Blessings dear Build-it community,
2010 - before
2020 - after
It feels like I might be having one of the most circuitous-ever routes to selling my home... Around 3 years since I first put it on the market, I've set my mindbodyspirit more energetically into it, and am making significant progress in finally pulling it all together for actually presenting it for sale publicly....
I'll be sharing some more Before And After photos of each room of the house, over the next weeks... this is a more general rumination on selling something that you've renovated yourself...
The Arthouse is a set of rooms in the heart of a previously-abandoned Italian medieval quarter, which since I arrived here in late 2009, has experienced an about-turn in its previous state of neglect. Guardia S. now boasts a dynamic international community, who have bought up at least a couple of hundred properties in the gloriously atmospheric centro storico, and have contributed (alongside municipal and European funding) towards major refurbishments and maintenance of the whole old town.
The town has changed a lot and been improved in myriad ways, since it started filling with stranieri. My own relationship with the house and town has been a spectrum of experience: from the euphoria of owning my first home, to the maddening frustration of trying to get stucco to attach to the high point of an arch; from the perfect moments on the balcony sipping wine and being drenched in the beauty of the epic panorama, to the perfectly horrible challenges of learning Italian from scratch in situ, amongst folks who speak the strongest of dialects (only loosely related to the conventional Italian language)...
Every day since moving here has brought with it profound learning, humility, emotional strength, spiritual perspective, fulfilment, connection, colour, depth and meaning. Every day has gifted me the enrichment of mastery of some kind: of the myriad microclimates in the rooms, and how to live symbiotically with seasons, insect life and neighbours' comings and goings – to the very lucid-making reality of subsisting on very little in an unfamiliar environment and culture.
It has been a beautiful journey, which in many ways I'd love to keep travelling – but there are multiple reasons why I want to move on, from the size of the house, to the fact that it is a much fuller and busier medieval quarter than the one I moved into – but more pertinently, the call of the wild demanding that I immerse fully in nature, plus the fact that, if I sell the Arthouse, I'll finally free up the wealth of my sweat equity which I've been investing in the property and town all these years.
Almost everything I've done in my life, like many folks, has been on a shoestring: this might be the one big move I can make in my years here in the 3D, which will give me the leverage to invest in long-term self-sustenance systems – like machinery and techologies for harvesting natural free resources and cleaning water that my household uses.
This will provide the freedom that I really need, to thrive beyond the hand-to-mouth rhythms of a more conventional bill-paying existence – which in turn will free the space energetically, to thrive like it should – and allow me to invite in guests who want to rest, heal, and learn about sovereignty and co-creation.
This is a most exciting prospect for me! The past years have been incredibly challenging: though I've never had better health nor felt so rich, nevertheless I've been pushed to the very furthest reaches of what I can navigate, and how I can keep up my energy.
I am very tired of pushing away at the system and seeing how increasingly inhospitable it is to folks like myself whose lifework is in truth, well-being, art and biodiverse expression. It really is time – at least for me! - to step out of the metaphor-dream-hopetogod of that elusive nichè way out at the edge-of-the-world, and to step into the living reality of an actual wild oasis of harmony and good-relationship-with-all-things that only immersion in wild nature can offer!
It will always be inherently speculative – some might even see it as a gamble - to leave one reality for another. Especially when the first reality is pretty darn divine. But part of living fully is knowing when there is a ripeness to the moment, and when that ripeness means both that something must be reaped, and something else must descend into the darkness: we gain the fruit, and the tree goes into the resting phase of winter.
It might never feel completely clear-cut, the choice whether or not to sell a magical place like my Arthouse, but if there is a full-spirited yes to something more, then that has to be honoured and acted upon.
We can only truly know what we feel: weighing up pros and cons to anything is an abstract contrivance that might give a general conceptualisation, but doesn't serve the wholeness of spirit and life-purpose. We can only really know from acting with that movement which moves nature and seasons... that holistic surity of direction and action, right-feeling and sensing-for-more. If we're aligned with the highest intention, I feel that we'll always land in the right place.
If you'd like to know more about The Arthouse in Guardia Sanframondi, see this page about it on my website – or contact me directly there.
