Living in a Yurt: Embracing Alternative Living

Kari Cooper, also known as YurtGrrl, shares her journey of alternative living and making an impact on the world. After a life-changing health event, Kari discovered the world of tiny houses and yurts, which led her to embrace a more unconventional lifestyle. She found solace and purpose in connecting with nature and advocating for environmental stewardship. Kari's mission is to create a world where everyone is accepted and loved, regardless of their background or identity. She is now running for public office to represent the unrepresented and make a positive change in her community.

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Transcript

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It takes a brave and independent mindset to go tiny. If you are trying to figure out your tiny pivot, this podcast is here to inspire and connect you with the other unconventional, gritty, inspirational people within this community. I'm Laura Lynch, your tiny house friend and host. On this show, we are always going to come back to money because as a financial planner, this is the question I hear the most. How do I make this work for me financially? Well, that's my jam, so jump in, let's go. New episodes drop every Thursday. Well, Carrie Cooper, Yurt Girl, welcome to Less House, More Moolah Podcast. It has been probably a year that we have been planning this conversation. So I am super thrilled to have you on the podcast today. It is great to have this conversation. You're in your yurt, which is something that is yet another way of creating an alternative living setup. So tell us your yurt. Girl Backstory. Wow. So the very basics of it. I was teaching full time at a job I completely loved. I was here in New Jersey teaching at Ken Place School, all girls private school, making the best money I'd ever made in my life. I was madly in love with my job, madly in love with my students, madly in love with the other teachers I taught with. And then One day I'm going down the stairs with a whole bunch of costumes and props and like the whole fifth grade behind me to rehearse, think Shakespeare, yes, Shakespeare, because that was our new challenge that year. And my legs went out from under me. Like literally just, they suddenly didn't work and I was on the stairs. So I went flying, everything went flying. I hit the floor and my legs still didn't feel right. All the girls rushed around me, are you okay, Mrs. Cooper? I'm okay, go ahead in, girls, go I was not okay. Go ahead in, girls, go ahead, it's fine. The nurse's office was right down to, yeah, two doors from us. So the nurse comes running, because she's one of my best friends. Are you all right, Carrie? I'm like, I don't want to worry the girls. My legs went out from under me. I'll come see you as soon as class is over. So I hobble Many months later, they still don't know what's wrong with me. I am laying in bed. It's got to be two in the morning. And I'm like, what can I do? I make two thirds of the income in our house at this point. And my husband, ex -husband was only making a third. And you know, it would just move for us a lot that way. So I was like desperate to know what could I do if whatever this is takes me down and I can't teach anymore, my income's gone. So I start. Googling like you do it 2 a Because you're desperate and I know I was on painkillers and I'm like small things you can build with your hand small tiny things And deep Diedrichson comes up on my feet now, this is 2011 and he has a workshop coming up and the workshop is building tiny houses and framing I already knew a lot about building from working backstage in every show I didn't perform in. So off I go to the workshop. Now, before I went to the workshop, I write Deke because he says, hey, you can camp there when you do my workshop. I'm like, my gosh, really? How much room do you have? And we're, you know, emailing back and forth and Deke says, well, what do you have? I said, well, I have a yurt. And like he responded in like 10 minutes, you have a yurt? Can you bring it? Can you put it up? Can you give tours? I'm like, yeah, I'm a teacher. Of course I'd love to do that. By the end of the weekend, Deke Diedrickson had taught me how to use all the power tools. And then I was teaching the power tools. He had asked me to start going to workshops with him and help teach. And at one point he had turned to me and said, yo, your girl, can you come over here and show them how to do this? Yeah. And I went, whoa. And he goes, and Deke turned around and went, my God, is that offensive? Cause you're not a girl. I'm so sorry, Carrie. Like, is that all right that I called you that? And I was like, dude, I think that's my name now. You're a girl. I'm like, cause I'm a girl, but I'm a girl. And he just lost it. Deke started giggling, everybody around. That's the whole workshop. So there's where I got to be your girl. And then I just started traveling with the yurt. as much as I could whenever I was able and teaching and talking about living in yurts and living gently on the earth and how we need to take better care of each other in this beautiful place we live in. And it's just