Earthaven is unlike almost every other North American ecovillage I know of, because it’s a village within a village. Our 329-acre property is surrounded by adjacent and nearby neighbors and friends who participate in and contribute to our developing ecovillage life and culture.

I first realized this when I first visited Findhorn, a large, well-known, 60-year-old intentional community and ecovillage in northern Scotland. The early Findhorn community, founded in 1962 in rented trailers on a 15-acre mobile home park, is the original village. Over the years the wider ecovillage developed out beyond its borders as former community members moved nearby and new people moved to the area specifically to contribute to and participate in the new spiritually oriented, ecologically aware culture Findhorn was developing. (Short video of Findhorn Community. )

The original community, the Findhorn Foundation, a nonprofit educational organization (now about 50 members), soon bought the mobile home park, The Park. Approximately 450 Findhorn-affiliated friends and neighbors live in various degrees of proximity to the Foundation, renting mobile homes or bungalows in The Park or living in several adjacent housing developments, including the Field of Dreams project and East Whins Cohousing. Others live in the small fishing village at one end of the peninsula, or in Kinloss, a larger village on the other mainland end of the peninsula, and in the small Scottish city of Forres, three miles away. Another Findhorn Foundation property, Cluny Hill, hosts educational events in a former hotel two miles past Forres. Many of these Findhorn villagers run businesses with a product or service, or a nonprofit with a mission, that resonates closely with the Foundation’s values. These include a wind generator co-op, a dairy co-op, a car co-op, a health food store, a credit union, a Waldorf school, and an Earth-restoration project helping to reforest the Scottish highlands.

While Findhorn had 60 years to develop this way, Earthaven started becoming a village within a village in the last 15 years or so. Members of our ecovillage family include, like Findhorn, former community members who moved next door or nearby, people interested in membership who didn’t end up joining us but still wanted to participate and live nearby, and longtime Scots-Irish neighbors who visit often and share their Southern Appalachian homestead lore. Other village members are visitors, especially people who attended Earthaven’s School of Integrated Living (SOIL) educational programs, like Earthaven Experience Week, so drawn to our values and culture they rent homes onsite or nearby. Many have become dues-paying members of our Earthaven Community Association along with most Earthaven members.

I believe Earthaven is one of the few communities in North America like this. Some former members of Sirius Community in Massachusetts live nearby and attend weekly dinners. But Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage in Missouri, which is similar to Earthaven in many ways, has no friends living nearby because their neighbors, mostly retired Mennonite dairy and soybean farmers, don’t offer rentals.

Wonderful neighbors in our village family include Leon Birstein and Geni Stephenson, who’ve been integral parts of our lives since our earliest days. Geni brings fresh produce and other homestead products from their organic farm to our weekly Coffee and Trade farmers market, operates a pottery studio some of our members use too, manages five small rental units adjacent to our property for new people considering Earthaven membership, and opens the Zendo on their property for morning and evening meditations. Leon, who built the Zendo and their homestead, runs the farm with another neighbor, Jonathan Greenberg, innovates useful ways to run a homestead (which many of us copy), and serves as an electrical, plumbing, and general homesteading expert for many of us.

Tricia and John Baehr and their children have contributed in numerous ways, John providing physical labor in various community workdays, and Tricia, a superb cook, hosting various village celebrations, catering various celebration events for members, and offering educational cooking and baking classes for kids. Tricia co-produced, hosted, and catered our Forest Garden Party one summer evening, where we wore forest-themed costumes and danced with the fireflies. She also wrote, directed, and produced a wonderful children’s play with Earthaven and neighbor children. Bob Broadhead participates in workdays, manages an onsite trout pond with one of our members, and hosts the coffee bar at the Coffee and Trade, and Seraina Broadhead is a Board Member of Culture’s Edge, Earthaven’s 501(c)3 nonprofit; hosts a study group on eldering for our older folks; and in a widely attended ceremony was inducted as a village  “Elder in Training,” to enthusiastic applause and cheers.

