This picture was taken at the village in the Philippines that my family and I helped to build last November as a part of a way of paying tribute to a beloved family member who left us too soon. Each of these gorgeous little brightly coloured houses makes a home for a family -- sometimes quite a large family. The home includes a separate toilet, a single bedroom, and a small living area. The living area doubles as a children's bedroom, and the kitchen is outdoors, behind the house. You can see a little hint of a kitchen behind the turquoise house on the left side of the image. I don't remember the measurements of these houses, but I'd be surprised if the area was much more than 300 square feet. When one of my relatives who had been on the trip with us posted this picture, another member of my family who had not been on the trip commented with wonderment about the size of these houses. How could anyone possibly live in an abode of this size, especially when teeming with children?
The image above is one of the most famous of American homes. Many will recognize this as Henry David Thoreau's cabin at Walden Pond. The cabin that you see in the picture is a replica of the one built by Thoreau, but he left careful enough measurements and descriptions that it is probably very accurate. Even though Thoreau lived alone in this cabin and not with a teeming load of beautiful Filipino children, you can see that it was a snug abode. Yet this tiny one-roomed affair provided a comfortable and nurturing environment for one of America's greatest philosophers.
As we enter the most uncertain of times when many people on this continent have very good reasons to worry about their futures and their homes, there is at least some satisfaction to be taken from these images. To someone who is trying to hang on to a 10,000 square foot home outside Tucson, the idea of moving into something like a Walden Cabin might seem ludicrous, horrifying, the signal event in an economic death spiral. Yet what if it turned out that we had the square foot equation dead wrong? All the scientific findings, including some that are beginning to emerge from my lab, suggest that the only thing about a giant suburban house that makes us at all happy is the symbolic financial success that it represents. As a home, a dwelling in the best sense of the word, a place of shelter, communion with family and spiritual renewal, most of what I know suggests that these big houses we can no longer afford to sustain are a nightmare, and the tiny huts shown in these pictures embrace us warmly and provide us with a source of hope, comfort, and security.
Ultimately, finding new ways to live with less may make us infinitely richer.
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