Su Libro

seeking harmony

Vastu explores an ancient system for spiritually centered home design, while other books celebrate small farms in New Mexico and dish on the details of green building and remodeling.

By Charles C. Poling

This article first appeared in Spring II 2008 Su Casa

Vastu: Transcendental Home Design in Harmony with Nature, by Sherri Silverman, Gibbs Smith, Publisher, hardcover, $29.95.

Purchase book

When we use home as a verb, as in the sense of heading true toward a goal, we hint at the deeper meaning we seek in our domicile. If home were simply an arrangement of walls and roof, plumbing and circuitry, I doubt the shelves at every newsstand would sag as they do under the weight of all those “shelter” magazines. No, home as a higher concept, freighted with emotion and spiritual yearning, surely has influenced this design and building trend of the past few decades.

Targeting the owners of that world view with her book Vastu: Transcendental Home Design in Harmony with Nature, Santa Fe author Sherri Silverman aims to give readers the knowledge and tools to create their own tranquil sanctuary protecting them from the threats of the world while also preparing them to succeed out there. In what feels a peculiarly American sleight, Vastu weds the practical to the spiritual, personal growth to self-interest. Here it’s the architectural equivalent of the “yoga butt.” It’s OK to want a really great house: it’ll make you a better person. Is that so wrong?

Maybe it’s all proof that no matter how secularized our culture becomes, the urge toward the sacred will find expression through whatever materials fall to hand. If the old church, your parents’ temple, or the new house of worship down the block doesn’t elevate your spirit, maybe your own house will.

Silverman brings impressive credentials. A Vastu sacred space design consultant with her firm, Transcendence, she holds a Ph.D. in Creativity, the Arts, and the Sacred Application of Asian Concepts. Since 1974, she has taught yoga, meditation, and sacred text courses from India’s Vedic tradition, which lies at the roots of Vastu (and of yoga and familiar forms of meditation—in fact, she calls Vastu “the yoga of design”).

Vastu is hardly a transitory pop-culture evanescence or feng-shui lite. An ancient Sanskrit term, Vastu translates as “energy” or “imperishable substance,” according to Silverman. As a term applied to a system of design principles, as Silverman propounds in her book, “Vastu’s purpose is to align our architectural spaces with the beneficial effects of the laws of nature and the influence of earth and cosmic energies. Vastu views a building as a living entity that nourishes our lives.” Buildings—homes—created in alignment with the guidelines of Vastu support our health, growth, and happiness, she writes. If all this sounds a bit like feng shui, the Chinese design system, Silverman claims that’s because Vastu predated and influenced it, but she concludes that Vastu offers greater depth and more benefits than its Chinese cousin.

By applying the Vastu guidelines, which incorporate a variety of arcane but quite specific principles, including a mandala and a rectangular grid—trust me, this system isn’t for the intellectually lazy—a designer can create a new house or even rectify an existing one as a personal sanctuary.

Every room or home space gets its due: starting with the lot, then covering porches, bedrooms, kitchen, bath, garage, and the like. So for instance, an office should be placed on the northeast side of the home, a children’s study area on the west. “Everyone should face east or north for the best brain wave activity when studying.” Skeptical? Try it, Silverman suggests—even just moving around furniture can make a difference, she claims. Vastu even goes so far as to give advice on how to declutter your space, organize your dirty clothes, and fence your yard. Everything counts!

Vastu is a smart book. Clearly Silverman has mastered the topic, and even if you can’t quite stretch to wholeheartedly embrace the belief system behind it, you certainly will glean innumerable ideas that just plain make sense. With Vastu’s 10,000-year history, it’s a stunning testament to the intellectual depth and subtlety of ancient Indian culture and its tradition of supporting people’s eternal need to meld body and spirit in our daily lives.



Artisan Farming: Lessons, Lore, and Recipes, by Richard Harris and Lisa Fox, photographs by Trent Edwards, Gibbs Smith, Publisher, paperback, $24.95.

Purchase book

Maybe you have the great fortune of living in easy walking distance to a bustling twice-a-week farmers’ market. Once the growing season gears up, you can browse the stalls, their tables loaded with lettuce, garlic, raspberries, apples, locally grown and baked bread, honey, corn, and so on, depending on the season. Many of these farmers are your neighbors; all of them come from nearby. They like to chat about their food, recommend ways to cook it, share a story about a raccoon . . . This exchange—social, economic, personal—has deep roots for all of us.

Lest anyone think the back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s and ’70s hit a terminal dead end around 1980, Artisan Farming presents powerful evidence to the contrary. Authors Richard Harris and Lisa Fox, herself an organic farmer north of Taos, report on a thriving if continually challenged small-farm agricultural scene growing and diversifying across New Mexico. Part history, part new millennium literary American Gothic, part cookbook, part coffee table photo book, and part manifesto for locally produced organic food, Artisan Farming achieves a rare and rarified blend of good stories, impressive research, engaging readability, captivating photography, and inspirational message.

