Here at Mandala Homes, we enjoy spending time talking with;
Eco Wood and Stone Home
1) people who are dreaming about designing and building their own unique home.
2) people who are in the midst of designing and building their own unique home.
3) people who have succeeded in the extraordinary undertaking of designing and building their own unique custom home.
When considering the motivation that underlies the big accomplishment of building a home, a story by poet, Robert Louis Stevenson, comes to mind,
Stevenson describes an annual ritual enacted by the young boys of his Scottish childhood. Every September, the local boys would buy small tin lanterns called bull’s eyes. They would light the lantern from the fires of their home hearths, tie it to their belt, wrap up in a heavy winter coat and venture out into the dark night. Each boy would wander alone in the fields that surrounded the village, coat tightly buttoned up, with not a glimmer of hidden light shining through. When a youth met another boy in the autumn heath, each would open their coat and reveal to the other the hot smoking light of home.
Stevenson felt that this childhood game symbolized the constant light of our connection with the center of our lives and that the boys are a symbol of a human being who is wandering in the dark night of life; each with our own hidden home-light burning secretly inside.
He wrote “The essence of this bliss was to walk by yourself in the black night, the slide shut, the topcoat buttoned, not a ray escaping….a mere pillar of darkness in the dark; and all the while, deep down in the privacy of your fool’s heart, to know you had a bull’s eye at your belt, and to exult and sing over the knowledge.”
Designing and building your own unique home is akin to emerging from a pillar of darkness, to have a steadily burning lantern in your heart. It’s like having a “bull’s eye at your belt”. It gives you a constant reflection of your own creativity, a tremendous sense of personal accomplishment and a feeling of security, peace, and possibility.