Recorded March 30, 2023, released July 24, 2023
Featuring: Doug Elliott and Lia Grippo

In this podcast, Early childhood educator Lia Grippo interviews storyteller Doug Elliott about his storytelling process. As an example, he shares the background for each of the verses from his iconic story song about the black snake eating the plastic egg.

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When we were keeping the chickens, catch the snakes, sometimes I’d keep it for a while. And then if I had a school program or something like that, I’d bring it and let the kids play with the snake. So I would say the snakes are getting jail time and community service for eating our eggs.

In today’s episode, early childhood educator Leah Grippo talks with storyteller Doug Elliott about his storytelling process.

Thank you, Doug Elliott, for joining us today. You’re welcome. I’m very grateful to sit in conversation with you. I wondered if we might just begin by you telling us, if you would, what’s the first story you ever remember being told?

My dad used to work regular hours. My mom was a full-time home person, and she would do things with me and my brother. We’d go to the beach, or we’d go walking here, or we’d go to the store, or whatever. And then my dad would come back and when he’d come home, they’d have a little talk about what they did that day. And then when it came time to settle me down, he’d go, here’s a story about the little boy who lived in Round Bay. That was the name of the community. And he would just take off on all the things that we did, run that through again. And so I guess that is probably some of the first stories, not a particular story, that I remember. But I did that with my son and that was always fun.

Your father would run through the story of your day with you.

Right. I was a little boy who lived in this community.

And I imagine, you can correct me if I’m wrong, but I imagine that for him also, that was a way of connecting with the separation of the day where he’s working away from home.

I guess so.

Yeah. How lovely. Do you remember as a child, did you know that those stories were about you, or did you have the feeling of, oh, I did that too.

I think I was little enough, I don’t actually remember the stories, so I just think it just was engaging.

I noticed when I had a little boy, I noticed that a narrative could pull him out of the temper tantrums or fits and like, did you hear? And then start telling a story and he had to quiet down to hear it.

Don’t we all have to quiet down to hear it?

That’s right. Life hadn’t changed that much.

Yeah, right. And were there other people in your life, other than your father, that you recall telling you stories?

Well, I mean, basically we all tell stories. We all tell about what we did. And that’s basically that makes our whole sense of reality. So in some ways, anything anybody tells you is basically a story, if they were telling something they did.

So you feel like you were surrounded by stories all the time because you were surrounded by people?

I think we all are. Yeah.

I think that’s true, too. Yes, we tell stories all the time. Do you remember the first story that you ever told with the recognition that I’m telling a story, a tale?

More in my adult life, I guess, realizing I would tell various stories in an accent. I remember Barbara Freeman and Connie Reagan Blake. They were one of the first storytellers that became public as a stage event. And they were traveling around and they kept saying, You’re a storyteller. And I was like, Oh, I guess I am.

How many years would you say you would consider yourself having been a storyteller at this point?

I guess we’re getting on 40 years anyway.

I imagine in that time, myself telling stories now and again, imagine in that time, the stories themselves have taught you a thing or two from the telling. Do you find that when you’re telling a story over and over again, that you learn something new in the story as you tell it?

Maybe about the crafting of the story and what story is ready for what audience and what way do you tell it to make it fit for the audience.

How do you feel that? Do you know what that process is? Do you name it? Name that process?

I think just watching the audience. And sometimes I’ll get together with some other storytellers and we’ll actually work on crafting our thing. What works for you about this? Here’s what I’m thinking about. And then tell the story, did that work?

One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is how ancient this craft is of storytelling and how it’s one of our oldest technologies for passing information on from generation to generation, possibly even for a generation we may never meet. I think so much about how so often the answers are all out there and we’re looking for the questions. Right. And so often when I’m listening to you tell stories, I hear and I see in my mind’s eye someone who’s willing to let themselves step into a state of innocence in order to see the world as it is. I wonder if you see yourself that way at all in storytelling.

I think if there was a formula to what I do storytelling wise, a lot of times it’s basically an incident, an encounter, a problem, or a question. You know what I saw? This thing did this, this, this, this. Well, you know what I found out? Because they do this when this happens. And I talked to an old Native American guy, and he told me that they always believe this is blah, blah, blah, blah. And then I went and looked in the books and I found this out. And so actually my story ends up becoming basically a narrative about my investigative journey. And as far as teaching material, that’s a great way to go because you portray yourself as innocent and ignorant, and we’re all innocent and ignorant about certain things. And so it helps you bond with the audience.

I found also that in so many of the old stories that get passed down over and over again. The one who can solve the really complex problems is usually the fool, the one who gets called the simpleton, right? The one who comes with innocence. And I see that. I see that in how you position yourself in your stories. I love hearing you say that everybody can relate to that. We all can, right? Stepping into the place of the unknown or stepping into the place of the wow, I wonder. And I find so much of that in your storytelling as well. So I wonder, do you ever find yourself going out and hunting for stories? Or is it really that in your daily life’s adventures, you’re catching them?

I think it’s the second more. I’m always thinking of, oh, that could make a story. Some particular incident, encounter, a problem or a question. A lot of these stories just sit around on the back burner for decades sometimes. And all of a sudden a new piece will come along, Oh, that’s perfect. That’ll finish it up right. I always like the Joseph Campbell stuff talking about basically, I guess his philosophy is that basically there’s only one story. It’s basically the hero’s journey. It’s what we’re all on every day. We wake up in the morning, we come out of the void and we live our life. And then in our lifetime, we’re born and then we come out of the void and we go back into the void again. And whatever happens in between is the journey. And that’s what we’re all involved in. And he divides it up into lots of different parts. And one of the parts is the call to adventure, where he says that you just got to discover it and I paraphrase it a little bit, ripples on the surface of life that reveals hidden springs as deep as the soul itself.

Whoa, there we go. What does that mean, that little thing? And how can we learn from it? And what does it teach us?

Lovely. We have to be paying attention in order to have that moment of, Whoa, look at that.

Was it Mary Oliver that said, instructions for living a life: pay attention, be astounded, tell about it. There it is. That’s it. Right there.

When you’re storytelling with a group of children, how do you find that you, as a storyteller, change what you’re doing?

I just try to talk to them from their perspective, I guess. Tell stories that I think that they would relate to.

You feel like there’s anything in your telling that changes when you’re with a group of children versus a group of adults?

Oh, sure. Particularly the content.

In what ways would you say that content, is it something children might directly have experienced themselves? Is it a simpler question? Is it more of the comedic?

Well, I always try to put humor in about everything. I can’t say there’s a particular way that I change. Some of the material might actually be the same, but it may be just played a little simpler or slower just to make sure they catch up with it.

There’s a story that you told once that I happened to hear that involved a snake eating a plastic egg. Right. Which to this day, I just love, love, love, love. The part of that story where you come home and get told, No, you have to take responsibility for this. You have to go solve this problem. But also the imagery of you helping that snake push that plastic egg out to me has really, really stuck with me.

It was an extraordinary adventure. And in some ways, that’s probably my figurehead story. Probably, if I have one story that people remember, that’s one. Just because it really happened and it’s so visual. So that particular story just led on to one thing after another. And I ended up writing a little song about it. And it starts with, There’s a big black snake. He’s crawling across my yard. Big black snake. He’s crawling across my yard. He may be moving slow, but Lord, he’s working hard. He’s a slippin’ and a slidin’, slippin’ and your part, slippin’ and a slidin’. Slipping and your part. Slipping and a sliding. Slipping and a sliding. Weaving and a gliding. Weaving and a gliding. Creeping and a crawling. Creeping and a crawling. Lord it’s really hauling. Lord it’s really hauling. That big black snake, he’s crawling across my yard.

And then I realized all these little incidents happened. The first thing was this snake, of course, eating the egg. But after that plastic egg incident, we stopped using a plastic egg and we needed a nest egg. And if we need a nest egg, we leave a real egg in the nest. But the problem is if snakes in the summertime come in, you got to eat them. And then we had our chickens were being free range. One time we had this settin’ hand. And a settin’ hen  is a hen that once she decides she wants to sit on the nest and raise babies, she won’t hardly ever leave that nest. You almost can’t get her out of the nest. And one day we come out there and we look and she’s dead. What’s this? This dead head laying there. We looked and all her feathers on her head and her neck were all sticky looking, kind of ruffled. And we realized that what happened, she wouldn’t leave the nest. That snake came in, said, this smells like bird. I eat birds. Probably constricted her, probably strangled her right there. Started swallowing her head. Got to her shoulder, she realized it couldn’t work.

So then the verse comes, with that big black snake he mess with my settin’ hen. Big black snake he mess with my settin’  hen. I run him off, but Lord, he’s back again. One of my neighbors was pointing out to me he had Martin gourds, which is the gourds, they put them up on poles and then they had colonial nesters. Well, look, Martin’s didn’t come that year, but a bluebird did. And he went out there one morning and there was a black snake that had crawl up a two inch pole 30 feet up in the air and were eating those blue birds. What was he mad? This thing is that good a climber that it could climb up a smooth pole. Well, that big black snake he’s hanging there in my tree. Well, that big black snake just hanging in my tree. I’m watching him, but Lord, he’s watching me. He’s slippin’ and a slidin’. Slippin’ and a slidin’. Weavin’ and a glidein’. Weavin’ and a glidin’. Creepin’ and a crawlingin’. Creepin’ and a crawling.

