Memphis Democrat
November 12, 2007

Hello, Toby the English guy here with this week's news, name-dropping and poetry-plugging from cold/hot/rainy Scotland County. As they say in this state, "If you don't like the weather in Missouri just wait a day." England's weather is all over the place too, though rarely as hot or cold.

I'll be reporting on a little less Dancing Rabbit news this week than usual. I'm a bit out of the loop, as caring for our month-old baby Adam and working on our Yome means Michelle and I don't have as much time to hang out, shootin' the breeze and catch up with the gossip. Suddenly we're a lot more up-to-date with life back home than we are with DR life, what with all those phone calls and emails with our families in England and the US.

Over the weekend we really enjoyed a Skype video call with my family back home in Essex County, England. Mum, Dad (poetry at www.kenchampion.org.uk), brothers Steve and Tim and Tim's partner Sam and their daughter Emily were all there. It was just like in those TV adverts for videophones back in the seventies. After the call I realized we'd not actually said anything to each other of any substance whatsoever. Just "hello!" and "isn't he cute!" and "isn't this fun!" and then "goodbye!".

Kim and Chad had their baby last week. Chad used to live in the village; he and his partner now live next door at Red Earth Farms. Nina was 6lb 11oz at birth, and is by all accounts a very beautiful little girl. "We're doing really good," Chad told me today, "and we're really groovin' on the cryin'. Actually she was smiling a lot yesterday so that's great." He and Kim like to joke that Nina was born in a barn, although their barn is actually a very cozy dwelling indeed, with a rocket stove with a flue that goes under a bench.

The Carletons had their membership forum on Friday. I was moved by their commitment to a life at Dancing Rabbit, not least because they first visited only this year. "We always said we'd stay in our home town until our kids dragged us off to a retirement home," Dave explained. "But after visiting here we changed our minds. Now we won't need a retirement home. We can just sit on our own front porch, gumming our millet."

As Cecil, one of the founders of Dancing Rabbit, put it in a DRTV interview you can watch at drtv.dancingrabbit.org: "It's an absolutely amazing process, to come up with what you think is a good idea, but you're not sure that maybe anyone else will, put up a website about it, and not just have people spend $30 on your product or want to be on your email list, but change their whole life, sell their house, uproot themselves, and come and move to it, and live it."

Michelle and Genevieve had birthdays this week. For hers, Genevieve had an open house all afternoon and a fiery spectacle in the evening. Alline - a real Anglophile - organized Michelle an afternoon tea-party with Earl Grey tea, scones, cream, jam and a request that everyone come in English dressed. I was amused at the number of striped woolen sweaters ('jumpers'), plaid sports jackets and neckerchiefs. By the time we arrived, most of the guests had adopted English accents and new names. Alline had supplied badges so 'Trevor', 'Nigel', 'Penelope' and 'Pamela' could enjoy their new identity as upper-class English types.

It's taken me a while, but I've eventually realized that my little 3x5 planner is just not working for me now I'm living in community. I've been eyeing up a friend's Payne STM-2 Time:Master 6x8 spiral bound wonder. She orders one every year from a little shop in Amherst, MA. I may well do the same, but it's made me wonder why it is that, six months after leaving my home town I'm suddenly needing a bigger planner than has seen me through ten years of academic and professional work. And Michelle was hoping not to use a planner at all when she arrived. Isn't moving to the country about finding a simpler life? You know, just some gardening and knitting and sitting by a roaring fire telling stories? Sure, there's much of that here, and for most of us it's a less stressful life than we left behind. But growing your own food, producing your own power and dealing with your own waste is a pretty complicated business.

When I heard Ted and Sara in the kitchen discussing the finer details of mushroom cultivation when all I ever asked for was "a pound of mushrooms please" back home, it reminds me just how much goes into getting food to our tables behind the scenes, both here and, of course, in mainstream America. Here at Dancing Rabbit all that stuff is far less behind the scenes, and we have to keep our own food, power and waste technology ticking along every day. So there are checklists and plans and systems and rotations and agendas and meetings, and that's why I need my new planner. In a way I long for the simplicity of just flushing a toilet, buying those mushrooms or paying the electricity bill. But it's the relationship with all the behind-the-scenes stuff that's simpler here: we're doing it ourselves, rather than paying for others to do it for us, and we're doing it using less resources, producing less waste, and probably having much more fun. We're also able to live on very little money here, so we can spend our time doing this stuff ourselves rather than earning money so we can pay others to do it for us.

As Roger Welsch, (the "fat guy in overalls" from CBS' Sunday Morning) puts it in his new book 'Forty Acres and a Fool: How to live in the country and still keep your sanity': "Pioneer life, Indian life, subsistence living is not a life without technology, or even simply a life with an alternate technology. In fact, almost any social and economic system other than mainstream American middle-class life is remarkably more complex, and therefore also substantially more satisfying."

It's certainly more satisfying and in fact, okay, maybe I'll make my own planner.

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