Tipi Living (Simple Living) [Illustrated] [Paperback]

If you are interested in buying a tipi and need some advice, or if you already have one but are having some troubles then Tipi Living may well be what you need. This easy to read book is a user's guide to living in a tipi. It will not tell you how to build one, but it is filled with practical know-how on everything from what size to buy and how to keep out the drips, to what local woods burn best and what local materials can be used as flooring. Also included is a small reference section of suppliers and further reading on different aspects of living in a tipi. Tipi Living is not just a practical guide however, it is an insight to the joys of living as part of nature, in balance with and not in dominance over Gaia. --Laine Phillips, Centre For Alternative Technology

This booklet is a practical guide to living in a tipi. There is no set of rules about how a tipi should be used, but if there were, Patrick Whitefield would be as qualified to write them as anyone. He has lived in a self-built tipi for more than eight years, and built them professionally for four. The appeal of a tipi is as much spiritual as practical. The circle is an organic, healing shape, especially for anyone who has spent a lifetime living in rectangles. Tipis are strong, roomy, weatherproof, tough, portable, and, perhaps most significantly, have a self-contained, open hearth. As a result, the tipi dweller's daily rhythms are much more in tune with those of the natural world. They become an integral part of the web of life. This concise booklet information (48 pages) combines practical information with lifestyle issues. Information includes: Choosing a tipi Pitching and siting Tipi maintenance Heating and cooking Furnishing This little book makes an elegant statement about how over complicated our lives have become. What passes for simple living in other books looks like life in the fast lane compared to the lifestyle espoused in this book! --http://www.emporiumbooks.com.au

Permaculture teacher, Patrick Whitefield lived in a self-built tipi in Somerset for eight years. This is his guide to all aspects of tipi living: the story of how he came to live this way; how to choose and pitch a tipi; living with Sun and Storm; maintenance; moving; firemaking; furnishing; food and cooking in a tipi. Full of first hand experience and practical information, it is also Patrick's personal account of a time of simplicity and spiritual connection with the Earth. A delightful book for everyone interested in tipis, low impact dwelling and those who want to celebrate the simple life.

This booklet is a practical guide to living in a tipi. One thing I’ve learned from living in this way is that the practical and the spiritual are not two aspects of life, but one and the same thing. So it’s quite spiritual too.
There is no set of rules about how a tipi should be used. This is an account of what works for me, written from my own experience and including a lot of what I’ve learned from other tipi people. I don’t offer it as the last word on anything, but as a door opening on the possibility of a new way of life.

Patrick Whitefield

Patrick Whitefield is a permaculture designer, teacher and writer. He is author of How to Make a Forest Garden, the mini classic Permaculture in a Nutshell, and the definitive Earth Care Manual. He is also consultant editor for Permaculture Magazine. Patrick grew up on a smallholding in rural Somerset and qualified in agriculture at Shuttleworth College, Bedfordshire. He then acquired farming experience in Britain, the Middle East and Africa. He has expertise in many diverse areas from organic gardening and practical nature conservation to thatching and tipi making. He bought his first tipi at the Green Gathering in 1983, and made them for a living from 1986 to 1990. He lived in a self-built tipi near Glastonbury for eight years.

Why Live in a Tipi?

When I bought my first tipi, I already had an all-weather tent, a good set of bender tarps and a choice of two caravans to live in. What did I need a tipi for? None of that mattered. I fell in love with the sheer beauty of it.
The beauty goes far deeper than appearances. The circle is an organic, healing shape, powerful medicine for anyone who has been shut up in rectangles for half a lifetime. Contact with the Earth is not a metaphor in a tipi. When I sit down I can feel the skin of our Mother under my bum. I look up and see the circle of poles reaching up into the air to meet in the patch of sky through the smoke hole. In the centre of the circle the flames of an open fire dance their dance of life. From where I’m pitched I can hear the gurgle of a nearby stream on a quiet evening, and I love to fall asleep with that sound in my ears.
Song birds and other creatures come into the lodge sometimes to see what they can find, and much of the tipi dweller’s daily round takes place outside, so that the distinction between indoors and outdoors is less absolute than it is in a house. Sun, Moon and stars, clouds, wind and rain have much more practical effect on the tipi dweller’s life, and I find myself living by their rhythms rather than the clock or the calendar. Women sometimes find their menstrual cycle falls into phase with the Moon when they move from a house to a tipi. It’s not so much a matter of living close to nature as being a part of the whole web of life.
A tipi is a highly practical way to live outside. In fact, with a tipi beauty and practicality are one and the same. The idea of something being useful but ugly, or beautiful but useless, is largely a product of our unbalanced industrial society. A tipi is strong, roomy, weatherproof, tough, easy to pitch and move, and above all has a fire inside. It was developed by the people of the Great Plains of North America, and it is hard to improve on a structure which enabled people to thrive in such a harsh environment.
There are many ways of using a tipi, from a weekend tent to a permanent home. Some people keep one just for fairs and festivals, and, though this can hardly be called tipi living, it’s a good use for one. A tipi adds dignity and grace to the scene, and provides a space where a circle of people can get together, drink tea, make music and dry themselves if the weather’s wet.
A tipi pitched in the garden of a house can provide an extra bedroom, a refuge from the rectangular confines of bricks and mortar, or a meditation space. But if it is left up for a long time it must be well used, because if it doesn’t have a fire lit in it regularly the canvas will rot, except in the driest weather.
Transport is not the problem it’s sometimes believed to be: an average family car can carry a medium sized tipi quite easily. A small tipi can ride quite happily on a couple of horse-drawn carts, or a good sized wagon. In fact, there is a tribe of tipi people in Brittany who are fully nomadic and take their tipis from place to place in wagons.
Living in a tipi year round is tough. Personally, my health isn’t up to it, so I spend some eight months of the year in my lodge and four in a caravan. But there are many people who have no other homes. In Wales, there is a village of over 100 people living in tipis; and there are several such communities in France (mostly in the Pyrenees) as well as in Portugal, Germany, Italy and New Zealand. There are also individual tipi dwellers dotted around the countryside, even, I’ve heard, in the north of Scotland.
Being part of a tipi village, where all your neighbours are living the same lifestyle, is perhaps a more complete way of tipi living than being the only tipi dweller in the locality. The tipi village in Wales has now reached its optimum size, and there is surely a need for new villages to be started in other parts of the country.
No one use of a tipi is “better” than any other, and there must be as many reasons for living in one as there are tipi people; but there is a very definite theme to tipi living which is universal.
We live in a society which is out of balance. The intellect is glorified over the emotions and intuition; material wealth is emphasised to the point where it becomes the main aim in life; humans are cut off from all the living beings of Earth - which are patronisingly lumped together under the heading “nature”.
Living outside can redress this balance, without rejecting what is good in our culture, and there’s no better way of living outside than in a tipi.