Day 6

My favorite little friend from the garden today. Isn't he a cool little spider?Bitter melon from the garden by the kitchen... once it cracked itself open we ate the flesh off the delicious bright red seeds... delicate and delicious!
Guembe, Jon's favorite... I think it's a kind of philodendron, and it grows everywhere here! It's huge!
Where I sleep (in the hammock tent to the left)... stuff tent to the right. Clothes are in there... and the rest of my pack contents. Lulu was checking it all out in this picture.

Sometimes I feel like I am becoming increasingly wild. Without a mirror, I really have no concept of how I look, and I imagine myself to be more and more like Ronia every day (Ronia is the main character in Ronia, the Robber’s Daughter, which I read to Sophie and Anders a few years ago. She is a wild young girl of the forest with tousled hair and a spirit to match.) as my hair is fly away and my skin streaked with red mud.

I have been reading the Celestine Prophecy and having revelations related to it… it’s reminding me about fractals again and inside each of us is the microcosm of the macrocosm. As part of this concept I am realizing that if one of my goals is to help heal the state of the world, I must also look inward to myself, to heal within. If we are really all one, then healing myself should also heal the world in a sense… it’s at least a good place to start. I have decided to stop eating grains for a little while to see if this helps. Now I just need to kick my chocolate habit. Hmmm…

We started constructing the base for our earthen long-drop composting toilet today. We spent all morning filling bags with subsoil, and tamping them down in a circle Marcelo made by attaching two sticks together with a string, driving one into the ground, and then tracing our template with the other. So simple. So clever. We have left two doors, because our composting toilet will have two chambers… one will fill and cure as the other fills.

Once it’s done curing, we’ll scoop out the compost and use it and go back to using the first throne as the second chamber composts. It’s a clever system, and means that we never have to empty buckets onto a heap- it composts right there in the room. And the bathroom itself will have a beautiful open view of the valley to boot.