Lord he’s really hauling. Lord is really hauling. That big black snake, he’s crawling across my yard. Well, we started free rangeing our hens. We realized it was easier to keep hens out of a garden than in a pen. And so we dispensed the garden, let the chickens run all around the yard. And there was a little shed out there, we have square bails of hay. I separated the square bails of hay, so there was a little space, so they had  little nesting places. But of course, being free range like that, you got to check on them regularly. And in the summertime, it’s like we go out there and there’s a snake trying to swallow it. Darn it, those eggs. You’re supposed to be out there eating voles in the garden and rats and mice. Not our eggs. Those are our eggs. Give me that egg. I’d take the snake out and we put it in the garden. And it’s amazing. You take a five foot snake and put it down and there’s one little hole in the garden and it just disappears. Realize the voles have this whole network underground there.

One day I come out there and there she is. It’s this not very large black rat snake. And she’s working on this egg. And she is working so hard. And she’s stretched out to her max, trying to get this egg down her throat. I think, Oh, all right, you can have the egg, but I’m waiting here till you’re finished and I’m taking you out to the garden. I’m waiting, and she’s struggling, trying to get this egg down her thing. I’m waiting, I’m waiting. All of a sudden, out of the back of the hay bails comes this other much bigger black rat snake. Starts following every contour of her body. Starts vibrating his belly. And next thing you know, there are two cloakas, that multi purpose opening at the base of their tail. Were locked together and time stood still as they rolled together there in the hay. Meanwhile, she’s still trying to swallow this egg. Finally, I guess he’d done what he’d come to do if you know what I mean. And he gave her a few fond flickers of his tongue and off he went. And finally, finally, she gets that egg into position and she can roll it, rolls her body and you hear the egg go crack.

And she finally finished that egg. And she looked up and it’s hard to read the expression on the snake, but you wonder what gave her more satisfaction. But then I wrote one more verse. It goes like this.

Well, that big black snake he’s really on the make. That big black snake, he’s really on the make. I saw a fresh laid egg get swallowed by a fresh laid snake. He’s a slippin’ and a slidein’. Slippin’ and a slidein’. Weavin’ and a gliden’. Weaven and a glidein’. He’s a creepin’ and a crawling. He’s creeping and a crawling. Lord, he’s really haulin’. Lord, he’s really haulin’. That big black snake, he’s crawling across my yard.

I learned an important thing about that. They always say females are better at multitasking. Now I believe it.

Thank you for that.

Well, it took years to build that up. every little thing I got to add to it.

Stories, they’re living beings. They change and they grow just like the rest of us. I guess that’s true. Do you sit and watch the rat snakes often?

Often. Yeah.

And that’s just in the course of daily living, right? Because they’re here with you, living with you.

Right. And we keep some snake boards around with boards that are lifted up off of the ground just a little bit to give the snake room places to hang out. It’s a way of monitoring if we have copperheads in the area, but also a way of giving them shelter and always handy. When we were keeping the chickens, they would catch them in there. I’d catch the snakes sometimes I’d keep it for a while. And then if I had a school program or something like that, I’d bring it and let the kids play with the snake. So I would say the snakes are getting jail time and community service for eating our eggs. In exchange for eating eggs. But apparently they have a thriving community, too.

Friendships, relationships. Well, at least temporary.

At least temporary.

That’s right. That’s the one day stand. I don’t know.

Having an adult child of your own at this point who’s living a full, rich, independent life and having lived through 40 years of catching stories and sharing stories. If you have any advice for those of us grappling with these questions of how to serve the young people so that we keep those connections alive with story telling.

I guess tell about your own mistakes, I guess.

That place where you played the innocent or the fool yourself, huh? Right.

I’d say you’re trying to be humorist, though, and talk about different kinds of humor. There’s a humor of power where you make fun of somebody else like an ethnic joke, and you show that you’re powerful. Power. And then there’s taboo things, like jokes about sexy, scatological things, because we’re all that way, so we identify. But you can’t really tell any of those in public. But the only time you can make fun of somebody is when you make fun of yourself. And a lot of times it’s a great way to really… Like I always tell the story about following this old mountain man around and trying to learn the plants. I couldn’t learn it. I had to learn which berries you could eat. I found these little brown berries on the ground. I couldn’t find what bush they came from. I said, What are those? He said, Those are smart berries. Don’t you know them? And I said, Will, they make you smarter? He said, Yeah, you ought to try a couple of them. I tasted one and said, It smells like deer. It tastes like deer poop. He said, See, you’re getting smarter already.

Just making fun of myself.

Thank you for your time. Thank you for talking to me. Thank you for your time.

Thank you for listening. For more information about Doug Elliott and his schedule, see his website at dougelliott.com. Leah Grippo is a co-founder of the Academy of Forest Kindergarten Teachers. You can find more about her at forestkindergartenacademy.org. Please visit our website at earthavan.org, and sign up for our newsletter so you know what’s happening at the village. This podcast is produced by the School of Integrated Living in Western North Carolina. Have a great day.

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Broadcast August 12, 2022
Featuring: Mollie Curry and Sara Carter

Mollie Curry moved to Earthaven in 1996, becoming one of the first village residents and getting involved in natural building. She’s taught natural building workshops since 1998, covering cob, plastering, straw bale, straw-clay, earthen paint, earthbag, and carpentry, as well as permaculture. Mollie has been involved in many of the natural building projects at Earthaven, as well as teaching and doing projects in other locations, which has informed her building experience. 

Mollie Curry shares what she learned in her nearly three decades of experience designing and building natural buildings at Earthaven and around the country.

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Working together, doing something physical that’s not too hard and not too dangerous, is actually a really great way to make and deepen connections. It is the heart and soul of natural building. It really is. And I just got chills, so you know.

Welcome to the Earthaven Ecovillage podcast, where we meet people and hear ideas contributing to Earthaven Ecovillage Village’s living laboratory for a sustainable human future. In this episode, our host Sara Carter talks with Mollie Curry about natural building.

Arriving at Earthaven

I think it was about 28 years ago that I first came to Earthaven. I was working with the Permaculture Activist magazine, and the guy who was doing that magazine was a founding member of Earthaven living with another member. So that’s how I found out about Earthaven. 

I thought, hey, I could go and learn to build my own house because they’re starting to build things out there. I went to some meetings and stuff. I was way into permaculture, obviously, but I never built anything.

Buildings at Earthaven when Mollie arrived

There was the open air pavilion. There was an old cabin that was here when they bought the land and the mud hut had been started.  Some of the founding members had gone to a natural building class and they started building this with different building methods: cob, straw clay, waddle and dab with an earthbag foundation. They were putting the knowledge they had just gained into action. It wasn’t anywhere near finished, but it was begun. Yeah, it had a roof.

I was really attracted to building a natural building, which I don’t even know if I’d heard that term before. I’d never even heard the term intentional community before, but I just kind of fell in love with the people and the whole culture going on here and with this project and what was happening here. It was pretty awesome and pretty primitive beginnings living in a tent. But pretty quickly we built the composting toilet. One of the other first things that got built. There was a couple that built a little house called the Zen hut. And then we were starting on the kitchen. So, the composting toilet, they were building their little house, composting toilet and the hut hamlet kitchen were getting built that first summer that I was here.

Engaging with natural building

I picked up natural building pretty quickly because I was a wilderness ranger before I came here, and I did a lot of trail work, and so I had a lot of knowledge about just how physical things work, my body with tools, that kind of thing. So even though I didn’t necessarily have the exact skills, I had kind of a precursor of that kind of skill set. 

It was a pretty male dominated thing, and there weren’t very many other women here living on the land. Patricia was probably the only other one that I can think of at the very beginning, more came. But, yeah, I was involved in conversations about design and understanding what was going to happen and doing it, but not all of it. There were some personality things that caused me to focus more on the garden at times. I was just like, I can’t handle that dude. But that worked out. 

I focused on working on the mud hut, which was being built, and it was my project to finish that. That was my assigned project, but I was helping with other stuff, but my focus was on the mud hut. And so other people would walk by. There were lots of visitors coming, even at that early time, and I would be like, hey, you want to do some cob with me? They would hang out for an hour or two, and we would make cob and pile cob on the wall, and I would teach them how to do it in a very simple manner. And that was fun. 

There were definitely times where I stood around in a group of men, wonderful men, and I remember one time in particular, I’m sure this has happened to many people, where I came up with some idea and I said it out loud. We were all standing around, and then no one said anything, and the conversation went on. And then, a minute later, some guy said the same thing, and everyone was like, oh, that’s a great idea. I was like, these are Earthaven dudes, and it’s still happening. Just because we have the really great intentions doesn’t mean we can actually put them into practice immediately. But I was just kind of slack jawed when that happened. Turns out it’s a lot of work to change culture. But that’s why to be here, we got to change ourselves to change the culture.

Why Mollie was attracted to natural building

There are different reasons I was attracted to doing natural building. One was the DIY nature, especially back then. There weren’t very many people anywhere that you could just hire to do something like that. But I thought, I’m going to build my own house and I want to know how to do it myself and that way it’ll be cheaper and all that. 

I was already an environmentalist and it made so much sense to not build a building out of toxic waste, basically like vinyl siding. I worked for the Forest Service when I was a wilderness ranger, so I saw the commercial logging in the Pacific Northwest. And what was happening here is conscious management of the forest for different things. One, we were making clearings so that we could live in it, but trying to use those trees to build out of. There is just such an ecological bent to people that are into natural building. And that is the main reason. Use renewable resources: straw bales, for instance, soil from where you are or close by. You can use things from the earth that then if you neglect the building, will go back to earth without causing a toxic waste dump in the site of the former house. That really was attractive to me.

And the creativity aspect… I really didn’t know about at first, but then I found out about cob and sculptural stuff and being able to shape mud and build just about anything you want. Even if you build a conventional house, you can do cob details on the inside, like curved corners on the inside of the walls or a sculptural kitty cat or whatever you want, like shelves up near the top of the ceiling. There’s so many things that you can do with it. I’ve definitely built functional bas relief. And I’ve built sculptural bas relief. Bas relief. It’s just sculpture that is stuck to the wall, basically. I fell in love with the mud and then I fell in love with the straw also, eventually, but my first love is definitely cob and plaster and earthen paint and the clay-y stuff.

