It’s Official!
We are now officially land owners/caretakers! We closed on Friday July 1st. What a long journey this has been. We’ve been looking for land for literally years. We moved in this past weekend. A new adventure begins!
Pics above: Our first “build” was a pop-up screen canopy that we’ve named Little Bell Hall (after some lovely little bell-shaped flowers that grow on the land) and serves as our meditation space.
Pics above: Our 2nd build was this Montana made wall tent that our friend Brian generously lent us. Wonderfully, our son Jaden came out yesterday and gave us a hand to hoist it on up. It even comes with a wood stove. And maybe now you’re thinking: Yeah but isn’t it summer? Well, yes. Yes it is summer. However, while it may be heating up during the day, it’s been around 50-degrees in the mornings.
Pics above: Sage smudging and honoring the land during our first ground-breaking. Putting in a latrine was our first order of business. Whether we’re digging holes, ground clearing, or starting to build structures, we want to do our best to be good caretakers of the land and its plant, mineral, and animal inhabitants.
Pics above: On the left: On Friday after we closed, we loaded up our van and the car with a bunch of stuff from our storage unit and headed to the land - this is the very first pic we took on the land after we closed and things were officially official. On the right: Our son Jaden generously agreed to come up on Saturday, to shuttle us back to town to our storage unit so we could both fetch our motorcycles and ride them out to the land. We grabbed this family pic while he was there. Oh, and the EM sign is a little thing I made at Deer Park Monastery this last winter, using dry beans, rice, and paint.
Stay tuned for more pics and to follow our progress! While we don’t have wi-fi (yet! did someone say Starlink?) or cell service on the land, we will be traveling to Missoula once a week and thus will plan to post here on this blog once a week, at least through the summer.
Thank you all for your love & support. We hope the home of Empty Mountain will be a home for all of us to enjoy together as a community of friends, on the path of practice.