Building the Foundation of the Cabin

The first square and good and true foundation

I have outlined those factors which are important in the pursuit of your dream: Your Cabin in the Woods as Conrad Meinecke might refer to it.

Buying raw land and building a quaint cabin away from it all is a dream for many of us. To dream of these pursuits, in a regular fashion so as to be distracted from your daily comings and goings, and doings and fixings of modern life is an indicator that the current of the so-named “rat-race” has begun to wear you out to the point that you dream of a fortune where you might begin to build your own pace of life. To escape from the Superiors of our working world and to bid them a formal “fuck-you.” To grow your own food. To practice husbandry with the flora and fauna of your fertile land. To befriend peace and quiet. And to fashion your life on your own terms.

This is what it means to dream of buying land and building your escape, brick-by-brick.

The most important factor in this pursuit is not the logistics of the many variables that you must track in your due diligence such as: “where are the wetlands?,” “What can I build and what can’t I?,” and “What is the soil composition?” though these are of material importance. Instead, there is a much higher priority that you would do good to remember in your search for your perfect plot of dirt and microbes, water and streams, and flora and fauna in this universe.

That is this: what you are doing now: working for and saving money; designing (mentally and on paper) your abode in which you will shelter and the life that you may live; and learning about the land; these are things that are the bricks to your foundation. And without them, your dream is at risk of staying in its illusive form.

While this segment in your life of pursuing your dream is painstaking and takes a great deal of patience to the point where you might scream at your clients on a particularly harsh day, it might be the most important, it is the foundation to your dream. Perhaps it would help to consider this in terms of a subject-matter that I know is of your interest. In constructing a cabin, the base on which the structure is secured and rests for the duration of its existence is its anchor to the fabric of the material world at any given point in time. The foundation takes the brunt of windstorms and erosion. It weathers seasons of the ground frosting and thawing; and lifting and pulling; and shrinking and expanding. It acts as the shield from burrowing creatures and pests. And, perhaps most importantly, it supports your and your loved ones life upon it’s shoulders as Atlas has done for the world. So too, this segment of your life which you wish to come to a conclusion, is the foundation of your dream.

Should you decide to skip over this vitally important step, you would be doing yourself and your future a disservice. At the very least, a weak foundation leads to an innumberable amount of tasks and chores to maintain an adequate shelter. Notice that I said “adequate” because once built, it might be the case that a weak foundation will never have the chance to becoming strong, and may very well only ever be adequate. At the most, a weak foundation could rip you straight out of the life of your dreamscape and return you to the hellscape of the rat-race.

So, I would suggest, that this period in which you find yourself currently, the dreaming period, is of the utmost importance. This period lays the foundation brick-by-brick to building your reality the way you see fit. Here is what I would suggest to make the most of it: