Sedentary Travelogue #4: A Day in the Life

Hello friends!

Here's the next set of my travel logs, except that I'm no longer travelling. I'd love it if folks wanted to send suggestions for a new name. I'm stumped and would love to have any ideas.

So, for any who haven't heard yet, I am now permanently (?) moved to NE Missouri and am living in and working on the Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage project. I've joined the income-sharing group named Skyhouse, which lives here at Dancing Rabbit (DR) and whose mission is to help DR grow. While income-sharing isn't my passion when it comes to community building, it's not something I have a problem with (at least not with this group of folks) and it is a great opportunity for me to be able to really devote time and energy to the wider ecovillage project. I'm also still working at the FIC office.

There are some of you who are new to my descriptions of all this and have no idea what Skyhouse, Dancing Rabbit or the FIC are, I recommend checking out the first of my travel logs. How? Well, I've decided to throw all of this up on our website. So the archive of these travel logs is now available: /jacobnews.php

A few friends have asked for a description of what the average day of my life here is like. So, it seems like as good of a place as any to start.

People are free to set their own work schedules here and the farthest that any of us commute for work is three miles. Given the non-existant dress code, it makes it pretty easy to wake up late and still start work at a decent time. I usually wake up on the early side for current norms around here, which means between 8 and 8:30, give or take 30 minutes. Folks generally fend for themselves for breakfast. A popular dish is the "Skyhouse Special" also referred to deragatorilly as "horsefeed" by some - basically it's a bowl of oats with peanut butter and honey or sorghum mixed in. Some folks also add raisens, cinnemon or hot water -- it's fast, simple and quite tasty, but does seem strange for it's "back to the basics" feel.

We get our peanut butter or other nut butters from East Wind, a commune down in the Ozarks whose nut butters are carried in many co-op food stores or other such places (like the old Oak Street Market in Evanston). When they clean their industrial nut-crushing pipes, they can't sell the stuff since it might contain a mix of butters and we often get a big vat of this "mystery butter" which is often made up mostly of almond butter or cashew butter -- Yum!

Anyway, enough about food. Aaron's the other early riser (though other folk are usually up just 30-60 minutes later) and on some days I'll head out with him to work on the cabin construction first thing. He's a skilled carpenter and is really good at working with people like me who aren't idiots, but don't really know anything about carpentry. So we'll work on whatever tasks are at hand (putting in a floor, insulation and building window boxes have all been recent tasks).

Eventually, we'll break for lunch and come in and probably heat up some left overs. While people take lunch at different times, there's usually several people about and it's a good social time.

In the afternoon, I might stay inside and do some office work. This could include taking care of correspondance with the numerous people who write to ask about our project, researching alternative construction techniques, calling experts to bring them in to run a workshop, or order trees for planting in the spring.

Dinner is usually ready around 6:30. We rotate cook nights so each person only has to cook approximately once a week (depending on how many folk around any given week). Everyone gathers for dinner and it's almost always delicious and varied. After dinner, I might play a game with folks, sit and read, write letters or email or play music. Or we might have a meeting. It's true, we have a lot of meetings, and during the winter it's popular to schedule meetings for after dinner so that the daylight hours are free for outside time. Meetings might be practical business work (determining hiring folks for work, projects plans, information sharing, decision making, accepting new members, etc.), visionary work (How might we build a local alternative economy? What sort of plan can we devise for sustainable land use? What would like to see in the new house we're building?), or interpersonal meetings (providing time to work through interpersonal conflicts, giving support to each other, finding out what's been going on personally for our friends, etc.).

First off, I should point out that people's days are definitely affected by the seasons here. What I'm describing is just the winter pattern for now and is just as likely to change for the summer. And even beyond that, it's pretty hard to nail down any pattern at all. Some days, I'll putz around for the morning and then work in the afternoon and just hang out with people in the evening. Other days, I might get up, go to the FIC office (3 miles away) with Jenn and work 4 or 5 hours, come home and bake bread while listening to CDs. Or maybe I'd join a group of people for some work project like putting stucco on the cabin walls, or cutting firewood or preparing garden materials, and then spend the afternoon talking with visitors and giving a tour of our buildings and the land.

In some ways, the one constant is that there is no "typical" day. It does remind me of college in some ways in that there is always so much going on, that it amazes me that I've only been here for two and half weeks. Life is very full -- so much can happen in just a few days, that time gets that weird quality where it seems to go fast, but also seems to go slow. It's fast because I'm busy and engaged in a lot of activity and conversation. But it's slow because with so much happening, I sometimes start to tell someone about an event that happened last week, when I realize it was only a day and a half ago.

The truth of the matter is that folks around here work pretty hard. But it's all infused with a lot of socializing while working and an extremely flexible approach to designing your own work scene. And if it's something you're excited about doing, the lines between vocation and hobby and following your bliss all blend together.

This has been a pretty practical account of life here. I'll try to make the next installment, whenever that might be, a bit more personal. Comments are always welcome! I hope all is well wherever you may be.

love,
Jacob