Feminine aspects of natural building

It’s very feminine as well. Working with cob. There are traditions all over the world of not only women, but men also, but a lot of women plastering and basically doing mud work. And sometimes I’ve called myself Messy Mollie because I tend to wipe mud all over myself. Not on purpose. But I’ve seen some amazing pictures of women in the southwest and in Mexico who are wearing full dresses, what I would consider fancy clothes, and not getting mud on themselves while they are plastering with their hands.

It blows my mind. Home building can be a very feminine thing to do. And I think it’s great to have both genders come together and it’s heavy work. 

Things Mollie learned doing natural building

One of the things I really learned early on is that a five gallon bucket of mud is really heavy. No reason to fill a five gallon bucket up with mud. I’m not macho. I don’t need to carry that. I can fill a smaller bucket or two people can carry a five gallon bucket full of mud. A two person bucket carry is awesome. So it’s like I might not have as much upper body strength, but I have a brain, so I can figure out how to do things that are too heavy for me, even if sometimes that’s asking somebody to help. 

I’ve learned a lot about building because a lot of natural building is just building: foundations, roofs, frames, post and beam, that kind of thing. One of the things I think is most important that I’ve learned by my experience at Earthaven is to insulate your foundations or any part that’s buried. We’re building a lot of times on hills where part of the building is dug in to the hill and there’s concrete block or some other form of water resistant material. It’s not going to rot. Insulate that or you will get condensation on the inside because of our humid climate. And that can create mold. So condensation. 

I’ve learned a lot about moisture when it comes down to it. Dealing with liquid water and humidity are huge learning curves. There’s still lots of debate even in building science about how to deal with humidity in houses, how to deal with liquid water. 

But, you know, having a breathable house, they even have recognized it in conventional building by Tyvek and all those house wraps are breathable. They’re like Gortex. They’ll let humidity out and not let liquid water in. Well, that also is done by lime plaster and earthen plaster. So you don’t want condensation happening in the middle of your wall and you don’t want it happening in the inside of your building because that part that’s underground is ground temperature. And then liquid water happens there. 

And drainage is so important. Drainage, roof overhangs. I’m a real big fan of gutters bringing water down to the ground instead of water flowing off the roof and then just blowing onto the wall or even just close to the house, making moisture around your house. You can get away with less need for dehumidification, air conditioning or whatever. If you have good drainage and there’s not a bunch of vegetation holding moisture around your house, airflow, those are some big ones. And in a place like this where we’re using solar and microhydro power. A lot of those times those systems are shared with multiple people, multiple families, or in my case, the power is shared with a whole neighborhood. We really can’t support people running dehumidifiers and air conditioners. I lived here for eleven years like that and I definitely saw mold be a problem in some cases and not in others. 

How to prevent mold without dehumidifiers and air conditioning

How do you prevent mold without having to use dehumidifiers and air conditioning? How do you prevent it from the ground up in the building itself? In the building itself and in your stuff. And air flow is big, light is big, and blocking out the humid air by closing windows at the right time, that’s one thing. And what I really saw was having easily cleanable surfaces and not having too much stuff makes a huge difference. It’s just like mold grows on dust. It will. And if you can’t clean the dust very easily because you have rough cut lumber. I lived in places with rough cut lumber. They were really hard to clean and so it was easy for mold to get a foothold, places like that. 

In the tiny little eleven by eleven hut that I lived in, the only things that molded were leather. Leather attracts moisture somehow, and mold can grow on it and otherwise I think there was just so much airflow and light in that building that nothing else really molded that I can remember. And it was totally in the shade and surrounded by vegetation. Well, there’s south facing windows that got lots of sun, even in summer.

Mold is definitely an issue, and I will say, unfortunately, in my 100-year old conventionally built house in town that I live in, we’ve resorted to a summer air conditioner. There was just mold growing on the walls in that house. So I guess my point there is it’s not unique to natural buildings. Mold will grow on paint, latex paint, mold will grow on whatever the finishes are on our wooden walls, in our house, the wooden paneling in our house, especially in this kind of climate.

Learning about the height to width ratio of a building

Well, this is an interesting one that I think that all the builder people at Earthaven learned by trial by fire or trial and error or whatever you want to call it, which is the height to width ratio of a building. So there’s a couple buildings here that have big outdoor bracing because we were like, oh, well, smaller footprint, build high. That way you don’t have to build as big of a foundation. That really makes a lot of sense to do that. But these buildings and then we wanted solar access, so they weren’t very wide. So they were tall and narrow. So three stories tall, but only basically one story deep, a little bit more than that. And that did not work structurally. So it ended up feeling like those post and beam structures were too wiggly, both for mental comfort and like, oh, is this thing going to fall down? And also because plaster’s going to break if you have a lot of movement in the building. So those braces were added after the fact of the frame going up. 

And then we did more research. Someone did the research, it wasn’t me. I was like, oh, that exceeded the height to width ratio that we should have paid attention to. And then after that I was like, oh, well, we won’t do that again. Unfortunately, both of those buildings were being built at the same time, so it was like only discovered when they were both already built. But yeah, that was a really great lesson. I love the build high thing. Take up less space, have a smaller roof, have a smaller footprint, and you have to consider that structural parameter when you’re building.

Building the road as we travel and life is a big experiment

That makes me think about a quote that I attribute to Paul Caron. I don’t know if he got it from somewhere else, but the sort of Earthaven motto of “we build the road as we travel.” And sometimes if we did a little more research into how to build the road, it would have served us better.

I would say, though, that it is all a big experiment. This is kind of my motto, life is a big experiment. Natural building is a big experiment. This community is definitely a big experiment. No matter what we’re doing, we build the road as we travel. And there was tons of research. I’m not sure if I could say it was actually pre-Internet, but it was not like it is now.

We were looking at books and getting calculations. There’s books that have calculations about spans of beams and with different species of wood and all that. So much stuff to research. So somehow that one got missed. Or maybe it was because it was on a really steep hill, it seemed like it was only two story, but then it was almost a story below it. Sure, it might not have clicked mentally, but yeah, I feel like it’s all the experiment. We do build the road as we travel. 

And also another little motto, which is what I thought you were going to say, is the wonky hut, which is a straw bale, is a great example of this one. We used to talk about making a little plaque that would say “how to do everything wrong and still have it come out right,” because mistakes were made in the building. That was the first straw bale that was built here. Well, actually, maybe the council hall was the first straw bale. I don’t know if they were. I can’t remember. But yeah, the roof overhang didn’t end up being long enough.

They added some roof on. The straw bales up near the top are kind of wonkily stacked, and it actually gives it a lot of charm and character. So it’s still a good house. It looks pretty funky and it’s still a great little house. So I’m sure it has its issues.

What was it that was hard to get into about straw?

“Oh, God, it’s so pokey, itchy and scratchy.” No, I don’t think it was that hard to get into. It was just that I loved mud, and that was the first thing that I was doing. So I really got into building a straw when I got together with my husband, Steve, and he and his wife deceased, were some of some straw building pioneers of what we like to call the straw bale revival, because straw bale building actually started over 100 years ago back in Nebraska, the sandhills of Nebraska, because white settlers, who were moving west,  were building sod houses, but the grass was not holding that sandy soil together. And that was right about the time of the invention of the straw baling machine. So a baler. So they suddenly had all these bales that were laying around and they were like, those look like great building blocks to protect us this winter, and we’re going to build a real house eventually. But then some people, I’m sure did, but others were like, this is a great house. Why do something different? And they plastered them and made them last.

Steve and I met at this event called Build Here Now, which does relate to Be Here Now. It was at Lama Foundation in New Mexico. That was one of the places I went and got some early training. I really wanted to learn how to do earthen paint. There was a woman that was going to teach it there, another friend. And I had already been teaching natural building before I ever took a class. I was like, I maybe should take some classes. I know enough to do this, but maybe not some other things to teach what I was teaching. 

We met there and ended up teaching apprenticeships there. We built a straw bale sauna and a bigger building. We didn’t design these. We just were the teachers of the apprenticeship doing the wall systems. So the roofs were already… Actually the roof was not up on the sauna. We did the whole sauna. 

You have morning circle and everyone comes together who’s at this event. It’s like a volunteer event where people are learning and teaching natural building. It’s a really cool event. The leaders of each project will say, okay, over here today, we’re going to be doing this. And it might be a straw oriented or straw bale oriented thing, or it might be putting the roofing on or something. And other people are like, we’re replastering the dew drop, which was a little office building that they had. And so there’d be a little competition between the mud people and the straw people. And they would be, “you don’t want to do straw bale. It’s itchy and pokey. Come with us and do the smooth, sensuous, mud job.” And the straw people will be like, “you’re going to get so dirty.” It was just fun and games. 

But yeah, I fell in love with straw because of its insulation properties. It’s a renewable-resource carbon sink that’s going to moderate the temperature of your building. We’re about to build a straw bale house in West Asheville, and I’m very excited about doing it for ourselves.

Mollie and Steve’s work now

We met before that workshop, but we got together several years after we met. He had a natural building company that was straw bale focused. And he had written some books and did a video, the first straw bale video. And I had my own little natural building company. And when we got together and fell in love, we decided to join our companies. We have really focused a lot on education, like teaching apprenticeships and classes and stuff, and also doing jobs. Sometimes we will teach a crew to do it, do whatever the step is. Like, a couple of times we’ve gone and just taught each step as it is occurring, like how to stack the straw bales, how to make cob, how to make plaster and apply it for each project. So we’ll go and basically consult like that. And we also do a bunch of consulting just on people’s designs. Sometimes people want to know,  they’re trying to figure out what they want to do and just having a conversation with them about the different methods, kind of the pros and cons, what might be appropriate to their situation. And then my favorite thing is doing, like, sculptural cob and plaster and earthen paint.

