A couple of us just recently got back from a twelve day workshop on Superadobe Earthbag Building offered by the Mojave Center. Not only did we gain a ton of hands on experience in building this way as we prepare to erect the first structures at Happy Castle, but we met so many incredible people in the process, people I believe will play big role in my life in the years to come. The Mojave Center is a non-profit that teaches natural building techniques and has helped construct over 30 domes since 2020, but the real accomplishment is the community they've managed to build along the way.
Besides being one of the few organizations in the country still teaching Earthbag Building Workshops aside from CalEarth, they've also managed to cultivate an incredible community of collaborators from all walks of life who are connected through this common passion. I met regenerative farmers, community organizers, teachers, artists, entrepreneurs, and builders who, despite our incredibly diverse backgrounds and experiences, all deeply believe in the value of building a life that was more holistic, enriching, and sustainable. And what's more, they were willing to put their money where their heart is. The workshop itself was not cheap, costing each of us a little over $900 to be there, but in retrospect it was worth every cent. I already knew a fair bit about natural building, having taken online courses with CalEarth during the pandemic, and as valuable as in-depth hands on experience is, I think the primary benefit we got from the experience was the people we met.
I've always known that any community-building project is only as strong as it's people and when I first attempted to launch Happy Castle in 2021, I had built what I thought was a pretty awesome group of 20-25 people. Some of them were my friends in real life, but the majority were relationships I had built online. I remember having a fire in me that felt inextinguishable. I was a powerhouse, organizing weekly Zoom meetings, answering emails, building our social media presence, doing research, planning, and even purchasing the land. However, like many during the pandemic, my mental health began to decline and I experienced burnout. Of all the people I had brought together, each so enthusiastic about the idea of building a commune and music festival together, it seemed I couldn't keep us organized. It was overwhelming and as my input shrank, the energy and momentum dried up with it. This scenario is all too common in community-building projects where one person takes on the role of visionary and organizer. The communities that actually get built do need a clear vision, but typically have a lot more buy in from the beginning, with people coming together, committing to building a community together, and fleshing out the plans before inviting collaborators. This time around we're taking it one step at a time, focusing on building the website first and foremost to showcase what Happy Castle aspires to be, before we start outreach or social-media efforts. The website isn't even complete yet, despite being live, but even after we're satisfied with it', we've decided on cultivating a mailing list of at least 9k people before launching our Kickstarter.
I live in a small conservative town where dreams of building a community are more or less scoffed at and, if I had to identify a reason why it took me nearly four years to pick up the Happy Castle project again, it'd have to be because it felt too unrealistic. Too ambitious and unconventional. Surrounded by people who didn't believe in me, I began to doubt myself. What I lacked was resolve, the leap of faith moment. I grew up in poverty and, for me, money was always a huge obstacle to developing my potential. I realize this is the same situation for so many others and, besides countering alienation and despair I witnessed during the pandemic, another central motivation for creating a community like Happy Castle has always been to give artists and entrepreneurs access to the resources they need to realize their highest potential. I'd been dreaming about Happy Castle since I was 18 years old (I'm now 28), but my experience with poverty had made me risk averse. It's easy to imagine "risking it all" when you have very little in terms of capital or outcomes. For me it was this choice between shooting for an incredible, rich, fulfilling, thrilling life of community and celebration, or one of loneliness, poverty, and struggle.
When I finally did manage to save up some money, the decision to buy land at start a community was a difficult one, but I knew that it was my life's mission and that I would regret anything else. Still, I would be lying if I said I wasn't scared. A life of poverty had conditioned me to restrain myself and conserve resources. What if it didn't work out? I alternated between being fully committed to "jump in the deep end", so to speak, and choosing the safe road. Buying the land was a way of making the choice a "no turning back" moment and for a year or so, it's all I could think about. I traveled the country exploring other communities and putting the pen to paper developing what Happy Castle would ultimately look like, but like I said, the momentum evaporated.
In the years since we've shelved Happy Castle, I bought a house, got a job with the government, and have more or less suppressed my calling and committed to a life of suburban mediocrity. That is until last year. In 2023 I had the fortune of hosting Sunburn, New Mexico's officially sanctioned regional Burning Man event on our property in Socorro. Burning Man had always been a huge inspiration to us in conceptualizing the culture of the commune and festivals, so to have this opportunity essentially land in my lap felt like a sign from the universe. A sign that hosting a festival on our land was not an impossible organizational and legal challenge, but something remarkably acheivable with the right collection of people. Not only did I meet with a team of incredible festival organizers, seeing the ins-and-outs of throwing a successful event, I met so many people at Sunburn who lived in intentional-communities, built Earthbag structures, made largescale art-installations, studied permaculture, and who were excited about Happy Castle. I realized to a degree that I hadn't before, that my community was out there. These incredible people doing these incredible things existed and they'd already found each other. I left Sunburn profoundly changed. Motivated and inspired.
