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.

Listen Here

View all our podcasts and search by date and topic. 

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.

View all our podcasts and search by date and topic. 

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.

Listen Here

View all our podcasts and search by date and topic. 

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.

View all our podcasts and search by date and topic. 

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.

Listen Here

View all our podcasts and search by date and topic. 

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.

View all our podcasts and search by date and topic. 

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

Listen Here

View all our podcasts and search by date and topic. 

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.

View all our podcasts and search by date and topic. 

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.

Listen Here

View all our podcasts and search by date and topic. 

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.

View all our podcasts and search by date and topic. 

Released June 28, 2021
Featuring: Paul Caron and Diana Leafe Christian

In this podcast, Earthaven co-founder and village philosopher Paul Caron shares how he got involved with the other Earthaven founders, innovations in round-pole timber framing that enabled building Earthaven’s iconic Council Hall, and what the Earthaven project is all about for him.

Listen Here

View all our podcasts and search by date and topic. 

Introduction

The main thing that we’re doing and trying to show people isn’t growing organic food, it’s sharing resources, coming together as a group and deciding how to make our lives better by cooperation. This is the thing that our culture is constantly tearing down in order to sell products to more people.

Hello and 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, Earthaven member and communities expert Diana Leafe Christian talks with Earthaven co-founder and village philosopher Paul Caron about the origins of Earthaven Ecovillage and the design of our iconic council hall.

A bit about Paul

Well, my name’s Paul Caron. I come from Michigan originally and I’ve moved around quite a lot. My life story is a bit complicated, but for a long time, I had  making a community in mind and mostly the choices I made in my life are to that end.

How Paul helped found Earthaven Ecovillage

OK, so first I came to this area already with starting a community in mind, and I had had been actually thinking about this for a long, long time since I was about 20. That was in the early 80s. And I moved into a community that was already formed, which was up the hill from here, and the vision there was “let’s all buy land together because it’ll be cheaper.”

But I had a different idea. Something more public and more radical. And there were several other people that were more of the page that I was, but because of the way it was set up, there wasn’t a way to actually do what I wanted to do. But we did hike around and there’s a hiking trail that comes through this land goes down the hill around and up the other side. And as we would hike through here, I was like, this place seems like the possible place for this vision and then I met people from Earthaven who were  already formed as a group and they were looking for land. They didn’t own land, but they called their forming group Earthaven.

They had been through several iterations of people and had gone through lots of preparation about the vision and the agreements, which is a good idea if you want to form a community to do all that first. The worst thing to do would be to buy land and then try to figure out what you want to do.

People from the group came and looked at this land and they were somewhat unimpressed because they had seen many pieces of land and they had a pretty strict list of what they wanted and what they didn’t want. One thing that they wanted was cleared land and structures, which this completely isn’t. There was one hunting cabin with only three walls. And what they didn’t want was neighbors that drove through, which we do have. But one thing that they wanted was good bold water. That’s how real estate people talk about streams. We have really nice water here.

They had seen many pieces of land, I don’t even know how many hundreds over a four year period. And they had never found anything that was exactly right. And the group was to a point, I believe,  where if they didn’t do something pretty quick, it was going to dissolve from lack of momentum and not finding that land.

Valerie Naimen, who was kind of the leader of the group, a person who had initiative and also freedom since she had real estate and didn’t have to work a job. So she pretty much led the land search and did a lot of tracking around. That’s why they were able to inspect many, many pieces of  land because they had someone full time trying to find this land.

There was the community next door, some of us who were into the more what you would say, eco-spiritual persuasion. The other people were just more like mainstream work-a-job-living-in-a-house types.  We started having a solstice and equinox round of gatherings that we would do consciously every solstice and equinox, a whole bunch of different people in that group. So it was like a whole weekend concentrated group ritual, you know, a party basically, and learning how to do that, not really trying to follow any particular tradition, but just putting our own ritual together. Well, just about in the middle of that whole thing, I hooked up with Valerie of the Earthaven forming group.

That ritual cycle was extremely magical and a lot of beautiful, intense experiences were had by all. Well right in the middle of that we started negotiating to buy this piece of land. We basically had to convince a group of heirs, so it wasn’t just one person, but it was a group of heirs, some of whom wanted to sell the land, some of whom wanted to keep the land. It had been on the market and then it was off the market and the older heirs wanted to sell it and the younger heirs wanted to keep it.

And so it took a while. But what happened was Valerie actually sold her house and moved into an Airstream on the border of this land on another friend’s property that bordered this land and put down an escrow and made an offer. And she did this personally.

You know, who’s in, who’s out. And also, it’s ten thousand apiece today, it’s 11 tomorrow. And this was very effective. Nine people put up money. This was September 11th of 1994. And by the end of the year, which is when we closed the deal, we had 14 people. And so we put out a big down payment and started buying this land.

Developing the land

So when you folks bought the land and now we have a physical Earthaven not just an idea of that name, but a real life property and people. The first thing to do was to develop the physical infrastructure, roads, bridges, footpaths, buildings, and my understanding is that you have been instrumental in this all along. You’ve been engaged in the spiritual and organizational and every other aspect of life.

And you, Paul, have also been perhaps the first and most significant person working on physical infrastructure. You build roads, you build bridges, you build buildings. So one of the rumors about Earthaven is that you were instrumental in the design of the council hall, our main meeting hall and the design of the whole community center complex. Would you tell us about that?

Yes. So the year before we bought this land, some other land was bought that borders both the community I was in, Rosy Branch Farm, and and this property that was with like minded people that were also friends of mine. And so that ritual cycle that I was saying about before we had the last installment, we did that for two years, so we had eight rituals.

The last installment was done on that other piece of land. And during that time, I started thinking about this whole community complex and I started thinking about a community building. And originally I was thinking post and beam. And mainly my vision was about using peeled poles, round poles, instead of square timbers.

Inventing a system for round-pole timber frame construction

And the thing is, because it’s a juvenile forest here, there’s lots of poplar trees that are about the size of a post and beam, which is about a foot thick or so. But if you cut it into a square post, they’re not big enough yet. But if you use the whole thing round, yes, it’s big enough to make structures out of. And so therefore, I started focusing on a system that would that would be able to do this.

Well, as you can imagine, making mortise and tendon joinery, etcetera on round poles is not the same as on square timber.

And so I had to invent a system. To be able to do it, repeatable cuts, where if things are square, you just measure and everything’s square. Then the other thing is that because in a round pole situation. What the system ended up being, is that the only straight line that you really have is the center line of the round pole.

So if you can put the round pole in a situation where you know where the center line is, like a lathe. then you can measure from that center line and make repeatable cuts and measure angles and do everything. And the other thing with that system is that 90 degrees is no longer a special angle. So you can make post and beam frames that aren’t all square, which is so satisfying to me because I was completely bored with square even numbers and all this, so the first idea I had was a big square timber frame and I mapped out a structural grid for it and everything.

But we had to go through a decision process, a design process to figure out what this big building was going to be our community center where meetings would be.

Well, and just like this is the thing. Valerie had done lots of research into communities and had come up with this fact that exists, which is that people who get a piece of land, if they just go start building houses and figure they’ll build the community center later, they never, never do it.

One of the main agreements that we had in the first was that we would wait to develop individual home sites until a certain amount of community infrastructure was finished. And we thought, well, a year or two we’ll build this community. But anyway, so the first thing we did was,  we surveyed the land. That was the other thing. It was we won’t start building houses until we have a total site plan for the entire property, a permaculture-based site, because several of the founders were permaculture teachers and designers.

Envisioning the community building

And the the intention of the community was to be a permaculture demonstration. So, anyway, what we did was we went out to Hunting Island in the fall. I think it was September or something like that, August, September, late part of the summer, early fall and Hunting Island at that time, I think it’s not that this way anymore because of the hurricanes took the beach away. But when we went there, there was a really wide beach.

And out on that beach, we basically drew in the sand a plan for a building and, you know, walked around in it, figured out how big the rooms have to be, blah, blah, blah, etc.. Well, we got back here and then we drew it all up on paper and then we started talking about it. And there was a crisis of confidence in the group because most of them were not builders and it seemed like too big. Too complex of an idea, and we got, like, paralyzed.

Well, so what happened then was in the meantime, in my mind, I had created this idea of the ultimate meeting hall. So what we were going to do with this other building was have a smaller meeting room that would do for now and some other facilities, office and stuff like that, and so then when we got to this place where we just, you know, it was kind of hard to figure out how to go forward.

Designing the Council Hall

Well, the thing is, we didn’t have any money. We had spent all our money buying the land. I mean, we bought this land for four hundred and twenty and sixty eight thousand dollars plus interest.

Ultimately, I think we paid about 570,000 dollars and we did this in seven years. Yes, it’s actually pretty amazing. But anyway, that’s another whole story. So when we got to this point where we couldn’t decide how to go forward, I brought forth the plan for the ultimate meeting hall, which was a round building, very simple to build, because it only had three parts. It had posts, it had beams. Some of the beams had crisscrossed, you know, diagonal knee braces and some didn’t.

And that was all. And so we cut down a lot of poplar trees and we peel the bark off of them and we made all the parts.

Oh, yeah, 13 posts, so the thing about 13 is that I was bored with even numbers and so 11 was too far, the span between. To divide a circle into 11 was about 11, 12 feet or something like that.

Well, the circle was 30 feet in diameter where the poles were that right? Thirty five, 35. And I think you have said in the past that ergonomics about how people meet in meetings is they need to be able to see each other clearly. Yeah. And so across that much span with chairs put in in from the circle of pillars is about the right amount to still identify people. But you can get the maximum amount of people around the circle.

I believe that I got this from one of the patterns in a pattern language by Chris Rog’s, right where there’s a distance beyond which you can’t recognize the facial expressions of people that well enough to have a meeting.

So anyway, we designed the the circular building based on that. Anyway, so 11 was too big and too far a span between and 15 was too small, so it had to be 13 and that’s what we did.

Well, what happened, my original design had like a… So the circle of pillars goes 15 feet high and it has four feet that sticks above and then beneath. And there’s windows around the upper and then below those windows, a roof goes out to a wider circle, circular wall. But I originally thought it would go all the way around. But then in the committee that we were actually finalizing the design, someone suggested, well, wait a minute, it should have more windows on the south for solar gain.

Yeah. And so and then I was like, oh yeah. So we can just, you know, make the five sections that face toward south be… No, no. And so I call that the wings.

