A Hut of One's Own

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If the vision of life that Chomei presents is austere, thanks to Buddhism's emphasis on impermanence and the tragedies he's witnessed ("One [person] dies in the morning, the other is born at evening; they come and go like froth on the water"), still, his description of his little house and the pleasures of solitary life are quietly joyful. He's furnished his hut with a couple of musical instruments, some sutras to chant aloud, and a few books of Chinese and Japanese poetry. When he's tired of his Buddhist devotions, he neglects them and takes a nap. "Sometimes," he writes, "I stir up the buried embers of the fire, making them my companions in an old man's wakeful night, or I delight in the voice of the owl, for there is nothing fearful about this mountain."

Thoreau's and Chomei's souls grew larger in their huts, huts that removed them from distraction, huts they furnished as images of their truest selves. Thoreau was distracted by the materialism and narrowness of antebellum America; in his solitude this somewhat misanthropic man discovered a larger self, connected to all others. Retreating from the chaos and death of medieval Japan, Chomei discovered a truth just as big -- that peace and joy can live beside an awareness of sorrow and pain. Their huts were handmade machines for turning solitude into wisdom, relaxation into a more vivid, truer life. No wonder we love the little house whose blueprint we all carry around in our souls.

Jon Spayde is an Utne contributing editor.

DIY Sanctuary

By Anjula Razdan, Utne magazine

When the folks at ReadyMade magazine, the do-it-yourself bible for the young and the hip, saw 32-year-old furniture designer Edgar Blazona's modernist prefab dwellings, they were so impressed that they asked him to design something their readers could both afford and put together "in a week in their backyards," says ReadyMade editor-in-chief Shoshana Berger.

The result is the tiny 10-foot-by-10-foot abode you see above, featured last year in the pages of ReadyMade. You can purchase the 100 square feet of Plexiglas, steel, prefinished wood, and other materials from your local hardware store for about $1,500. ReadyMade sells detailed blueprints through its Web site for $35, and about 300 readers have taken the plunge so far, Berger says.

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