41>Hutmatters~2

As a young man, I spent most of my time outdoors one summer, working on farms, and sleeping outside or in barns. I felt trapped when I finally went home to four walls.
Ten years of living in small round huts have made conventional houses feel vast and slightly vacant, like unfilled swimming pools.
That's how they feel to me from the outside too : suburban grey space. Acres of dormancy and disconnection. As an angst-ridden teenager, I found the suburbs the scariest place of all.

We get used to our cages.
Planners despair as folk rescued from squalid terraces and rehoused in airy apartments plead to return.
Places become the holders of memory, of the pages of our unfolding roles, so of us.
There is a pioneering gene in us all, a homesteader instinct, that thrives on the making do, and making better.
This has to compete with an army of statutory building requirements, devised to ensure safe housing, but robbing all but the most ingenious or defiant of us of the will to try much more than a few shelves.

Something's Changed.
I think that when "property" prices where always spiralling upwards, they provided a double helix of hope to peoples' endeavours to aspire and acquire. Enough heady hope not to consider the hopelessness of anyone left behind in the future.
That's gone or is at least on Hold.

Somewhere to shelter feels like a pretty basic right to me.

It's just grown-up dens really. There's no authority in the world that has the right to take the joy out of life.
Maybe one way to restore the magic is to exclude the concept of permanence, of the dwelling being more than what it is at that moment in our lives, for our purpose. Like our bodies.

Look around you at the buildings. We are burying the Earth in our dead shells.