When I was in my teenage years, I lived across the street from a playground and baseball park. I would walk almost every day around the park with my two dogs, and admire the beauty of the trees flourishing there — especially one weeping willow tree. She was nestled into her own little alcove among the chaos of the baseballs flying around, and the laughter and shrieks coming from the playground swings. There was a bench next to her to start a conversation with her and to marvel over how her branches fell into cascades of teardrop leaves that enveloped and held whoever was near.

I felt like she was the embodiment of my soul.
Like I was those branches.
And in some ways, she reflected back to me my grief and my gifts that I had yet to discover until I was an adult … when I would have some roots to anchor into in order to be present with all that would unfurl inside of me.

This weeping willow tree reminds me of one of the goals that Earthaven strives towards:

Goal 13: We recognize elders as the trunk and children as the fruit of our village tree, and collectively prioritize what all the parts of our “tree” need to thrive. 

All parts of the tree are valuable and vitally needed for our necessary expansion and growth. The children are the fruits of our labor, the accumulation of our wisdom, and the future of shaping our world. They are the next wave of presence and consciousness and awareness that our planet desperately needs for solutions, change, and hope.

And so my hope is that they may know and be seen in their gifts and be celebrated with unconditional love. That they may be held in their expansion and contraction by us — the parents, the elders, the friends, the family, and the mentors. My prayer is that we invest in them and nurture them so that they may burst like ripe fruit with their juicy sweetness into our world.

How are you investing in the next generation? 

I invite you to have the ultimate intentional community family experience this summer with us. Earthaven Ecovillage Experience Week this July 31 through Aug 6 is a deep dive into the embodied essence of Earthaven and its members through events, work days, and classes to further your understanding of community living.

Simultaneously, bring your kids to Eco-Explorers Adventure Week from Aug 1 through 5, our summer program where they will experience community with other children who love nature. This program is also available as a day camp for those of you that would like to commute.

Be your part of the tree … because we need all to thrive.

Your tree hugging friend,

Jill Lacasse xx

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We love our birds here at Earthaven Ecovillage. It can be heartbreaking when one crashes into the window because it sees the sky reflected there. Up to one billion birds die each year as a result of window collisions in the United States alone.

Since our earlier post, we have discovered several more good solutions. Our favorite involves using a paint pen to draw thin, white vertical lines on the outside of the window. The video above was taken through a window with these lines. Nearly invisible! And very effective. Here are detailed instructions.

We also had good luck with using vertical fishing line installed several inches away from the windows. This gives the birds a visual warning as well as a tactile one when they fly close enough for their wings to touch the lines. Details here.

Lots of folks also report that these window decals are very effective. Birds can see ultraviolet light that humans can’t, so the decals work well without blocking your view. CollidEscape also makes a number of guaranteed and high-performance products to prevent window strikes.

Let us know in the comments if you try any of these.

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Transcript from Video:

Courtney Brooke: Good morning, Zev.

Zev:  Good morning.

Courtney Brooke: What are you doing?

Zev: I am grating this incredible black turmeric grown by Leon with his mad, passionate devotion to beautiful food and medicine plants at Full Circle Far next to Earthaven Ecovillage.

Courtney Brooke: Look at that color of the grated root.

Zev:  This is after Courtney Brooke dug it up with Leon, harvested it. Then I had this vision that doing a steam inhalation with it would heal my nasal passages. So I’m working on that and I’m gonna tincture some and make an elixir with some, like Rachel taught us to do. Really excited about this plant.

Courtney Brooke: This plant was dug maybe like a few days ago. On Thursday? Like last week. Just from our neighbor.
I have a motto that I live by that I eat purple things every chance I get because you are what you eat.

Zev: And she wants to be purple.

Courtney Brooke: Yeah.

Zev: Wow.

Courtney Brooke: The smell is intoxicating. It’s not like regular Turmeric, is it?

Zev: No!

Courtney Brooke: The smell is like, what is that? Some people say it’s kind of like….cardamon?

Zev: Camphor? But I don’t know. What do you think, Mom?

Courtney Brooke: What’s Camphor?

Jodi: Hmmm. Camphor usually drives me crazy when people have it in their cedar closets. I would like, oh my gosh.  I just accidentally broke open this little Orange one.

Courtney Brooke: Let’s see it.

Jodi: Or maybe this is called yellow.

