My Hermit Life

While I was in Bangkok for the cremation of a dear aunt I took along a book of photos of my tiny house to show relatives how I was living now. Since the tiny house trend has not yet come to Asia even via cable TV most were quite puzzled by my choice of lifestyle. Small wooden houses were associated with poverty and rural farm life. Nor had they ever seen one on wheels. "So is it a vehicle?" they asked me. They were so flummoxed they didn't know what questions to ask. What they could see was that I had made most of it myself and I was very proud of it.

Then I met a couple of nuns attending the cremation and showed them my photos.  They asked me how big it was in meters and compared it to the size of their rooms. One of the nuns commented that I was living like a Hermit and this was a good start to becoming less attached to the material world, people, animals and plants. I was so startled by this reframing of the tiny house in a traditional Thai spiritual context that it was my takeaway moment of the whole trip. I wrote up a post describing the details of the traditional Thai cremation I witnessed and my conversations with the nuns as this self- revelation of the tiny house as hermitage unfolded.