Creative Sattvic Housing

Claire and I just spent a couple of days in Chris Seeley's shepherd's hut, which was very cosy, especially with the storm beating on the roof - quite wonderful ....Now we're home again in our tiny and lovely Dartmoor cottage ....

It set me thinking again about housing, because one of my main life challenges is to have somewhere to live that suits me, has enough space for my work, and doesn't cost so much that the cost of housing distorts the work I want to do simply to pay the bills ....

A friend of a friend has been looking at houses to buy near to Ashridge, and it makes my heart sink. It is so, so expensive up there. Cottages for £700,000, that kind of thing. About three times what I can buy based on Devon cottage prices .... Fed up of living out of suitcases, tired of renting flats I don't want ... But what do do instead??

It did make me think about my blogpost about the world's most expensive private house owned by Mukesh Ambani (learn about that house here Ambani House)

It brought to mind Satish Kumar's book The Spiritual Compass:

Satish reflects on the three gunas (from the sanskrit), or "basic qualities". He writes about:

• sattvic, which is the quality of calm purity and simple elegance. He compares it to..
• rajasic, which has energy and passion, but can be excessive, extravagant and showy, and
• tamasic, which has qualities of dullness, toxity, dark and depressing. 

The gunas can be applied to anything: food, work, homes, possessions, lifestyles ... I find them always a useful (if sometimes painful and challenging) guide, especially when I find myself yearning for more money, bigger houses and so on .... You can read more about the ideas here Resurgence Satish Kumar Review

Specifically in relation to houses, picking up Satish's book again made me revisit a great inspiration to me, Simon Dale's house. A simply beautiful eco-selfbuild. I think it is simply beautiful ....

Simon Dales webpage

And just today I saw in Permaculture magazine a feature on low cost low impact homes in Nicaragua ...
Permaculture Nicaragua article ....

There's a lot going on and people are being very creative in dreaming and making wonderful low cost homes that are in essence sattvic ... light, calm, elegant and rather wonderful


Maybe I am just not being creative enough yet .... and getting down about it isn't sattvic at all.

Still don't know what to do ... and I don't need to do it today.
A canal boat may be my best creative option :-)