Partly I love doing it because it’s fun for me, but also creative. But partly I like doing it because you can do it in a conventionally built, latex-painted house, basically renovate a quote normal house. So it’s a way of incorporating the earth into a quote normal house. And you don’t have to build a whole straw bale or straw clay or waddle and dob or whatever house. You can actually bring the mud inside in a beautiful way. And it has a great feeling. Clay actually gives off negative ions and so negative ions are positive vibes. So you can really bring that into your space and transform it just by doing pretty thin plasters and paints. And if you really want to go for it, like cob details. I love the curving corners. I love just the sculptural fun stuff, like around windows or mantle pieces or that kind of stuff. You can also bring in a lot of personality into the space in that way. 

The house Mollie and Steve plan to build

We’ve been designing it for what seems like a long time. It’s going to be a post and beam, straw bale insulated, so straw bale walls, house in the middle of town in West Asheville on an infill lot. And we have gone back and forth about how big it is. It seems big, and then we’re like, but it’s not too big. But is it too big? All the design details. We’re going to have a little earthen floor in the bedroom and the upstairs, which is like a south facing thing. So it’s passive solar as much as we can make it. The narrow end, because of the lot, has to face south. So I’d rather have it 90 degrees. But that can’t happen. There’s natural building purists, and we are not that. For instance, we’re going to have a concrete basement. Some people will be like, you need to build that out of stone. It’s like, no, we’re not actually.  I’m really excited about building something for ourselves and having classes and apprenticeships that are going to help do that. And friend and family volunteer work days.

Natural building as a community building experience

Part of what’s really cool about natural building is it can be a community building experience. And I think that is another thing that really attracts me to it. My dad makes the joke about Tom Sawyer. Ho ho ho, you’re going to get people to wash your fence, paint your fence, or whatever. But people actually really want to connect in that way. And working together, doing something physical that’s not too hard and not too dangerous, is actually a really great way to make and deepen connections. It is the heart and soul of natural building. It really is. And I just got chills saying that.

Mollie’s website is mudstrawlove.com.

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Broadcast July 3, 2022
Featuring: Kaitlin Ilya Wolf and Sara Carter

In this podcast, Kaitlin Ilya Wolf discusses how creating a cycle of annual seasonal rituals helps Earthaven ecovillagers sink into the cycles around us and within us to become a part of this land. She then shares the parts of a ritual, challenges of facilitating ritual at Earthaven, and offers tips for rituals for people who don’t have a community or piece of land to connect with.

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Welcome to the Earthaven Ecovillage podcast, where we meet people and hear ideas contributing to Earthaven ecovillage’s living laboratory for a sustainable human future. In this episode, our host Sara Carter talks with Kaitlin Ilya Wolf about how ritual helps us connect as a community.

We’re recording this on a beautiful summer day in Earthaven’s village center pavilion. The sun is shining, the birds are chirping.

About Kaitlin Ilya Wolf

I’ve lived here at Earthaven for almost 15 years now, with my husband. Actually, my husband and I met here at Earthaven and got married here. I am a priestess of cycles. I’m an ordained minister, and I’ve been leading rituals here at Earthaven for a long time; pretty much since I first got to Earthaven and also working with SpiritWalker Orb here at Earthaven, which is the group that organizes rituals. I’ve been leading ritual here and working with other people to help us sink into the cycles here through ritual.

Place-based living and becoming naturalized

In our larger culture at Earthaven, we use the words “place-based living” a lot. Robin Wall Kimmerer takes that a step further, and she speaks about becoming naturalized to a place. I think of you in having a big role for us as far as creating culture here goes with ceremony and with ritual. Can you tell us about what that looks like for you and how that concept moves through you?

That’s the biggest part of a lot of our work here at Earthaven. In many different ways, physically, spiritually, energetically, emotionally, intellectually, working to naturalize ourselves. I think that’s a really great way to put it, to really become part of the land that we live with. The way I work is through ceremony and ritual — really sinking into the cycles around us and within us to become a part of this land.

At Earthaven, we have a cycle of rituals through the year. We celebrate the solstices and equinoxes and the cross-quarter days as a community. We have specific rituals that we’ve built over the years, created together, and they look similar to each other. We just had the summer solstice. We have a specific ritual for that that looks similar every year, but it also changes. So, it’s both sinking into that rhythm of the year, remembering where we are in the year, in the solar cycle. It also can change and morph through time and our work naturalizing ourselves with this land. Really sinking into these rhythms is a long-term process.

Cultural orphans

A lot of us really feel like cultural orphans. Coming to this way of living can be really difficult. And there’s a lot of finding our way. It can be really hard. And so finding our way together and sinking into the cycles can really help us define that. And it takes time, though. It takes time to really let ourselves be together and let ourselves learn from the land.

I think a lot of us feel like the wider culture, mainstream culture, has left us longing for more connection; more connection with other human beings, more connection with the land, more connection with ourselves. And a lot of our own cultural knowledge has been erased. We all come from indigenous roots. Every human being has ancestors who are indigenous to a place in this world. And a lot of us feel a longing for that connection, of being connected to a place, connected to a tribe of some way. And a lot of the knowledge that our own ancestors had has been erased. And so there’s a lot of ways that a lot of us are trying to reclaim that and reclaim a certain way of living.

Cultural appropriation and learning from indigenous people

There’s lots we can learn from indigenous peoples that exist now. And also, really claiming our own heritage is important and claiming that all of us have connection with land. I speak about this, it’s touchy because the issue of cultural appropriation is real. And that’s something I work with a lot in trying to be respectful and, especially if I’m doing anything with other people, always knowing that I have permission to use anything, especially if it’s of a culture that exists now.

And so it’s been really important to me to learn from indigenous peoples that exist now, but also to learn my own heritage, learn the practices that come from my own ancestry and to find new ways to find new ways for all of us to reclaim ourselves as human beings connected with the earth.

Parts of a ritual

There are many different ways people hold the word “ritual.” When I say ritual, I mean being in a specific place, creating a container for sacred space, and holding a specific intention. Usually there’s raising of energy and it’s about connecting between the worlds. Creating a sacred container lets you can reach inside yourself, reach other spirits, other worlds. There’s lots of different ways to talk about this and different people hold it in different ways. So, usually in a ritual there will be a beginning that you create that container in some way. And there are many different ways to do this.

Often here at Earthaven and in the ways I have learned, we will call in the directions. We’ll call in the east, south, west and north. Here at Earthaven, we’ll also call in above and below and center. Calling in the directions to witness us in our rite and hold us in that container can be really powerful, especially when you have a practice of doing this at the beginning and end of your ritual. It helps you as a human being to get in a rhythm and teach yourself to switch your gears, to sink into yourself, to sink into your connection with around you. Having some kind of practice that you begin and end each ritual with, whatever that looks like for you, can be really powerful if you continue to do it and continue to teach yourself that that is the cue your body knows.

The middle of the ritual can also look like many things. It’s hard to talk so generally because ritual looks like so many different things. I work with larger groups, smaller groups, and individuals. There are common things in all these rituals and they all look very differently. So, often in our group, like I said, we’ll begin with calling in the directions and we’ll state the intention of the ritual. And then we usually have a group meditation to begin with, to connect all of ourselves together. And then we’ll go into the practice of the ritual. And like I said, for the different holidays, the different rituals, that will all look differently. But it’s always about raising energy of some kind or enacting a practice to connect with the energy that’s going on in the land around us at that time, especially for the solar cycle rituals.

Earthaven’s summer solstice ritual

We just celebrated summer solstice, which is the height of the sun. It’s the longest day of the year. For that ritual every year we have a drum and dance circle. First, we gather together and light our fire and call in the directions and have a meditation where we really sink in to this longest day.

Solstice also means to be still because when the sun rises and sets throughout the year, it moves along the horizon. During the solstice it looks like it’s rising and setting in the same place for three days and so the word solstice means to stand still and so during our ritual this year we took a moment to really sink into that, to be standing still within the height of your power and really sinking into the energy of that and what is to come for the rest of the summer.

Then we have a blessing of the community with nine sacred herbs. Nine different people bring nine different herbs and ask for different blessings on the community (lavender for beauty, rose for love, cronewort for wisdom, comfrey for abundance, yarrow for health, rosemary for awareness, motherwort for family, thyme for serenity, and St. John’s/Jane’s wort for magic) and offer them to the fire. We raise some energy and continue into drumming and dancing throughout the night, knowing that all of the energy we’re raising through the drumming and dancing is contributing to that calling in the  blessings for our community. It always feels really appropriate to be drumming and dancing on the summer solstice. This is an ancient tradition, it’s one of the fire holidays.

The next morning, usually on the actual day of the solstice, we’ll meet to sing up the sunrise. We have a fire and say prayers and welcome the sunrise. We sing up the sun for all the solstices and equinoxes in the year.

For the summer solstice we also have an annual work party that we’ve been having for many years. We gather together at our swimming hole every year usually on the weekend closest to the solstice. We have many creeks that run through the land here at Earthaven and there’s one spot that we call the swimming hole. At this work party we work to deepen a little area. We call it the swimming hole but it’s really more of a dunking hole and often throughout the year, rains will come and it’ll get filled in so then every year at this time we go and deepen a spot, work on the steps, build a little wall to keep a little area a little deeper, and beautify the area, work on tending that area. It’s a really fun work party everyone getting in the creek together and it feels really good to really embody something that way in a ritual. It is its own mutual in a way. We gather every year together and do the same thing and tend to our spaces.

