Going With the Flow
Since closing on the land purchase on July 1st, we have just this week hit a grand total of 48 people who’ve wonderfully come to visit us here at Empty Mountain, not counting those who have come out more than once, of which we’ve had a few. My mom, Hannah, is visiting from Arkansas. She makes 48!
Mike is making great progress on the hermitage. We now have OSB sheeting on the roof and some foam board insulation going on top of the OSB. After a long discussion about which option to go with, we decided to do a combination of fiberglass insulation bats on the ceiling inside the rafters and foam insulation boards on the exterior of the roof sheeting. Doing both will give us a good R-value for the roof, while also allowing us to maintain some of the aesthetics of the rough cut lumber Mike milled from trees on the land. If we did only fiberglass bats on the ceiling in between the rafters, we would’ve needed to either sacrifice some of our R-value or cover over all of the wooden rafters. For the walls, we’ll be doing fiberglass bats, but not so much as to have to cover over the wooden pillars our hermitage is framed around. So when it comes to insulating, we’re hoping to find that nice balance of both form and function. We want the benefits of having really good insulation for optimal climate control, while not having it come at the expense of covering over all of our lovely wood on the interior.
Seasonal shifting is starting to effect the rate of battery charging power we’re able to draw from our PV panels. With the decreasing light, coupled with the fact that we’re experiencing smokey days with low visibility from local wildfires, we’re not drawing adequate juice to charge up our lithium batteries. This morning, our batteries were sitting below 30% full. So our draw - limited as it is - is now outpacing our ability to recharge the batteries. The inverter/controller for our solar power set up (She-Ra, as we’ve named it) has the option of hooking up a generator to it as well, in the event we need to supplement our electricity needs when we don’t have enough sunshine. So we should be able to use a generator to fill up our batteries, however something is awry and while She-Ra is registering the generator, for some reason it’s not entering into the batteries. We have yet to figure it out. Note to self: add it to the list! Figure out how to troubleshoot generator not powering batteries. This one is pretty pressing too. Here in Montana, I’m not sure anyone would be able to depend fully on solar power year-round. We just don’t have enough sun for that. Maybe if you had enough panels and enough batteries, but I think even then it would be a stretch. Gosh it would’ve been nice if hooking up the generator had just worked. But that’s how it goes eh? Life is full of stuff like this. We expect to do a thing and have it go a certain way and then boom, something happens and it goes very differently than planned.
Practice insight: going with the flow sometimes means finding creative ways around rocks in the river of life we didn’t see coming. Fighting the rocks expends a whole lotta energy, and is often fruitless. Also: whatever is happening is part of life not separate, no matter how displeasing or inconvenient it is. Every moment of every day is a time to bring our practice into action. Practice isn’t a thing we do only when life is going smoothly and we have loads of free time. If Mike and I were not interested or able (or willing) to bring our practice to this whole experience of building and slow growing Empty Mountain in the here & now, what would we be waiting for?! The time to actively apply the practice is always available right here, in the present moment.