Attending the Mojave Center's Superadobe Earthbag Dome workshop was a similar experience, but even more enlightening in many ways. What brought together the people at Sunburn was their shared belief in Burning Man's ten principles and a desire to sustain that community at smaller events throughout the year. Most of them traveled from state to state, following the various Regional Burns and contributing their art, energy, or effort. However, at the end of the day, these were parties and the people attending were their to celebrate.
In contrast, the workshop attracted builders. People who weren't simply looking to have a great time, but who were willing to expend their time, money, and extreme physical effort to bring their vision to life. They still possessed the extreme diversity of skills and professions I saw at Sunburn, but they also had a certain clarity in what they collectively wanted from life. They wanted to build homes using sustainable methods and materials. One man I met was a regenerative farmer and avid anarcho-leftist who wanted to build a queer commune in Vermont. Another was a neo-spiritual astrologist hoping to start a small village in the mountains of San Diego. One was a work-from-home web-developer and podcaster traveling around the country in his van who wanted to buy land nearby to where we were building and create a self-sufficient village for likeminded van-dwellers to put down roots. In a surprising example of synchronicity, I met another man who owned land in the same subdivision as us in Socorro who was looking to build a Bohemian Glampground. Everyone had so much to share and contribute and it was incredibly mentally nourishing to be surrounded by people who not only respected our aspirations to build an eco-commune in the high-desert, but in many ways shared them. These people felt like my tribe, like the kinds of people I had envisioned living and building Happy Castle with.
The connections and friendships we built after just twelve days were so impactful and energizing, I could suddenly see myself doing this for the rest of my life more clearly than I had ever before. This microcosm of intersecting dreamers was exactly the community I wanted to build at Happy Castle. Despite the hard physical labor and rough conditions, I didn't want it to end. In fact, I wanted to take this ten day experience to a whole new level of community. I wanted to keep building the homes that my friends and I would live in, keep sharing daily meals, having those deep, intellectual conversations, uplifting one another in pursuit of their passions and purpose, making music and art, growing our own food, learning new skills together, hosting incredible festivals, celebrating life, and deepening our relationships. This is what Happy Castle will be.
Although building these relationships was inspiring, we took the workshop in the first place for primarily educational purposes. We've always intended for Happy Castle to use natural-building extensively in its construction and have long planned to leverage the community's expertise and construction needs into a school of our own to be operated onsite. Like the Mojave Center, this Dome School would seek to increase access to low-cost alternative building techniques by establishing a continually growing network builders and teachers. We hope to offer our workshops at far lower cost than the Mojave Center and with multiple simultaneous projects, an in-house labor force, and various alternative revenue streams, we believe we could get the costs down to $250-350 per student. This Dome School would also serve as one of our major recruitment pools, with our instructors directly inviting promising students to join the commune.
Earthbag building is designed to be feasible with only hand tools, and this is exactly what we did over the course of the workshop, digging, mixing, transporting, and bagging soil ourselves, but for the scale of the community we plan to construct, our school intends to invest in heavy machinery and to develop specialized tools for efficiently erecting Earthbag Domes. We really believe this building style has the potential to positively impact homelessness and poverty in this country and would love to see it take off, but the reality is that after nearly thirty-years of development, it remains very much a niche building method. For one, despite rigorous safety testing by CalEarth, local building codes majorly restrict Earthbag construction in most places across the country, but another obstacle is the sheer labor intensity of building this way. Throughout the workshop, one of my main goals was to identify areas to lower physical exertion and improve efficiency. We came up with few ideas which, while certainly increasing upfront costs, will drastically lower costs and effort over the long-run. These include unique, curved scaffolding, reusable metal frames, a specialized self-adjusting compass, a bucket conveyor belt system, a modified pickup truck, and an emphasis on limited number of reusable designs for structures. While there is bound to be flexibility with everything we build, these tools could shave days off preparation and construction times while simultaneously lowering the labor force needed for each project.
As with most great things, we'll start small, using the tools and techniques we have ready to construct the first few structures onsite, but long-term we hope to be a real force for progressive political change and that will require innovation. Speaking of the first few structures at Happy Castle, we're looking to start construction in late 2025 on a large communal kitchen, consisting of five interconnected domes and a small shower dome. Both of these will drastically improve the comfort level of our very first residents and workshoppers. It'll be a grind at first, with builders sleeping in tents, showering offsite, and cooking meals on propane powered camp-stoves, but dome by dome, Happy Castle will transform into an oasis of amenities. First it will be the kitchen and shower, then toilets, then housing, and eventually art studios, a library, a gym, a sauna, and so much more. If the Mojave Center can build a fully livable dome, with lights, plumbing, and plaster, in a matter of three weeks with a crew of 10-15 amateur builders, then we can build a village of dozens in less than a year. If this sounds like something you want to be a part of, then keep in touch and look out for the opening of membership applications.
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