Courtney Brooke: Wow!!

Zev: Yeah, that’s the one that we call carrot turmeric…

Courtney Brooke: Because we just eat it.  It’s so crunchy and sweet and mild. That’s also from just next door at Full Circle Farm. They’ve got that turmeric,  the normal turmeric. They’ve also got what they call a red turmeric. And then they grow this also black turmeric.

Zev: Which is actually purple

Courtney Brooke: Which is actually purple. Blessed are we. There’s a saying,….all these, come from the place we call India….And there’s a saying there that says, if you have the black turmeric in your home, you’ll have good fortune and abundance of finances.

Zev: Finances.

Courtney Brooke:  So maybe…

Wealthy are we.

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Hey there, People of Earthaven,

This is my belated goodbye.

Dominator culture maintains that “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” or that personal growth stems most measurably from painful experience. I’ve always been suspicious of this attitude, observing that while hardship shapes us, it’s in joy and continuity that we are able to shape ourselves. My two months at Earthaven confirmed that for me; for the first time in a very long time, I was able to breathe and get some perspective. I was constantly impressed with the community that you all work to create… even more so now given the contrast of being back in the world outside.

Thanks to everyone who made me feel welcome and valued, and who caused me to smile at any point. I appreciate it more than I can say, and I carry it with me.

Love,

Georgia

The post Loveletter Corner appeared first on Earthaven Ecovillage.

The first structure Earthaveners built together, called the Pavilion, was intended as a kitchen. Foreshadowing the design of the Council Hall, it was a yurt with round, straight walls and an experimental ferro-cement roof. Bamboo harvested from a Weaverville roadside made the purlins, and a wood fiber called excelsior was stuffed behind them. Not long afterward, we realized the flammable ceiling was a deal-breaker for a kitchen. That was 1995.

We went back to the tiny Mud Hut until the Hamlet Kitchen was completed a few years later, and in the ensuing years the Pavilion was renamed the House of Oneness, designated but rarely used as a meditation-yoga space, and then for childcare. I only remember using it for kids’ activities during the Bioregional Conference in 2003. Eventually, after the roof took a hit from a tree limb and the unmaintained interior began to slump, it became a barn for Yellowroot Farm’s adjacent field.

Enter Zev Friedman and his uncanny feeling for the meaning of things. Analyzing the changes in Earthaven culture, he began to call the deteriorating structure The House of Gathered Diversity. He proposed that we preserve the history and meaning of the structure by transplanting the surviving wooden posts to a new sacred space in the Village Center and building a memorial bench to preserve sacred space at the original site.

According to Zev, “this transformation ritually depicts the diversified direction the community seems to be taking, and it creates useful infrastructure to help maintain a sense of connectedness between different parts of the village as we enter the next stage of Earthaven’s life.”

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As Firekeeper (aka President) of Earthaven for 2014, I am excited to announce that we will be turning 20 years old this year! Earthaven has been an intentional community seed bed all these years, attracting villagers to settle and explore what it means to take responsibility for the care of our land, our natural resources, and each other. Over the past two decades, we’ve gathered some magnificent things to share—harvested from our experience developing practices and norms for stewarding what we share in a way that will benefit its future stewards.

This week I read an inspiring work by activist and writer David Bollier, who looks at the study of “the Commons” as a new paradigm of economics, politics and culture. These days, when most of us think of “the Commons,” we are likely to be referring to open source software or Wikipedia or even the Internet. However, Bollier says that “…a commons arises whenever a given community decides it wishes to manage a resource in a collective manner, with special regard for equitable access, use and sustainability.” This touched me deeply in my core, as it dawned on me that building Earthaven is a vibrant expression of commoning!

Visitors on a tour of the Earthaven Commons, which includes hundreds of acres of forest.

“Commoners are determined to open up new social and political spaces in which people can make their own rules, negotiate their own governance, and craft solutions that are tailored to their local circumstances.”

Some of our recent news highlights what friends and neighbors have been up to recently to make life more meaningful, common resources more accessible, and the future more abundant. Earthaven is commoning all of the time…!

I invite ya’ll to explore your Commons. Just start small. It can begin with organizing a neighborhood work party. Bring snacks to share. Build relationships in your community one neighbor at a time. And, as most of us learned in kindergarten, it turns out to be true that—to have a righteous good time—“You gotta share, and… everybody gets to play.”