Harris and Fox cover their subject from seeds to entrées, from politics to hydrology to geography to economy to wildlife—all the factors that influence the fortunes of farming. They provide driving routes for touring farm country, recipes for cooking—enchiladas, salsa, or buffalo tenderloin, for instance—and lists of farmers’ markets across the state. But best of all, they lead the reader into lively encounters with a raspberry farmer, an organic cattleman, a fruit-wine maker, an heirloom seed preservationist, a multigenerational apple-growing family, Hispanic farmers, Native American farmers, Anglo farmers, newcomers, old-timers . . . They all have stories to tell about what they do, how they came to their land, where they go to market, and most important, why they have committed their lives to a low-paying, strenuous, seemingly antique profession.

Why? Here’s the reason I’ve gleaned: a small farm simultaneously connects a farmer to his own unique patch of earth and to the globe at large. Inherently, definitively sustainable, small farming reinforces, even reestablishes the place of humanity—of all of us—within the great cosmic round. When we support these farms by buying their produce and eating their food, we engage our world in a more direct and intimate relationship than we do when we buy a package of lettuce trucked in 800 miles and retailed by one of the world’s largest corporations.

The farmers in Harris’ book stake out a bogglingly wide range of diversity. I could never pick favorites, but I was struck by Estevan Arellano, a farmer working his ancestral farm in the Embudo Valley, land his family has owned since 1725. Arellano remembers the old days, when they would barter with neighbors—apples for pigs. Food and its preparation were shared. Working the land for hundreds of years, “how much more sustainable can you be?” he asks.

Or consider goat farmer Nancy Nathanya Coonridge, who “blends a pioneer way of life with modern technology” on a remote patch of rangeland somewhere between Pie Town and Acoma. Keeping the herd so isolated, she has found they don’t need antibiotics, hormones, or chemical wormers, which makes the organic commitment come naturally. Look for her goat cheeses, flavored with herbs and even green chile.

If you’ve been in New Mexico awhile and have a taste for local, fresh food, you’ve probably sampled produce from these folks: Champagne apples from Dixon’s Apples in Cochiti Canyon (is there a better apple, anywhere?) or honey from Sparrowhawk Farm in Bosque, or organic wheat from Gonzalo Gallegos and the Sangre de Cristo Agricultural Producers’ Co-op in a Cloud Cliff Bakery loaf.

These people lead lives markedly different from most Americans. But think about it: somewhere back in your family tree, a farmer grew food. Planting, tending, and harvesting a crop or livestock inspired the first organized human societies and the first technologies. As spring heats into summer, we can all sense that fertile efflorescence of the land’s abundance—it must be hard-wired into our genes by now, though most of us don’t know how to directly connect to that feeling beyond planting a garden or mowing the lawn. Artisan Farming offers hope that the ancient craft of small farming will remain with us long enough for a large cultural rediscovery of the benefits of growing and eating local food. What a harvest!



Green from the Ground Up: Sustainable, Healthy, and Energy-Efficient Home Construction, by David Johnston and Scott Gibson, The Taunton Press, paperback, $24.95.


Purchase book


The Carbon-Free Home: 36 Remodeling Projects to Help Kick the Fossil-Fuel Habit, by Stephen and Rebekah Hren, Chelsea Green Publishing, paperback, $35.

Purchase book

As publishers leap into the green market, here come two books that approach green homes from two angles, new construction in Green from the Ground Up and retrofitting an existing house in The Carbon-Free Home. Between the two of them, anyone should be able to find specific, even how-to information for increasing his or her personal sustainability quotient.

Loaded with tips, techniques, illustrations, and apolitical rationale for sustainable building, Green from the Ground Up aims to be a definitive resource on green home building for builders particularly but also homeowners. Author David Johnston, who has battled on the front lines of green building for many years, brings his considerable experience to bear on every facet of the subject. The presumed audience appears to be builders who find themselves drawn toward green building—whether for marketing reasons or personal conviction—and are just beginning to grasp its comprehensive, system-wide nature. Whereas once a house with solar panels and natural surfaces might have earned the adjective green, nowadays the term denotes a much higher standard of overall sustainable design, materials, and construction practices. For readers seeking an overview reference with enough detail to point them in the right direction, Green from the Ground Up offers the information in an appealing, easy-to-use package.

Johnston and coauthor Scott Gibson open the book with a brief rallying-cry rationale for green—“green is no longer on the fringe”—then plunge directly into those ground-up details. A conceptual chapter about the house as a system encourages a scientific, holistic view of it as a structure comprising interrelated parts. The authors pay particular attention to energy, air, and water—and their behavior. It’s basic physics, applied to design and construction. The next chapter addresses designing for sustainability, then subsequent chapters hit the home’s key components: foundation, framing, roofs and attics, windows and doors, plumbing, insulation, solar energy, and so on. Small sidebars of text debunk anti-green myths, explain key terms, clarify a tip with a paragraph plus a photo, illustrate best (and worst) practices, explain the “green factor” for major elements of home building (for instance, siding and decking), and so on.

