As a family, we’re in the process of designing our dream home, a small cottage-y frog-shaped building, made of mud. I’ve become enamoured with the flexibility of cob, from the round, snug spaces it allows, to the possibility of having dragon-encrusted bookshelves and reading nooks around the house. But just as important as the final design, is the process of getting there.
I’m not a person who lives in my body, most of the time. As a child, it never seemed to fit, it was too large and clunky, and it had these needs that got in the way of my reading and writing time, and then puberty hit. Which in itself – the changes to my body – was fine. But the reaction of adult men around me was not. The first time I remember an adult male behaving inappropriately, I was ten. He was trying to look up my shirt. I was groped by an adult male at 14, and the catalogue of sexual harassment escalates from there. As it does for most women.
The medical profession didn’t help. When I had ‘appendicitis’, the female nurse sexually assaulted me. Though, given that my menarche came while I was recovering from surgery, I’m no longer convinced that I had appendicitis, it could just have been intense period pains…
Which is to say, my body has always been the vehicle for carrying around my brain, not really a part of who I am. I don’t like this, and have been working on reintegrating myself, which seems to mean at least in part finding out what this rather damaged (see notes on my bike accident!) body of mine is capable of.
It’s already surprising me. In the garden, and at Stardust Farm, I’m finding that I’m more capable of doing physical work, and of enjoying it, than I thought possible. I’m enjoying the ache in my muscles that comes from a day of manual labour. And I realise that I can do more than I thought possible.
It’s with this new-found confidence, even delight, that we’re rethinking our Farm. Previously, we were going with rammed earth, which requires a lot of inputs, and technical skill. Now, we’ve decided to go with cob. We’ll still need help, but cob is a technology that even a four-year-old can master. It doesn’t require a healthy, strong (male?) body to do heavy lifting; and it can be sculpted to fit the strangest of dreams.
And anyone can be part of the journey! We’ll be inviting people to take part and discover what cob can be, just as we start learning ourselves.
