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The Tao of Cob: How a Kansas Grandmother Built Her Own Natural Home in the Woods
The Tao of Cob: How a Kansas Grandmother Built Her Own Natural Home in the Woods
The Tao of Cob: How a Kansas Grandmother Built Her Own Natural Home in the Woods
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The Tao of Cob: How a Kansas Grandmother Built Her Own Natural Home in the Woods

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The Tao of Cob is a how-to book on earthen-house building, written as a memoir in Dorethy's pithy, homespun philosophical voice. A retired librarian, the author has studied a wide range of subjects which are evident in her descriptions of her building project. Sections include the joy of using hand tools, gathering manure and stomping in mud to mix the building materials, and communicating with wildlife in the woods, as well as the hazards of a 60-year-old grandmother driving a '72 dump truck.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateMay 18, 2013
ISBN9781301788972
The Tao of Cob: How a Kansas Grandmother Built Her Own Natural Home in the Woods
Author

Dorethy Hancock

Dorethy Hancock retired early as a Reference Librarian in Topeka, Kansas, in order to do something different: specifically to help raise consciousness about living in a healthy, earth-friendly environment and leaving a "light footprint." She built an earthen home during the summers of 2003 and 2004, treading in the mud and literally "hand-sculpting" the house, finishing it with artistic expressions of bas relief designs on the walls. The home is located on 30 acres of woods and prairie on the Potawatomi Indian Reservation north of Topeka. Dorethy's education concentrated first on music, then on achieving a B.A. in English Literature and an M.L.S. in Librarianship. She has a varied background of interests encompassing farm life, home economics (sewing, food preservation, etc.), music, philosophy, psychology, world cultures and religions, shamanic traditions, travel, sacred geometry, and, most currently, sound healing, having attained practitioner certification with the Tama-Do Academy of Sound, Color and Movement in Malibu, California and France. Dorethy's website is: www.CenteroftheRainbow.com.

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    The Tao of Cob - Dorethy Hancock

    Prologue

    Having begun to build a cob house in the woods on an Indian Reservation as a 60 year old widow, I am often asked when, how and why I first had the notion of tackling such a project. This question always gives me pause, because it’s like any other knowledge one obtains through a lifetime: it just evolves. Like the reading of books that draws you from one footnoted reference to the next, until you have a certain collective sense of a given subject, my thoughts and dreams just followed a natural path from one to the next and the next, and so on. Thinking back, I remembered having discussed many times with my husband the desire to live out in the country. At some level he wanted that, too. I had grown up on a farm; and, while he had not, he at least had worked on farms as a teenager, and loved those experiences. But time passed and we didn’t follow through on those dreams.

    After he had passed away, and since I was not altogether satisfied with my job at the library, and, wanting to achieve something else in my life, I got a notion that it would be fun to own a Bed & Breakfast. Allan and I had traveled a lot in our 14 years together; and we’d loved the cozy, sometimes quaint, B & Bs we had experienced in England. In each one we had found convivial companionship—be they the owners or other tourists like ourselves. I found working with the public energizing; and since a B&B owner would be meeting the public daily, and it can be assumed that people on vacation are going to be friendly and agreeable, this seemed like a fun occupation. So my dreams, for a time, took the turn of planning to build a large house in order to make of it a Bed & Breakfast that I could continue running, perhaps with help, throughout my passing into retirement age.

    The B & B-planning stage went on for some time. Elaborate planning of the building itself involved the creation of an extensive tabbed notebook into which went clippings on all manner of ecological concepts, styles of building with natural materials, fireplaces, flooring, favored looks for the front door, roofing materials and structure, economical heating and cooling systems, colored glass windows including those cobbed-in and also some stained glass ones which would require classes to learn how to make. I spent any number of hours, days, weeks and months drawing out floor plans, always with the idea of facing them in the direction of optimum passive solar gain. These often were intensely focused attempts to have kitchen, sun room and master bedroom all with south- and east-facing windows, while the living room and any other rooms were relegated to the less preferred southwest, west, and northwest sides. Few, if any, windows would be placed on the west and north sides of the building because those are the directions of most intense weather in Kansas; and the house must face south/southeast, for warmth in winter and coolness in summer. Many hours were spent studying Feng Shui principles as well as those environmental/solar, because they make sense to me, from an energy standpoint, following the natural lay of the land, with a house protected by slopes around back and sides.