become. I think it saved me in a lot of ways because when I had to leave teaching and it was so sick for the first five years, Laura, I mean, IV, prednisone, I lost my sight, I was legally blind, like all the things in those first five years. I think if I hadn't had the new your girl thing to hang onto and pour my creativity into, I would have come out in a much darker place. Yeah. So that's how I became your girl. It was kind of like a career pivot, but it was also like I was trying to save my own self and my own family because I didn't know what was next. I just knew it wasn't good. And it wasn't, it cost us a down payment on a house. We had like 15, my ex -husband and I had $15 ,000 saved up and my medical bills ate that in four months. Like, gone. not good. Yeah, for sure. So you took up this yurt mission. And it sounds like that you have carried that forward. And certainly there's been a lot of ups and downs, I suspect. And you and I have talked before about some of the ups and downs that you have gone through. So tell us a little bit more about of your thoughts around stewardship and stewardship of the earth and you know how you see that we should be caring for the earth and each other because I know this is you know what you just mentioned it's kind of your your mission now. It absolutely is my mission now at first. I felt like it was just a smaller piece of your girl the environmental impact part and it was more me saving my own by being outside in fresh air with my feet touching the ground again instead of living in a little apartment with boxed air and all this poison, right? So your girl was saving me that way. And then I realized that that was also a bigger part of my mission. I needed to speak more about that. So I started going out and when I was speaking, one of the things I talked to my audiences about is what can you do right where you are? I'm not asking you. If you're comfortable in a 2000 square foot mansion and that works for you and you are good with that, what else can you do? Can you put solar on that sucker and supply your house and the house next door and help us fix that? Like what baby step can you do? So more and more people were coming to me asking those kinds of questions. And I just try to let Understand and experience what I have. So here's the first thing in my healing journey I found out. I was living in this apartment that I'm in right now. I smelled toxic mold the day we moved in, but I didn't have a choice because of my fixed income. So my son and I had to come here in the midst of a divorce. So immediately I'm like, where can I go to get out of here so I can breathe fresh air? So the York Girl stuff got me out. Well, I was at a festival, I think in North Carolina, for like five nights, and I noticed by night three, my brain fog was going away, my rash is on my body, my joint, like everything was dissipating because I was staying in the yurt outside in fresh air, and I was sleeping in contact with the ground. So there's two resources there that people can check And the first thing is the grounding part, like sleeping on the ground. There's a whole movement. There's a whole movie called grounding. And the natural healing vibrations of the earth, when we come in contact with them, especially in bare feet or at the beach in your bathing suit, the earth's vibration comes up and over you and recalibrates you to the earth. And it takes a lot of the pain. I didn't really As woo woo as I am, I was very skeptical because I also have a really big brain. I'm super smart. So I always look at things like, until I see the science and then I saw the science and the proof and then I did it. I found out that the more we touch the earth, the more it heals us and we heal it. So I've learned now that the only way for me to go forward and heal is I have to be in contact with nature as much as possible. We have lost that. on the whole as humans in every flipping country, but especially here in the U .S. It's all about grab the fast food, run over here, have five jobs, have a side hustle. I have more than you. And that is not what we were put here for. We were put here for each other. I firmly believe that we were put here on this planet to create heaven on earth, whatever your religion. religious background is. Whatever is most sacred to you, that's what we're supposed to be making here. We are sucking at that right now. But we have to keep trying. I mean that's my biggest message right now is we have to be the light right now because the darkness is very loud. So let's talk a little bit more about taking care of each other because I know your personal experience having dealt with some illness and being out in public places. Let's talk about taking care of each other and what you think that looks like in a world, you know, as you've pointed out where we are very isolated from each other and disconnected from each other. What would you like to share about? your experience and how things could be better. So I've started to come up with this very silly theory, but I love it. And that is that we're all meat suits. And if you can greet each person as a meat suit and remember that they have all this backstory that