There’s a few different times throughout the year that we’re really working towards connecting yearly tasks in the village with the holidays and building that together to really embody the cycle in our bodies as well. More than just gathering to celebrate in ritual, also tending the land and tending different aspects of our village life together as a community.

Imbolc at Earthaven

Another holiday that we celebrate is called Imbolc. It’s at the beginning of February. We also have a few things that we do that are tending different aspects of our village life. We have a ritual where we gather together to tend our council hall altar, and for the few weeks before that, all of the altars and shrines and sacred spaces around the whole community are tended in different ways by different people. In this way, we’re making sure that all of these alters are getting tended at least once a year. These are alters are in public spaces and were created by different people for different reasons. Many of us work every year at Imbolc to tend them. And then we gather together to all tend the Council Hall altar, our main village altar.

We also have a tool blessing around Imbolc, where we gather together for a full day. At Earthaven, we have community tools that we all share and can check out and use. And on this day, we gather together at the tool shed. We call it the storage barn. We tend to the tools all day, cleaning them and sharpening them, and then at the end of the day, have a big tool blessing, giving thanks for all of the tools that help us live the lives we live.

Challenges about facilitating ritual at Earthaven

One  thing I’m still learning about, and will probably continue to, is finding commonality within a village that doesn’t have a shared religion. Here at Earthaven, there’s many different people who practice different kinds of spiritualities and religions, and yet I really feel like having some kind of spirituality in common is important. I feel it’s really important to have some things we can share to sink into these cycles and to sink into village life on a spiritual level together. The one thing we do have in common is the land. Everyone here has a deep devotion to connecting with the land and tending the land, serving the land, connecting with the spirits of this land. So, that’s one of the things in the community rituals that a lot of us are always continuing to work with —  finding ways to be together in ritual as a community that are general enough for everyone who comes from different spiritual traditions, general enough to all feel welcome ,and feel like it is theirs, and also specific enough so it’s real, because if you get too general with ritual, it’s meaningless.

I think continued practice, through these cycles, through coming together every year and having rituals that we come back to at each holiday, has really helped us as a community to find this place where we can meet in the middle together, knowing that what we all have in common is our connection with this land. We all have our own ways to personally connect spiritually with the land and with each other, but having chosen to be here in this place, in this community, with this land, we do have that in common. The cycles of this land are within all of us because of that.

Kaitlin’s training and background

I’m trained as a priestess and an herbalist. I’ve studied with Susun Weed in a Shamanic herbal apprenticeship, which really helped change my paradigm and really connect with the earth. I’ve also trained with Temple of Diana, a Dianic women’s church, international church. I’ve trained with them and am an ordained minister through Temple of Diana. I’ve also studied with Martin Prechtel in his school in New Mexico, learning the spiritual traditions and history of the world. And I’ve studied with other people. Those are my main teachers. Linda Conroy was my first. I like to mention her as well, herbal mentor and helping me connect with the land. And since being here at Earthaven, while studying with other people, I think my main teacher is the people, the community here at Earthaven and connecting with the land.

Other types of rituals at Earthaven

One of the other things I do here at Earthaven is lead the Red Tent, which is a women’s circle or women’s group. We meet at a space here at Earthaven monthly celebrating our cycles.

I also facilitate personal ritual. Anyone who is wanting some kind of ritual in their life, which could be a rite of passage, honoring something that they’re going through, some kind of transformation, it can look like many different things. If we really embrace personal ritual in our lives, the rituals can be sign posts throughout our life. When people feel they need support in that, I have a process I can lead people with, either to facilitate it or help them create their own ritual, they would facilitate themselves.

Other spiritual practices at Earthaven

There are lots of different ways people are gathering together and sinking into different cycles. Here at Earthaven, as I mentioned, the Red Tent, with women gathering monthly. There are people that gather weekly for a Shabbat ritual and dinner. There is weekly meditation that someone leads, and there’s men’s groups and women’s groups that are meeting regularly throughout the land. There’s a lot of different individuals and groups here at Earthaven that are all working towards sinking into cycles and sinking into the land and really weaving the web of our community together many different ways.

Tips for rituals for people who don’t have a community or piece of land to connect with

Even if you’re not living on specific land that you feel connected to, we all live in this world that has specific cycles. Really tuning into the cycles around you, whatever they are, the yearly cycle, as we’ve talked about, the monthly cycle of the moon or the cycles of your life, is a good start.

And I would encourage you to really hold intention with that, to think about what these cycles might mean for you and your life and to really hold strong intention when you sit with those cycles and enact ritual in whatever way that looks like for you.

I think holding a specific intention is a strong base, and it’s really important for any ritual. Think about why you are doing this and what are you hoping to get out of it. Think about what you hope to feel or do after this ritual. Are you hoping to feel a certain way? Are you hoping to bring some kind of transformation into your life? Are you hoping to connect with the land? Connecting with the land or cycle can be enough. For example, “My intention is to connect with these cycles.” Just holding that can help you focus during a mutual.

Why Kaitlin is dedicating herself to creating ritual

In a way, it feels like ritual is a way for us to focus ourselves and to connect, as I’ve already said, to connect with other humans, to connect with the land, with the earth, connect with ourselves. And ritual is a way to have a container for that focus and to have a way to keep coming back to it. Our bodies are made for ritual. I believe our human bodies remember things and when we enact them in a ritualized way, we can go much deeper. And I feel that ritual, however that looks for you, is a way to connect and keep coming back to that connection. I feel as human beings, that is what we’re here to do — to connect in all the different ways that that means.

Kaitlyn’s website is priestessofcycles.com.

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Broadcast May 12, 2022
Featuring: Doug Elliott and Debbie Lienhart

Doug Elliott is a naturalist, herbalist, storyteller, basket maker, back-country guide, philosopher, and harmonica wizard. For many years made his living as a traveling herbalist, gathering and selling herbs, teas, and remedies. Doug currently lives in Rutherford County, near Earthaven Ecovillage.

Doug shares his early mentor experience while growing up in an estuary of the Chesapeake Bay. Later he moved to North Carolina as part of the back-to-the-land movement, learning from old timers. Along the way, he shares how shoestrings made from groundhog led to him meeting his wife and how important it is to help older people be who they are.

Transcript

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The best way to understand the creator is to study creation. And that’s kind of been my mission in life, is just looking for points of contact with nature. Is it catching a frog? Is it picking an apple? Is it picking wild Juneberries? Points of contact.

Hello, everyone. I’m Debbie Lienhart, and welcome to the Earthaven Ecovillage podcast. And today I am so excited to be here with one of our neighbors, Doug Elliott.

An early mentor

We’re a similar age and going from “we used to have mentors” to now “are we mentors” and what does that mean? So, we thought we might talk about that today. Would you like to tell us about one of your early mentors?

I guess there’s an early mentor. I was actually raised in Maryland, raised in an estuary of the Chesapeake Bay. I can remember there was some wilder, rougher kids that lived around in the area. And I can remember them showing me. I remember going out with my crab net, trying to catch crabs, and I can remember taking a dip with the crab net, dipping it forward and getting it stuck in the mud. And this guy is a little bit older than me. He said, just turn around and pull it towards you. And I learned that’s the way to work a dip net.

I think in some ways I of learned at an early age that some of those people that are more closely connected to the Earth have a little more experience, and I could learn a lot from them. Since that time, I’ve always been a nature kid. I’ve always been interested in the natural world. And I’ve always found that people that have a deeper connection with nature can often teach me a lot.

Connecting with old timers in the Southern Appalachians

As I moved down to the Southern Appalachians, I found myself really interested in talking to old timers. At the time, I’ve been pretty interested in herbs and medicinal plants. I can remember just talking to the old timers about that. So many people have so many insights and experiences that it’s always been great. I ended up in Yancey County, ended up kind of actually living right next door to an old fellow, my old friend Theron Edwards. He was raised right there in the holler and he knew a lot of medicinal plants. He would make medicines and things like that. I remember going off with him and we’d hike around in the woods and stuff.

Eventually I was traveling with kind of an herb mobile, I guess you’d call it. And I go to old time music festivals and the traditional music festivals. I’d set up a booth with old time remedies, herbs, teas, and old time remedies. And what was nice about that is that any time anybody had anything to say about herbs or wild plants, they’d come and talk to me. In some ways, that was my classical education. And so somebody who knew 100 banjo tunes, they also were probably country enough to know about a number of different kinds of herbs and plants. I met a lot of different people that way.

Theron would say, well, you come around here a lot, and why don’t you just move into that old cabin of mine? He had an improved cabin and he had an old cabin. So I stayed with him for a while. I stayed there and eventually ended up buying land there and built a little house there. And although I don’t live there now…  we moved down to Rutherford County just because the situation has got even better down here.

What was really fun about going around with Theron is that I had names for plants, and he had names for plants, and we had different names for the same plant. I’d ask him, what do you call that? I call that rattleweed, he said, what do you call it? I said, well, the books call it black cohosh. Oh, yeah, I heard of that. And next thing we talk about it. And so we had a lot of adventures like that, just gathering wild foods, gathering apples up in the mountains, and showing me about different kinds of plants and birds.

