فصل 10

10

Building a Sacred Hut

Bob Gould and I had been friends since my first days of high school. We had both moved to Florida from up north and were the new kids entering tenth grade. We bonded immediately and remained good friends all the way through college. Bob was the handy type, the kind of kid who always excelled in shop class. When it came time to build a meditation hut on my land, he jumped at the opportunity.

Neither Bob nor I had ever built anything like a hut to actually live in. I was good with my hands and had been a sports car mechanic while in high school. But to build a small house, Bob and I were way out of our league. We reached out to a college friend, Bobby Altman. Bobby’s credentials were not that he had actually built a house before, but that he had just finished his master’s degree in architecture. At least he had the theory of how to design and build something. How hard could it be to build a small hut where I could go into solitude for a while?

Apparently, Bobby Altman didn’t think it would be hard at all. He quickly designed plans for the hut, which included a balsa wood model. I remember the first time I saw his design. I literally thought he was crazy. This was not just a small, simple, one-person hut for meditation. It was a wedged-shaped house with a stunning front of glass that spanned sixteen feet wide and rose twenty feet high. To be perfectly honest, I had been envisioning more of a box with a door and a few windows. How were three college grads, who had never built anything before, going to build this?

Bobby Altman insisted the house was going to be easy to build. I wasn’t so sure, but Bob Gould was all for it. He thought it would be a fun challenge for the three of us to live on the land in tents and build it. I remember that I didn’t see it that way. I already had a full-time challenge—getting back to my beloved place of absolute stillness and peace. But if I had to build this architecturally designed masterpiece of a meditation hut to get there—so be it.

We jumped right in with the abandonment of reason that belongs only to young hippies and crazy people. It was an amazing experience. I had very little money left to build Bobby Altman’s chalet. To keep costs to a minimum, both Bobs agreed that we could use rough-sawn lumber instead of the finished lumber you buy at a lumberyard. As fate would have it, there was a sawmill just a few miles down the highway from my land: Griffis Lumber & Sawmill. James Griffis and his wife were real southern country folk, not longhairs like the three of us. We got sideways looks from pretty much everyone whenever we went to pick up lumber. Aside from our hair, we stood out because of what we were ordering. We started with the eleven cypress columns that would form the support structure of the house—at twenty-nine feet, you might as well call them trees. James Griffis allowed us to hand select the straightest trees right off the logging truck when it arrived. We got to watch workers strap each of the trees to the giant mill and cut them down to six inches per side, give or take half an inch. It was a real back-to-the-earth feeling watching the actual trees being turned into the backbone of your house.

In time, Mr. Griffis began to open up to us. One day he invited the three of us to dinner at his house, which was adjacent to the mill. This was a big deal since we had been living in tents and cooking what we could over an open fire. It was particularly special for me because I had been living out of my van or in a tent for almost half a year. It wasn’t just a matter of a home-cooked meal; just going into a real house was going to be a novelty for me.

The Griffises’ house was a warm country home. The walls were pecky cypress, milled long ago on-site. Mrs. Griffis had cooked up a southern meal with plenty of vegetables, since she had heard that I was a vegetarian. The conversations were warm and friendly, and it really felt as though we were all family. At one point, Mr. Griffis said something I will never forget. He said, “Before we met you three, we used to think that hippies were the dirtiest, filthiest things on Earth. You know, we’ve really come to love you boys.” It was another one of those beautiful moments that started me thinking—where were all these unbelievable experiences coming from? Somehow, deeply touching experiences kept coming from the most unexpected places. It was really starting to blow me away.

As days turned into weeks, the house began to take shape. Once the outside siding was up, you could really begin to feel the inside space. Bobby Altman then posed a question I had never thought of—which of us was going to do the electrical wiring? Though I had never done such a thing, I volunteered. Bobby handed me a small book on electrical wiring from one of his courses and left me on my own. His confidence in my ability to do the entire electrical system for the house rather astounded me. But if he thought I could do it, then I could—and I did. A great spiritual teacher once said, “Every day bite off more than you can chew, and chew it.” Life was teaching me some very important lessons.

We laid pinewood floors throughout the house, put cedar decks in both the front and back, and hired a plumber to install exposed, cast-iron plumbing pipes for the bathroom area. By then, the house had taken on a life of its own. We had put our hearts and souls into building that house, and we were very proud of what we had accomplished. To me, it had started out as a project to build a quick, simple meditation hut, and it turned into a one-of-a-kind life experience. But it wasn’t the one I longed for. All I really wanted was to go into solitude and work on my heart’s only desire—absolute peace, stillness, and freedom. With the house finished, the time for that work had finally arrived.