning what I would say to this person in an angry manner. This is how easy it is to become stuck in the past and the future at the same time.

By deduction then it must be that the way out of our suffering comes from within us.  If it is true that we hold on to our suffering the it is true that we have the power to let go of our suffering.  This is profound.  It is something I have been able to experience in my life, but it is difficult to maintain if one does not live in the moment.

We can teach ourselves to live in the moment.  The best way is through meditation.  meditation is difficult.  If it weren't everyone would be doing it.  Meditation with focused breathing is very powerful.  Meditation is simply sitting with legs folded and one leg in front of the other, and hands on knees palms up.  Burning incense while meditating helps open one to spirit.  I also like to listen to meditation music or chanting while meditating.  Start by taking slow deep breaths.  Focus on deep rhythmic breathing.  One will notice various thoughts and emotions coming to the surface especially when one is new to meditation.  Acknowledge the thought and then refocus on breathing and or music.  The more you practice this, the easier it is to live in the moment.  We soon learn to let go of our attachments to our thought and emotions.  We resolve each moment as it happens.  It is also easier to see when we are becoming stuck in a moment, and correct it with a simple deep breath.

" A saint is a very simple man:  when he walks, he walks.  When he talks, he talks and that's all.  He doesn't think while listening, daydream while walking, see while touching.  This is hard.  That is why he is a saint."  Sujata, Beginning To See


Blessings
Rev. Jeremy