The Good Life Lab
Page 1
About the cover. In about 1925, gathered around a table at 54 rue du Chateau, drinking their “tonic local brews,” a group of artists and writers who would come to be known as the Surrealists (but who were then, André Breton admits, just adepts at the “art of living”) invented a new version of the old parlor game Consequences.
In this new game, which they called Exquisite Corpse, collaborators took turns adding to an image or poem, without knowing exactly what had come before. The game of Exquisite Corpse celebrates the idea that our minds hold surprises we cannot alone imagine — a persistent theme in this book. Here, four artists — Melinda Beck, Meg Hunt, Bert van Wijk, and Kristian Olson — invent two individuals capable of doing just about anything.
Bismillah al rahman al rahim
In honor of Al Hayy
Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
Foreword(s)
Preface
Part One: Life Imagined
Life in the Waste Stream
Jump and the Net Will Appear
Broken Heart Seeks Giant Band-Aid
To Live a Decommodified Life
Everything Is a Tool to Change the World
Commodified People
Swap-O-Rama-Rama
Nature Is the Truest Book
Ladybugs in New York City
What Is the Cost of a Job?
The Sky Is the Ocean
Part Two: Life Hands-On
Makers of Shelter
Building in Truth or Consequences
Free Fuel
Things of Value
The Notorious Goblins
The Cost of Living
Take Time
Getting Better All the Time
Nature Unlocked
The Digital Homestead
The Least Useful Most Fun Thing
A Cottage Industry
Wisdom
Part Three: Life Lab
Mad Skills
Kitchen Magic
Power, Electronics, and Technology
Cars and Fuel
Shelter
Holy Scrap
Epilogue: Make Mistakes
Resources
Acknowledgments
Credits
Copyright
If it is bread that you seek, you will have bread. If it is the soul that you seek, you will find the soul. If you understand this secret, you know you are that which you seek.
— Rumi
Foreword(s)
The most creative and innovative adults I know are good at taking risks, learning new things, and immersing themselves in the tools and materials out of which they can make new things. When I founded Make magazine, I began calling them makers and soon I was considering just how different they are from those who only see themselves as consumers, not producers.
This book is all about becoming a maker. Making is an active mindset. It means you can learn to do anything you really want to learn. It doesn’t mean you will be the best at it. The effort itself is worthwhile, even if all you gain is an appreciation of how much better others are at it than you. Makers understand the value of openness and the importance of sharing what you learn, especially from failure.
Making is an approach to doing things in spite of the fact that you don’t know how they will turn out. Wendy writes: “Start even if you don’t know how.” That’s a maker’s reason for getting started. It is about having projects you want to do, knowing that you hope to learn something. The best projects are the most challenging. Making is exciting because you don’t really know what you’re getting yourself into. Inevitably, once you dive in, many unexpected things happen.
The Good Life Lab is not another predictable set of recipes encouraging you to do what others have done in hopes that it’ll work for you. It is an invitation to experiment on your own and to try to live a life of your own making. It will be messy, imperfect, and a lot more fun. It will be your adventure.
— Dale Dougherty,
founder of Make magazine
Wendy Tremayne is a new kind of gentle, loving, practical radical. Writing with humor, lightness, and intelligence from a peaceful and compassionate place, she demonstrates how, following our heart’s promptings and using the full resources of our bodies, minds, and souls, we can create a new life for ourselves, one in harmony with our true humanity, in service to our Earth, and attuned to the deeper realities of the cosmos. Wherever we live, whatever our situation in life, we can all learn something from Wendy’s “radical experiments in hands-on living.”
— Christopher Bamford,
author of An Endless Trace: The Passionate Pursuit of Wisdom in the West
The Good Life Lab is a wonderful, open window inviting you into the radically common sense adventures of Wendy and Mikey. It’s well worth going out of your way to look into it.
They show us how we can begin to practice transformative homesteading — the conscious habitation and improvement of our lives, land, and community — anywhere, starting right where we are, wherever we are. The key is to become aware of, engage with, then begin to work with the resources flowing through our lives (time, food, energy, joy, neighbors, shelter, “waste”) in a way that simultaneously magnifies these and other resources and creates additional potentials, often by also enhancing others’ capacity to do the same or better.
This is where I feel the true power of this book lies. It tells a story of striving, creating, and living in a way that elevates life beyond ourselves. It is not about an insular self-sufficiency, for Wendy and Mikey are not isolationists, but rather weavers of interconnecting webs. They seek out those in both their immediate physical community and the global digital community to teach them the skills they lack, while giving back with their growing strengths and the knowledge and creations that arise from their collaborative experimentation.