What I was impressed with him is he had a deep knowledge of so much more than just herbs and wild plants. I remember one time we were up on the mountainside gathering some wild catnip that grew up there and I hear a yellow breasted chat. Now, the yellow breasted chat has this whole variation of calls, buzzes and twitters, and it’s the largest warbler, and it kind of whistles and sings and does the different collections. I said, Theron what kind of bird is that? And he said, that’s a Mockingbird. And I was kind of disappointed because I thought, well, he didn’t know his birds. But I, of course, would never argue with a traditional person like that. I said, what does he look like? He said, oh, he’s a little… got a big yellow breast and kind of greenish on the top. And there’s a Texas Mockingbird. That’s the one that’s gray with the white on the wings. You find them down around town. And he knew exactly what that bird looked like. He had a different name for it. But to me, that deep knowledge was what really intrigued me. And he called wood thrushes chitterling. That’s kind of what they sing like “chitterling,” and then catbirds were called corn planters. When he showed up, it’s time to plant your corn. And he did different things by the signs and had lots of different things.

The best thing you can do for an older person

The whole topic of eldering, elders and eldering, has really been up in the primitive skills movement, and at Earthaven too. What makes someone an elder?

Well, I guess you have to define that for yourself. I remember one time being called by another old friend of mine up in Yancy County when I moved down to Rutherford County, an old man I used to go out and hunt ramps with, and we’d do a few different things, and he’d call me every now and then. “You ought to come up here and help me do something.” Well, I live two hours away, so it was a big deal to come up there, so I didn’t go up there very often. But one time he says, I got some…  my bees are building up. I need some help with them bees. So, I went up there with a friend of mine. And he was really very tottery, but he wanted to go get the honey off his bees. I remember my buddy and I got on each side of him and taking him up the hill to his beehives, and then literally almost carrying him, just helping him. And he kind of stood there and just talked to us about it all and supervised, and we took the honey off his hives and took him back down the hill, took him to his house, and we cut the honey out of the combs and did all that.

I realized that I wasn’t really there as a neighbor, like to help him go to the doctor or whatever like that. But what I was there for was to help him be who he was. He was an old mountain farmer beekeeper, and that’s what he did. And I realized then, right then, even with my own family, that’s the best thing you can do for an older person is to help them be who they are. And I realize that my mother liked art, so I could take her to an art gallery and just help her be who she was. And I realized, I’ve got the beginning of Parkinson’s disease, so I’m not as able as I used to be. And when people helped me come to these gatherings, things like that, I realized they’re doing just that for me. They’re helping me be who I am. That’s an incredible gift that you can give to an older person.

Well, and letting someone do that for you is an incredible gift you can give to them, too. Well, I guess that’s a nice way to look at it. I hope so. Part of the making life wonderful game. We try, don’t we?

Biodiversity and cultural integrity in the Carolinas

Sometimes people ask me how I ended up in the Carolinas and why I ended up being here. I often say it’s for the biodiversity and the cultural integrity. So biodiversity, like where we’re sitting right now, we’re about 40 miles from cottonfields like you’d see in Mississippi. We’re also 40 miles from spruce fir forest, like you’d see in Maine and Canada. And so, talk about diversity. We’ve got a whole lot going on here as the altitude changes and the cultural integrity. Just like I was talking about with the old timers, the area has been less touched by civilization in many areas. And so, there’s more of a cultural appreciation for the environment and a cultural connection to the environment.

And that’s what I live off of, exploring that human connection to nature, since we’re all part of this miracle of creation, to realize that sometimes… I say that the best way to understand the creator is to study creation. And that’s kind of been my mission in life. It’s just learning more ways that I can connect with. Looking for points of contact with nature. Is it catching a frog? Is it picking an apple? Is it picking wild Juneberries? Is it chasing a snake, sneaking up on a deer? Points of contact.

One of the funny things the old timers sitting around the store, they often hang around the old country store. They hang around. One day they’re saying… there was sort of like this whole movement in the late 60s, early 70s, this back-to-the-land movement, where after the Vietnam War, a lot of us said something is not right with the way the society is going. Let’s see if we can be a little more connected to this miracle creation that we’re all a part of. And so a lot of people move back and to seek out the wisdom of the old timers and people who learn how to live there. The old timer’s sitting on the bench saying, “yeah, saw ol’ Zeke, he’s out there plowing with his mule. Yes. Had his hippie with him.” I think I know who they’re talking about.

Becoming a storyteller

Now it seems like you’ve turned a lot of this wisdom and touching of nature into stories. Well, there you go. More points of contact. You can go out there, take pictures. You can go out there and gather things, also go out there and collect stories. A lot of my stories end up being basically an incident, an encounter, a problem or a question. I go out and I see something and then explore it, and the narrative becomes what I learned about this thing from talking to different people.

Here’s a story. We can maybe talk about one time I was up in my little cabin up there in Sang Branch up here in Yancey County, and I always loved talking to my neighbors. They’re mostly traditional folks, and they often had lots to say about life. And one day I look over and I see my neighbor Lije, an old mountain man with gray hair and bib overalls, coming up the trail to my cabin. The cabin was perched up on the edge of the hill. So he had to come around the back to get into the cabin. It looked like he was carrying something, but my lawn was about waist high and I couldn’t tell what he was carrying. And I come over there. “Lije, what brings you here?” I often was down there talking to him. I was surprised to see him come to my house.

“Doug, I brung you something. Something you’ve been wanting.” And he flops the dead groundhog on my doormat. I’ve been wanting a groundhog?

“Well, thank you Lije, I appreciate that.”

“Well, Doug, you said you was wantin’ one of these things.” And I remembered that I’ve been up to his house talking a few weeks before, asking about the old days and how they got along. He said, “well, time is tough around here sometimes Doug. We didn’t have a whole lot to eat. Sometimes we just have cornbread, some greens. That would be about what we’d have, a glass of water. Now and then somebody shoot him a groundhog buddy. And everybody come around to get some. Oh, yeah.”

His wife, she’s saying, “that’s right, Doug, them groundhogs, they good.”

I said, “well, I’d like to try that sometimes.” I thought I’d get invited to dinner. It looks like dinner just come to me. Now, I’ve cleaned and skinned and cleaned animals before, prepared while game. But of course, you never learn anything by telling what you know. You never learn near as much as you do by just asking questions. “Lije, anything I need to know about how to prepare this thing?”

“Well, Doug ya skin ’em clean like anything else.” He says “now up one of them front legs these little scent kernels, buddy. And you cut them out of there and under them armpits cut them out of there. And it’ll keep them from tasting so gamey. I mean, you thought you had gamey pits. Let me tell you, a groundhog’s got you beat.”

“Well, thank you, Lije. I’ll do that.” And I was looking for a place to hang it up.

“Doug, you’d be sure you save the grease.”

“Save the grease?”

“Yeah, buddy, that’s a fat groundhog. He’s been in my corn patch the whole summer, buddy, he’s corn fed. He’ll be fat.”

“Okay Lige. What would I do with the grease?”

“Son, there’s 1001 things you can do with groundhog grease.”

I said, “like what?”

He said, “make medicine out of it.”

“Make medicine?”

He said, “yeah.” He said, “I’ve cooked many a spoonful. I’ve been coming up and it’ll help you,” he said.  “Doug, be sure you save the hide.”

“Save the hide?” Groundhog doesn’t really have a lush fur because they hibernate all winter. They don’t really need a big… Not like a mink or a raccoon or something like that. And I said, “Lije, what I do with the groundhog hide?”

“Lord, there’s 1001 things you can do with groundhog hide, Doug.”

“Like what?”

He said, “take it and you tan it and you make shoestrings out of it.”

 I said, “shoestrings?”

He said, “yeah.” He said, “in the old days, we couldn’t go to town and just buy what stuff we wanted. We had to make what stuff we had. We need good shoe strings, buddy. We get ’em a groundhog hide. We tan it.”

“How do you tan it, Lije?”

“Well, you take it and get your dish pan with some ashes and some water. And soak it in there and the hair will slip. And then you work it over the back of a chair from the time it’s wet ’till the time it’s dry, buddy, and you have you a tanned groundhog hide. You cut your shoestrings out of that.”

“Okay. Now, what about the grease, Lige?” I said, “how do I deal with that?”

He said, “you render it out like you would lard.”

I said, “how do you render out lard?”

He said, “son, how can I tell you anything if you don’t know nothing to start with?”

“So, like bacon grease?”

“Yeah. Put it in frying pan. Just put on a low heat and it’ll render out.” So, I did that and I skinned that hide. And I actually made some groundhog hide shoelaces.

Actually, I was at the 10th anniversary of the National Storytelling Festival 30 some years ago, and I was telling a little bit of this story, and I said, by the way, I’m wearing my groundhog hide shoelaces. If anybody wants to come and see me, see the shoelaces they can come up after the program.

After the program, this dark-haired woman with sparkly eyes and long, dark hair came up and said, “let me see those shoestrings.” She looked at the shoestrings and she disappeared in the crowd. Later on, I went to visit some friends who were camping near there and she was there with them. And actually, she’s not a dark-haired woman anymore. She’s got what I call a possum blonde. And we’ve been together for 30-some years, and our son is almost 30 years old. So that’s kind of a sweet story.

And anyhow, I cooked that groundhog up and it was delicious. And I realized, I thought about who there’s this animal. If you have ever had one in your garden, you know what a pest they are. They’ll go down the row, they’ll eat up everything in your garden, they completely destroy your garden. And they’re considered to be a real pest. But in the traditional context, it’s not only food, but also medicine, also clothing, or at least shoestrings. And also they use groundhog hide for a banjo head. You make music with a groundhog — music, medicine, food, clothing, and there’s even songs “shoulder up your gun and whistle up your dog, shoulder up your gun and whistle up your dog, we’re going to hunt for the old groundhog.”

So anyhow that’s out of the beginning of kind of a journey of investigation. And when I get into groundhogs and I’ll probably be talking about it some more groundhogs. There’s Groundhog Day that marks the halfway point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. And there’s groundhogs and dogs. It goes on and on.