The outer circle of more space outside the pillars around the back, the north and west and east are the wings. Yeah.

Yeah. And actually all the time I actually was thinking of the play of the space as a theater.

Like in theater. In the round. Yeah. Like a dinner theater place where people are having dinner in the wings and looking in the actors doing their act.

Exactly. And so we haven’t done this yet. But we will, we may in your lifetime and mine. We’re going to have theater in there.

Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, so I  mention this at every opportunity.

We can keep the dream alive. So we now have this beautiful, beautiful community center called the Council Hall, and it’s largely due to your planning.

Well, yeah, I did plan the thing and I supervised the construction, but I barely did any of the work. I mostly just waved my arms around.

About Earthaven as a demonstration that something else is possible

Well, you have you had visions back then and you helped to manifest your visions with the help of the forestry co-op and before that, just general labor making the council. You have visions not just physical, but philosophical and in other ways for the future of Earthaven too. Would you share that with us?

Well, the thing about the community that I want to make clear, which I also mention at every opportunity, is that this is not just a place for us to have a nice life in the woods. It’s about it being a demonstration so that people in general can get the idea in their head that you don’t have to go on the mainstream path and just do what everybody else is doing, which seems  to be unsatisfactory and seems to be what many people think is their only option because they haven’t been to a place like this or the other ecovillages out there.

And so it’s meant to be a demonstration that something else is possible. Well, the reason why we need something like this is because our mainstream culture is unsatisfactory in certain ways. Basically, the idea of happiness and success is about consumption of luxury goods. Well, this is an elite activity. You can’t have everyone consuming luxury goods. We don’t have enough earth to satisfy the number of people that we have in that way.

The other thing is it isn’t really satisfying. In other words, consumption of luxury goods satisfies you in the moment and then makes you desperate later on because you want yet more. Because what the culture is telling you is buy things, then you’ll be happy. Oh, wait, you’re not happy now. Well, just buy some more.

So, well, the thing is, it’s like people don’t have a model that suggests that there’s some other satisfaction.  It’s like the idea that money doesn’t buy happiness is a well shared cliché, but people don’t think deeply about it and they don’t really believe it because they don’t act on that.

So I think what you are sharing with us is that living a satisfying life in the good company of friends on land you own and control the destiny of and you can fulfill your shared values, tends to bring more happiness than buying yet the latest toy?

Well, yeah, the idea part of our founding documents uses the the phrase “elegant simplicity.” And it basically is the satisfaction of living together, sharing resources, having a common culture which yet allows enough individuality for everyone. I mean, this is a dance that we have to do. It’s basicallythe main process that in reality is going on. That’s the dialectic between the individual and the universal.

So we are doing community activities well. We also need to balance that out with just living our lives.

Yeah, well, and for that reason, we chose not to be an income sharing commune type community.

The economic system here is called independent income. So we just have certain things that we all pay together to have done together and then the rest of our lives are whatever we want to do.

Yes, we each earn a living and save money or spend it or share it or borrow it or loan it as we wish, but we pay dues and fees to Earthaven. We take care of the roads. We take care of the tractor. We take care of the community building. And you know a lot about this. And you’ve helped shape what this place looks like.

Paul’s visions for the future

Once you told me that everywhere you look at Earthaven, you see what could be there and what might be there in the future and what you would like to hope that could be there and that you want to help make happen.

I have visions. I have visions for every part of this land, and they’re not necessary. I mean, you know, it’s all optional. This whole thing is optional. That’s part of the point of it. We were hoping that people can see this and then look in their own lives and go, what options do I have? So it’s not like we’re trying to tell everyone how to do it. Basically, we’re just trying to tell everyone that you can do it.

And you figure out what you need to do. The other thing I say is that ecovillage needs to come to every city block. This is not a rural hippie in the woods type thing. We’re doing this because it was the easiest thing to do when we were doing it.

And, you know, it’s sharing of resources, coming together as a group and deciding how to make our lives better by cooperation.

Thank you for listening

Please visit our website at earthaven.org and sign up for our newsletter so you know what’s happening at the ecovillage. This podcast is produced by Earthaven Ecovillage School of Integrated Living in Western North Carolina. Have a great day.

View all our podcasts and search by date and topic. 

Broadcast March 29, 2021
Featuring: Zev Friedman and Diana Leafe Christian

In this podcast, Zev Friedman shares how he started living and teaching permaculture at Earthaven Ecovillage, and then how that led to forming Co-operate Western North Carolina (Co-operate WNC). Along the way, Zev shares examples of different types of permaculture and the work that Co-operate WNC is doing.

Listen Here

View all our podcasts and search by date and topic. 

Earthaven is my own personal greatest training ground for cooperative living, because what we’re doing here is mutual aid. So to be able to be here and learn those lessons in a day-to-day way and then apply them to a larger social context has been a real honor and gift.

Hello, everyone, my name is Debbie Lienhart from the School of Integrated Living at Earthaven Ecovillage. Welcome to the Integrated Living Podcast, where we explore integration within ourselves with the people around us and with the planet. In this episode, host Diana Leafe Christian talks with Zev Friedman.

Hi, Zev.

Hi, Diana, would you please tell us your whole name and introduce yourself as a person here at Earthaven and who teaches for SOIL?

I would be happy to.

My whole name is Zev Hayim Segal-Friedman and I live here in the Hamlet neighborhood at Earthaven. Very happy to say that. And I grew up here in Western North Carolina, one of the few people I know who lives here, over in Silva in Jackson County in a four-acre kudzu patch, where I moved with my parents when I was two years old in 1983. And I’m now running an organization called Co-operate WNC, which is a regional mutual aid network.

What does WNC stand for?

Western North Carolina.

So your organization is Co-operate Western North Carolina.

Right.

And what does it do?

It’s a regional mutual aid network. We coordinate different informal community groups, organizations, and households to cooperate and share resources and knowledge and develop long term relationships for a regenerative future.

So you are a permaculture teacher, you teach it, you design landscapes. You’ve been doing this since before you came to Earthaven in 2013. You’ve taught it here before you moved here.

That’s true. Taught it here since then.

Can you tell us how you moved from teaching permaculture and designing landscapes to Co-operate WNC?

Sure. So we’re going to take about six hours now, right?

No, we’re going to take it a little chunk at a time.

Okay. Yeah, well, to really answer that question, I have to go back to how I got into permaculture itself, because permaculture is really a strategy for me. To meet kind of a long term sense of mission and purpose that I developed in my own life when I was starting around when I was 17, but also with my parents because I grew up in a social activist family and kind of got these values of examining how we are human and what we’re doing here at an early age.

But then when I was about 17, I started to have experiences myself that led me to both witness the beauty of ecosystems and human cultural diversity on the planet and also feel the grief of loss and destruction of those systems and peoples and places. And I began to recognize I wanted to be part of keeping the beauty alive and slowing the destruction down. And so I started seeking then for ways to do that. And permaculture was was the best thing that I came upon.

Why is that? What is it about permaculture? Did its basic principles or practices drew you to it in order to fulfill those values?

Yeah. Well, I think that one thing is I was in the environmental science program at UNC Asheville, and there are all these academic formalized approaches to dealing with environmental problems, and they were very nonintegrated and non-grassroots. And permaculture I came to understand as a very people-owned approach to earth healing and cultural healing, something that we can actually do with community control at a community scale.

Could you tell our listeners the basic what it is, how it works of permaculture to give a basis for where else we’re going to explore in this talk?

There are a lot of different definitions coming from different directions. But one definition I like is from my old mentor, Chuck Marsh, who used to live at Earthaven. He has now passed. He was my business partner too, and his definition was permaculture is a design system for creating regenerative human habitats. And I like that because what that emphasizes is it’s a design practice. It’s a way of looking at any system, whether it’s an economic system or a landscape or a business or a family or a community, and using a certain set of design principles and approaches based in ethics, which people care and earth care and sharing the surplus, and then design that system based on a set of ecological principles.

Could you say more about why people tend to associate permaculture with gardening and give some examples of applied permaculture design in some of the areas you just mentioned?

Yes, well, I think that in the U.S., because permaculture is a global movement and by the way, really closely tied with the agroecology movement, which is more owned by people of color and indigenous people around the world, permaculture has tended to be a pretty white movement. But in the U.S., I think it’s come to be associated with gardening. This is actually related to your original question of why Co-operate WNC and why mutual aid, because we have a very fragmented society in the U.S. and the types of change that we need, in my opinion, to have a really regenerative human future are so deep that most people who are in privileged positions aren’t willing to consider that type of change.

And so gardening, something that’s just a gardening system, is an easier bite to swallow for a lot of people. Oh, I can just change the way I manage plants. But actually, permaculture is about redesigning the entire human approach to life.

So white people in general, in your experience and the experience of permaculture designers in the U.S. Are more willing to look at the oh, let’s garden in a different and better way aspect of permaculture, then all the aspects which you and your colleagues are wanting more people to take a look at.

Yeah, I think so. And because the other aspects ask more challenging questions of us and make deeper transformational demands for our lives and our communities. And so, yes, I think that’s true. And I’ll say, though, that things like the COVID-19 experience that we’ve just been through as a society and other emerging crises are putting some cracks in that and causing more people to consider deeper types of change. So that’s opening up more of a more of a pathway for the kind of social and economic transformation that I think has also been a part of permaculture from the beginning.

Could you give some examples of applied permaculture design, say, first in economic or social realms in the United States. Just pick one and then you could tell us some applied design and then maybe the other, because I’m betting people can picture permaculture-designed gardens, but they may not yet be picturing what you know about.

Yeah, and that’s another thing I’ll say is that is it’s easier for us humans to imagine what we can see. And so that’s another reason why gardening has been the more adopted layer of permaculture. So I do think of the landscape systems as a training ground. If we can see the interconnection between plants and fungi and animals and water systems, it makes it easier for us to think about the interconnections between human communities and so on. So your question examples.

I’ll speak first to kind of a visible, tangible ecological example, one that a lot of home gardeners are working with is if you have chickens or ducks. You can design the system around them where the chickens or ducks are integrated in a run along the edge of your property, for example if you have an invasive plant problem coming in from the edge, you can create a long, skinny run along that edge with fences on both sides.