Friends and neighbors serve on Earthaven’s committees, serve in community roles or part-time jobs, or offer classes. Allie Bales serves on our Care Team, Alinahh Ever and Chelsea Spitzer are on our Racial Equity Task Group (and Chelsea was a teacher for our youngest children at The Village School). Chris Ehart is barbeque master at our Tuesday night cookouts, Jason Dionne helps on our Council Hall wood furnace crew, Danu Macon served as our Labor Project Coordinator. Arturo Chaves teaches Cumbia, Merengue and other Mexican dances, Kayla Birstein teaches kickboxing, and Michelle Dione taught Middle Eastern dancing in our Council Hall. Jonathan Greenberg and Sarah Nolan-Poupart cover shifts at our onsite farm, and Karen Budd is the SOIL registrar. Other friends provide garden and farm products, delicious snacks, and homemade crafts at our weekly Coffee and Trade farmer’s market or our annual Bizarre Bazaar — Peggy Austin Malone, Otter Kaase, Chrisa Hickey, Alinahh, and Rainbow Teplitsky.

Longtime area residents Alvin Lytle, Thrisa Murphy, and Lois and Reid Murphy, whose Scots-Irish-descended families have lived in our southern Appalachian mountains for generations, have each brought benefits and local wisdom to our village life, and Alvin, a local organic farmer, offers organic farm products at every Coffee and Trade.

Other neighbors who regularly contribute to or have done so in the recent past, and who regularly attend our social events, include Chris Heath, Brent Hickey, Ed Hickey, Linda Bark, Pripo Teplitsky, June Lytle, Rio Fiore, Sarah Anne Amunson, Ben Kassahun, Luke Cannon, Juniper and John O’Dell, Thomas Doochin and his partner Paeonia, Jane Ware and Don Miller, and Faith Butterfield.

We can never forget Randy and Sally Frazer, who lived here long before Earthaven was founded, not only kindly invested in our Earth Shares Fund in our early days to help us get started, and generously gave us a donation too.

We are so lucky. Thank you all so much!

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Decades ago, Brandon Greenstein and friends initiated the “Bizarre Bazaar” at the White Owl in Earthaven Ecovillage, as an opportunity for folks to display, demonstrate, share, sell, trade, or give away the fruits of their labors in a variety of arts, crafts, and entertaining offerings. This heartful gesture has become a community feature ever since! Fresh food, handmade baskets, jewelry, clothing, hand-knit and crocheted accessories, jams, beverages, medicines, and more have continued to show up through the years. Most of us look forward to the brief, energy-packed afternoon together, our mid-December extravaganza in the Council Hall.

Last year, I heard a neighbor say, “I love bringing my latest inventions to the Bizarre Bazaar, just to see what I should focus on for the coming year.” A friend who brings his year’s accumulation of healthy blessings told me, “I’ve done the Bazaar for four years now, and it really does make a difference in my holiday economy!”

It seems that, for us Earthaveners and many of our neighbors, getting dressed up and sharing in the excitement of trade and the purveying of our homemade, homegrown, and upcycled goods, elbow to elbow in concentric circles of tables in the Council Hall is a ritual with multiple blessings. We remember to do what we do best and share it. Folks display and offer samples of new items and ideas since we last met. We can chomp and slurp as we sell and trade, wandering to each other’s tables over and over again, considering deals we might make and changes for next year, as we meet new sellers and customers every time. It’s even got me creating a table of my own, where I can upscale houseplant arrangements in adorable thrift store baskets and pass the profits on to our Village School. One of my favorite opportunities is when I’m able to offer original art work from close friends and former neighbors now living as far away as France!

One day, this may well be the main way we offer and access many of our basic needs, beyond the bulk items in our pantries. For now, the pleasure of shared commerce in an old-fashioned style keeps us looking forward to and showing up on that special Saturday in December every year.

This year (2022), the Bizarre Bazaar happens on Saturday, December 10, from noon to 4 pm. And you are invited!

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This time of year, we like to acknowledge our interdependence with our extended community and also look for more ways we can work together. Sunday afternoon we had a discussion about interdependence. We talked about how we could grow and preserve more food, have fewer trips to town, and grow black soldier fly larvae for chicken and trout food. We also saw that we could do more to support Cooperate WNC, a nonprofit based at Earthaven that is promoting mutual aid in Western North Carolina.

