Edification in a Tiny House Community

A tiny house community such as Noodle Soup Village, offers the opportunity to create a small society within the larger one where respect for one another and the Earth is priority number one.  In order to develop respect, one needs trust.  Trust that your personal possessions are safe and secure.  Trust that fellow villagers protect you and yours, the same as they protect themselves and their own; common goals with like-minded people where competition and self interest are left at the door, a psychological condition best discarded to the annals of history like organized religion, monarchies, and racism.  Self interest is acceptable when a society realizes that doing good for all is good for the individual, and then:  That is birth of an empathic, enlightened culture, concerned with it’s own survival.

Everyone dies, and you can’t can’t take any of your material possessions with you.  You don’t own anything, you only borrow it from the future, so why not return the world in a better condition than when you started with it?  Instead of dwelling on the past and worrying about what the future may hold, let us learn from the past, and use that knowledge to make a new and exciting world.  What matters is what you do today.  This day.  Right now.  I write this having slept in with a hangover, farted around on youtube, contemplated working on the Squatch, and will likely end up writing a bit more, watching a movie or two, and finish off the day telling myself I will accomplish more tomorrow.  Part of living, is seeing the world around you change, but I think the good life is seeing changes you made on the world.

I like to design and build things.  It took me years to realize how much the environment I lived in was detrimental to my progress and personal development.  With positive feedback and support from other motivated and excited individuals, I find my attitude and general state of happiness is improving.  Positivity is abundant in Portland, yet I still feel like I’m still outside that community.  That is why I seek to create a community of people with similar goals, the more ambitious, the more crazy, the more impossible; all the better.

Competition and self interest are not innate, unalterable traits of human beings.  Compassion, empathy and kindness are just as likely in the right environment.  A tiny house community seems to me ideal for this environment.  A few people in a few tiny houses, with few possessions, all packed tightly together that share resources, surpluses, responsibilities, knowledge, dreams, passions and goals, will grow with one another in such a way as to bring about the best traits in each other and grow out of the worst.

-M.C. Pletcher