    The Bed & Breakfast house I planned on building was to include seven guestrooms on one end of the building and my own living quarters on the other end. I chose the number seven because it has been a sacred number for most cultures throughout time. For the consideration of the health of my customers, I’d include a Jacuzzi and/or a steam room with aromatherapy. Each of the seven rooms would be decorated in one of the major Chakra colors, with a motif fitting for that color (but not the too commonly-used motifs one tires of seeing, like apples and geese and bunnies): The red would be pomegranates; orange would be tangerines or orange bougainvillea; yellow, honeysuckle or yellow roses; green, Jack-in-the-Pulpits or bamboo; blue, morning glories; indigo would be blackberries, blueberries or Trillium; purple would be Japanese irises or wood violets. In addition, the breakfasts I served would have seven different menus, international in flavor, such as one day doing French—(radishes, French bread or croissants, or crepes); another day doing English—(scones and clotted cream with raspberry jam, or what the Brits refer to as a full-cooked breakfast of fried eggs, fried bacon, fried mushrooms, fried tomatoes and pork-n-beans–surely not too many takers on the latter); German—wurst (cold cuts, sausages) and cheeses with substantial whole grain breads; Caribbean—dried salt-fish, fried plantains, fresh pineapple, watermelon, cantaloupe or other fruits; Mexican—huevos rancheros and tortillas; and a couple of American choices to round out a week (waffles or pancakes, eggs any way, fruit or yogurt and cereal), just in case somebody stayed that long. The list was far from conclusive even though you may think the planning is already getting entirely out of hand, but it was fun to ponder.

    Besides the ideas of how to furnish, decorate, equip, organize and run a B & B, the idea evolved that, since I am artistic and had been creating jewelry, as well as items for the home, I would have a special room just for a shop to sell arts and crafts. I would consider taking on consignment the crafts of my friends who also set a high value on natural products. This expanded to the need for yet another room which would be a therapy/treatment room that could be rented by friends who were skilled in various non-medical healing modalities. This, in turn, led to a vision of a much larger space that could be utilized for workshops of all kinds, including all of the above endeavors (healing modalities and the making of health products). A large space such as this could also be used for artists of any sort to come and do their art—I’d have a kiln for the ceramicists, and there would be plenty of outdoor space with beautiful natural landscaping where painters could paint plein aire. Maybe some little theatre in the summer?

    Ah, dreams!! Once I realized how many square feet I had going here, and how much it would cost to build it, I could see it was never going to happen. But for the better part of three years I was searching for the right piece of land on which to build, which included lots of trees, with a south-facing slope for solar gain, private but not completely outside civilization. One realtor kept sending me out on wild-goose chases to see land that had no trees at all, or maybe only one or two scrubby ones off in the distance. When I complained, he told me about some variety of tree that supposedly grows very fast. I said, "Look at me! I’m almost 60 years old! I don’t have time to wait for trees to grow!"

    I did not set out to buy land on the Potawatomi Reservation. It was some time before I realized that I had been led to this place for any number of reasons, foremost of which was that the Tribe required no building codes. Nowhere in Kansas, nor in most other states, would I have been permitted to build a cob house because there are no Standard Codes for cob. These codes have been written for standard (i.e., square) lumber and other materials, square building designs, etc. Once upon a time, codes were standardized and made law supposedly for the safety of the owner, so that not just anybody could throw up any old kind of structure which may not prove safe to live in. But now, it turns out that the laws have skewed it to the point where it seems one must be a Builder with years of training, in order to build a house. NOT SO!! Humans (and animals, I might add) have built their own homes from the beginning of time. Only in the last 100 years, more or less, has man relinquished his own power to an expert, because keeping up with the Joneses meant bigger and bigger, better and better, until it got to be out of the realm of a non-tradesman to build his/her own home. Well, I stand as proof that one CAN, indeed, build his/her own home, and build it with the materials that occur naturally from the land on which it is built. I’ll grant you, it’s labor-intensive. But that labor of love is well worth it in terms of self-satisfaction, not to mention that it’s an activity that can draw a community together when you get help from the neighbors. When you build naturally, you should have help from others with a vested interest so that no one has to be paid, with the possible exception of certain trades, such as electrical and perhaps roofing, which really do require some training.

