The Wooden Horse

Today it is Chinese New Year and we enter the year of the Wooden Horse.  The year is said to be the one of renewal in which we throw out useless ideas and purge ourselves of unnecessary attachments.  The Wooden Horse, I think is a perfect year for tiny housers, because along with this purging the year proclaims that progress, modernity and unsentimentality will reign.

According to this tradition it is a good year to clean out your closets, to work as hard as a horse and to advance.  Just my kind of mentality!  I have just been reading a little on the the year and it makes me hopeful that this will be the best year of my life.  I hope this is correct!

All these thoughts about how the year of transformation has closed and we pass into the year of moving forward, made me think about how this is reflected in my own little homestead.  Last year was the first time that I concentrated on the beauty of my home instead of the utilitarian function.   I think that this was accomplished with the addition of all the stone work.  Yet I ordered the stove in that year too and this will transform the house into a reasonably practical year around sanctuary.  The fact that I picked up my new wood stove yesterday and the plans to install it are moving forward this spring seem timely and meaningful within the context of this tradition.

What I mean is that installation will be a lot of very hard work.  The stove while tiny, weighs about a hundred pounds.  As well I do not want it in the house but rather in a box outside, so again next spring I am going back to work again in stone.  I know I have a lot of physically hard work ahead of me, but this will transform Tiny House Ontario into an almost fully functional home.  A simple tool for heating means a lot.

I am giving too much thought, perhaps, but I love that this year, the year where wood and horses intersect, that I will be doing the work of adding a wood burner to my home.  Somehow, everything just feels right.

Here is the box and a peek inside.  I did not take it out yet because it is very heavy and I because I still have to move it to the tiny house, I want to keep it packaged and safe.