I'm going to come right right at you there so watch out.
I'm Sun Ray Kelly.
I consider myself an artist because I do do carpentry in my work but it's more
about the art and the beauty that I'm trying to convey.
So right now we're at the side of the temple. This is the latest structure
we've built on the land here. Some of the natural building features is the
walls are straw bale. It has an earthen plaster. Actually came out of this hole
that we dug to build this pond. we took all the soil out of that and put it on
the wall, but that's what we used to make the wall. It has a living roof which also has
lots of straw on it. It's like a double layer of straw with two layers of pond liner.
One of the things that I try to do with my art is to create a feeling of motion
and movement and nature eplores a straight line. She doesn't do it and so I
do it as little as possible too. I try to use and I love curves and I love the
curves of the human form. I love the curves of the earth. I really dig into the sacred
geometry of the spiral and how the spiral is how energy moves. A lot of my
work I don't really feel like I'm just building buildings anymore. I'm creating
energy vortexing machines that actually
transform human consciousness. Nature's the greatest artist you know and I mean
nobody else is as good as nature and so when I can ever I can borrow from nature
and use her in my art then my art becomes much more powerful.
Some of the other
features has a radiated heated floor in it. It's heated by wood-fired mass heater
that heats the bathtub and heats the house heats water for the floor.
Principles are of the down drafting stove so if we light a
fire over here get the chimney warmed up and then we pull the fire through this
maze which goes up over an oven through this heat exchanger heats the water down
under the bathtub and then goes up the chimney so it's a way of getting
a lot more heat out of the fire.
And then this here is the old dome and
this is all inside this structure. We basically live in the circle around the
old dome and inside it's more of a just a special place.
Well the dome is made of cedar and basically I cut the boards thin enough
that I can bend them. It's really a process of just bending boards and
first make a circle, a ring out of laminated wood on the ground and then about nine
feet up there's another circle that I make out of laminated boards and then on
the top is the hub so that the first board you slip in under the hub you bend
it over the upper circle and then down to the lower circle and you screw it on
then you go across 180 and you put one on and 90 and 90 and then you got four
and then you just start filling them in till the whole thing is seated in. It
makes a beautiful dome which is pretty amazing and a swing cause I like to swing around.
Yeah. Kids love it. I love it. It's a pretty functional house and then it's
easy to eat. It's got a wonderful kitchen. This is the kitchen.
This house we're coming to
is the Sky House kind of was my second major house on the property. I think I
started in 82 kind of moved in 88 or whatever and then it was still not
finished but started out to just be small and then it just kept
mushrooming up and growing up you know.
Well the first advice I give everybody is take a walk in nature every day get
out be in nature and then allow that to work on you because it will work on you
and seeing nature you'll automatically get the sense of its beauty and its
majesty and it's grace.
That's my electric trike. It weighs a hundred pounds goes 65 miles an hour and
but anyway this is a solar diesel-electric hybrid. It's a net gain
vehicle. It's designed to make more power than it uses in the year by collecting
sunlight and it has electric drive motor when your solar charge runs out then you
can run on diesel or biodiesel or veggie oil it's kind of old-school and it still
burns fossil fuel but that's the little diesel gem
set there. This is one of my masterpieces but also in process too
you know it's infinite amount of money it's costing to build this thing.
Even the suicide doors and stuff, but the electric motor's in here inside
the box here and in the tranny. It's a very comfortable little house in here
roomy and we loved it. We loved traveling and being part of it.
Practice. Everything in life is about practice. If you want to get good at something you
practice. You want to improve your skills you practice. It's almost the answer to
everything you want to do is get out there and do it. You know little steps. Little
steps lead to big steps so that's how you start.
Challenge yourself one way or another do something like that and then
those gateways will open, those valves will open and then the floodgates will flood you
with immense more creativity than you ever felt possible.
Ninety-eight I guess was when we built this one and of course it was called the
Garden House because it was built right in the garden. It's the kind of thing where I
was going through my divorce with Judy, I needed to move out, I said, "well I'm
going to move into the garden", so I moved in the garden and built the house in the
garden. It's a very solar house. It has a very nice solar gain. It's a fairly efficient
house in that it doesn't ever get too cold or too hot. It's shallow so that the
light penetrates the whole house so I can sit here in the winter and I get
basically I get the Sun going across the sky but I get the reflected Sun off this
glass so I actually get two suns heating me all the time on this deck so the deck
never gets very cold here.
And this is the other half of the solar diesel electric. This gypsy wagon here it's
basically a Toyota with 70,000 miles. It runs perfect. I couldn't kill it. I had this
dream to do this or be so lucky but I couldn't kill the Toyota so I decided I
would have to cut it in half and make two out of one and that worked real well
and a beautiful little gypsy wagon which me mostly just use as an Airbnb
guesthouse because we don't really take it out much on the road. It's a little tall. It
catches the wind pretty good.
We are in the outdoor kitchen. We use it, the Airbnb folks use it, the community that comes here.
It's a sweet spot for everyone. I asked myself, "what is the greatest thing that I
ever did in my life?" and for me it's building the pond because building the
ponds I'm able to affect the ecosystem greater than anything else I do.
I create the ponds, the frogs come, I plant the fish, the Eagles come, the herons come
the otters come. All these creatures come to eat from the ponds and so I got
this tremendous amount of life. The orchards are great too because we
got deer, bear, tons and tons of brood light coming in here you know to feed on
these on these systems that I've created and I'm trying to demonstrate that
this planet is the garden planet. It was meant to be a garden then it's just
happy happy happy when it's allowed to be a garden and on down the trail we go. One
of my favorite parts of the property is down in this forest. It's
where I come to get my inspiration on. This is the little stump house
here. This is one of our little Airbnb cabins.
I lived here my whole life. I grew up on this land and one of the first things we
built was Stump Houses. We would go and we would go inside these giant cedar
stumps which were absolutely amazing and make little little fortresses and stuff
and this is our sauna. This is 30 years old now.
Amazing amounts of saunas in there.
This one pond here it's got the most fish of all of them. My best fish success
story here. Well this is our little outhouse for the Airbnb guests
and the sauna and stuff over here. One of our little tree houses.
Mostly for fun. I love treehouses.
Thirty years ago a guy brought me this roll a rope that he got from the dock for
anchoring huge ships in the water down in Seattle and I always was trying to think
of something to do with the rope and then I came up with this idea to build a
suspension bridge across here and so we did.
Good little bridge. Now we're kind of circling back. This is the orchard. This
is you know this is where, where I started my dream of edible forestry
and so I got loads and loads of apple trees, nut trees, hazelnut, walnut, hickory, hard
nut, blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, huckleberries, blackberries so we're
trying to create a sustainable world where we can live off the garden. Oh yeah
yeah let the love in your heart flow. Forgive everybody and move forward in the
present that's probably my three things. I would pass it on as
good advice and take a walk in nature.