A churning in my soul and a restlessness in my heart signaled to me that I needed a change. I felt the strong call to move to a self-sustaining embodied community from my smaller spiritual community in California.

The three years I spent in Cali were a time of silent retreat and spiritual initiation. Now, I was craving to be warmly engaged with the world through relationships and contributing to a larger vision and mission in a conscious and deliberate way. My chapter was closing in California. I trusted in the void that was my next steps —  the free fall of endless possibility.

Then I found Earthaven and felt pulled to register for the Earthaven Ecovillage Experience Weekend.

When I first arrived in Asheville and we were driving up to Earthaven, I could feel the crystalline energy of the Appalachian mountains, and so much joy and expansion filled my heart and body. Everything was screaming yes! I was pleasantly surprised by how Earthaven was literally in the middle of a forest! The land felt well loved, alive, and thriving compared to the crisp grassy land of California.

There were around 30 people at the Experience Weekend, including a large group who were thinking about starting an intentional community in Ohio. Little did I know that we were going to be creating our own ecosystem during the weekend and that I would connect on many different levels with the people there. I met some incredible people, and we shared stories, songs, visions, and our hearts. I felt an instant connection to the facilitators — NikiAnne, Farmer, and Becky — and their embodied essence and passion for Earthaven. It felt expansive to know that I could grow in this environment where body-based practices, grief and ritual, and connection to nature are celebrated and embraced.

I felt grounded and connected to the land through our hikes together from each neighborhood and I loved exploring the possibilities of how people choose to build their homes and live on the land. The food was delicious and prepared with such love and intention. I loved that the meals were inclusive of everyone’s dietary needs, and created from quality and sustainable whole foods, with some grown on the land. We went on a wild foraging walk with Dimitri; I learned all about the abundant native friends growing on the land and tasted their sweet and intricate notes. I gained knowledge about the building of eco-friendly homes, the governing system, how Earthaven has made consensus decisions for 27 years, and the history and stories of the people.

I knew I had found home when I felt a sense of belonging to this group of people who carried the ultimate vision of a regenerative culture that is receptive to the changing needs of its people and the land that is so cherished and honored. I felt my own growth edge would be challenged here and sensed the expansion that would come with being immersed in this level of connection.

All the stars aligned, you could say, and now I am working for Earthaven’s educational nonprofit two months in, steeping in the unfolding of rich relationships, and joyfully sharing my heart and gifts with the community. I feel so incredibly blessed that Earthaven has welcomed me with such open arms and willing hearts.

The Earthaven Ecovillage Experience Weekend is a great way to become immersed into an intentional community. It gives you a snapshot into what life is like at Earthaven if you decide to make the move. I highly recommend the Experience Weekend or Experience Week if you are interested in gaining a realistic understanding of the challenges of living in a community, as well as basking in the immense abundance and richness that come from building relationships and being together through all the facets of an ecovillage.

Upcoming Offerings:

Earthaven’s School of Integrated Living (SOIL) offers the Earthaven Ecovillage Experience Weekend twice this year: May 27-30 and October 7-10. There’s also a new Earthaven Action Week following experience weekend so you can extend your visit and interact more with the Earthaven community.

I look forward to meeting you there, and giving you a little taste of the embodied essence of Earthaven!

Much love,
Jillian

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My firewood shed and firewood

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I pulled that from Wikipedia. But the concept that humans are creating an entirely new geo-ecological epoch is a big deal. Our destabilization of the life support systems may change the planet so significantly that it takes millions or billions of years to recover.

That’s why so many people are looking at models for life-giving, planet-focused, integrated systems for life, love, work, family, and home.

Earthaven Ecovillage, with our land-based life, is just one of many approaches to new ways of being. Come spend a week with us to see what we’re up to regarding these “new ways of being.”

Earthaven Ecovillage EXPERIENCE WEEK is an opportunity to live with us and immerse yourself in our village. Our curriculum includes:

• Organic food production
• Natural Buildings
• Renewable Energy
• Off-Grid Utilities
• Resilient Community
• Regenerative Culture
• Personal Growth
• Deep Connections

Read all the details about Experience Week. If you can’t make it this year, please keep it in mind for next year or check out our Visitor Weekend in September. And thank you for being part of our global virtual community.