you don't know about and all this trauma probably and all this who the heck knows what. So if you can come into any situation and greet that person in front of you with some kind of reverence and holiness for what they might be going through on a daily basis, this is how we have to seeing each other instead of this party in that party or this color in that color, or this country in this freaking country. We don't have time for that anymore. It's 2024. You all need to put on your big girl panties. I had enough. have shared with Laura already, I think that I'll be running for public office soon because I'm really ticked at this world. I busted my butt in my 20s and 30s to make a beautiful world for the family I was going to create. Then I created the family and turned around and now the world is like, I have no words for where the world is right now. I just know that I need to be the light. I think if we can start thinking about each other as just meat suits with a lot of problems and go forward like that and try to be more understanding. think we're so quick to judge you put a label on every darn thing. We need to let that go. We are all meat suits who want love, right? Shelter, food. That's kind of it. And maybe sometimes go to a concert or something. You know? And health, We all have connection. I'm always striving for that, yeah. Because I have the Lyme's disease and now the newest diagnoses of the Bartonella, which is basically Lyme's older, bigger, meaner brother. And it's giving me a heck of a challenge right now. I keep losing my sight in the eyes, getting rash. Well, you can see them. I tried not to cover them up too much. so everyone can see, but the rash is all across here and they come out about this far and the paint. Hoo -wee! So yeah, the barchanel has given me a run for my money, but as I said before, the more I get outside, the more I fresh air, the more I get positive interaction with other people that understand me. The more I meditate, the more I do forest bathing, which I'm really into now and I want to my certification in that. Because it's huge. Like they've been doing it in Japan for ages. They got it down. They know what's going on. We need to all forest bathe like daily because all the modern equipment that we're being inundated with, our bodies can't take it. The meat suit is like, even if you don't realize So we need to get out and get that kind of sloughed off of us so that we can really be genuine and like live out of our hearts instead of out of this noise. Yeah, I think that you, you know, bring up some good points that we all have our stories and sort of, you know, generational trauma as a term that's like very, you know, very much in the ether these days. I think we're all becoming more aware of the way that the stories that have passed down through our family have created wounds, then those wounds reacted with more hurt that got passed down. There's this expression I've heard a lot lately, and I've probably said a lot lately, hurt people, hurt people, hurt people. It just passes down through the family, right? Absolutely. And so now is our opportunity now you know, so many of us are recognizing that fact to, you know, work to reverse those behaviors and those reactions that just get passed down, you know, through the family and, and look at others and understand that others have that exact same story going on in their lineage and in their experience of the world. And how can we treat each other in a way that honors the fact that we're you know, doing the best that we can with the, you know, with those things that have been passed down for us and that we're trying to, you know, take care of ourselves and take care of those that we care about and hopefully do more to take care of the earth that nourishes us and the earth that has taken care of for all these many generations. And so I love the fact that you're out there talking about that. How do we take care of each other? How do we take care of the earth that nourishes us? How do we connect with it in a way that restores us in a way that is the natural way? I just was glancing through Instagram a minute ago and there's a story coming out in the media reminding us that we have been you know, focused on protecting ourselves from the sun. And yet the nutrition that our body gets from the sun, the vitamin D that our body gets from the sun is so healing to us. so understanding that we were created in this ecosystem that we live in. Right, we're part of it. We need to stop separating from it and understand the power that comes from working with it instead of against it. Like I thought we learned that, but I guess we did not. So I think that definitely we're becoming more aware of that. So that gives you some hope that people are reconnecting, right? And so as a mom, how do you think about future generations and what are you hoping for in the future? I'm hoping for the world I dreamed about when I was in my 20s. When I was in my 20s, I wanted to marry my fiance at the time and we were going to have one child naturally. Then we were going to adopt a child from every single nation that needed adopting until we couldn't afford it anymore. I want to see