I love the mind- and soul-opening quotes that begin each section of this book, and how they lead into the tales of Wendy’s and Mikey’s experiences. These are stories within stories. The story of how they built their papercrete structures is also about how they scavenged the discarded paper for the papercrete, about the miscellaneous found and repurposed parts that made the tools to mix and apply the papercrete, about all the joyful, eccentric, sharing innovators they encountered along the way. Point to just about anything within their homestead, and the stories begin to flow. Not just any stories, but empowering adventure tales, with quirky twists and turns that go places you don’t expect, for which you are grateful, because it shows how you might get there, too. As Wendy says, “It’s all common sense — free and available to all.”
— Brad Lancaster,
author of Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond
Many people in our contemporary consumer society, feeling dissatisfied and disgruntled with the jobs and lifestyles in which they find themselves, daydream about a better life, a life that more accurately reflects their values, and a better world they wish to help create. Wendy Tremayne was one of those people, until she and her partner, Mikey, left their 9-to-5 jobs behind and began a quest for something very different, what Wendy describes as an “uncommodified” or “post-consumer” life. This book is the story of their journey, which led them to a small town in New Mexico, and of their lives homesteading there.
Wendy relates their story with an infectious spirit of adventure. She acknowledges fears, paradoxes, and contradictions, and describes many of the things she has learned. In these pages you will find practical information to guide you through a remarkably varied range of do-it-yourself projects, including building with papercrete, plastic welding, and fermenting your own kombucha, kimchi, and tempeh. But far more compelling than the DIY skills themselves is Wendy’s ar
ticulation of the values that have guided her and Mikey to learn these things.
No book, this one included, can offer step-by-step instructions for creating the life you dream of. Each of us is unique, with our own histories, desires, and dreams. We cannot follow in Wendy’s footsteps, yet certain aspects of her journey may illuminate a path for us. In sharing and reflecting upon the discoveries she and Mikey have made and the life they have created for themselves, Wendy Tremayne provides us with much creative inspiration and food for thought on our own transformative journeys.
— Sandor Ellix Katz,
author of The Art of Fermentation
This is no ordinary how-to book. Through the telling of stories and offering of practical advice, Wendy reminds us that, to whatever extent we allow ourselves, we are all master practitioners in our own Good Life Lab. The moment we begin to visualize ourselves there (is your Good Life Lab coat white, plaid, or sequined? Only one thing’s for certain — it’s made from something rescued from the waste stream), magic starts to happen. The trick is to start now, from wherever we may be. . . .
This book invites the embracing of paradoxes. It’s okay to be part of problems and part of solutions at the same time — cultivating awareness of what constitutes an inspiring, sustaining, meaningful choice is the goal. The more aware we become of the ways in which even the smallest decisions affect our own health and the health of those around us, the more empowered, connected, intuitive — and alive — we are.
The Good Life Lab is not only an excellent technical resource for the emerging homesteader, it’s a call to action and a guidebook for anyone with a heart that’s ready to be followed.
— Alyce Santoro,
the Center for the Improbable and (Im)Permacultural Research
Life is a single whole. In the end, nothing in this world is separable from anything else. You and I are who we are because of everyone and everything that has come before us. And everyone and everything that comes after us will bear the trace of who we have been: what we have thought, what we have said, and what we have done. The past is our heritage, the future is our legacy, and the present is our moment of truth.
We have been born into a world that is fast-changing. Never have so many men and women lived upon the earth. Never have men and women taken so much from the earth. The planet is groaning under the strain of our demands. Glaciers are melting, rivers turning toxic, rubbish heaping up, species vanishing — all so that we may keep up a way of life that gives us happiness. But are we really happy?
Wendy Jehanara Tremayne and Mikey Sklar set out to find a state of happiness that could not be bought with dollar bills. They let go of the corporate ladder and planted their feet on solid ground. By trial and error, with faith and vision, they built a new life, a life of work and play and celebration under the vast desert sky. This fascinating book tells their story.
The dervishes of old were known for their patched robes. When their robes tore or wore out, rather than buying new ones, they patched the ones they had. In time, like Joseph’s famous cloak, their robes became quilts of many colors. Wendy and Mikey have made the whole of their life a patchwork robe. For all with eyes to see, that priceless dervish robe is a manifest sign of the bounty that is forever.
— Pir Zia Inayat-Khan,
president of the Sufi Order International
In this End-and-Beginning Times that we are quickly approaching, many of us will be lighting out for points unknown, where Tremayne’s not-to-panic common sense and a willingness to work will slow us down and let us live. And many of us will stay in coastal cities, or in tornado alleys, or near nuke plants or fracked pipelines — and the lessons from this book will apply just as well.
Wendy Tremayne is a refractor. Her slowing down the problem of the temperature in a room makes that room offer up unexpected sensual experiences. The practical solution to temperature control becomes a garden of delights. Then our horizon shifts and we are startled — because we simply don’t see (in what we mistake for dirty hard work) this panoply of experiences.