The information never gets too technical for the average reader; builders will want to dig into the Build Green New Mexico guidelines and other sources for more depth. In fact, while the book is chock-full and chunked into hundreds of reader-friendly details and advice, here in New Mexico at least it will best serve builders as a triangulating reference providing a supplementary view of the best practices incorporated into the Build Green New Mexico guidelines and the LEED for Homes standards, among others. Still, Green from the Ground Up offers enough specifics to enable a builder or homeowner to sort through key decisions, even if it doesn’t provide the final answer (or regional slant) on things ranging from wall systems—structural insulated panels, adobe, or advanced framing?—to lumber options for a deck or materials for countertops and floors.

Anyone involved in green building these days will want to pick up this book for its smart, digestible summaries of options, those either/or choices that nag every building project but especially where green is concerned, given the still-evolving nature of the field. For instance, the idea of a carbon-footprint rating, which would indicate the greenhouse-gas emissions of a given product, will probably trigger another transformation in the evaluation of “green” products. Until we have that, either subjectivity or the ascendancy of particularized criteria (low embodied energy vs. reduced lifetime fossil-fuel consumption, for instance) will continue to color preferences from paint to portal vigas.

The Carbon-Free Home champions sustainability from a quite different viewpoint, addressing remodeling and do-it-yourself projects that mostly can be done by the average homeowner on limited funds with rudimentary construction skills. Furthermore, authors (and husband-wife team) Stephen and Rebekah Hren infuse their writing with personal anecdotes and the kind of proselytizing vigor that recalls the early solar-home books of the 1970s. These folks from Durham, North Carolina, are believers who want you to come to the river with them. But their faith comes from rationally assessing the world situation, applying a scientific understanding of energy and technologies, and practicing an engineer’s discipline for measuring, gathering data, and making empirically based decisions.

If you accept their basic assumptions—that our current high-carbon energy diet cannot be sustained, that it will ultimately ruin our biosphere if we don’t reduce our carbon emissions, and that we can do something about it right now, at home—then you will find this book engaging, empowering, and inspiring. Even if you’re not so sure about these ideological points, you’re still likely to find sensible projects in The Carbon-Free Home that are worth a weekend spent with a hand saw, hammer, nails, and salvaged lumber.

That’s because many of these energy-reducing ideas just plain make sense. A few years ago at our house, looking for shade, we strung wire diagonally across an L-shaped corner, encouraging wisteria and Virginia creeper to grow between as a living patio roof. What do you know? The Hrens write in detail about that very idea, using climbing, twining plants to create cooling shade and thereby reduce your air conditioning-related energy consumption.

But rather than flipping willy-nilly through these pages looking for a project, the Hrens recommend a more systematic approach. Start by understanding your home energy use: space heating, water heating, and cooking generally add up to about half our overall home energy consumption. What about the other half? By keeping an energy diary, you can figure out where you’re guzzling gas and electric by the keg, not just the cup. Between behavioral changes, easy projects, and a few simple purchases—hang the laundry outside, turn out the light when you leave the room, replace incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescent ones, insulate your refrigerator—you can drop your consumption immediately.

Bigger changes come harder: retrofitting for solar heat, for instance, creating a living roof (yes, those are plants on top), baking in a solar oven (that’s what I’m talking about), installing a woodstove (they advocate for wood burners, whose carbon load seems to be an unresolved debate in the green world), and building a sawdust toilet (uh-huh!).

Moving beyond home to lifestyle, a chapter on transportation looks at the realistic options—after first concluding that a remote cabin in the woods carries a high carbon penalty, just in trips to town! The Hrens drive an old Mercedes diesel on veggie oil, but they also bike. Yes, they’re probably younger than you. And they live in downtown Durham, not 25 miles out in a desert subdivision. They also evaluate hybrid cars, electric cars, electric bikes, public transit, even horses (if only!), biofuels, and overseas travel by freighter (aye!).

If you decide to dig into one of these 36 projects, the Hrens tell you the estimated project time and cost, energy saved (high, medium, low), maintenance requirements, skill level and type, and the tools needed. They also give simple directions and folksy hand-drawn diagrams for each project. The time investment ranges from one hour, for sealing windows, say, to several weekends, for creating the “Humanure Hacienda” that processes your toilet effluent. The afternoon spent making a laundry gray water catchment system sounds especially doable and appropriate for our dry climate.

Maybe the best part of The Carbon-Free Home is the Hrens’ chipper, let’s-get-it-done attitude, with no trace of gloom. “We do not have to abandon civilization and go live in a cave . . . to retrofit our lives for fossil-energy independence.”

We just have to get started.