Kimchi Rylander, an artist and permaculture activist, has been practicing sustainable living for decades. She’s lived at Earthaven for the past 13 years and when she’s not organizing a work party in her neighborhood, she’s out with her rabbits, or tending her compost shrines.

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This March, Earthaven residents participated in a “Spring Cleaning” event, sorting through a ton of stuff (kept because someone once thought each item would someday be “useful)” and hauling much of it “away” in a trailer of metal and a couple of dumpsters of trash. Items from Salvation Alley, the Village Center, and many neighborhoods were gathered and the two mindsets—“Keep it, we’ll use it someday” and “That’s a piece of junk, toss it!”—got a chance to be debated in real time as we sorted through almost twenty years of built-up stuff. To our credit, much was already headed to a landfill and just took a detour here, some as early as a few years after the community began.

The storage barn on Salvation Lane was the first building built by the Earthaven Forestry Cooperative.

The intention of “Salvation Alley” isn’t to hold ritual evangelical healings, but to have a place where salvaged or excess materials from a building, plumbing, electrical, etc., project can be set aside until someone needs just that thing. As one who dabbles in a lot of projects around the community and our farm, I find it a useful resource overall.

But the reality is that the good stuff gets used and the junk stays around. It gets rained on, more dented, broken and smashed, and becomes if not useful for art projects, landfill. While we keep most carbon “waste” on site (stumps, brush, cardboard, all kinds of paper, natural fiber, etc.) where it can break down into soil, the plastics, metals and other materials humans create just don’t go away that quickly.

Sorting with a smile: “Prince” Otter and Spring Cleaning co-organizer Carleigh O’Donnell.

Paul likes to point out that having things “clean and pristine” is a pathology, and I too question the environmentalist who always wants to “clean it up.” However, if our storage area is not allowing us to find and use salvaged goods, we’re not doing any net good anyway.

The Spring Cleaning days were an all-out community effort that brought a lot of us together in a funky, fun way that could become something more regular as we grow and develop our neighborhoods and the Commons.

Andy Bosley runs Yellowroot Farm with his partner, Julie McMahan, and holds many roles around Earthaven including forestry, governance and men’s awareness work.

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Hepatica

Trillium

On a recent walk through the burgeoning Springtime woods, Suchi took these pictures to refresh those of us who are desk-bound, and to charm you who’ve not visited in a while.

“A deliciously long spring began with Bloodroot blossoming, continued with Trillium coming on, Trout Lily, Hepatica and Violet, and rounded off my ecstatic adventure with Lady Slipper and Showy Orchids. Oh, Nature!” ~Suchi

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Last month our friends and favorite facilitators Violetta Ilkiw and Alex Bulkin left after a 10-month internship as our bi-monthly weekend “group conflict and organizational change” cross-mentors.

We’re “cross-mentors” because we were mentoring them in the challenges of doing their humble work in the field of an intentional community while they were teaching us about (and modeling) patience and forbearance under many levels of stress.

The post Thank you Alex & Violetta appeared first on Earthaven Ecovillage.

While bicycling to the Zendo for early morning sitting practice, I encountered a box turtle on the trunk road in my neighborhood. Stopping to get a closer look, I became enchanted with the rugged, bearded old critter. I thought it would make a good totem animal for Earthaven, symbolizing long life and slow measured movement in a variety of habitats from wooded swamps to dry, grassy fields.

Like many of us, box turtles are omnivores. Favorite foods include almost any insect (although they seem to particularly relish worms and slugs), virtually any fruit or berry, mushrooms, and a variety of vegetables. Everything they eat is local food.

Box turtles model localization since they do not travel far, and often live within an area less than 200 meters in diameter. While homesteading and localizing is an ideal Earthaven folks value, many of us still travel and depend on fossil fuels far too much.

Placing their vital energy carefully, turtles do not begin mating until they are 7 to 10 years old. With an expected lifespan of 25 to 30 years, they are sexually abstinent until well into their adulthood.

If we seek to live sustainably, there are many lessons we can learn about the slow and steady lifestyle of the turtle.

Marjorie Vestal is a Community Health Professional, beekeeper, blackberry farmer, mother, and recent grandmother. She lives at Earthaven Ecovillage where she cultivates woodland medicinal herbs and enjoys an ever-deepening connection to the natural world.

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