We’re here in the Southern Appalachians, and we always hear about, Punxsatawney Phil, but is there a local equivalent? Like, is groundhogs related to Groundhog Day? Traditionally?

I think it’s more of a German custom leftover from the time of the totem animals, of hibernating animals seen as a metaphor for the human spiritual journey, that the groundhog goes into the ground in the fall of the year. And it’s like he’s buried, he doesn’t come up till spring when the times ready to be reborn. Now we’re all followed by our shadow. We all have our dark side. When they put us in the ground, that shadow, that symbol of the soul, is set free. When the hibernating animal goes in the ground, the soul of the animal is set free, and then it sleeps the sleep of death. And when it comes out in the spring, if some of the old soul, that old shadow is still there, the process isn’t complete. So, we say if Mr. Groundhog saw his shadow, we get six more weeks of winter. And that’s where that all came from, from ancient bear and badger cults.

That was an amazing thing to learn about that. Yeah.

Plans for this year

Looks like on your calendar you have a busy summer. I get to come to Earthaven at the end of May (2022). Then I got invited to go out to Utah to the Timpanogos Storytelling Festival, which is one of the biggest ones in the country. I’m hoping I can get that together. So, thank goodness I can still mouth off. I got a little bit of Parkinson’s disease so a lot of my skills are… I realize that being able bodied is a temporary condition no matter who you are. And all we can do is enjoy it as long as we have it.

I have about ten recordings out there. A lot of them are on Band Camp. Some of them you can get from CDs. And I have a bunch of books out, about five books, if you call them all books. Some of them are hardcover, some of them are soft cover. And I guess my website, dougelliott.com two t’s in Elliott.

Conclusion

Mary Oliver has a great quote which I think sort of embodies a whole lot of instructions for living a life. “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”

That just says it all, doesn’t it.

Thank you for listening. Please visit our website at earthaven.org and sign up for our newsletter. This podcast is produced by Earthaven Ecovillage School of Integrated Living in Western North Carolina. Have a great day.

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Broadcast November 1, 2021
Featuring: Swami Ravi Rudra Bharati

Swami Ravi Rudra Bharati, formerly known as Dr. Rudolph Valentine, has been very committed to the integration of Eastern thought, particularly yoga and tantra, and permaculture, and all that implies, as well as it relates to healing.

Swami Ravi shares his background as a physician and holistic healer of Ayurvedic medicine in clinics in India and the US. During his medical career, he studied tantra, which he began teaching after retiring from medicine. In 2004, he moved to Earthaven, continued teaching, and developed the Dancing Shiva retreat center. 

Most of the conversation explores a holistic view of soil health, plant health, the health of people and the planet, including the implications and challenges for healing the people and Gaia.

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We  discovered that Tantra and permaculture were really based on very similar principles. My long-term interest has been in the interface between these two disciplines and all that implies, as well as how that relates to healing. So, yeah, we’re here at Earthaven, where this intersection of different disciplines is what it’s all about.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Earthaven Ecovillage Podcast, where we meet people and hear ideas contributing to Earthaven Ecovillage’s Living Laboratory for a Sustainable Human future. I’m Debbie Lienhart, and today I’m excited to talk with one of our Earthaven members and elders, Swami Ravi Rudra Bharati. So, would you like to introduce yourself?

Introducing Swami Ravi Rudra Bharati

My name is Swami Ravi Rudra Bharati. And I was formerly known as Dr. Rudolph Ballentine. I’ve been living at Earthaven for 17 years, and I have been very committed to the integration of Eastern thought, particularly yoga and Tantra and permaculture. And in fact, at one point, Patricia Allison and myself offered a nine-week live-in workshop or event on the integration of permaculture and Tantra, and that was very exciting and very fun. We sort of discovered that tantra and permaculture were really based on very similar principles, and that’s what we played off of during that event.

My long-term interest has been in the interface between these two disciplines and all that implies, as well as how that relates to healing, because in my previous incarnation, I was a physician and practiced holistic medicine for 45 years before I retired. So, yeah, we’re here at Earthaven, where this intersection of different disciplines is kind of what it’s all about. And as we work toward a sustainable way of living, we need to weave in all these things that we have learned over the centuries to create something that is truly alive and enlivening as a way of life.

Swami Ravi’s journey through medicine

One of the things you bring is that you’ve been a real physician in Western medicine and then had quite a journey through different kinds of medicine. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

I went to medical school at Duke Medical School, not far from here, and received my MD degree. And then I did a residency in psychiatry in New Orleans in Louisiana. Before that, I did a rotating internship where I had an opportunity to use all my skills — delivering babies, doing surgery, and so forth. Then, I did my training in psychiatry. And in the course of that, I became interested in yoga. And at that point, yoga was something really new in the US. This was 1973.

And so the only way you could really find out much about yoga was to go somewhere else to learn it. And so I ended up going to India, and that’s where I met my teacher. And I also was involved in studying Ayurveda because that was a holistic medical system.

What’s Ayurveda?

Yeah, that’s the traditional system of medicine in India, which would be comparable to Chinese medicine that comes from the culture of China. So I studied that and lived and worked at an Ayurvedic hospital for some time. And then I became interested in the integration of those things, and my teacher invited me to come back to the US. He was already established in the US, and we created a program of what we call combined therapy, which combined many Western holistic techniques, Ayurveda, yoga, meditation, and so forth. So I did that work for 20 years. And then I set up a clinic in New York City, which I ran for a number of years and then wrote a book to summarize what I had learned about how all these traditions fit together. And that was called “Radical Healing.” And once I had completed the book and could offer it to the world, I retired from medicine and began to devote my time to teaching Tantra, which was something that had been part of my training with my teacher from the beginning.

Starting to teach tantra

So I had 20 years of intensive training in tantra and began to teach. I taught at a school called the Body Electric School, which was in California. And then I taught increasingly on my own. And then I came to Earthaven and eventually created this retreat center where we’re sitting today Dancing Shiva, which is part of Earthaven and thereby had access to an environment — both a learning environment, because it’s embedded in Earthaven, but also surrounded by nature and surrounded by beautiful forests, which is the ideal place to teach tantra and the ideal place to help people improve their health. So I’ve had the joy of being here for all these years and continuing to do that.

Tantra is in one sense, you could say it’s advanced yoga, but many of the teachings of yoga come from Tantra, like the idea of Kundalini Shakti and the concept of the chakras, and really a lot of the understanding of breath. But these are what are called in India sister sciences, like yoga and tantra and Ayurveda are all so closely related, but kind of based on the same foundations and therefore really easily integrated. But that is also characteristic of most of the teachings that come out of India, whether it’s philosophy or science or whether it’s medicine or spirituality, they aren’t really so separate as they are in the west.

And that’s because the thinking in the way of dealing with life is much more holistic. They are holistic, meaning that it thinks of it all as a whole rather than separate pieces. And that’s one of our great stumbling blocks in the west is that we fragment everything in the interest of analysis, which is very valuable. But then there’s another thing called synthesis. And if you do all analysis and no synthesis, then you end up feeling scattered.

Relationship to the holistic aspect of permaculture

I’m looking on the wall over there, the diagram done by one of the founders of Permaculture, David Holmgren. He has a flower-like diagram with all the different aspects of permaculture. And there are so many. At the very bottom is holistic medicine, the foundation of it all. When we step into permaculture, we step into holistic thinking, which is refreshing.

A story from the tantra and permaculture workshop taught with Patricia Allison

There were so many wonderful events. I remember one of the participants was from a very different lifestyle, doing healing work. And somehow he got interested in permaculture. And he came and it was very difficult for him because to pull together all these different ways of thinking was almost painful. And he used to come to my place where I stayed and kind of sob and weep. And like, “I don’t know whether I can do this.” But he did. And I think changed his life in a lot of ways.

Patricia was so broad and her scope of thinking, it all was exciting for her to bring these different things together. And so we just had a lot of fun.

About building Dancing Shiva at Earthaven Ecovillage

Now you’re up here and we’re in this beautiful Dancing Shiva place that you’ve built and some other people had started some things. But you’ve done a lot with it. So can you tell us about developing this site?

For many years, I was doing weekend workshops on tantra, especially for men. And it was a life-changing experience for a lot of people because such a different way of thinking about themselves and their bodies and the relationship between sexuality and spirituality, and all of that. And the way that we did the workshops was everybody helped produce the workshop. So when we cooked meals, different people took shifts to help cook and then to clean up and then to empty the compost. And then all the things that make a workshop go.

Everyone was doing it. So we were functioning in a weekend as this little mini community. And at the end, people would always say, Why do we have to leave? Why DO we have to leave? This is the way I would like to live. And so after doing that for six or eight years, I thought, Why do we have to leave? And so maybe we can create a place where we just live that. And so that’s how Dancing Shiva came into being. We wanted to set up a place where you could live the teachings.

And then it occurred to us eventually, of course, that that’s the basic idea of a monastery. Can we live the teachings? And can we all participate in growing the food and cleaning up and cutting down the trees and hauling the firewood and doing all the things that need to be done to make life possible and still remain in that state of mind and in that environment that is conducive to this other way of living. And so that’s what we have been striving to develop here at Dancing Shiva and now are able to enjoy it.

I had the privilege of coming to a recent retreat here. Deep ecology and yoga retreat. It was a very sweet environment to be retreating in.

And so that makes such a difference. I mean, these things like yoga and permaculture, you just can’t teach them in a hotel meeting room. You can try and you can get across some of the concepts, but you can’t feel it. You need to be out in the forest. You need to be in the woods. You need to be in a place where your surroundings are supporting what you’re learning.