And the chickens, especially chickens in this case, patrol that and they scratch things up, dig up the roots of the plants that are trying to come in from the edge and can act as a biological control. Then you can plant elderberries and mulberries. In that run, the elderberries and mulberries shade the chickens, which keeps them more comfortable in the summer. They provide fruit for people, they drop extra fruit for the chickens, and then you can put wood chips around the mulberries and elderberries and dig shallow pits so that when heavy rains come, you fill those pits with wood chips inoculated with a certain mushroom species and the rain percolates into those pits, feeds the plants, filters the water, makes edible mushrooms, which also make food more food for the birds.

And so it’s an integrated system that includes animals, fungi, and plants in an interconnected food web that makes more yields and health than any of those things, would alone.

So the combination, which is the permaculture design of this particular home site from invasive plants strategy, not only does that, but it provides you with mulberries, elderberries, edible mushrooms and eggs and chicken meat, if you are an omnivore, and water filtration and you have fun creatures to look at. And the manure that you can use in your compost bins to create compost with.

Thank you for that example.

So then going to a social example, I’ll give one from my own work because that’s what I’m most familiar with. In 2011, we determined that permaculture design classes, which were what a lot of us have been teaching, are these big 16 or 20 day classes that are a big commitment and expensive for people to join. And a lot of people are saying, I can’t sign up for that. So we did a big survey, my colleagues and myself, and took feedback on what would help and people said we need something cheaper and we don’t care about certification.

And so what we actually did, we went back to the drawing board and we said, all right, where are the different groups that could be matched up and make this work? And we came up with was this thing called the Permaculture in Action Class, where we teamed up with land owners who we had done permaculture designs for, and they paid into the class. And then we had teams of 20 people who are enrolled in the class come and do work installations at their projects.

And then we had a team of five apprentices who had been working with us for a year who acted as the crew leaders. So through all of that, the students paid some money, but not as much, and the landowners paid money and the apprentices got a little money and exchanged education. We got paid for the for the work. The landowner got a low cost installation. It worked out for everybody, got a bunch of things done and so I would call an example of the kind of more invisible layers of how permaculture work is done.

But of course, it was integrated with the visible as well, the installation of permaculture systems.

So in this case, as with the chickens and all those yields, mulberries, manure, eggs, no invasive plants, there were multiple benefits from the same well-designed action, the benefit of the land owner getting a permaculture design and work on their home site.

The apprentices got some experience designing and working with people in applying permaculture design. The people who wanted to learn permaculture less expensively and didn’t care about a certification, they just wanted to learn it. They got to do it for less money and then get hands on.

Yes, and the permaculture trainer got income and all kinds of yields.

We actually sat down and listed like 20 different benefits and yields that we received from it at the end of it.

Thank you. Thank you for that example.

Yeah, you’re welcome.

Can you give any other examples, if you wish, of social permaculture design and economic permaculture design?

Well, I think where I’d like to take it, is how we got into Co-operate WNC and the mutual aid work, because you said there’s this thing in systems thinking in which permaculture, by the way, is, of course, sister of or some kind of relative of systems thinking, which everything we just described is systems thinking. It’s not thinking of people or plants or anything as an isolated element. But how does it all work together in a food web?

Well, let me just ask you something before you go to that where you were going. So that our listeners can get a picture of a system, it’s not a thing or an action. It is a collection of things and actions that together give you more as a group or as an individual than you would have had if you had any one individual thing or action. And one example I’d say is our chicken patrollers around the edge of the property. And another example are those apprentices, the landowner and the permaculture students in the permaculture training all benefiting from that design. So it’s applying design to things and actions for great beneficial results to everyone involved.

Yeah, OK. Yeah. And and one of the one of the kind of facets of systems is understanding nested systems, which means which nested means like a like an egg nesting and in, in a nest. But there are different scales of systems that are inside of each other like a common ways to think about it is an organ in my body. My lung is a nest, is a system in itself. It’s also part of my whole body, which is a system.

And then I am part of my family, which is a system and also Earthaven, which is a system, and also the United States and there are other levels between that and so and inside a lung, inside a set of three lungs and trachea are smaller systems, the alveolar system. And the blood exchange system. So little systems are nested inside bigger systems. And the whole thing is a pattern of systems. And for those who look at strange, amazing mathematical art like fractals…

So you were, I think, going to tell us a little bit more about how you came to be fascinated with, intrigued by and wanting to create Co-operate WNC.

Yes.

And and that’s about kind of understanding scale and nested systems, which is that I started to see through my permaculture work that I was saying earlier, there’s this fragmented society in the U.S. And many people unwilling to make the short-term changes that could be called sacrifices that are necessary for a long term kind of wellbeing. And I see that fragmentation as the single biggest barrier to the type of transformative ecological healing and other kinds of healing that we need locally and and at the national and global scale.

And I really came across that in my permaculture work because I was usually working with nuclear families who hired me to do a permaculture design or installation and most of the students in classes, nuclear families and people would learn all these things. But the thing is, permaculture is a multigenerational project. And it’s a human transformation project. And it’s impossible to do as an individual or as a nuclear family in a meaningful way because we’re nested in these systems that are heavily weighted against it at every level. I discovered that I would do a permaculture design for a nuclear family, a couple, and we would come up with this 125 year vision for their property. But then they’re both working full time jobs and their parents live in other states. And besides, they don’t have enough support for their relationship because they’re living on a farm by themselves and all kinds of things in their personal lives would break down in their attempt to even enact something like that.

So I started to see that we needed support systems and a greater set of skills and culture around cooperation to have any chance at enacting the kind of grand vision of permaculture.

So what I take from what you just said is that the example of that couple on the farm by themselves with their parents in other states and they each have a full time job, is that even though they paid for, got interested in and were probably excited about the 125 year plan through multiple generations of how to grow and develop multiple interacting nested systems for higher yield on their farm, they didn’t have the time. They didn’t have the extra people. They didn’t have the other generations.

They couldn’t possibly predict what would or wouldn’t happen in the next 60, 70, 80, 100, 125 years. So without the nested social support system already in place, how can they possibly do that? Permaculture design.

And that’s what you noticed and got you going on this.

Yeah, and then looking around us and at the history of humans and human cultures, what stands out is this. Experiment in nuclear family living, in isolated living, is a very recent experiment. It’s enabled by the industrial revolution and it’s basically failing and having dramatic impact on humanity through.

You can see it through depression, rates of depression. You can see it through all kinds of social breakdown. And so, but alternatively, if you look at the history of cooperation and how we’ve organized ourselves in communities at different scales for for our entire existence as a species, that’s how we survived. That’s how we dealt with the complexity and unexpected twists of life. And so I started studying that. And then I had this one particular visit that was really formative for me. I had the honor of visiting this group of indigenous people in northern Oaxaca, in Mexico and north central Oaxaca, with the Mixteca people in Yukuyoca, which is a village that’s a part of a group of 12 villages with a multi thousand year intact mutual aid culture living in the same place for thousands of years through the Spanish invasion.

And there I got to I was actually there studying kind of agroecology practice, milpa farming. But what I saw, I got more than I bargained for, was that they had this very intact type of cooperation and mutual aid, a whole vocabulary around mutual aid like like the Inuits have around snow, all the words for different snow. These folks have 10 or 12 words for the different organs of mutual aid and they’re in their culture. And one of the things they were doing was they were starting from seeds and planting 700,000 trees a year among this cluster of 12 villages with 75 to 150 people in each village based in their own cooperative financing of the project to reforest this desertified landscape around them that had been created through Spanish logging of the area. And so when I saw that and all the ways they cooperated, not just on farming and agroforestry, but also on taking care of the elderly and the children and training people for schooling and dealing with health issues, I was blown away and I was like, wow, this is a tangible example for me of what mutual aid culture could look like.

That was in early 2017. I came back from that with with a sense of clarity and determination around, I think this is the direction we need to go, in our own place in society.

If I had had that experience, I would have been blown away, too. Did you say 700,000 trees a year, 150 people in 12 villages of all different ages because it’s multigenerational villages?

Yeah, yeah. And they were increasing the rate when I was there, so it’s probably more by now.

So did you see those trees doing what trees do when planted in desert landscapes, which is changing the culture, changing the moisture level and then acting as shade nurse plants for little plants to grow under their shade and then re populate the area with actual growing plants?

Yeah, we could really geek out on that. I saw some amazing things in that regard. Really quickly, it was part of a 30 year farming cycle, land management cycle they had, where they were planting alder and pine trees and then they would grow those for 30 years. Alders or nitrogen fixers, which improve the soil, and then they would cut the trees down and then grow milpa, grow corn, beans and squash, anapolis cactuses, edible cactuses, in those spaces, and agave.

And then after some time, they would come back and plant trees in that same spot. So it was a long-term mosaic of landscape management. And I got to put my arm into the soil in one of the places they had planted 27 years before I was there and there was there was like ten inches of dark black topsoil there, whereas 100 feet to the west there was no topsoil. It was literally limestone with a few cactuses. So I got to see the impact of that planting, it was very impactful.

So you came back to the U.S., fired up with the idea of, OK, what can we learn from this and how can I help this happen?

Yeah, exactly. And I’ve been reading about the history of of cooperatives and mutual aid in the U.S., which is a very grand history for anyone who wants to dig into that. And it’s the birth of the credit union movement in the U.S.. The birth of the unions in the U.S. Came out of mutual aid societies. And I said, wow, there’s a lot here. And specifically around farming and agriculture. There’s there’s a huge history in the U.S. and everywhere of cooperatives in organizing agriculture and organizing farming systems between communities, the Grange in the U.S. is an old mutual aid society that focused on farming. So yeah, and that’s where Co-operate WNC came came from. As I said, let’s make these linkages between the economics and getting beyond nuclear families and the social situation that we’re in, including institutionalized racism. Let’s make the connections between those things and ecological healing earth care and agroecology systems with physical stuff that permaculture does.

Let’s make those connections more visible and more explicit and use cooperation and mutual aid, financial arrangements and grassroots organizing to support the type of long term permaculture work that we that we know we need to do.

What kinds of projects is Co-operate WNC taking on here in this region of Western North Carolina?

Well, we’ve got several really exciting things going on. You know, one of the big things is, we’ve forgotten this stuff as a culture, even about cooperation, so, again, it’s hard to imagine what we can’t see. And so a lot of what we’re doing at this time is some foundational education and training around cooperative history and possibilities and tools and techniques, now serving a lot of educational gatherings, learning circles, we call them. But we do have several programs that are actively doing stuff, including community savings pools development, which is a cooperative financing technique from from New Zealand.

