This summer I’m living in a 100 sq. foot Bunkie on a farm in Ontario, Canada.

I’m living in a 100 sq. foot Bunkie

If you’ve been following me for a while, you probably aren’t too surprised. I seem to have an affinity for the unique and unusual.

Last summer, I stayed in a Medieval village in Switzerland.

Before that, it was backpacking Africa…nearly 4000 miles solo across the continent by land to be exact.

And then, the pandemic hit….

I ran out of books to read, so I started reading my old notebooks. Last year I logged 5 alone. Some are thin with wrinkly, watermarked pages from shaky-handed coffee cups or salty tears; some are short and thick, encrusted with doodled margins and tales from the road.

I landed on a passage I’d jotted down just days before the start of 2020.

“To live with COURAGE“, I wrote, “just think of the freedom“. Through releasing fears, I envisioned new possibilities and contemplated the refreshing space that could emerge. Space for opportunity and growth. “When that new space unfolds, resist the urge to fill the void”.

Little did I know how resonant those words would become several months later. When the world shut down, we were all in a void, in one way or another.

After spending 4 months underground in a doomsday bunker basement apartment, Bunkie life presented itself as an opportunity for me to embrace this void and reconnect to nature. In my 100 square foot space, I am learning to live with less and recalibrate to a slower cadence of life.

My days are no longer ruled by the clock, but by the sun and the natural rhythm of my body. I sip my morning coffee on the front porch, accompanied by only my thoughts and surroundings. I am often enveloped in silence, intermittently broken by crickets chirping and tiny squirrel footsteps prancing across the dewy grass. The early mornings are like that: quiet, yet alive.

These solitary moments are as fluid as the clouds I’ve taken to watching; they float on by, rolling seamlessly into another without any undertone of distraction; they are dynamic and profound in their simple beauty. They are free.

During these strange times, I am challenging myself to be more present. To sit with myself, without the impulse to swipe a screen or flip a page. In the absence of such distractions, memories play like a slideshow; faded polaroid images, stirring nostalgia or melancholia. They rise and fall like waves, with a gentle pause of neutrality in between. Apprehensions and infinite possibilities for the future loop on repeat, sometimes with a faint sense of familiarity, like a re-occurring dream or deja vu. Sometimes a thought or idea will creep up on me in an unnoticeable way, like the waxing moon, night by night growing, until suddenly it illuminates the entire night sky.

I am learning and unlearning; solitude seems to render such things. It forces a cracking open, an organic vulnerability. You can’t hide from yourself, when you are by yourself.

And so I sit on the front porch of my Bunkie, alone but not lonely, leaning into the void. My thoughts are loud, but my heartbeat is louder. What a time to be alive.

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