“Few humans in life have the privilege of tracing their new path home.”
Six months ago, Colgrande was a court auction win, a piece of paper. Many hectares of woodland and wild countryside, a small hamlet of ruins abandoned for years. Today it’s a well giving water again, a road drawn meter by meter on the real ground, and a group of people who didn’t know each other until recently, now beginning to collaborate around an innovative method for building the future and new homes.
It didn’t happen the way we’d planned in detail. It happened because, month after month, we learned to ask ourselves the simplest questions — Water, Food, Home, Energy, Funds — and let the answer come from the world, not from our heads. Every time we complicated things and stalled in front of the complexity, we went back to asking what was truly essential, and what happened next was something we could never have designed at a desk.
In these six months, the right people arrived, almost always in the right order: someone who can read the land, someone who can read agricultural regulations, someone who can design self-sufficient houses, someone who has already built with straw and wood — all drawn together by wanting to bring their knowledge here. None of them was planned for in any marketing or project plan. They came because someone spoke to someone else, and each of them sensed that behind our intentions there was method, not just enthusiasm.
The CàNoVa method, now taking shape at Colgrande, is made of divergent and convergent phases, of complication and simplification, of reciprocity (ayni) and collaboration (ubuntu) in practice, of tradition and innovation, of humans and AI working together.
Reaching the sixth month brought us a big, unexpected gift, one that could shape our next steps. A small, simple house — sought only to be a temporary roof during the works — offered to become something more: a first place where those who come to Colgrande to support us, help us, or simply rest can be hosted.
Six months aren’t enough to build a community. But they are enough to show that the CàNoVa method holds: ask simply, invoke reciprocity, leave room, trust that the answer will come, believe in positive dreams. Onward.
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