There are variations around the planet. But in this one, 15 to 25 people get together and pool their savings and then make proposal-driven loans to each other for starting a farm or starting a business or paying off debt or paying the down payment on a house, different things like that. So it’s a way of cooperative refinancing stuff.

Does that mean the 15 or 20 people create their own little tiny bank and they are the ones who invest in it and fund it, and they’re the ones who can get a loan from it with each other as the people who help decide which things we’re going to fund. And then when they pay the loan back, they’re more likely to really want to do so because it’s peers and colleagues who loaned them their own money.

Yeah, it’s kind of informally like that. We are using an actual established bank to hold our money, but then it acts that way. We get to choose among ourselves what we lend money to with zero percent interest to. So far we’ve gotten three of them going and including one Earthaven and there’s a staff person, part time staff person who is helping to train people and has developed a training program for that.

And they have over 120 of them going in New Zealand. So we have some mentors over there who we’re talking with and learning from. And so that’s really exciting. And that ties into a lot of this stuff because that was a big barrier I ran into in permaculture work I was doing was, how do you finance all the good ideas? And here’s one way, right? So that’s one of our programs.

Another one is the WNC Purchasing Alliance, which is a cooperative bulk purchasing initiative that is connecting up different organizations and community groups to bulk buy all kinds of things that we need – foods or equipment, environmentally friendly cleaning supplies, farming equipment and supplies to get the costs down, but also to allow us to direct money towards locally owned producers and businesses.

So it’s a powerful way of kind of changing some of the economic dynamics.

So does that mean you’re doing the stacked functions of many different things coming in and many different benefits going out, which is part of permaculture design, as I understand it, so that people are putting money in to helping local businesses provide them with cheaper goods because they’re bulk there, but in bulk, the volume discount and distributing these goods among the very people who’ve been funding this? So they’re buying, but in a group, what they need and helping local businesses?

Yeah. Plus the connection socially of getting to know these other people and finding some friends and colleagues and allies.

Yeah, that’s huge. That last thing is the relationships. And that’s a big summary of everything we’re trying to do is to take things away from the transactional type of of economics that the industrial economy demands of us, where we treat other people or communities like mechanisms for our own devices, like buy and sell.

And we don’t care about you as a person and move that into relational economics, where every economic transaction becomes an opportunity for deepening trust and relating for other types of working together along with the economic transaction.

It sounds like what this is doing is recreating connections between generations and between neighbors, which is maybe how humans used to live before the relatively recent invention of giant cities, suburbia and the nuclear family that you alluded to before, to sew up the ragged sleeve, I’m quoting Shakespeare here, of a frayed sleeve of culture ,to reweave it, it sounds like.

Yeah, I think we are trying to do that.

Well, would you let our listeners know how they can learn from you through soil? I think you do offer various different kinds of classes online and in person through the SOIL organization.

Yes, we’re working together to put several different classes together related to agroforestry and to cooperative agriculture and cooperative organizing. So check out the SOIL website at schoolofintegratedliving.org for that and also for Co-operate WNC. We’re a nonprofit mutual aid network and that’s www.co-operatewnc.org. And check out our programs there and you can sign up for our newsletter as well.

And just one more word on that, which is Earthaven is my is my own personal greatest training ground for cooperative living because because we’re doing it here is mutual aid at different skills and in different ways. And so to be able to be here and learn those lessons in a day to day way and then apply them to a larger social context has been a real honor and gift.

Thank you so much then.

Thank you for listening. Please visit our website at Integratedlivingpodcast.org and sign up for our newsletter so you know when new podcasts are released. You can also browse the School of Integrated Living upcoming online and in-person class offerings. This podcast is produced by the Culture’s Edge School of Integrated Living at Earthaven Ecovillage in Western North Carolina. Have a great day.

View all our podcasts and search by date and topic. 

Broadcast May 11, 2021
Featuring: Erin Boehme, Kelly Villarruel, Lia Grippo

Synopsis In this podcast, Academy of Forest Kindergarten directors Erin Boehme, Kelly Villarruel, and Lia Grippo discuss nature connection and young child development. They also talk about the annual Reaching Nature Connection weekend conference at Earthaven Ecovillage. Enjoy the podcast, and please consider a donation to support our work.

Listen Here

View all our podcasts and search by date and topic. 

Anywhere  you are, there’s an opportunity for nature connection, anywhere where there’s other people around, there’s an opportunity for nature connection and anywhere where you are in a place, there’s an opportunity for Nature connection.

Hi, I’m Sara Carter from the Earthaven Ecovillage School of Integrated Living. Welcome to our podcast, where we explore integration within ourselves, with the people around us and with the planet. In this episode, I’m interviewing three fabulous educators, amazing women from the Academy of Forest Kindergarten Teachers. Would you start us off with an introduction, Kelly?

You bet. Hi, I am Kelly Villarruel. I am one of the co-founders of the Academy of Forest Kindergarten Teachers.

I live here in Santa Barbara and I’m also the director of the early childhood programs with the organization Wilderness Youth Project. And I’ve been in this field for a very, very long time. And I find that every day is brand new and fresh and magical. And I just love being here. Thank you for being with us. Thank you for having me. Hello. Thank you for having me today.

My name is Erin Boehme and I am also a co-founder of the Academy of Forest Kindergarten Teachers. I am also the director of Wild Roots, a school in the Eastern Sierra in California. And I also have co-founded a community arts center here in my community. I feel really blessed to be able to do this work with young children and with adults, as a community builder, as somebody who feels very passionate about nature connection work and about humans in general.

I’m Lia Grippo, also a co-founder of the Academy of Forest Kindergarten Teachers and founder and director of the Wild Roots Forest School. It’s for a school here in Santa Barbara and Chumash territory. And, you know, I’m really grateful to be able to do this work for as long as I have, because as my colleagues have have already stated, we are really in love with with all of life. And that is our broader than human community and includes our fellow humans.

And what a pleasure it is to do the work of becoming and being human in this earth. Thank you. That’s lovely.

Well, I’m really excited to talk to you all today and for full transparency, I’ll name that I have been privileged to study with you all at two Reaching Nature Connection conferences, as well as your level one teacher training. And it’s certainly enriched my life. And so I feel really pleased to be able to, in this little way, help share you with our listeners, with more of the population. For those of us who may not have heard of forest kindergarten before, can you explain what that is? First, kindergartens, without going into the long and varied history, differ from nature preschools and nature schools in that they are one hundred percent outdoors.  Nature immersion early childhood programs, some forest schools work with children beyond early childhood as well.

For our purposes, we work primarily with children two years old to seven years old. And there’s a wide variety of forest schools and the cultures of programs.

What about the Academy of Forest Kindergarten Teachers? How did you all found it? Well, the Academy of Forest Kindergarten Teachers started as an opportunity for us to get to collaborate and learn from and work with other educators in the field, and we started by doing a weekend conference-like workshops where we shared our background and nature connection work in early childhood.

And we had the opportunity of bringing the unique quality of being a forest school teacher to the greater community of teachers, meaning that being a forest school teacher really requires you to be very clear and keen on your childhood development, as well as being a developing naturalist.

And then when you bring those two elements together, there’s kind of a third space that you create as a teacher by marrying the nature connection work, your naturalist’s work with the depth of knowledge you bring for early childhood. And so, because of that unique quality of teaching style, we decided that it would be something to share with people who had an interest in doing this kind of work with young children outdoors. And from there, it grew into even more people being interested in the conversation, and it felt like when we first started the Academy weekend workshops, there were very few people who knew about forest schools.

And now here we are. And it feels like there are just forest schools popping up everywhere around our country. And we’re very grateful to see that movement happen.

Yeah, that’s great. And each of you run a separate program as well as the Academy of Forest Kindergarten Teachers. Is that true? Yeah, Erin and I, both of us direct a Wild Roots campus. Myself on the western side of the state and Erin on the eastern side of the state in California.

Kelly, can you tell us about the organization that you work with? Right, I work for an organization called Wilderness Youth Project that was founded, I think in 1999 as the founders at the time, Warren and Cindy were working out of a place called Transition House, which is like a homeless shelter. And they were seeing that the teens were really having a hard time. So they started taking the teens out and seeing just a real dramatic change in the way that they showed up in the world, being out in nature.

And so that was where where we started. And so our organization works with Nature connection, with children from ages about two and a half, all the way up to adult.

So you three co-host an annual conference at Earthaven. For one thing, I’m curious, why do you come all the way from California to teach this conference in Western North Carolina? Largely because we’re invited, to be honest.

But that invitation stems from having a dear friend and colleague in the field, NikiAnne Feinberg, who used to actually work with Wilderness Youth project with Kelly here in Santa Barbara before coming out to Earthaven. Oh, goodness, quite some years ago. And so that relationship is long lasting and established, but we come because we’re invited. And also we come to North Carolina from California because, you know, we recognize that in our in our more in-depth teacher trainings, people travel from all over the country and all over the world to come and train.

But for weekends, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to travel across the country. So we really enjoy the opportunity to go to the east eastern region of the US, as well as have programs on the West Coast.

And I remember that at least one weekend I was a part of there were people from New York and Florida and maybe Ohio or something. People definitely travel for these weekends. Would you tell us a bit about the conference?

Well, I think our up and coming conference, we do different things at them, but I think this one is going to be like craft and game based where we’re doing a lot of Hands-On work with creating. And it’s things that teachers can actually bring to their programs. So they’re really walking away with lots of tools and their magical toolbox that they can bring directly to the children that they’re working with. We do a variety of games and songs and like I said with this one, it’s going to be crafting — top secret, top secret project.

And what about those who might be intimidated by singing? Fairly common, I think most of us have been given the message at some point in our lives that we really don’t have any business singing in front of others unless we’re professionally trained or somehow have some gift that we were born with. But, you know, song is magical and there is no culture that I’m aware of that doesn’t have song as a part of the culture and singing.

And the more important thing than being a great singer is singing together and singing joyfully. What I will say is if you work with children, particularly young children, they are incredibly forgiving audience. All they care about is that we’re enjoying singing together. And if we can cultivate in ourselves the joy rather than the need for perfection, then we’re really doing a service to those children. Hopefully that if they ever hear that message somehow themselves, that they ought not have any business singing unless they’re perfect, that they’ll disregard that message because they’ve had strong experiences.

But that’s just not true. Singing, singing together bonds people. It helps us line up and align our rhythms of breathing and our heart rates and our brain waves. And it’s truly a unifying experience when we sing together. So, you know, so much of our work is really about reminding us adults how to play and what it feels like to be playful. And we invite and encourage people to cultivate that attitude with all those things that feel edgy, whether it’s whether it’s singing or whether it’s being silly or whether it’s being chased in a tag game.