The relationship between soil health, plant health, and the health of people

I think the punchline, which I will give you first, is that we really aren’t separate. We think of ourselves as separate, and they’re the plants, and they’re the people. And then there’s the food. And these are different issues, but they’re not in a way. Our challenge is to put the pieces back together and try to understand it as a whole functioning system. So we know, for example, that in the body, in the human body, there are somewhere around 200,000 different proteins that need to be synthesized for good health, for really, not just to stay alive, but to have vibrant health.

The human genome only contains 25,000 genes, and one gene oversees the production of one protein. So how on earth are we supposed to get all the other things that we need? It turns out that our tissues of our body are actually teeming with microbes. Bacteria have probably, now I’m not remembering the figures, but hundreds of thousands of genes among them, because there are many different varieties of bacteria. And then in our tissues, also are fungi, and they have even more diversity and more genetic material, up into the billions of different genes. And then they are parasites, which we are always trying to identifyo s we can take strong antimicrobials to kill because we shouldn’t have parasites in the body. But actually, we should have what we call parasites. They’re not really parasites. They’re actually allies. They are manufacturing some of these 200,000 things we need that the body can’t manufacture, and so are the bacteria, and so are the fungi. So our bodies are actually very similar to the soil.

So where do we get these microbes? Well, they used to be everywhere, but we permeated the planet with antimicrobials and pesticides and chemicals that will kill microbes. And we’re always obsessed. There are advertisements on television about how you should use this detergent for your wash, because otherwise, bacteria might be on your clothes. You can’t put clothes on your children with bacteria on them.

Well, actually, there are bacteria all over the surface of our bodies and inside of our bodies. And we need a wide variety of them. In the scientific community now, and that part of the scientific community that’s studying this issue. They have developed this term of postbiotics, not prebiotics or probiotics, but postbiotics, meaning the substances that the microbes produce in our bodies that supply those other 175,000 substances that we need for good health. So the postbiotics are really where the important information is and the important functions are. So in order for these microbes in our bodies to produce those things that we need, we need several things. We need them (the microbes) and one of the best places you can get them is from the soil. So if you go out into the garden and you grow your food, you’re not just growing the food that has all this richness, but you’re inhaling the microbes that your body needs to be able to produce the things you want from that excellent food. So this is where the boundaries blur. Like, where does this organism of life stop? And where is some different thing happening? Because actually, they’re bleeding into each other because we need the food from the soil.

But we also need the microbes from the soil. If the soil has been poisoned with pesticides and is using chemical fertilizer, we won’t get that from the soil, and neither will the plants. So the plants will be lacking in trace minerals, for example. But they’ll be lacking in other substances as well that microbes are producing.

Plants and mycorrhizae

In fact, the roots of the plants secrete a sugary sweet substance that feeds the microbes so that the microbes can then feed the plants now. So where does the plant stop and the mycorrhizae start? It’s all one system. So all these microbes living in our body that need to produce all these wonderful things, they also need raw materials to produce them from. And that has to come from the plants. So what we’re eating should contain a wide variety of different plants, substances and different kinds of molecules that different plants produce.

Problems with loss of diversity

When we have a diet, like in the United States, where there are, like, six or eight plants that most of our food supplies are made from, then that impoverished source of nutrition can’t really support the work that all those microbes living in your body and your own cells are trying to do. So there’s such a loss of diversity. This is just how the world expresses the issues that… We have trouble with diversity, we can’t accept people that don’t look like us. Well, the same thing. We’re destroying the diversity in the soil.

We’re destroying the diversity in the food crops. We’re destroying the diversity of microbes in our bodies with antibiotics that kill microbes. So if you take antibiotics for sore throat or for whatever, you’re killing off a huge number of those microbes that live in your body. And then when you dump Roundup on your soil, you’re killing all the microbes in the soil. So the plants rely on the microbes in the rhizosphere of the plant. That’s the area around the root. There are these fungi that are called mycorrhizae.

And without the mycorrhizae, the plants can’t absorb the nutrients that are in the soil. So you’re cutting them off from their food supply. It takes 2 grams of roundup to destroy all the mycorrhizae on an acre of land, and we’re spraying on, I forget how many billions of pounds a year on the soils in the United States. So when we disrupt, we actually fragment nature and cut the pieces apart from each other where they can’t join and function together. Then we are creating dis-ease. There is a disease on the planet.

And there’s a disease in our bodies because we aren’t getting what we need. So we have in our kind of mania and our fear of microbes, we have been really destroying our health. And so what we need is to begin to have more respect for the integrality of nature. This is an integrated system that is beyond our current understanding. A little by little, we’re learning more and more and more, but we’re still so far from grasping both the wide scope of it and the intricacy of each detail and how everything is interlinked with everything else.

So instead, we split it apart in pieces. Well, that part, meaning those microbes, are to be feared. So we have to destroy them. Well, now this is a bizarre kind of thinking and a very disturbing and destructive way of thinking. This is what leads to wars. And so it’s the same mentality and we use that terminology. It’s the war against cancer. The war against the viruses. It’s the war against the bacteria. We’re at war. And so the war always tends to destroy both the people that you’re trying to kill and yourselves.

And so the war mentality is not where it’s at. It’s a misstep like Oops, that was the wrong way to go, let’s step back and see. Well, how can we approach this? Not as a war, but as a kind of marveling at the collaboration of all aspects of nature to create this planet. It’s so incredible and beautiful and magnificent and brilliant. And can we just be in awe of that and grateful for that? And then we can become healthy?

The relationship between human health and planetary health

In one session I gave once near Atlanta, everybody’s talking about global warming back now, people backed off and they said climate change. But still everyone’s thinking global warming. Gaia, which is the planet earth, has a fever. She has a fever because we are really hacking away at her. And we’re doing so many things that are destructive to her that she’s falling ill and has a fever. This is one angle to think about it from, which is quite valid, I believe, if we want her to be well. And here’s the whole key to this. She is us. I mean, we’re part of her. It’s not really us over here and Gaia over there. Gaia includes us. We’re part of that network of living things. And that living organism, Gaia includes us. And so by making her sick, we’re getting sick because we’re part of her. Yes, it’s all one challenge. And to think you can address climate change without addressing what are you doing to the fields of the agricultural lands of the whole planet? When you’re dumping poisons on the land and you’re killing off the microbes?

And how does that affect what goes into the air and the levels of carbon dioxide. Plants take carbon dioxide and make oxygen. But when you spray herbicides on the land, it kills the plants. So the plants can’t convert the carbon dioxide into oxygen. And then we say, oh, we have rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Well, could that be that you’re killing the plants that used to convert the carbon dioxide into oxygen and water? Maybe that’s such an obvious point, but that doesn’t seem to get into the discussion.

Part of our fragmentation, our fragmenting tendency is that we look at every issue as an isolated issue, and we don’t see how all the issues are interconnected. “That’s just too much. Can’t deal with that.” That cripples us in our attempts to really do something productive and constructive for our health and for the planet’s health. And the two are the same.

So when we talk about nature now, people are talking about forest bathing, like using connection with the forest as a healing process. Well, yeah, it really does work but we are making the forest sick. So we have to heal nature before nature can heal us with the efficiency that it could because we are damaging it. So it’s a self destruction thing because the whole thing is us. And yet we’re destroying it. And we think that that makes sense, but it really doesn’t.

So we have to kill the viruses. Well, guess what? Viruses are not alive. Scientists have been saying that for a long, long time. They’re not living creatures. There’s no life in a virus. You can crystallize it and put it in a jar and come back in 100 years and it’s still there. Viruses are not living entities and so we have the idea that the viruses come in. Now, I don’t know who came up with this way of thinking, but the viruses come in and they sort of take over the cell and make it produce more of itself because it can’t reproduce because it’s not alive. Well, how can a non-living thing try to take over your cells? I mean, what would that mean? How could it have the intention? But we project onto the viruses, these monsters, and they have ill will toward us, and they want to destroy us. But they’re not even living things. They’re just a chemical compound.

So this is a bizarre kind of human tendency. And the technical term for it, of course, is paranoia. There are these little things out there. They’re trying to kill me. Well, I don’t see. Oh, they’re out there. I know they are. And they’re trying to… That’s called paranoia.

So our paranoid tendencies have led us to destroy a lot of nature. There’s a fear of nature. There’s a book called “The Problem of Civilization” by Derek Jensen. And he says that we, particularly people in North America, we have a fear of wild nature, like the dark forest. There’s evil things that go on there, and it swallows you up, kills you. And so we have been dedicating ourselves since we landed on the shores of Massachusetts or wherever it was, Plymouth Rock and so forth to conquer nature.

Well, what does it mean to conquer nature? We are part of it. So we’ve really destroyed a lot of the integrity of the life forms on the continent and out of fear and projecting that fear. So fear is not the answer. And war is not the answer. That’s a bumper sticker that the Quakers will offer you if you want one. War is not the answer. War has never been the answer to anything. So, yes, we need to step out of that paranoid position, that paranoid place, into more of a sense of awe and respect and cherishing the richness of the nature that we are and that we inhabit. And we are because we are the one big system that’s called nature.

Programs at Dancing Shiva

We have a website, dancingshivatantra.com. You can find all the information there. You can also email us at dancingshivatantracom@gmail.com. We are offering all kinds of programs on the interface between deep ecology, permaculture, yoga, meditation, and tantra. And we have programs at all kinds of levels. We have entry level programs. We have an advanced program, a three-year program for training teachers to teach this. And we’re in our third three-year iteration of that.

We are here to work along with our other neighborhoods at Earthaven to try to offer the world a sustainable future and see if people will become as fascinated by that possibility as we are. We also have some online offerings and we’re organizing more.

This podcast is produced by Earthaven Ecovillage’s School of Integrated Living in Western North Carolina.

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