After the discussion, Tricia Baehr, wrote and sent an article about interdependence for homesteaders. Tricia and her family live up the creek from Earthaven in a neighboring community. She participates in homesteading social media groups, bringing information and practices into the community.

Please enjoy the following article from Tricia.

While the US celebrates its independence from England many moons ago, perhaps it is fitting for those of us who subscribe to the homesteading lifestyle to celebrate something else, interdependence day.

Those of us who tend our hearths, homes, land, and animals know that it takes more than an independent spirit to accomplish the goals and tasks that are required to do what many consider the great work before us. I had heard the phrase regarding farmers and farming that looked to farmers “feeding the world,” but in my observations I feel like that puts a lot of pressure on farmers. What if we looked at it another way, that farmers and homesteaders’ first goal is to feed themselves and their families, then their direct neighbors, and then their communities? What might that look like? We’re all hearing about shortages in the food supplies, supply chain issues, and oddly, a barrage of destruction from fires and other curious destruction of food producing facilities.

Yet, we as homesteaders walk out into our gardens this time of year and experience overwhelm at the abundance that spews forth from the land. We struggle in the spring to get all of the plants and seeds into the ground. The longer days and shorter nights allow us time to deal with it all. How many of us find ourselves pressure canning late into summer nights attempting to save the harvest for the cold winter nights?

In my little valley nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains, we like to celebrate Interdependence Day by naming all the ways in which we as neighbors and a community come together to feed each other. Whether it’s the woman with the small herd of cows that allows so many of our neighbors to have access to nutrient-rich ancestral foods, or the folks who grow a variety of vegetables with compost-rich soil that has been 20 years in the making, or the elder gentleman who organizes and manages our local trout pond, to the neighborhoods that manage cooperative gardens together, to the gaggle of women who gather in the summer time to can, pickle, ferment, dehydrate, and preserve all the abundance, to the folks who raise, tend, and slaughter together chicken broilers for their freezers, or the small groups that gather to kill a hog with reverence and appreciation, doing all the hard work of scalding and scraping, eviscerating, butchering, sausage making, curing, and smoking together.

We have come to realize that none of these tasks exist in a vacuum. We’re all dependent on one another for this way of life.

How do we retain our personal sovereignty from entities that would want us depending on handouts from sources like governments AND also be connected to folks living nearby with similar values and goals?

I believe that it starts with knowing and collaborating with our geographical neighbors. Communities thrived in the past with this concept, yet the 20th and 21st first centuries have separated us more and more. I frequently see in homesteading social media groups the contrast of some working collaboratively with their neighbors and communities and others struggling on their own devoid of connection because of all of the many things that are used to separate us as a society. Religion, politics, appearance, lifestyle choices, and more. Caesar’s playbook of divide and conquer is still being used against us, but as country folk who understand the value of being connected to a piece of land and all the abundance that can bring, there’s certainly something within us all that seeks the interdependence we all may need to make it through the future that appears to be headed in all of our directions.

I have helped many a neighbor on chicken processing day. Someone in my community taught me and my husband and now we share those skills with anyone who wants to learn. Currently, we are devising a way to build a small walk-in refrigeration unit so we can cure cheeses or hang an animal for further processing.

Will we use it all the time? No, yet we plan to make it available to our neighbors to use when they need it.

Our neighbor Andy owns a poultry plucker. Whenever we process birds, we borrow it from him. There’s no charge, but we generously give back to his family a bird or two, some bone broth, and anything else we have abundance of in exchange and in gratitude.

I am witnessing more and more skill sharing around farms and homesteads these days and I am seeing more and more folks flocking to land outside of densely populated areas. There’s something about being neighborly and cooperative that many of us long for, maybe because we know deep down in our hearts that with rural life—with being so connected to the seasons and land—that attempting to be self-sufficient isn’t completely done in a bubble. That our interdependence is key to thriving in the countryside.