Yeah, I really agree with what you’re saying. And just on a personal note, for those who are listening who might be considering signing up, I have found such beautiful space holding from you three. I have found such an availability for my vulnerability, whether it is with singing or with writing a story and having a fit about it or all kinds of things, those games. Yeah, I think it is scary for grownups to get back into play and get back into song. And I just so appreciate your helping bring that forth in us.

I would also add this is, Erin, that part of the unique nature of our trainings and our conferences has so much to do with the fact that we have such a healthy partnership with three women who work together. We truly, genuinely, authentically love each other and love to play together as colleagues. And I think that what we model is space for any adult who joins us, because we have a synergy between the three of us that I think builds confidence between us, which allows then our students to see that there’s space for adults to be that joyful, that carefree, take a little bit of risk and be that vulnerable and that it will be OK.

And as an adult who works with other adults who I know are going to be working with young children, I personally know that that is so essential to face those vulnerabilities and to find courage, to be willing to be playful and authentically joyful as a role model is so incredibly important that we hold it in the highest regard when we do these trainings and these conferences, because we we dearly hope that that transformation will take place and people will go away feeling lighter and more willing to do this with the young ones.

That actually reminds me of a story that happened when we were out there several years ago in North Carolina, we were playing this song game and one of the participants was there with her daughter and her daughter was so, so shy and she was probably in her early 20s. And so we start singing down by the banks of the Hanky-Panky and playing this game and where when somebody is out, they have to go into the pond in the middle of the pond and the pond edge is getting smaller and smaller and we’re getting closer and closer. And this was the part of the day where this woman’s daughter started singing out loud so joyfully, her face lit up. I was almost in tears. Her mother looked over and saw her face and just couldn’t believe how how expressive she was. And she spoke to us afterwards talking about how her daughter was so shy and she was surprised that she came out in such a big way with her voice. So there’s a lot of magic in singing together as a group, especially when we’re all just really in it being silly and and going for it kind of contagious.

Mm hmm. A beautiful moment.

Yeah.

Thanks, Kelly. You three must have so many beautiful, magical stories, both from your work with children and from your work with adults.

Who should consider coming to reaching Nature connection, who’s it aimed at? Parents, educators, people who just want to show up and have some connection with other human beings.

We’ve had people from so many fields of of work and so many reasons attend and and that includes, you know, who Kelly has named. We’ve also had occupational therapists who work with young children come to our programs. We’ve had naturalists who might do nature connection work with adults, but want to understand what that looks like with young children, because it’s not the same as just taking a pared-down approach to adult nature connection work. We’ve had therapists, child therapists come to our programs and school administrators as well, as well as we’ve often had homeschooling families joining.

And I remember hearing you speak to the difference between nature connection and environmental education, and I’m just imagining possibly in some listeners ears, there’s some environmental education pinging happening. And I’m wondering if you can explain your conception of the difference with those two things. Yes, thank you, Nature connection is a term that I think it’s used rather loosely, but it actually has a really specific meaning. And it is really important to know the difference, especially when you’re working with young children, because environmental education does not tend to be developmentally appropriate for the young child.

What’s happening in nature connection is that it’s primarily a relationship building process. We like to use an analogy that nature connection is the sensation you have of falling in love for the first time where you are in wonder, curiosity, excitement, you’re in a state of investigation all the time. When you first meet the person that you have those extra special feelings for, you’re wondering what they’re doing. You’re asking yourself questions you might be tracking, listening more carefully. All these things that we humans do when we first fall in love with something is really the process of nature connection work.

It’s the relationship building with the natural world and having that first love affair. And as nature connection mentors, we have the privilege in our work to stay in wonder, to continue to look at the world through the beginner’s mind, through the beginner’s eyes, through the beginner’s sensory. We have the privilege to ask questions and not be concerned if we have the answer or not, and to allow those little seeds of mystery to be planted and hope that someday we’ll solve the mystery.

And those are the things that we have the privilege to do as a model for the young child. And of course, it authentically happens that those behaviors, even for us as adults, become a regular inherited way of being. When you’re working in nature connection, environmental education has a really specific purpose. It is important to know about the environment. It’s important to know how the connections and environment are related and why they affect each other. And why wouldn’t we do this?

This happens, however,  environmental education is remedial work. And so, if we do not start off in the beginning of our relationship with the natural world in a love affair, we truly do end up in a position where we might start to disconnect or have fear or start to pull away from nature, because truthfully, when we are told something’s polluted, something’s dying, something’s not going to live, we tend to feel fearful of that and not want to invest in a relationship that’s long lasting. And so when we are already in love, when we’re deeply invested in our relationship with the natural world, and then we find out that there are problems, pollutions. You know, climate change, big, big problems. We are willing to hold on to that love affair and stay invested in that relationship. And so in the remedial work comes, we kind of like to say the marriage counseling starts in environmental education, then we’re able to say, OK, here I am, I’m at the table. I have the tools I need to now face what might be happening in the living or in the natural world. And I want to be dedicated to staying connected rather than turn away and become disconnected. And so that’s really the nature connection piece in why the young child really is allowed. It should be protected for them so that they can stay in that love affair while they’re young and while they’re building those relationships to last forever.

Thanks, Erin, that’s really powerful words. And it sticks with me. I think I heard you say once that my job as an adult is to model what it looks like to be in love with nature. And in my work with children, it does feel like my job is to model everything. That’s all my job is to model what it is to be a person. And so I’ve really taken that piece to heart. Thank you.

Can I just go back a little bit to and it does relate to this also, but again, one of the reasons that we founded this organization was also the fact that we were finding we have lots and lots of young children on our wait lists and we as two organizations can’t reach all the children.

And so if we created something where we could work with other educators who become nature connected to continue to work on their own nature connection, then this whole genre of work can be spread really far and wide to reach so many more children because every person can benefit from Nature connection.

Do you have a preference, Kelly, working with children or working with adults? You know, you give me a group of four year olds and I absolutely know how to act, but you get me with a bunch of adults, it’s a little trickier. You know, I just drop into my four year old mind and I’m just four and and then I can do pretty good. I actually really enjoy working with both — they’re different each range has such different gifts and both of them feed me in my work.

So I actually can’t say I have a preference. I really enjoy both.

I would add though that everyone should study early childhood and child development because it applies to all ages. I feel really blessed to have studied child development because I can always see the five year old boy in the grown man when there’s a conflict or something that we are walking through in the adult world knowing child development should, in my opinion, just be one hundred percent basic skill that you learn in your educational life, because it’s such an in-depth study of the way that the human grows.

And once you kind of have that, you’re really in a compassionate place in the world working with people of any age. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely, and I also know that storytelling is a big part of your work, and I hear that there’s a special guest this year at reaching Nature connection.

You know, every time that we come out to North Carolina, for Reaching Nature Connection, we have a glimmer of hope that we will get to spend a little bit of time in the presence of the great Doug Elliott. And when that opportunity comes to fruition, we are so grateful Doug Elliott, for folks who don’t know him or his work, in my humble opinion, is one of the best storytellers I have heard and seen in terms of deep nature connection through storytelling.

And he has such a gift of telling stories in a way that you can truly feel yourself there, witnessing what he’s telling you about in a way that is deeply affectionate and relational and funny. We are so grateful that he will be telling stories once more. I am grateful for everyone who gets to hear him, but also a little selfishly grateful for ourselves as well.

And you are also such a beautiful storyteller. All three of you really see weaving stories into the work that you do. Thank you, Sara. I was just noting a few moments ago, Kelly said that actually reminds me of a story and I realized, oh, I love that. Kelly says that all the time, that everything reminds her of a story. And, yeah, storytelling is one of the most ancient technologies humans have for passing on information and most of the information that’s passed on in stories throughout human history is passed on carefully, carefully from one generation to the next, and so often without our stories we’re lost.

I’m wondering if you might have some simple strategies for people who maybe don’t have access to a lot of nature.

Nature’s free. My dad has a sit spot, which we talk about a lot. It’s your secret spot where you go to that you can just sit outside and just notice what’s happening in the natural world. But he doesn’t get around really well so his sit spot is actually at his kitchen table by a window. And so he spends a lot of time looking out the window at the Karpas trees that is home to tons and tons of bird activity and all kinds of cats moving through there.

So he spends time there getting to know the birds of that bush very, very well. So nature connection can happen out of a window if you’re just paying attention. There are people who work outside every day and are never nature connected. So a lot has to do with how you show up in the natural world, whether it’s through a window or just listening to the sounds. If you’re in it with your senses, you’re going to take in a whole lot more than if you’re just walking down the street with your mind focused on a whole lot of other things.

My children used to love to build fairy houses. And so for the young child or even the adults who have access to a tiny patch of dirt, building a fairy house is a great way to get nature connected. So you’re having the opportunity to care and tend for things that are smaller than yourself, whether or not you ever see them. But it’s a really great way to start or gardening, being out in your garden or tending a flower in a flower pot and watching it transform over time or, you know, growing micro greens on your counter.

That’s also nature connection if you’re really there with it. Yeah. Yeah, to dovetail on that. One of the things I think that often goes missing, that is missed is that tracking weather, watching the sky, watching the patterns of wind, listening to it, feeling the sensation of the wind on your skin, listening to the sounds that the wind makes. Weather is also nature and nature connection. You know, we often say that nature connection is the process of connecting people to place people to people and people to self.

So anywhere where you yourself are, there’s an opportunity for nature connection anywhere where there’s other people around, there’s an opportunity for nature connection. And anywhere where you are in a place, there’s an opportunity for nature connection. But also, you know, there are insects all around us, if we’re lucky. And I know that the truth is in some places insect populations are declining, but there are some really sturdy insects who are going to stick around and you can probably find them if you start looking for them.

And, you know, even in urban areas where there aren’t a lot of plants, weeds come up in the cracks. It’s good to pay attention to those beings, those relatives that come up and push up through the concrete. And they’re pretty tough and they’ve got interesting lives and interesting stories to tell. And as Kelly said, the birds, even if the birds that you have are crows or pigeons, to just pay attention and I think the simplest way to pay attention is to pay attention, as Aaron described, as you’re getting to know a new friend.

