Ever since my recent admission to myself that some part of me had genuinely believed that arriving here on the land would be like arriving in Paradise, and the subsequent emotional bewilderment of accepting that this was not in fact the case, I have been trying very hard to pay attention to the deep-down things I seem to think and feel about being here. It seems to me now, after some reflection, that there is more to it than simply the disappointment of not arriving in Paradise after all.

I knew, after all, that there would be work to be done when we got here; I wasn’t so naïve as to think that it would all be effortless. But I did think that the nature of the effort would be more vivid, dreamy, and magical, and less ploddingly practical. And this is because all the work I have ever done to make a place magical has been – of necessity – very creative, very inexpensive, and above all very temporary. Having lived in somewhat shoddy rentals all my life, I am very good at making a space feel magical through the use of gauze and staples, materials that are cheap to use and easy to play with. It is hugely daunting to me to imagine making real changes, doing real projects, beyond the dollar-a-yard-drapery-and-fairy-lights method of transforming space that I have been leaning on since I was in college.

shabby expectations

I have no practice, either technical or imaginative, in making real and solid and permanent alternations to a space. I never thought about it because I never needed to. All the things that grownups do to houses that they own – putting in wallpaper and nice flooring and redoing countertops and buying decent furniture – were not things that it occurred to me that I would want or need to do, because on some very basic level I never thought I would end up in a house nice enough to be suitable for that kind of thing. When I thought about where we would end up, what I imagined was always a kind of kaleidoscopic collage of all the weird wonderful wooden houses that dot the Mendocino coast – shabby, funky, full of quirks and odd angles and poor wiring, but also full of character and personality and flavor.

In a house like that, I thought, I’d have no trouble rolling up my sleeves and getting to work, painting and hammering in bookshelves and making it our weird place. And anyway, the plan was always to build our own little magical cob cottage in a corner of the land somewhere, and turn the main house over to friends and family to visit in; everything we did would be emergent, organic, and we’d build our own perfect little place down the line, and in the meantime it would be easy to make it into a gaily-decorated daydream. And this was an easy thing to assume, even when we started looking at actual houses, because all of them were like that: odd, quirky, handmade, shabby but interesting, like us.

This house, however, is not like that.

This house is the nicest and newest place either of us have ever lived. Neither of us has ever lived in a house built after 1970. We’ve never lived in a house that had more than one bathroom or untrodden carpet or fresh white paint or new appliances or outlets wherever we want them. But this house was built in 1997, and it is far more clean and modern and up-to-date and normal than anything I ever imagined. It was cheap because it is wholly off-grid and in the middle of the forest, which means it lacks the convenience of other, funkier houses we looked at which were closer to town and didn’t have decaying battery arrays. But it isn’t old, or weird, or full of odd bits of stained glass or barnwood doors or huge slightly crooked windows. It is solid and well-engineered and clean. It is a nice house, a grownup house, a real house.

a paradise just like the life before

I did not expect to ever own a grown-up house. I expected to own a house that looked like all the cheap rentals of my childhood. When I say that I expected to arrive in Paradise, in other words, I seem to have been thinking of Paradise (as many people seem to) as a place that was really pretty much like the life before, only somehow better – closer to our dreams, more truly ours, more easeful and secure. We’d do weird temporary art in the main house, and slowly build the long-term, special, dreamy, magical places all around. It would be easy. It would be fun.

I had, of course, no images prepared from my decades of imaginative practice to help me come to grips with a house that was new and undamaged and clean, an unweird house. The fact of its niceness seems to have tripped a wire in my brain. It is hard to put language around this, and maybe it will make no sense to anyone who didn’t grow up in shabby rentals, but – a nice house partakes of all the social myths of permanence and property. You don’t make weird art in a nice house. You don’t paint the walls glitter-black or glue chairs to the ceiling. What you are supposed to do with a nice house is make it nicer. Unlike the place I expected to be living in, which would have been already half-handmade, full of other people’s quirks and thumbprints and unfinished projects, a clean, new, white house does not stimulate my desire to start making funky art in every corner. It does not invite imagination, memory, experimentation. It invites normality, and all the images I have of normal houses are, well, normal. They may be shabby or they may be expensive, but they certainly don’t look fantastical.