that kind of a world. I want to see a world where my son who's 14 can go forward and be whoever he wants to be in his 20s, choose whatever it is he wants, but know that he is safe in his choice and not threatened. Whether it's religious, you know, a religious threat, which a lot of my friends are facing right now. Whether it's a social threat, which I face every day as a bisexual woman. I mean, there's so much out there that makes me feel threatened when I go out in public. I have to be careful in some areas where I live about wearing rainbows. It's, that's not okay. That's not okay with me, which is why I'm running for fricking public office. don't know. But yeah, the world I want to see is one where my son Tristan can go forward, love whoever he wants to love, travel wherever he wants to travel. Not here that Americans are jerks. or not go to France and hear the French people are snotty, or not, and let's get all the prejudice out of the way. And again, the meat suit. Everybody's got the meat suit and they got that, what is it? Whose hierarchy of needs, Laura? The Maslow hierarchy. Thank you, Maslow's. Right, so if we all start there, we're on the same base. I don't care where you If that's the world I want for my kid, where he can just meet someone and say, hi, how are you? Let's go get a kombucha and hang out and not have anybody pointing at anything, whatever he chooses. Yeah. So you've been an activist for a long time. And now you're thinking about running for public office. How do you, you know, what would you like to achieve in that? some visibility to start with. The reason I'm running is I think it was about two and a half years ago, I got really mad when a number of things were overturned and then Roe v Wade was overturned and then I really lost it for about 24 hours. So I said, what can I do? I think it was Eleanor Roosevelt that said, do what you can with what you have where you So I said, all right, what can I do? I'm in this town. All right, the first thing I can do is see who's on my township council. So I looked it up and I started crying because there was no one that was female on the council. There was no one that was divorced that was on the council. There were no people of color on the council at And one of the council seats was wide open. So we're not even paying attention, myself included, to what's going on. have a council seat open. So I was like, no, no, no, I need to call myself to accountability as well. And as sick as I am and as pissed off as I am, if I have to roll in there on my flipping walker in order to get stuff done, then that's what I'm going to And I just want to see some representation for divorced women, for people of color. I'm Native American. I don't look it because it's a lot of generations back, but I am. There's just so many minorities in my town here and people of lower to middle income like myself that not being represented on my town council. So that's something I can do or try to do in whatever capacity. So I'm going to try. once they find out I'm coming it's going to be a rough one. I've already spoken to a couple local mayors, etc. and let them know. And they said it's going to be interesting. I said I know it is and it's going to be hard but that's okay. I'll just do it at whatever capacity I'm So let me, if you would indulge me, I'm just gonna sort of go back and summarize. So in your 20s, you wanted to take care of uncared for children from all around the globe. Then you spent a long time teaching, very service oriented. Then you used the York girl, Position to talk more about caring for the earth and caring for each other. Yeah, and now you are even in your You know in your health and with all of the other things of needing to take care of yourself You would like to represent the unrepresented on your town council So it sounds like that you have had a mission of creating some impact while you have been on this for your entire life. share with us, has, we've talked about living in the Yurt from a health perspective, how has not being focused on achieving the American dream, choosing alternative housing, whether that was apartment or Yurt or what have you, how has it allowed you to maintain your focus on making an impact? rather than creating a really nice nest for yourself. Right, right. Well, I mean, the first thing that pops right into my head is it takes me out of the stream of normality. So as soon as you get out of that stream of work the nine to five, put the money in the 401k, all the things my parents taught me you're supposed to do that no longer work. Once you release that and step out of the stream of what everybody else is doing and do something funky like that, it's easier to focus on the higher thoughts that you're having, the bigger dreams that you're having. There's less distraction. When I'm out in my yurt, even if the venue offers me electricity and a spot with all the air conditioning inside and all the things, usually I will pick outside and I want to be on the ground because that's part of the yurt girl thing, right? Part of getting connected to the earth again. I think just always being willing, even when I was scared, to step out of the norm and