Yes, I would add that you need to say “wow” a lot, just practice entering any relationship with “wow” and you’ll find out that it works. We always remind folks who are just starting this journey that it’s not important that you identify what type of bird or tree or insect it is you’re looking at. It’s important that you know that exact bird and even if you want to call it, you know, Henry or Barbara. That’s what’s most important, is that you’ve paid enough attention, that you do feel related enough to the living creature, that you can give it a name that helps you relate even more deeply.

And then someday you’ll find out it’s a red winged blackbird or a, you know, a grackle or whatever the bird might end up being. But what’s most important is that originally it was Barbara.

Hmm. Great, thanks. Thanks for those tips. I guess to wrap it up, do you have one more thing that you’d like our listeners to know?

I would just say that it’s important to know that when you attend a conference with us that we we will be giving you also a lot of factual, in-depth information about child development and some of the backgrounds of maybe even in psychology and in occupational therapy and things that relate to the bigger picture on the child’s experience and, of course, school. And also we do play and sing. But there is there is a very a very well visited area of depth that we go into that we might consider more on the academic side.

But the lovely part is that we’re really good at holding rhythm. So we know when there’s just enough of that and it’s time to get up and play. If we’re not having fun, we’re just not serious enough. Thanks Lia.

Kelly, was there one thing you wanted our listeners to know? I think just that it’s very playful, you know, we get serious, but we’re also very playful because there is a lot of magic that happens. And I say magic a lot, but it’s really true. There’s a lot of magic that happens in the play in the moment when we can connect to others through play and we really get to experience life the way young children experience life through play. And I think it’s important.

Thank you so much for being with us today. It’s been a pleasure to talk to you. And I’m so looking forward to seeing you in these mountains again. And how can people learn more about your work? You can find more information about us at our website forestkindergardenacademy.org.

Well, thanks again so much for your words and your wisdom, and I look forward to seeing you at the conference. Thank you for having us.

Thank you for listening. Please visit our website at integratedlivingpodcast.org and sign up for our newsletter so you know when new podcasts are released. You can also browse our upcoming online and in person class offerings. This podcast is produced by the Earthaven School of Integrated Living in Western North Carolina. Have a great day.

View all our podcasts and search by date and topic. 

Broadcast February 7, 2021
Featuring: Steve Torma, Eric Wolf

---

Listen Here

View all our podcasts and search by date and topic. 

Having been a lifelong geek around communication and relationship skills, social justice, social transformation, I began to get really clear that of all the things that I had been interested in, that NVC was the best combination of theory and practice of anything that I’d ever experienced.

Introduction

Hello, everyone, my name is Debbie Lienhart from the School of Integrated Living at Earthaven Ecovillage. Welcome to the Integrated Living podcast, where we explore integration within ourselves with the people around us and with the planet. In this episode, host Eric Wolf talks with Steve Torma  about compassionate communication in community settings.

So one of the things that I (Eric Wolf) love on my tours, I do public tours, sometimes Earthaven private tours and things I love to talk about is conflict and community and people go on my tours and say we were here last week. But this tour is very different. And I really enjoy that aspect because I think as Americans or many Americans don’t realize how much energy it takes to get along when you don’t have to, when you can’t buy your way out of the situation you can’t just leave. You can’t just move. And so to me, this is the secret sauce and Steve has developed his own recipe. And so today we’re going to be learning the secret sauce of community.

At what point did you become aware that you had a problem with living in community and conflict?

Well, maybe growing up in a family of 11 kids and authoritarian parents. I’m joking about it. But I’m very also serious that as a kid, I started realizing not only in my personal life, but also in the world that, why is there so much conflict and why do we have such trouble getting along with each other and so forth? And as I continued on my path into intentional community, it was very obvious to me that this desire that we have to live together and enjoy each other and work together can get so disrupted by the ways that we generate unnecessary conflict and our inability to handle the inevitable conflicts.

I don’t think all conflicts are inevitable. I think conflict is inevitable. But most of the conflicts that we create are not necessary, in my opinion. But they’re products of how we’ve been raised to think. It’s often called a dominator culture. So I would say pretty early on in my community life, in my early and mid 20s, it was clear to me.

Central idea or practice to help live more successfully through community

So let’s say someone is listening and they’re living in community. What would be a central idea or practice that they could adopt that would help them to live more successfully through community. And understand that in my definition of community, community is conflict. To be in community is to be with people. You’re going to have  difference of opinion. The question is it violent, emotionally present? You know, what form of conflict are you working through? And so I’m curious what you have learned. What is the most valuable thing for you in how to deal with the close quarters of community?

Well, first, I want to appreciate what you just said about conflict, and I think that’s important. I just want to add that I’ve been very influenced by a man named Dominic Barter. He and his community developed a system called Restorative Circles. And one of the things that Dominic said resonates with what you just said, Eric, is that conflict is the flow of information between people and that conflict becomes painful when we resist the flow of information. I had never heard anything like that. And it really got me thinking. And as I was thinking about it through the lens of compassionate communication or nonviolent communication, I started thinking about the theories and ideas that Marshall Rosenberg, the man who developed nonviolent communication, about how everything that we do is an attempt to meet a need, and that when we can see through that lens, when we’re having a conflict with someone, if we can see through that lens of like, oh, they’re saying this thing or they’re doing this thing and  it’s painful for me or in some way uncomfortable.

If I can go to the level of awareness of, oh, they’re trying to get their needs met. I wonder what needs they’re trying to meet and then to ask myself that same question. If I’m feeling something and wanting something, what needs am I trying to meet? So I’d say the number one skill to practice is to drop into this need level, because in nonviolent communication or compassionate communication theory, conflict is never between needs, it’s always between strategies.

And that sounds like a huge claim. And the first time I heard it, I didn’t believe it. And I asked Marshall himself once when doing a training Do you really mean that? Like, it’s always a conflict between strategies and never between needs. And he said, yes, absolutely. And here’s a guy with 50 plus years all around the world working with everything from couples to warring nations.

It’s an incredible claim. And so I’ve been experimenting with that idea for about 12 years now. And it’s really fascinating how a conflict can shift when we start getting curious about each other, about what is going on at your level. What are you needing? What are you hoping? What needs are you hoping to get met by this thing that you’re saying or this thing that you’re doing? And when both people get curious like that, it almost always dramatically changes the situation and makes it much more workable.

How Earthaven has shifted and matured over time

How have you seen Earthaven shift and mature over time as you’ve lived here? Like, what are some of the behaviors you saw early on that were spectacularly unsuccessful and how over time this behavior shifted?

Yeah, I would say that integrating nonviolent communication into the culture of Earthaven has been an enormous step for us in moving toward being able to live our purpose as a community. It’s allowed us to be much more effective at creating inner peace within ourselves or not so agitated in dealing with each other, for being more skilled at communicating with each other and working out conflicts, increasing our capacity to collaborate with each other, to be more powerful in manifesting projects, reaching our goals. It’s been very, very significant in the evolution of our community.

Steve is particularly good at not saying things that make people look bad. I’ve noticed that about Steve.  That was a great answer, don’t get me wrong. But how has behaviors here at Earthaven changed over 20 years and you almost refused to say the ways that like.

Spectacular failures in community conflict

Can you describe, because I know there are people listening who are living in a conflict or  there might be someone listening who’s living in communitarian conflict. And could you describe some of the spectacular failures, without saying anybody’s names, of course, that you’ve seen over the past 25, 30 years?

Sure. Probably the most noticeable one is what we call an NVC judgment as a tragic expression of unmet needs. So two people or two groups are having a conflict about a particular issue or proposal. And instead of saying something like, wow, I’m just really frustrated when I hear the way that you’re describing, you know, that project or what you want. I’m really frustrated and I’m really scared about how that might affect the well-being of the community or that might affect the quality  of the land or how we interface with the public or, you know, what the concern is.

And instead of saying the feeling and the need, someone says a judgment. Something like, well, that’s a ridiculous idea. That’s a stupid idea. Why would you even say that? You know, don’t you care about the community? Or if we do that, that’s going to be terrible for the community. I make all these judgments that almost always people would respond defensively and mutually aggressive. And there was so much time and energy wasted on slinging judgments and criticism and blame back and forth, rather than being able to drop down to the need level, which in NVC, NVC being the acronym for Nonviolent Communication, which in NVC we believe that in every moment we’re just trying to get our needs met.

So the word spectacular is quite accurate. It was a spectacular waste of time and energy and created so much pain between people and over the last 10, 12 years. As we’ve grown our self awareness and our skills of communicating and so forth, we’ve gotten much, much more efficient at working together and being curious and empathetic.

So I would say those two words, curious and empathetic, are the the practices or the the energy that helps to shift when people are are stuck and locked into conflict to be able to go to curiosity about the other person, genuine curiosity and genuine empathy, which in NVC means really listening to and connecting to the other person’s feelings and needs.

Making NVC part of the Earthaven new-member curriculum

How difficult was it to convince the community that nonviolent communication should be a part of the curriculum for new members?

I think it naturally happened over time. It was not a goal that I or any of us had at the very beginning to try to make this be part of the membership process. I was just kind of, you know, desperately trying to have less conflict in my own personal life, in my neighborhood life and in my community life. It was kind of like, I want to put these fires out, you know? And so as more of us had the direct personal experience of, whoa, I’m using these new tools and things are feeling better and I’m being more effective at communicating and working together with people, then over time it just became a natural occurring thought to many of us, how do we weave this into the culture of Earthaven?

And that’s when one of those strategies was  let’s make it be part of the membership process.

Recommended NVC skills or practices for people to bring into community life

In particular, what skills or practices of nonviolent communication, would you recommend people bring into community life?

Yeah, such an important question. You know, as you asked me that, I remember this philosophical struggle I when I talked with others about it, because in NVC we don’t try to make anybody do anything. It’s contradictory to the spirit of NVC to say you have to learn NVC. But in conversation with people, it became clear that the basic consciousness and skills of NVC would make people’s entry into the community much easier and much more effective.

And so we did have it included in the curriculum or in the membership process. And I would say the most important skill is to start with what we call an NVC self empathy, which means the ability to drop out of my head and out of the dominator culture ways of thinking, which are judging and blaming and diagnosing, and drop into our bodies to actually be able to know what I’m feeling and what I’m needing. So in NVC, we call that self empathy.

So that’s the most foundational skill that there is to develop a feeling and need literacy so that at any moment I can connect to that part of me that then allows me to be able to share that with other people. So that’s the next concept or skill is what we generally just call honesty, which is to be able to share what’s going on for me at the feeling and need level instead of just sharing my judgment and criticism. And then the third would be empathy, which simply means my ability to connect with and put my attention on your feelings and needs.

