Elijah Hill
When you are a blind builder screws, not nails, are your best friend. Graham Mosen stands in his half-acre Inglewood garden, with a ‘‘rattle gun’’ screwdriver in one hand and a cane in the other.
Around the property are various homemade creations and projects – a composting toilet, a catamaran, and tubs of growing vegetables that are part of his ‘‘50 tubs’’ philosophy.
While he taps his cane on the system of ropes that allow him to navigate the space, Graham explains he still hasn’t decided what the half-finished building in his garden is going to be.
To his granddaughter it is a playhouse, to his wife it is a tea house – but to Graham, who is legally blind, it could be many things. It could be an ‘‘ideation centre’’ or a ‘‘think-tank for a resilient community that designs accessible landscapes’’.
The structure is made of recycled pallets and has been built by Graham without a single plan – he holds all the designs in his head.
Inside the tiny house Graham brews a cup of homemade tea and talks about a few of the adventures he and wife Val have been through over the years. These range from teaching in schools around the country, to rewilding 50 acres of degenerated farmland in Northland and living communally.
They have two children, four grandchildren and set up the Taranaki Environmental Education Trust and Taranaki
Environment Centre on their Inglewood property where they taught about sustainability, permaculture and conservation.
A genetic condition led to Graham slowly losing his eyesight – ‘‘like a brown fog coming over my eyes’’ – it got particularly bad about 1998 when he found he couldn’t finish reading book three of the Harry Potter series.
Someone told him that when a person loses their vision, they go through the stages of grief.
‘‘For a long time you deny the fact that anything is going wrong, you get bigger, thicker glasses, magnifiers, and then when you realise it is happening invariably you go through the stages of anger, self-pity, why me?’’
Graham says initially, he wouldn’t leave the front gate.
‘‘Then you realise, well, the proverbial has actually hit the fan and all you have got to do now is get on with it, and that actually took quite a while to get through and over.
‘‘I took up a cane and realised that, hey, this is a great thing, it is like your eyes on the end of the stick – it is like an antenna.’’
Since then Graham has done everything from swimming to tandem biking to a high ropes course to taking part in an adventure course at Outward Bound. He says that at Outward Bound they would write diary entries at the end of the day – because he didn’t rely on sight he was able to write through the night.
He is starting the Harry Potter series again – this time via audiobook – can take pictures using his phone which tells him when people are in shot and has cleaned the gutters of his house with the help of a belay system attached to the chimney.
In his half-completed teahouse, which has been built using a technique called ‘‘the golden ratio’’, Graham explains that being blind has made building easier.
Instead of a tape measure, he uses two pieces of wood and clamps them together to get his measurements.
‘‘It is more accurate than using a tape measure, with that you will measure three times and get the same results twice. This way there are fewer mistakes.’’
And while he used to be ‘‘quite good’’ at tech drawings, to get his designs across to others he now has to mould them into clay.
Still, being a blind builder has its challenges – ‘‘if you move something 30cm I will never find it again’’, he says.
In his workshop, every tool has a specific container it goes in and if someone moves the ropes he uses to navigate the garden, he will get lost. ‘‘Some say if you want to hide something from a blind person, put it right in front of them.’’
At times conversation with Graham can feel like jumping through the sections of an encyclopedia – he will quote Buddha in the same breath as the
Graham Mosen
lunar calendar, and jump from Māori or Celtic tradition to permaculture.
He and his son have been building a catamaran for 40 years, on the ground is a slab of log he is going to turn into timber, and he would like to turn the playhouse/ teahouse into a modular design that people can order from a catalogue.
‘‘You want to wake up and put your feet on the ground with excitement and a purpose,’’ he says. ‘‘All you have got to do in life is take on board the greatest possible task with care and attention to the smallest detail, then all of your dreams, and maybe wants, will be met – and that begs the question, what is the greatest possible task that you could take on board?’’
For Graham, a lot of that has to do with the people and the land – and how society can become resilient by making it accessible for everyone.