just do it has been the thing. Or just try and be ready to fail. I have failed so many times. Gosh, Laura, everybody will love this one. My favorite Your Girl stories about messing up, even though you're the professional. I was so tired. at that North Carolina festival I was mentioning earlier, I'm giving a workshop on making a yurt in front of a whole bunch of people. And I'm like four people helping me and they've never done a yurt before and I'm instructing them. And I turn around and I look at the work yurt wall, okay? And I'm holding my first cup of coffee because I had a rough night the night before. None of us could sleep because there were big trucks. buzzing the place and keeping us awake. was really weird. Anyway, so I can't, I'm half awake when I'm trying to teach. like, I got this, I got this on the across, it's up here in my sleep. So I turn around. The yard is upside down. The wall. The wall is upside down. Now I turn around and see that the whole wall is upside down and there are many, many people watching me and filming me and YouTube me and all the things. And I look at it and I just start laughing. I turn around and I said, now my friends, my friends and new neighbors, you see this yard? Don't do this. And they're like, what? Like, see this? Wrong. Wrong. I am wrong. Do you see this coffee? I didn't finish it. This is why the yurt's upside down. my gosh, the whole place lost it. We had to take it down, turn it upside down. I was purple with embarrassment, but I was like, I just have to embrace it. I just have to embrace it. But it ended up being one of the most fun workshops I ever taught. So you have to not, I won't say not be afraid. You have to not let the fear stop you. Gabby Bernstein, Gabrielle Bernstein, big thought person. She says fear is false evidence appearing real. Don't fear it or fear it and move through it. Because we have this, we have this, and then we have this. That's it. And that's the one thing my illness has taught me is that I am especially myself. here we go. The water works. I am not, I am not guaranteed tomorrow. So I better make really good use of today. That's my legacy. So if I can teach people that we have now. And remember we are meat suits. That is another soul looking at you, right? That is another spirit with a family that loves people too. Even if they're being a jerk to you. Yes, that's beautiful. Well, I'm going to transition you out of the waterworks and ask you one more question. And that is you have to tell us about your girl theme song. And if you want to sing it a little bit, you can. So I was telling everyone, I was telling Laura earlier about when I first went out, I had this wonderful song that I was always singing called Back to the Earth by I Jason Mraz. Yeah, that's right. And it's all about being connected to the earth. And that's where we need to go back to because that's what's going to heal us. When we get in connection with the earth and it gets connection with us, we heal together instead of the separation. Yeah. So that song is called Back to the Earth by Jason Mraz. it goes, let's see. I love the beginning because what I used to do when I speak, come up the aisle. I used to, if they have tech there, I have them play the song and it starts. Then I start rolling up the aisle in my great outfits, singing and I go, doodaloo, doodaloo, doodaloo, doodaloo, doodaloo, doodaloo, doodaloo, doodaloo, doodaloo, doodaloo, doodaloo, doodaloo, doodaloo, doodaloo, doodaloo, I'm going back to the earth. I'm going back to work. And then it's all about how we got to work with earth. And just like the lyrics struck me and that became my your girl song for a long time. Well, that is beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing that with us. It's definitely my intention in this tiny house that I'm in to be back to the earth. I know right. And I think that's something that all of us in this space are yearning for. So thanks for setting that example and sharing your thoughts about that. So Carrie, if folks wanna track you down, where do they do that? So you can find me on all the things as just yurtgirl. So it's Y -U -R -T -G -R -R -L. Double R is cause I'm a little zesty. Or Sassy. And you can find me on it's york girl. Just Google that on all the things and it comes up on Insta, on X, all the wonderful things we have now. And I'm trying to get on TikTok a little bit, but it's a lot of work. All this social media. and then you can find me, for instance, if you're local, if you look up New Jersey Lunar Fair, I'm always there with Tamer Lane, you're, hey. Thank you for taking the time to listen to Less House More Moolah. I have another free resource on my website for you, the Unconventional Values In just two minutes you can pinpoint your style of freedom seeker, security guardian, adventure enthusiast, or community builder. Check it out at TheTinyHouseAdvisor .com. And one more Well, thank you so much for being on the podcast and sharing your life experience and your impact, unless with more love. It's been an honor Laura. Thank you so much for being patient and waiting on your podcast tell a friend who is trying to a values based life. It would totally make my