I live in a holler—there’s not a ton of sun, it’s sloped and terraced, and we do the best with what we have. We can’t grow hay or straw for the things we might need it for (mulching, bedding, or livestock), so we depend on other sources, like the fellow down the road with hay fields and the equipment to harvest it. We prefer organic, glyphosate- and GMO-free feed for our poultry, so we find the closest source possible.

My friend whose neighborhood garden is prolific is a single mom. She works outside of her homestead, as do I. Each summer we gather at my place with the abundance of vegetables for processing. We get social connection and jars and jars of preserved food for our efforts. She gifts me with half of what we preserve. She grows and harvests and I help with washing, sorting, canning, dehydrating, cooking, etc. We use my space, tools, resources, and energy (propane and electric). It’s a win win.

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I asked around the village to see what other villagers are reading. Deborah Clark recommended Helen Zuman’s book Mating in Captivity, A Memoir. It’s about her experiences in the Zendik Farm cult, which she didn’t know was a cult until she was in it for a while and discovered that her autonomy and self-worth were being eroded by the cult leaders. You might call it a cautionary tale of someone who was very interested in community life and looking for love, but found a distorted version with the Zendiks.

Deborah reports “I’ve actually read the book twice, and it’s really well written — she conveys what happened and her process with a satisfying balance of juicy description and economy: never a wasted word. Somehow she clearly speaks her truth while maintaining some objectivity, portraying the cult leaders as humans and not monsters. It was particularly interesting to me because I had read about the Zendiks and was curious about their ‘community,’ and also knew someone else who had gotten out (he was there at the same time Helen was). It was especially juicy the second time I read it, because by then I had gotten to know Helen as a dear friend, but I think the book would be of interest to anyone who is interested in the topics of community, cults, and personal transformation.”

Spoiler alert: Helen survived the cult, did some good healing and processing, or as she would say “composting” of her experiences, and went on to be a successful writer, activist, and entrepreneur, and now has a regular podcast called Chocolate Church.

Bruce Johnston is reading a book called Shame: How America’s Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country by Shelby Steele.

Bruce reports “The book is about how America’s ‘culture wars’ began in the 1960s, when America finally became accountable for its treatment of Black Americans, and then for imperialism, sexism, and so forth. The book argues a schism in American life has come from that awareness and the loss of moral authority that white America experienced as a consequence of that awareness. The book contends that this cultural war has prevented sensible policy in many areas of life and has generated an avoidance of principled discussion around sensitive topics like race and gender, mostly because American institutions still feel that they lack the moral authority to do so. I recommend it because it is a point of view on these topics that I rarely hear: unconventional, delightfully practical, humanistic, and relatively free of ideology.”

And our elder Arjuna da Silva is reading a book that’s 50 years old, but not yet known — The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. She says that it’s a radical and amazing investigation of the more likely evolution of human thought and consciousness based on ancient texts that have apparently rarely been seen in these lights. She recommends it for people interested in evolution, consciousness, or healing.

What are you reading? If there’s a book you’d like to share, please share it in the comments.

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A big shout-out to the Farm Beginnings Collaborative for giving us basic idea of structuring stages of learning. They do this really well in their “Growing the Next Generation of Farmers” worksheet which lays out the beginning, in-training, startup, seasoned stages of a farmers journey.

This road map helps us address the challenge of educating an incoming populace with a wide range of experience, expectations, ideals, and skills. It helps us be realistic about the process of membership and creates a structure for what comes next at each step of the process.

It allows us to co-create more successful outcomes for the incoming “New Roots” and encourages them to engage for fully in their own journey. Education is always an investment in the self so whether or not new residents stay at Earthaven long-term, they are deepening their relationship with regenerative culture along the way.

Many thanks to Lena Estes for the drawing and for the fabulous team of Courtney Brooke, Garrell Bevirt, Arjuna DaSilva, NikiAnne Feinbert, and Lee Warren for pulling it all together.

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Day two of a four-day plaster party on our new house (Chris and I will be moving into the middle floor)

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Monday afternoon basketball back behind the storage barn

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Esme shares her family’s vegetable harvest

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My firewood shed and firewood

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