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HOW DO WE WANT TO LIVE?

Dear Creatrix,

How was it to work on the first exercise for this chapter? And to find answers to the questions I gave you? Did you think more about what a home a could mean to you?

How deep did you go? And what have you learned about yourself?

Today, I will share some of my answers with you because I know it can help to find your own and to possibly go deeper and pay more attention to the details, that are easy to ignore.

So, have a look and see to which of your own experiences reading about my life is going to take you.

Here’s a bit more about my background:

I’ve lived in Germany, Ukraine and the US and houses were built very differently in these places.

I grew up in a house that was built by my great-grand-parents.

Technically, I grew up in the fruit & vegetable shop, turned garage, turned tiny house, which was built by my great-grandparents and renovated by my parents.

It was cute.

Passers-by called it the witch house. Every room had many functions.

The table in the children’s room was also where we had our biggest meal (as this is in Germany, that would be a hot lunch).

Breakfast, at least on the weekends and on special occasions (see picture below) and dinner (Abendbrot, mostly bread and cheese or sausage) was eaten at the couch table in the living room, which could be moved up and down depending on the occasion.

In this house, the entrance was also the kitchen, and we had a tiny baby’s bathtub standing in the shower for us children until I was about nine and we moved out.

When I started going to school, my parents put a desk for me to work on in their bedroom.

In the living room, next to the couch, was a pull-out table with a typewriter. That was my Mum’s office.

Later, we moved into the main house, which was also built by my great-grandparents.

My great-grandpa, who died a year before my birth, was a farmer, I think, that’s why they had the fruit and vegetable shop. My Mum still remembers living in the house without running water or a toilet.

When I was born, my great-grandmother lived by herself on the top floor of the house and the ground floor was split up into two flats.

My grandmother lived in one flat and the second one was rented out to someone. When the renter moved out, my great-grandmother moved into his flat and my Dad rebuilt the upstairs area. He put on a new roof to make it bigger and built separate rooms for my brother and me, a bedroom for my parents, a living room, two bathrooms and a kitchen.

For me, it seemed like the biggest magic possible, that he was able to build something so solid that we could live in it. My parents still live in the house, though everything around them has changed a lot.

When I was a teenager, I went to live in the US for a while as an exchange student. My host mum had also built part of her house herself.

She had lived in Germany as an exchange student when she was a teenager as well, so she understood that all I knew was solid brick buildings and explained to me how wood building worked.

The US was also the first place where I saw a whole house on a truck. Impermanence and lightness like that were entirely new concepts to me.

My definition of what made a house really broadened for the first time when I was there.

Then I moved to a village in Ukraine. Houses were built from clay bricks here. Those clay bricks were made from clay and straw, taken from the fields right next to the houses.

You could see people drying them in the sun.

They were good houses. Sustainably built. I would like to build a house like that one day.

But I was also there during a flood and saw the walls dissolving. Whoever can afford it builds stone brick houses now too.

While commodities such as running water, showers, electric stoves were present in both, the US and Germany, they weren’t in Ukraine.

When I moved to Ukraine in 2000, we only had electricity for a couple of hours per day and while the house I lived in had a pump for water (which you activated by removing a wooden stick that was secured by a rubber band), most houses did not.

You would get your water from the well, either your own well in your backyard or from the communal one, depending on where you lived.

In Ukraine, there were also summer and winter kitchens, as heating the stove with wood in the summer would have been too hot inside, especially as some people usually slept in the kitchen at night.

So, the stove often moved outside or to the hallway in the summer.

One of my all-time favourite memories is sitting outside with a friend, a chopping board on my knees to chop cabbage and the chicken running over my bare feet to pick up the pieces of the cabbage that I dropped.

I’ve been dreaming about living with chicken ever since.

The function of the rooms there was often much less permanent and adjusted to what was needed as well. I even remember the chicken living in a room for a while that was a bedroom before and later became a beautiful bedroom again.

Thinking of that, part of the house I live in now, in Germany, used to be a barn as well.

What all of these places have in common and what I remember and love about them are the outside areas. Being able to feel part of life, the seasons and to put your bare feed on the ground regularly.

Of course, I also lived differently. For the last twenty years, I lived in cities, in building blocks, sometimes with a balcony, but not always.

Yet, a balcony to me is not the same as actually being outdoors. I don’t feel grounded the same way.

Your experience might be different, I know other people experience this differently.

But when it comes to things, I have learned about myself, over the course of my life, and this is the point of this exercise, one thing is, that, if given the choice, I would not want to live without being able to actually sit on and touch the earth regularly.

Being able to walk outside in my bare feet, to be able to put my hands into the soil, care for plants and vegetables improves my sense of well-being, and connection immensely, and it is what is most important to me in a home.

Much more than any room, even though I’m a big fan of designing and building furniture and creating cosy and beautiful spaces.

For me to feel alive and happy, I need plants and a garden.

Everything else comes second.

HOW ABOUT YOU?