So those three things, self empathy, knowing what’s going on for me, honesty, being able to share my feelings and needs with you, and empathy, being able to connect with and receive and be curious about your feelings and needs. Those three things are the the the core of NVC as it would be applied to any relationships, but especially community.

How Steve began to experience NVC

How did you begin to find and experience nonviolent communication in your life? What was your first exposure and and where did you learn it and study it? And you’d said you’d actually met with Marshall at one point?

Actually, my first exposure to it was way back in 1983, at the tender age of 25, I did an afternoon little mini workshop with a guy, not Marshall, with somebody else. And so I always knew of it as a thing, but didn’t really practice it all that much. It wasn’t until 2007 when I was experiencing a lot of conflict in my intimate relationship with my partner and within in our neighborhood here at Village Terraces and in Earthaven.

And I was kind of having this sense of desperation of really needing to figure out what I and we can do to get beyond this grueling conflict that was so exhausting. And that’s when we in  Village Terraces hired a fella from town to come out here and do an eight week class for us on NVC. And that really lit me up. I had a very clear awareness. That’s what I really need. That’s what we need in order to be able to grow beyond these stuck levels of painful conflict.

And so after I immersed myself in it for a year or two, I decided, well, I’m I’m no expert. But Marshall has this phrase, anything worth doing is worth doing poorly. So I’m going to start offering it here at the community. Just for free, anybody who will be willing to come in and learn together, I would invite people to come and do that. And so I started facilitating classes here at Earthaven and immediately began to see positive results in my own life and in our neighborhood and in the community.

And then a friend of mine approached me about wanting to start a school for teaching these kinds of things, communication and relationship skills and so forth in Asheville. And so I started on a very small scale doing that around two-thousand nine, ten, whatever, and did do a 10 day intensive with a couple of other friends of mine with Marshall and some other NVC trainers. That was a very deep dive into NVC community and process and so forth.

And so it’s just grown from that point. And having been a lifelong geek around communication and relationship skills and social justice and social transformation, I began to get really clear that of all the things that I had been interested in, psychology and religion and spirituality, that NVC was the best combination of theory and practice of anything that I’d ever come across. So I just continued to immerse myself in mostly Marshall’s writings and teachings, but other NVC people as well.

And it’s just become my spiritual path, because I think of it as kind of like a postmodern spirituality. It takes the core teachings of all world religions, and takes away the dogma and the trappings of it and just gets to the to the heart of what those teachings are about and how to live it moment by moment. So it’s both my spiritual path as well as my passion for sharing it with people. And it’s the main thing that I do to contribute to the world and meet my needs for purpose and contribution and meaning in my life.

Where Steve teaches classes

Well, mostly my own classes that I set up through my Real Center website, but sometimes for other organizations as well. Firefly Gathering is probably the one that I’ve done the most. I think it’s like been eight years or so. I teach there and a variety of other organizations that I may do. A one-off workshop or maybe a class. And one of my favorite things that has happened over the last four or five years is groups of people will come to me, groups of friends get together, family and friends get together who have taken class. One or more of those people have taken classes with me. And they come to me and they say, hey, I want you to teach NVC for my family or for  my community of friends.

And so I’ve had about seven or eight. Those they’re my favorites because there are people who already know each other. They already know that they want to go deep with each other. And so I call those my family group classes. So I do that as well. I’m now starting to do a few more things online this year, teaching a lot of classes online. So branching out a little bit now into video as well.

How Steve plans to carry forward the practices of compassion and communication in community settings

How do you see yourself carrying forward the practices of compassion and communication in community settings going forward?

Yeah, I think what we’re doing right here, getting more into audio and video is a cutting edge for me. And also continuing with this project that my partner Terrie and I started called the 10000 Love Letters Project, which has three goals. One is to write and collect 10000 love letters over the next 30 years. Well, now it’s 27 years, to share NVC with 10000 people and to also distribute 10000 copies of this booklet on the Iroquois Confederacy Thanksgiving address.

So this was a project that Terrie and I started as we were entering our what’s called the third saturn cycle, about a 30 year astrological cycle, which has roughly 10000 days. So it’s a big part of how I want to apply my life and promote these values of community and compassion and social, personal and social transformation and what I hope will be a full third saturn cycle, which will take me to about 90 years old, I hope.

Thank you for listening

Thank you for listening. Please visit our website at IntegratedLivingPodcast.org and sign up for our newsletter so you’ll know when new podcasts are released. You can also browse the School of Integrated Living upcoming online and in-person class offerings and drop us a note via the contact form to let us know what you’d like to hear in future podcasts. This podcast is produced by the Culture’s Edge School of Integrated Living at Earthaven Ecovillage in Western North Carolina.

Have a great day.

View all our podcasts and search by date and topic. 

Broadcast January 21, 2021

Featuring: Diana Leafe Christian, Sara Carter

---

Listen Here

View all our podcasts and search by date and topic. 

Diana’s vision:

My vision is that communities exist everywhere and anybody who wants to create them has a rather easy time of it and it works well and they know what to do. And the people who join them understand what they’re joining and they know how to join and they find it easy to do. And it’s a good fit for everybody.

Introduction

Hello, everyone, my name is Debbie Lienhart from the School of Integrated Living at Earthaven Ecovillage. Welcome to the Integrated Living podcast, where we explore integration within ourselves with the people around us and with the planet. In this episode, host Sara Carter talks with intentional communities expert Diana Leafe Christian about how to find an intentional community that’s aligned with your needs.

Hi, Diana. Will you please introduce yourself and tell us how you learned about this topic?

Well, my name is Diana Leafe Christian. I live at Earthaven. I’ve lived here about 20 years. I have studied intentional communities from my great interest starting in the early 90s to know how did they get started successfully. They were like Athena sprung full form from the head of Zeus. And I thought, well, wait a sec. They must have gone through some steps and I couldn’t find any information anywhere except a paragraph here and there in various books on communities.

I was editing a newsletter about how you start communities in order to learn how you do it. It was journalism as forcing function. And then I got hired by Communities magazine to be the editor. And when I did, I continued to interview people to ask them, how did you form your community? What did you do? What were the steps? I didn’t ask people what they thought theoretically, their values, their beliefs. I asked them, what did you do?

And I interviewed as many people as I could from failed communities, which they were all around me in Colorado where I live, as well as successful communities. And I saw a clear, clear pattern of what the communities that succeeded did and the communities that failed. And I thought, holy mackerel, somebody ought to write this down. And so I wrote a book “Creating a Life Together”, which must have been the right book at the right time, because it’s been translated into eight languages by now.

And after that, and while living at Earthaven, which I had recently joined, I realized, oh, there needs to be an equivalent amount of information on the other side of this. How do you find a community that you want to join? How do you find a community that’s a good fit, that resonates with your values, your lifestyle, what you want to do? So I decided to write a book about that and I did Finding Community. I was on Earthaven membership committee, which I loved being on and which was very meaningful to me.

And I interviewed membership committees of various other communities to find out what their methods were. And I interviewed a lot of people who were seeking community or who had sought community and landed in the community that they liked. So I learned a lot about it, wrote the book, and now I’m doing this online class for SOIL, the nonprofit here at Earthaven, to help people know what I learned so they could find the community of their dreams ideally.

What drew you to Earthaven?

Well, there are highly noble reasons and a simple, silly, practical reason. The highly noble reasons are what’s really cool. It was beautiful. The land is beautiful. I really liked the people that I met, which were the earliest, earliest founders and early members because it was so long ago. It was very primitive. There was one falling down, three-sided cabin, a gravel road and a few minimalist huts made of wattle and dab, all pieces of this and that.

And people were living in trailers and camper shells stacked with straw bales to keep them warm. So it didn’t look like much at the time, but it had a beautiful permaculture design. The people who were founding it were very impressive to me because of their long term vision. It was going to be a village scale community, which it has become. So I was impressed by permaculture, the fact that it’s a beautiful forest and the people that I met and the vision for it, that the ultimate ideal, we’re going to be an agrarian village and the fact that it was going to be and was an educational organization to help people know this is what we’re learning how to do.

And we’ll share with you what we’re learning that works well and doesn’t work well. So that was really inspiring to me. Here’s the mundane, practical reason. I just lived one county away and it was the closest one. And also there were very few in the US at that time.

There was maybe three that were village scale and they were in other states. So it was kind of a no brainer.

What year did you write Finding Your Community Home, 2005?

Well, the book is called “Finding Community: How to Join an Ecovillage or Intentional Community”.

So how did you learn about what people seeking community need to do in order to choose the one where they’ll stay?

It’s like getting married, I think. Don’t marry the first community that has to date them first. Be very cautious, get references, you know, find out what they’re like and what they’re like, really.

And so what I did was the same thing I did to understand how to write a book about advising people how to start a successful community. I just interviewed people up one side, down the other. I talked to as many people I could on membership committees of long standing communities and of people who were seeking community and what had their experience been at the various communities that they had visited and what were the downsides and the things that went wrong. And there were loads of them. And I wanted to help people not have to fall into those pits. And I also found out what tended to work really well.

And what the community can do to make it easier for people and what the people can do to make it easier for the community to get to know them and to like them. And some of the worst things you can do and the best things you can do when you call them, when you email them, when you visit them and how you can assess is you or is you ain’t my eventual baby, so to speak.

And now you’re teaching a seven week online class called Finding Your Community Home for people searching for community to join. Why do you think this is important?

Well, because I want to make it easier for both communities and the community seekers. Well, let me back up about one step. Communities have visions for the better world they’d like to see and missions or missions and purpose, which is what we’re doing right here right now as people on this land that we hope will eventually contribute to making that better world. Well, people can do that, too, not just communities. So I have a vision for a better world I’d like to see. So I’ll tell you what it is, and this fits right into it.

My vision is that communities exist everywhere and anybody who wants to create them has a rather easy time of it. And it works well and they know what to do. And their local, state and federal government supports them in that, rather than throwing logs in the road and the people who join them understand what they’re joining and they know how to join and they find it easy to do. And it’s a good fit for everybody. So anybody who wants to live in community or create one or be a thriving, contributing member of the community has good information about what works and doesn’t work.

