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