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We’re thrilled to be hosting campers again in our campground at Earthaven Ecovillage.

You’ll need to register for an in-person Earthaven tour to be eligible to camp. The campground is open through October and we have a Saturday tour every week the campground is open. If you cannot make it for one of our Saturday tours, you can schedule a customized time.

All the camping details, including online reservations, can be found on the School of Integrated Living website.

Here’s one of my favorite memories from a group event in the campground before COVID.

I look forward to seeing you in the village.

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While it’s hard to be encouraged by the way humans are utilizing planetary resources and influences, to some extent it just makes us hunker down even more, to mine those inner resources that will help us go the distance—get another project done, another plan designed, even explore another conflict…and keep creating what means most to us, including collaborating on celebrations and community traditions.

One way to share some of these developments with us is by staying subscribed to this newsletter and becoming a Supporting Member.

I hear visitors sometimes wonder how such a cool place could be so…messy! It’s understandable that the vision we have of where we’ll be in another decade might be the same one visitors are looking for now. But Earthaven is not a Planned Community! We’re a community in various stages of planning, still dreaming ourselves into existence, in many ways more a process than an accomplishment—one that needs more time and capital to unfold in the organic way we’ve learned to trust.

So we invite you to visit with an eye for what stands out as beautiful to you, whether in the landscape, the built environment, or the lives of the people and animals you meet. Please feel welcome to join us (as Supporting Members, students, work exchangers, and for a community tour), and to feel the possibilities. Come grow with us!

Earthaven, by the way, is growing! As our new structure takes shape, eight people have lined up so far to take the jump into Full Membership as soon as we’re ready to make that official. Here’s what one wrote in a recent membership interview:

Question: What are your deepest dreams and aspirations for living in community?

I see a thriving community where people know the land intimately, they know the food and medicine all around them, they know how to make fibers and tools from the land, and they do this in a sacred way. We create so much food, the wildlife begin to thrive and populations surge. Ceremony is weaved throughout: honoring the land and its inhabitants, individuals going through rites of passage, and important annual events. There are tools that address conflict, bringing peace to people’s hearts. …. I see a deepening in spirituality as different backgrounds come together. I see dancing and singing weaved into everyday events, [with] children heavily honored and actions looked at with an eye for future generations…. I see a place that people get excited to visit and feel sad to leave. This is the place I want to call home. (It is interesting, as I write this, to see how some of this is present already, and so maybe what I’m imagining is a deepening of it all.)

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above: This year’s first snow, about 8” in January, was poetically beautiful and rather quickly gone.

 Monday it gets warm, up into the 70s, and by Wednesday it freezes after midnight. Again. Cold wind slices through the sun’s bright warmth and we lean out of its way; next, it’s gone and we’re pulling off sweatshirts. If snow doesn’t come again, which it might, we’ll be wading in the creeks by the end of the month!

This exquisite weather is nonetheless worrisome because of how the disrupted patterns may cause even more disruption—and also because the huge climate mutations going on all around us ask us to direct our attention to what we can do to support ourselves and others in environmentally and socially useful ways. So far, our lifestyle choices strongly support renewables and movements that resist the continuation and expansion of fossil fuel extraction.

left: Quince bloomed early at the Earthaven neighborhood called Dancing Shiva.*

We wish all our readers a healthy and encouraging Spring. We hope many of you will come visit, take a tour, enroll in a workshop, get your Permaculture Design Certificate and definitely drop us a line to share news from your neighborhood.

Here at Earthaven, residential neighborhoods are reinventing themselves as “pods,” slightly more independent units of interwoven legal entities that have most of the same ecological and unitary guidelines as before, but are taking more individual responsibility for designing their purposes as embracers of the Earthaven vision.

Amidst so many changes within and beyond the community, we continue to treasure our opportunity to learn and practice conscious connection to life, land and each other!

*Dancing Shiva is dedicated to teaching Tantra—an inclusive spiritual practice—to all folks and, in particular, the queer community, through workshops and individual retreats in the U.S., Mexico and Costa Rica, and through satsangs and written material. For more information, email dancingshivatantra at gmail.com

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