So my vision is a world where it’s like that. My mission and purpose, which is what am I doing right here right now, is to draw upon my background in journalism and find out stuff, do research online, talk to people, interview people, gather as much wisdom from as many people as I can, and then try to put it into clear, thorough, interesting, engaging writing and classes online, like through SOIL and other online classes that I do.

And share what I’ve learned and share it in bite size, easy to understand pieces, so it’s not arcane or strange. So that’s why I think it’s important.

A lot of times people just think “I want to live in community. Well, there’s one over there. I’ll go check that one out.” They have no idea.

All the different kinds there are they have no idea. There are two basic, extremely different kinds of internal community finances, such as income sharing communities, which are rare but prominent, and independent income communities, like Earthaven. This makes a huge difference in your experience of living in the place. They don’t know that the different kinds of missions and purposes for different communities will totally affect what their life is going to be like.

They don’t know often that whatever legal entity, singular or multiple legal entities the community has will have a huge effect on their life. They don’t know that how many work hours may be required of them or no labor requirements, how that will or won’t affect their life. They don’t know that how the community governs itself and makes decisions will totally affect how well or not they enjoy living there. They don’t know that a membership process needs to be clear, thorough, and rigorous so that their future neighbors will be people that they like and feel good around. There’s so many things people tend not to know because they tend to have starry eyes like “Whoo! Community. I just want to join one. There’s one. I’ll just see what they’re like.” And they mean well.

And oftentimes the people in the community, just want to tell them about their community, but they don’t really have this sort of larger context because people in communities tend to know about their community, but not about communities in general.

Are these the things you’ll be covering in the course?

Yeah, yeah. There’s about seven things that I want to share with people who take this course, this class, the different kind of communities there are that are out there, there’s about seven or eight different kinds. How to research communities thoroughly online.

How to know what websites really mean, you know, how to read between the lines and pick up on certain clues,  and what to ask when you email them if it’s not already on the website and how to plan visits, which is a very big deal, very time consuming. And you have to take off work and it’s expensive. And so it’s a big deal. And how to be a great guest at a community, which is good for you and good for them.

What to bring and not bring. Do bring leather work gloves. Do not bring your dog.

How to ask questions when you still don’t have the answers and what questions to ask and how to ask them sensitively and not be in people’s faces and be annoying, in which case the person might respond with a gruff voice and a scowl when really the community is more friendly, but you’ve got them at a wrong time. And questions to ask like who owns the land? How do you make decisions?

What is your decision-making method? Who makes the decisions? Do you get your money back if you leave? How much does it cost to join? What are the annual due’s and fees? Do you have them? Do you have labor requirements? Do you track them? What do you do if people don’t work? What do you do if people don’t pay? What do you do if people violate your community agreements? Do you have community agreements? How do we know what the community agreements are? Do you have an orientation process for new incoming members?

All kinds of things like that that a lot of people wouldn’t think to ask because they’re thinking “Whoopie, community, people will love me, finally.

What would someone who is founding a community learn from the class?

Well, let’s say we have a group of community founders or one or two founders from different communities who are taking this online class. They would learn a whole lot about how to help themselves attract exactly the kind of people they want to attract and perhaps courteously deflect away others who might want to do a completely different thing than they want to do or who somehow wouldn’t be able to pay whatever is required or wouldn’t be able to do the work, whatever is required or who have a completely different set of lifestyle choices or different values.

So you know that expression, a double edged sword. There ought to be an expression, a double-edged blessing, like a good thing. So it’s beneficial if you’re seeking to join a community. But the very same information can be beneficial if you’re seeking to create one. So you’ll know how to attract those members. So one of the things that I’ll be talking about is different kinds of membership processes that different kinds of communities do, and giving some real examples of real communities that I’ve researched both a while ago and more recently.

And so people starting communities will be able to get a sense of, oh, yeah, we could take that idea from that group and we could consider that idea from that group. So I think people starting communities could benefit from this class.

A little story about seeking community

Once upon a time, I was out in the little culvert between our two properties here, and I was pulling up some weeds and doing something. And a woman pulled up in a car and she had a German Shepherd dog in the passenger seat with a seat belt across his chest. And she pulls up and she was very, very distressed and near tears. And she said, “is this Earthaven?” And I said, “yes, it is.”

And she said, well, I’ve come a long way and I want to I want to stay here and I want to see if I want to join this place. I just left my home I’ve got everything I own in my car. And I need a place to stay and I need to know where to go here.

And I thought, oh, golly. I said, listen, did you contact Earthaven before you came here to talk to the campground manager you set up to stay in the campground? And she said no. And I said, did you contact Earthaven ahead of time to see if you could stay here and visit and that you’re here during a time when you could visit? No. Did you did you arrange to take a tour? No. Did you did you know we had a website? Did you look at the website? No.

and because she was getting upset with me, her dog. Being her protector and her best friend and dogs being telepathic with their owners, began to leap and snarl at me across the steering wheel towards me because he believed I was harming his mistress, who was ever more upset by each question I asked. And I was looking around thinking, what the heck to do?

She’s stuck. She’s scared. She’s driven a long way. And she was telling me how hard it was for her to find the place. And so she finally found it. And so she was feeling really relieved to have found it.

But she was scared and all she wanted was the place that we would put her up and take care of her because she misunderstood that communities aren’t places that offer hospitality, like the medieval set of monasteries that you could go to and they put you up, and so the two problems I had was I didn’t know how to break it to her that she actually couldn’t stay here and would she like to get a motel in Black Mountain, which is the nearby town.

And the other problem I had was, is that seat belt secure because of the slathering and growling and spittle coming out of his  snarling jaws as he was leaping across her to try to get out of his seat belt and get out the window. And I was down low under the window. And I thought, am I in grave danger of having my throat torn out by a raging German Shepherd  because we don’t offer hospitality here for people who just show up.

And so how it ended was the dog remained securely in the seat belt. And I told her, I’m so sorry, but we can’t accommodate you because we didn’t know you were coming. If you’d like, you can go to the campground and I’ll call the campground manager who can meet you there and see if you can arrange to stay there. And you just can’t arrive like this because this is our home and we need to know when someone’s going to visit us.

That was shocking for her because she said, well, I thought this was a community. And because I knew what I knew after all these years of research, I knew what she was saying. She had projected onto the word community the idea that we just take care of people and a lot of people think that.

And it’s heartbreaking to see when you are the one down in the culvert pulling weeds with the dog slithering at you. That, in fact, that’s not the case. So she said, well, I’m just not going to stay here. I thought this was like a community and she was crying and the dog was growling and barking and snarling and they left. And the second thing that came out of it was I knew more even than I did before that people who want to visit a community need to call them first and email them first and go to their website and find out what to do. So that was a very dramatic example of that for me.

Are people asking “can I contribute in a way that makes me valuable in this community?”

I think it helps to make an analogy with romance. When you’re going to marry someone, you don’t just marry the person you don’t know at all. You get to know them first. And I’m using a high school analogy from decades ago. You might date a little. You might go steady, you might get engaged, then you get married. But you don’t just go from, I don’t know you at all to getting married. And so both people have to want to do this thing.

So both parties – a community and a community seeker need to want the other. There needs to be a resonance between their values, shared values, a resonance between this is what the community is doing and this is why it’s doing, and its activities and its purpose. And the person wants to do those activities and has that purpose for the community they would live in. And they are willing to abide by the community’s agreements. And the community understands that they’re willing to abide by their agreements and they tell them what they are as compared to not telling them and expecting them to telepathically understand and then abide.

But we never told you what they were where the new person puts their foot in it all the time. And that happened to me when I first came here and. They need to be able to afford it in all the ways that are important, including can I make a living living there? And do they accept pets because, you know, I have Snarly, Barky, Scratchy, and Bity, and I want to make sure that they are welcome.

In your search for community, how many of communities have you been to?

Yeah, I’ve been to about one hundred and ninety.  I made a list.  And all over the world too.

How did you know and how do you know that this is your community home?

What a great question. I think it’s paradise here now that we resolved some of our most excruciating and crushing earlier mistakes, and we’ve turned ourselves into an agrarian village-scale ecovillage that seems to me healthy and thriving with vibrant, well-organized governance and wonderful new incoming young people who really give life and vibrancy and new ideas to the place. I was telling a friend the other day that one of our new young people who came in introduced holistic management to us and now we utilize that. And another incoming new young person introduced ecstatic dance and contact improvisation and other kinds of dance that we now have available regularly once a week and in other ways too. And various people who come in with visions and ideas for really good things to do and find a natural incubation place here to then manifest their dreams. Another young person who came in is about to start a holistic healing center in her neighborhood so it strikes me that this is a place of opportunity for people to manifest their dreams and I get to live here.

So I would rather live here than any place, although I do have a list of my seven favorite ecovillages in the world and Earthaven is one of them.

When you were first exploring Earthaven when it was much rougher in terms of physical and emotional infrastructure, how did you know then that this was your community home?

How did I know at the time that I joined when Earthaven was so much rougher that I’d want to be here?  Well, do you know that tarot card with a guy with a stick and the little white dog is stepping his foot off the cliff? The fool.

Perhaps I was being foolish, but for one thing was taking a chance and stepping off the cliff. And for another thing, I didn’t know just how rough it was going to be. I didn’t know how hard it would be for me or how hard it would be for the community to go through its various challenges over the years. I was aware of these kind of challenges from other communities that I knew about by then, but I really didn’t know any details about what would be happening here.

And I sort of grew up in a community with Earthaven growing up. I personally grew up because when you go to community, you sure do grow your consciousness better than it was when you got there, because you have to or else you can’t stay there. You really have to. And I ended up feeling wonderful about Earthaven and but I didn’t know then what I know now. If I could have seen ahead, I would have thought, yes, I’m willing to go through those years in order to get to those years, like the years now. And I think things are going so well. So seems to me very fortunate for me that I got to land here.

How can people reach you? Do you have a website?

It’s really easy. It’s Diana Leafe with the E on the end of Leaf,  Christian spelled exactly like the religion DianaLeafeChristian.org. And that’s how people can reach me and find out about my various online classes, workshops, consultations and other things I do.

Outro

Thank you for listening. Please visit our website at IntegratedLivingPodcast.org. And sign up for our newsletter. So, you know when new podcasts are released. You can also browse the School of Integrated Living upcoming online and in-person class offerings and drop us a note via the contact form to let us know what you’d like to hear discussed in future podcasts. This podcast is produced by the Culture’s Edge School of Integrated Living at Earthaven Ecovillage in Western North Carolina. Have a great day.

View all our podcasts and search by date and topic.