Nourishing health with food, shelter, water, warmth: Hospice for the living
Having studied medicine and cancer twice I have spent years of my life in and out hospital I have witnessed many people pass away. Like many cancer patients, I found myself creating a world I wanted to see around me not seeing the world in front of me. Desperate to have a different reality, I painted the world I wanted. I painted a world without hurt, without pain, and without man-made objects. I edited out powerlines, houses, bridges and dams. I painted rivers unfettered by concrete and buildings. I painted birds crossing un-marred sky’s and horses running unbridled. Unbound by colour or time, I created portals of escape for 14 years. In 2009 after finishing working with an art crew on the Fuji Rock music festival I was painting birch trees when a friend, laughing asked, “are you going to paint in that port-a-loo.” I winced, looking at what was in front of me and painted the blue green plastic toilet. Then when I went to paint a perfect Shinto shrine in Kyoto, I asked myself, “Are you going to paint in that bulbous mass of hundreds knobby phone wires seething from the roof?” and then winced while painting. Then capturing the seismic lines of the Fuji mountains, I sliced the epic landscape with the yellow and orange power lines that arched across them.
On returning home I began to look at my bed side table, ingredients in my tooth paste, lines in my energy bill statement. I accepted, ate, and painted and what was in front of me, the beauty and the ugly until I couldn’t take it anymore. I accepted everything I could and if it was something I thought was harmful I removed it from my life. Delicately wrapping the contents of my studio up I walked out of my painting studio on March 10th 2009, and entered over 14 institutions studying biomimicry, urban planning, design, finance, engineering, and finally settled into a Masters in Architecture for Advanced Environment and Energy Studies to inform me what about what was empirically harmful. Using the course to reconnect myself to the fundamental nature of the ecosystem started making my home a hospice a process that I continue. Nourishing the basic Maslowian needs of food, shelter, water, warmth I tenderly grow awareness of the system, I live in. I have begun creating supportive webs where service and consumption are mutually sustainable to all myself, those around me and far away.
The short-term process is to make my home and office refuge for myself and others the medium term is build retreats for people to consume food, energy, an nature in a sustainable way, the long term is to grow this into multiple spaces. Connected by sustainable transport as well as values into global network I live in.