the power of patterns

Without any patterns of my own to steer by, the social patterns of this kind of house simply seem to have taken over. All of sudden my ideas of decorating with papier mâché trees and floor pillows in lieu of furniture felt to me like student stuff. It seemed to go with all those shoddy apartments where we could never quite feel secure, a cheap way gussy up a spot when you’re not allowed to make anything lasting and anyway the place isn’t nice enough to bother spending money on. (I’ve been allowed to paint the walls in one of the places I have lived since I was old enough to want to – a total of three houses and seven apartments in twenty years. And why bother, if you know you might have to leave next month anyway? Better to just use gauze and twinkly lights.) Without me realizing it at all, all the wonderful weird patterns of making a place that I had been holding for a lifetime seemed to fade away, and instead I began to think only about normal house stuff. I pushed away all my images of indoor forests and colorful walls, because you do those things in handmade tumbledown cabins, not clean, finished, well-maintained houses where nothing is falling apart. Because the house is in such nice shape, my thinking ran, everything I do here has to be nice too – none of this duct-tape-and-glue-gun college-student stuff!

And “nice stuff,” when you are talking about a house, means expensive stuff. I felt frozen, stuck, bewildered. Everything cost so much money. For example, we turned the biggest bedroom into a dance space, and the bamboo flooring cost a thousand dollars. I still feel guilty when I think about this. And at least the dance floor serves a purpose, whereas replacing the hideous new gray carpet (which constantly static-shocks us) elsewhere in the house would cost the same amount and yet be purely for aesthetics. I couldn’t bear to think of it – and yet the carpet makes the space so dull, and I couldn’t think of how to improve the house without replacing it. Thinking about “what to do with the house” became nothing but this kind of dreary puzzle. It had exactly none of the pleasurable and dreamy quality I expected it to have; it simply felt bad. I felt I had to get everything right ahead of time. Making the house nice was going to cost a lot of money, after all, and therefore it couldn’t be some sort of emergent process; I had to have a perfect and correct design.

When I made my undergraduate thesis, I needed a floor I could glue things to, so I built one out of plywood on top of my apartment floor, and then, spontaneously, I decided to paint the wood grain blue and gold. It looked wonderful and it felt magical and making it was a delight. That was what I thought it would be like when we got here, not researching and choosing and measuring and ordering and laying some kind of inexpensive-but-still-nice laminate. My imagination simply stopped functioning: as soon as I imagined something I would start costing it out in my head, and then I would recoil in horror at the pricetag, and then what if it didn’t look the way I wanted after all? The pleasure of transformation, of art in space, vanished completely. It was a misery to even contemplate, and the sense of the financial consequences of getting it wrong simply froze me in place.

thank goodness for the misery

And o heavens, thank goodness it did – long enough for me to notice that I felt horrible instead of happy, long enough to ask myself why I didn’t feel the slightest spark of joy about transforming this place when I had expected it to be the culmination of a lifetime of creative longing. Thank goodness for my poor sick soul, bewildered by what I was asking it to do.

I wish this pressure was less easy to succumb to. But adults are given few images of magical places that don’t come with a pricetag. In my last post I wrote about my realization that children’s literature seems to be stuffed with doorways to wonderful elsewheres, but it didn’t occur to me until afterwards that this is really in sharp contrast to books for adults, which almost never contain such doorways – and, if they do, tend to couch it in terms of pure fantasy, whereas children’s books about wonderful and fantastical places almost always have one foot firmly in this world; they suggest that ordinary people just like you and me can step into the magical realms. Why on earth do we lose this? Is it because as adults we are confronted by the enormously dull reality of the joyless, lifeless human spaces we have to inhabit as grown people? I suspect this is the case – and yet only as adults do we actually have the ability to transform our spaces, to increase the chance that magic will take place. Children have very little power to change what is around them, which is in part why the stories of stumbling upon elsewheres are so important. And yet, once we get to adulthood, we are persuaded to focus on making our spaces livable and pleasant, not wild and evocative. We dismiss the candles in saucers and record players on the floor and tapestried walls as juvenile, signs of immaturity and irresponsibility. Real adults buy nice couches.

the non-possessable

The prevalence of “boho” and “cottagecore” as popular aesthetics seem to me to be proof that we do still struggle with our squashed longings for admission to magical spaces as adults. The difference, however, is that these aesthetics are still tied tightly to the idea that the key to magical space is money. Responsible adults don’t make weird magical spaces out of cheap materials with their friends; they are supposed to buy the trappings that make a place marvelous. You are supposed to pick out, from an almost-infinite catalog, the objects that adhere to the idea in your head of whimsy and charm. But truly magical spaces are not really made by shopping creatively. I can’t buy a lot of pillows and flowerpots on Etsy and wind up with Lothlorien or a cottage out of a Studio Ghibli film, even though some part of me wants to believe that I can, because it would mean I could maybe just have them. Magical spaces are not designed, planned in advance and then tidily executed. They grow. They do not conform to an idea but to a feeling. The spaces we really experience as magical grow and change and decay; they come into being through time and love and accident, through collaboration and accretion and chance.

