007 How I Built an Off-Grid Cabin (part 3)

Hello Everyone,

Welcome to the third and final installment of How I Built an Off-Grid Cabin. It’s a story of how I went from a scary rock bottom to finding health, housing, and love in a single year.

If you missed either of the first two parts, you can find them here along with all past editions of this newsletter. If you’ve received this email from a friend and would like more in the future, you can sign up for the mailing list here.

Note: I’ll be pausing this newsletter for the next two weeks while I help my partner with her wonderful new offering Homecoming and visit with family. I’ll be back with a new edition on September 18th.

Ready to Build

By April 2018 I was healthy and strong enough to begin work on my cabin. In fact, I was healthier and stronger than I had been in years. 

Not only that, my recovery had been steady and swift. After a lifetime of pushing myself to repeated injuries and other stress-related conditions, of working relentlessly as a way to prove my worthiness, I had found a gentler, intuitive, and compassionate approach. 

The kicker was, by emphasizing these feminine aspects of myself, I had achieved the exact results I’d been seeking with my habitual, more willful and masculine approach. 

But I also understood that the progress was tenuous. It depended on newly-formed habits and strategies that ran counter to my entire past. 

The cabin project was going to be physically and mentally intense. I’d be doing heavy labor, mostly on my own, and I would be learning as I went. 

I understood that stress could easily push me towards old, familiar habits and that my entire recovery could be lost in a single day.

I needed to be impeccable in following my intuition. I needed to keep my stress levels low, even if it meant working slowly. I knew, at this point, that I was more productive when I didn’t push myself.

I was ready! But there was one other complication…
 

The Other Complication

I was attempting to build the cabin with hand tools.

That’s because I had discovered, a few years earlier, that my sensitive nervous system was not compatible with power tools. Very not compatible. So incompatible that 10 minutes with a chainsaw or circular saw would lay me up for days or longer. 

It wasn’t always that way. But, like many things that were never good for me in the first place, I became conscious of how bad they were for me as I became embodied.

At first, I was devastated. Power tools are faster, less tiring, easily available, and easy to use. 

Hand tools on the other hand, are hard to find without spending a fortune. And that’s assuming you know what tool you need for the job and how to use it (I was clueless). Aaaaaand, no matter how good you get at them, they’re A LOT more work than power tools.

As an often injured, small framed person working alone, this felt like a big hit. But, like everything I’ve encountered on the healing journey, what I thought was a major setback became a gift. 

That’s because hand tools are perfect for building a cabin with the Feminine.

They’re quiet, they don’t vibrate like power tools, and they’re free of noxious fumes. They also create built-in work breaks because they’re tiring to use and they need regular sharpening. 

And unlike working with power tools, I always knew well in advance when I was running out of steam for the day. If I was paying attention, there was no way I could over-work.

So, even though it seemed like the project would take longer, hand tools fit perfectly with my new take-it-slow approach. Which meant, paradoxically, that I would likely stay injury free and be done faster after all.
 

The Cabin

Step one was collecting logs to make lumber. For economic and ecological reasons, I decided to use trees from my property. Using an old double bit axe, I felled, limbed and bucked each tree into 10ft, 12ft, and 16ft logs.

Moving the 300--800lb logs from the forest edge to the building site was accomplished with a set up of ropes, pulleys, rollers and something called a peavey. 

I turned the logs into lumber using a friend’s portable saw mill. This was not a hand tool but most of the vibrations didn’t reach the part I held onto. 

Every piece of lumber was then cut with a handsaw, and some, like the ceiling and floor boards, were smoothed with a hand plane. Each piece was then hammered or screwed into place.

By conventional standards, the project moved at a snail’s pace. For me, it was perfect. My stress level was low and my body felt great. Besides, I was learning as I went so I always needed time to figure out what came next. 

To my surprise, I had turned an ambitious project into something joyful and relaxed.

Over the course of the summer, people began stopping by and telling me how impressed they were. They hadn’t seen someone build this way since their grandparents.

They were amazed by my hard work, my skill, my determination and grit. I even had one particularly burly man tell me, in a sheepish way, how manly I was. 

I had spent my entire life desperately seeking this kind of validation and ruining my health to get it. Now, as it poured in, I realized how little it mattered. 

In my mind, I wasn’t working hard or being especially manly. I was doing what I wanted to do in a way that felt safe, enjoyable, and nourishing.

From April through August, I felled trees and piled close to 40 logs near the building site. In September, I built the foundation and started milling lumber. On October 6th, with the help of a few neighbors, I raised the frame of my cabin. By Veteran’s Day I was moved in. 

Two days before Christmas, after much delay, I received the final chimney part and I had my first fire. 

It was a symbolic moment, the culmination of a 6 year dream. And it also proved that this new approach, using the Feminine to guide even the most masculine tasks in my life, was a success.

But then came another complication...

Three days after I raised the frame to my cabin, I met the love of my life – who happened to live in New York City. And, on the day before I moved into my cabin, I heard a powerful message from my intuition.

It said that the cabin and the homesteading life was not my last stop. 

I was shocked but I understood. I had finally broken a 20 year cycle, a relentless pattern of emotional and physical injury and illness, by healing my heart and connecting to my body. Now it was time to help others do the same. 

In the process of healing myself, I discovered that I was able feel other people’s energetic disruptions - the root cause of many chronic physical and emotional health issues - in my own body. I could then facilitate their release using the same techniques I used to heal myself.

In addition, the past year had solidified a healing roadmap that I could use to help others. 

As it turns out, those two moments – meeting my partner and receiving the intuitive message to move on from homesteading – have altered the entire course of my life in incredible and unforeseeable ways. 

I’ll cover this new phase of my life in subsequent editions of the newsletter but you can learn about it now in this interview from my partner’s wonderful podcast Our Nature. We also recorded this interview a few years earlier which documents my broader healing journey.

See you in a few weeks!

Energetically,
David