A version of this post was originally published as a Friday Reflection from Starcross Monastic Community. You can find the original text here.
One year ago, my partner and I bought a 1999 short bus with the intention of turning it into a tiny home. One of our first major tasks was to paint the signature yellow exterior a different color in order to legally drive our 23ft-long former school bus. We arrived at an aquamarine shade somewhere between the pale hue of the sky and the cerulean color of the ocean. After days of scraping away at reflective tape and vinyl lettering, sanding down every square inch of the original yellow paint-job, and scrubbing dirt out of screwheads with a toothbrush—I realized the endeavor I had untaken was going to be leagues and bounds more demanding than I had initially anticipated. Nearly every waking hour for the past year has been consumed with trying to teach ourselves DIY electrical, plumbing, and carpentry. There has been no shortage of mistakes, obstacles, and frustrations. Yet every day abounds with learning, and thus every day abounds with growth. As a result, I’ve come to view the bus building process as a great metaphor for my spiritual journey.
But first, why would anyone choose to build a school-bus home? At twenty five, contending with the surging costs of housing while wages remain stagnant feels dismal. As hedge funds and private equity firms aggressively buy up single-family homes, and the commodification of shelter and land accelerates, many student-debt saddled Millennial and Gen-Z aged folks watch as the fabled “American Dream” recedes into the rearview mirror. When looking toward the horizon, my generation seems marked by a pervasive anxiety around our ailing climate, distrust of our political institutions, and the realization that the “dream” was only ever an illusion built upon generations of stolen land and exploited labor. The choice to live inside a school bus may seem an unconventional response, but inspired by a combination of constraint and creativity, it is where we have found ourselves.
In the current Age of Instagram, #vanlife is usually presented as a glamorous, bohemian alternative to “traditional” forms of housing. Although, this presentation ignores the reality that the prohibitive cost and scarcity of available housing is forcing folks to locate or create their own alternative housing options. In highly performative settings like social media, it behooves individuals to narrate their circumstances as creative and highly stylized “choices.” Certainly some measure of choice exists here, but I want to illuminate that the overwhelming majority of people who live primarily out of vehicles are not affluent vanlifers. They are ordinary people, with ordinary jobs, trying to live within their means in a society that has determined that housing is not a human right.
Okay, back to bus building! At the start of this journey, I frequently felt overwhelmed and out-of-my-depth. Like someone practicing meditation or prayer without much prior experience, I felt tortured by my own torrent of judgements: Am I doing this correctly? Am I forgetting something important? Why is this taking so long? Even simple tasks are rarely as straightforward as I would have imagined and they always require more patience than I possess. A dear friend advised me that I’d better learn to appreciate the process rather than compulsively assessing my progress or fixating upon some imagined future where the bus is already completed. The reality is that the bus will probably never reach “completion”, but instead require continual tinkering and problem solving. It may never “arrive” but it will always be in a state of “arriving”, just as Joan Chittiser describes monastic spirituality. It is my choice whether to greet those moments as opportunities for growth or to view such obstacles as problems to be dealt with as quickly and joylessly as possible.
There are gratifying moments of heartfelt satisfaction, like the first moment we turned on the lights after installing our solar system, marveling that we successfully harnessed the power of the sun! However, the vast majority of the work is dirty, sweaty, and decidedly unglamorous. This rings true of my spiritual walk as well. While there are mountain-top moments of transcendence, they are strung together with much longer-lasting periods of absolute mundanity. The trick is to find what is mystical about the mundane. To try to find the blessings which are buried in the humdrum. To laugh about all the misaligned angles and uneven cuts. Choosing to remain present throughout this process, particularly in moments of hardship or monotony, is something I must practice every day.
In the spirit of remaining present, in an attempt to ward off my anxieties about all that remains to be done and all the lingering questions that remain yet unanswered — I call to mind one of Rainer Maria Rilke’s (1875 – 1926) poems from Letters to a Young Poet:
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart
and to try to love the questions themselves
like locked rooms and like books that are written
in a very foreign tongue.
Do not now seek the answers,
which cannot be given you
because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is, to live everything.
Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it,
live along some distant day
into the answer.
It has been a little over a year since we set out on this journey and, finally, this little dream is being realized. There were countless moments when I felt overwhelmed by the process, the work, and projects which spawned even more projects! Yet I’m grateful for all the encouraging words from friends, family, and total strangers who beseeched me to live fully into my questions, and to trust in the answers that reveal themselves.
IsabellaZHall 