The places that glow inside our hearts are rarely filled with things we bought off Amazon, and it doesn’t matter what the countertops are made of. But for several months I really did forget this. I feel now as if I had narrowly escaped a trap, some kind of a clever con. You buy a house, and it is a nice house, and you behave like an adult and buy nice things for it. You do not fill it with giant paper trees you made out of tentpoles and duct tape. You do not paint the floor to look like a starry sky or sew a bunch of cushions out of cheap fabric instead of buying actual chairs. You do not use candles instead of ordering lamps. People only do that who can’t afford to buy things. To need to make things because you can’t afford to buy them is the sign that you are someone to take seriously. Or this is the subtle social message, anyway, which I almost swallowed, as if it had been a hook baited with the juicy word homeowner.

the transgressive pleasure of magical space

Truly magical spaces are, I think, fundamentally anti-capitalist. They are transgressive in two important ways:

First, magical spaces are part of the commons. Finding a doorway or glimpse of elsewhere is not, mythically speaking, in any way dependent on one’s legal relationship to the property in question. In fact, trespass, discovery, abandoned or forgotten property, getting lost, and uncovetous exploration are all common characteristics of stories about finding our ways into spaces that shimmer with a deeper kind of life. A magical house isn’t magical if no one comes to visit or no story is told about it; the magic never lies in possession of the place but in the act of stumbling upon, dwelling in, relating to, uncovering it.  

Secondly, what makes a place magical is not how it looks but how it feels, and the things that determine how a place feels are almost always very simple and nothing to do with money: the way the light falls, a warm color instead of a cool color, a certain quality of sound. These things, when they feel right, are not stylistic choices but embodied responses. Maybe a ceiling is too high and I feel dwarfed, but the room will feel better if I hang something soft across it to make it feel lower. This window shaded by vines feels good to be near, and there is a chair just where I want it, and somewhere to put my tea. This wall is cool in the hot sun. This grove is full of silence. These are not about ideas of how a place should be, but qualities that have been nurtured through the act of being present with the specifics of the actual place itself – through truly noticing what feels good and what feels bad. This responsive awareness is not purchasable. Design blogs rarely mention it. It is not something you can find on Pinterest. It emerges, always, from being in relation with the place itself. A magical place is one that has somehow grown into feeling enormously and deeply good to be in, seductively good, special. It is where you are drawn back to. Your body wishes to dwell and linger there. The things that make everyday life seem harsh and drear are softened, your eyes rest on things that interest and delight them, you feel held, a sense of ease or aliveness enters you. It feels like its own place, somehow cut out from the rest of the world the way a beloved person is themselves and not like anyone else.

I can hardly begin to explain the enormous sense of relief I feel in having realized what was happening to me. As soon as I realized that I had given up my own images in favor of some idea of a “nice house,” all the dreary anxiety simply disappeared. This house does not need to be nice. It needs to be alive, which is not remotely the same thing, and requires only that I be willing to try to make weird art. And in this moment I feel strongly that I have learned a lesson about not abandoning the dreams of childhood. After all, I didn’t want a nice house as a kid – I wanted magic, which I might define as the sense that many wild possibilities are entangled and open, that a door might lead anywhere. Any place that feels truly good to us is this kind of threshold, not just itself but many places at once – other places we remember with the same dreamy feeling, images from dreams and visions, glimpses of the spirit realms. Places that feel magical and alive are like rocks in the river of time, anchors for daydream and memory and deep experience.

That we have the power to make our spaces more like this is the theory that underlies my lifetime of obsession. And I almost forgot. I really almost let that go. I almost fell for the image we have of the solid, stable, responsible homeowner who certainly doesn’t do build weird experimental sculptures in the middle of their floor, because that’s kid stuff, and only kids are changeable, experimental, in the flow of the world. Adults are supposed to build only tidy, solid, lasting things. Well, I’m not having it. If it’s juvenile, so be it. I am here to make things weird, to see what happens if I remain convinced that the spaces of our lives can still be doors to elsewhere.