Robbie Wheelock reflecting on Earthaven Ecovillage Experience Week

(Transcript from video)

Hey there. I’m Robbie Wheelock. And I was a participant of the Earthaven Experience Week. Being from Asheville, and being from school at the time, that was something that I felt would be a good supplement to the education I was receiving. There was a lot of hard learning that you do about the reality of communities and also with sustainability and what not. And that was my interest in school: sustainability.

And so I saw Earthaven, because it’s nearby. I wanted to take this chance to explore what it can really look like.

I got a lot more from that Experience Week than I was even looking for. Which is really a wonderful thing. And it was wonderful being out here because of that. Some of the things I took away from my Experience Week…..

First of all, I got the things I was looking for in terms of how the community operates and how it stays fulfilling itself, in terms of energy, in terms of roads and infrastructure, in terms of housing. So that was the hard concrete stuff that I was hoping to get out of the Experience Week.

But it turns out that I ended up getting alot more than just that. It turns out that community is a lot more than just that. That’s something that kind of woke me up during the Experience Week; how much goes into making an intentional community like this work.

It’s more about the…..The glue that holds it together really is the experiences.

You’re going on hikes with people, and you’re learning about plants, and you’re getting to enjoy these sweet wineberries, and your getting to eat flowers and so you get a connection with nature and not just with humans and development.

You get to learn that there’s more to a community in terms of celebrations. And, in terms of the knowledge that each other has to offer. Because everyone here does something a little different but they all contribute to the whole.

And so, I think all those experiences together, with the hard knowledge that I learned from all the little courses that we took, that really made me take away something that will last far longer than buying a book.