In our shopped-together life, we see what the products instruct us to see. Beyond the horizon of our products, beyond the city limits — out there in New Mexico with Wendy, we are taught to see a rough, simple life. In Wendy’s hands, we discover that it is delightful, moral, whole. I can’t think of a more important gift for us, as it becomes increasingly clear that consumer society has deadly consequences. Earthalujah!
— The Reverend Billy,
the Church of Stop Shopping
This is less a story about some radical new way of living than that of our return to normal. It’s not about going “off the grid” and living in isolation from society, but rather about returning to the interconnectedness and social values that have characterized humanity pretty much since there have been humans. The fact that learning real skills, developing competencies, and sharing them with others in a mutually beneficial, winnerless game should appear so alien to most of us attests to how far we’ve drifted from anything resembling a cooperative culture.
The moment of disconnect, as far as I have been able to tell, was the Renaissance. Though hailed as a rebirth of the oldest human values and the beginning of rationality, the industrial age, and what we think of as modernity, it was actually — or at the very least also — the dismantling of a peer-to-peer society in favor of a highly centralized one. Local, abundance-based currencies were outlawed in favor of the same kinds of debt- and scarcity-based currencies we use today. In order to transact with one another, people had to borrow the “coin of the realm” from the central treasury. Trading with one another meant becoming indebted to the bank.
Of course, most people had little to trade once “chartered monopolies” (what we now call corporations) were given exclusive province over one industry or another. Instead of creating and exchanging value with one another as humans, craftspeople went to work for bigger companies in the city, and received wages for their time. Over the next few centuries, assembly lines and mass production served to further disconnect workers from the value they created — all the while presenting a false rationale of greater efficiency. This efficiency was never real: unaccounted for in the equation are the public roads required to ship all this stuff from factories to towns, as well as the environmental costs of factory production. The only thing it did better was disconnect us from any sense of competency, self-sufficiency, or local value creation.
Luckily for us, that system is finally breaking down. Corporations have collected all the money by now, and they’ve lost the ability to create any more money with it. They are stuck improving their balance sheets by shedding assets and workers instead of making anything new. The resulting unemployment crisis is a blessing in disguise, requiring us to seek the kinds of solutions in this book.
Actually doing stuff may seem scary to those of us more familiar with meaningless cubicle activity than real value generation. It feels a bit like being thrown on a desert island and being forced to come up with a skill set worthy of membership in the tribe. As this book amply demonstrates, those skills are attainable, even innate. The readiness is all.
— Doug Rushkoff,
author of Life, Inc. and Present Shock
Preface
Love is the merchandise which all the world demands; if you store it in your heart, every soul will become your customer.
— Hazrat Inayat Khan
I am writing this book more than a half century after the publishing of Helen and Scott Nearing’s classic Living the Good Life: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World (1954). The world that they found too brutal to remain a part of and chose to leave has hardly become less troubled. A simple life is even harder to find today than it was in 1932 when the Nearings left New York City to start a homestead in rural Vermont.
Like the Nearings, we began our journey in New York, where a real estate agent and a package of ladybugs helped bring into focus one thing: We were going to have to leave the city if we wanted to lea
d the lives we dreamed about. My partner Mikey and I lusted for a life free of pointless drudgery. We wanted to do meaningful work that contributed to life and did not have a detrimental cost to others. We believe that the collective bounty of our planet — food, water, air, and shelter — ought to be available to everyone, whatever their economic status, and we wanted to be part of that vision. These ideals sound simple, but they have not been easy to follow. Not for us, not for the Nearings, and not for those inspired by their writings over the fifty-odd years between their adventure and ours.
In the city, we fantasized about living closer to nature. We wondered if it was possible to secure healthy food and clean water. Since the two of us had only lived in the suburbs and the city, Mikey and I had plenty of acculturated knowledge. That is, we knew how a complex society worked and how to work in it. What we craved was a more natural knowledge, a connection to nature and the rest of life. We tried to imagine a different sort of lifestyle, one less entangled with commerce, materialism, and the influences of marketing. The rewards of our fancy jobs, we saw, could never remedy what we felt was missing from our lives: time to develop our own creative ideas, participation in envisioning and shaping the world, and freedom from the exhausting work that we, along with many others, had become accustomed to. We wanted to explore what life could be in an environment free of at least some of the pressures of a monetary system and a society structured by capitalism. Recognizing that an economy based on both perpetual growth and limited resources makes no sense, we started asking ourselves what could be relied on. Contributing to the making of a different kind of economy seemed to us a reasonable thing to do. We never set out to prove that life could be lived without money, but we wanted to make our lives have less to do with it.
Our hunch was that it would not be long before the economic system crashed anyway, so we pulled our retirement savings out of the stock market and hedged a new and less popular bet. We bought resources: an acre of land and tools to make things.