    Another reason I believe I was led to this land was so I could teach this fact to people in the community: and so it was, in the summer of 2002, having purchased 30 acres of prairie and timber on the Potawatomi Reservation, about 20 miles north of Topeka, Kansas, that my planning became more focused on actually building a place for me to live.

    Chapter 1: Imagining a Beginning

    By 2002, three years after my husband’s passing, I had endured the worst part of the grieving process and was ready to move on with my life. Retiring at the end of the year 2000, with the intent to find land and build a Bed & Breakfast, I had not accomplished much of anything except wild imaginings about some glorious facility that I hoped to build. I followed many false leads while hunting for land, hoping to meet the criteria for a passive solar building—a south-facing slope, with plenty of trees in strategic places, a water source, etc.

    In addition to research in books, I perused various building techniques with an architect from Manhattan, Kansas, who had been introduced to me as a natural builder. Stan was intrigued by my ideas because no one else was putting these principles into practice in Kansas, that he knew of. In fact, only in sporadic places around the country could one find natural building taking place. He was a kindred spirit who believed in using natural materials, rather than conforming to man’s greedy presumptions of what he needs: i.e., too big, too fancy, and involving too much embodied energy in the process. (Embodied energy refers to a measure of energy—such as horsepower or BTUs—that it takes in order to accomplish the manufacture of a particular product.) I had been reading several books on natural building (see Bibliography). We spent time traipsing over acreages of land. Throughout the course of my dreaming/planning, Stan actually made two architectural drawings, neither of which were used, as it turned out. It was not my intention to waste his time or my money, it’s just that the actual building evolved in other directions. One of the drawings did come in handy, though, because I needed to present something to the Tribal EPA board who approved my building permit. The fact that the building never looked anything like that was simply the way things develop on their own.

    Chapter 2: Mulled Philosophies

    The year 2002 was crucial in a number of ways. Both my father and my first husband (my children’s father) passed in the Spring of that year. I had retired, yet was not really doing anything toward providing an alternative living for myself; just living off investments, which was of necessity a temporary situation. I was making jewelry and selling it in art fairs, yet not enough from which to make a living. I was spinning my wheels--planning, planning, planning, and allowing odd activities to interfere with actually achieving my goals; and I paced the floor asking Spirit for help.

    I subscribed to the Sedona Journal of Emergence, reading from cover to cover the spiritual channelers who published monthly. What I found there was that I was not the only one experiencing this uneasy feeling of waiting. As Lightworkers, many were aware that we were well into the major shift happening with the earth, begun in 1987 with the Harmonic Convergence, which was to culminate in some grand unknown change in 2012 that some referred to as our ascension, yet others thought would be the apocalypse, or the end of the world. We tried to be ready, yet we knew not exactly what this shift would be requiring of us. We spent time meditating and gleaning all we could from the self-help books, to figure out how to delete our karma and learn to love and forgive our fellow man so that we would be spiritually ready for the change in which we came to earth to participate. Psychic channelers said we came from the stars; and/or from Atlantis or Lemuria. We knew that we had been the brave souls who, when asked who wanted to go back to physicality and lead the way back home, we raised our hands with great enthusiasm, shouting I do, I do! Pick me, pick me! We are the ones we have been searching for! Yet, in 2002, the new garments of spiritual change were uncomfortable. We banged around trying to figure out how to learn to live above our 3-D weltenschaung, having been told that we would soon

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