I’m out in South Carolina this week, meeting with our architect to make some preliminary plans on the timeline and concept for our new house on Dewees Island. Dewees is accessible via ferry so as you can imagine, the building isn’t going to be easy. All the building materials and the people who will be using them, will be delivered on a barge. A piledriver will be brought over for the foundation, which requires pilings because we are building on sand and because the first floor of the house will be nineteen feet about sea level. And because the island is 65% nature preserve, protected inperpetuity, the structure requires all sorts of review boards to make sure we aren’t overstepping our boundaries with the local wildlife or disrupting sand dunes, wet lands or anything else that actually belongs to the earth, but we, in our human-centric minds claim to own. It’s going to require a great number of tools to bring this home to life - a lot of green ones and a lot of equipment. Projects like this don’t overwhelm me, they excite me. Yet another adventure I get to participate in that will undoubtedly create memories for not just me, but for generations of either my family or maybe, eventually, someone else’s. But it will require significant work and having the right tools in place.
The idea that tools are required for building a house is a given. So how is it we miss the obvious requirement of tools when we are buiding a life? I’d say our lives mean more than a house, yet most people go about constructing their lives without much thought whatsoever about the tools they’re using to build it. And half rate tools build a half rate life.
I keep a notebook of thoughts, quotes and ideas for writing my book. The clever cover reads, “Shit I Can’t Remember,” becasue indeed, that is exactly what it contains. I use it to fuel my mind when I sit down to write each day and sometimes just to explore myself. On my flight to Charleston I came across this entry…
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