The Long and Winding
Road Home

12 years ago, I stumbled into my own life.

I was living in Colorado with my then partner, Marqis, when we discovered that we were pregnant. My first urge was Home… back to Michigan with my family and friends and familiarity to see me through this big new adventure/challenge/scary new development in my life. Marqis had a different urge. He had spent a year in high school on a Kibbutz in Israel and a number of years since in coop houses. His first urge was Community.

I was, I am now a bit ashamed to admit, dragged kicking and screaming by a patiently stubborn man into my first community living experience. After several painful days of conversation (during which I invoked every negative stereotype about communes you can imagine) I sullenly agreed that—on the way home to Michigan—we could stop for a day at the community Marqis wanted to visit in hopes of us liking it enough to stay.

We arrived at East Wind on a hot and sticky summer’s day that didn’t help Marqis’ case any. We had landed right before dinner time and the first thing I noticed was that someone had made a really quite good meal, and all I and the 60-some people who were trickling in to the big common dining room had to do was get a plate and dig in. I was by this point quite familiar with the constantly hungry pregnant woman scene and dug in to this gift with real relish and relief.

Various other surprises awaited me over the next few days (yes, next few—I consented on that first night to extend our visit… I may have been stubborn but I wasn’t foolish!). I had been an activist for years for gender equality, the environment, and more recently cooperative economics. I discovered rather quickly that while I had been talking (and rallying and lobbying and… you get the idea) about all of those issues, here in the woods of Missouri, people were actually DOING these things. I was very quickly sold on the idea that community was an excellent way to walk one’s talk and to do so with companions.

I also met other parents and realized that I would be able to lean on people who had already been through the thousand little stresses of parenting. And live in a beautiful place. And be able to let go of financial stress. And eat organic food. And… this was all set up already.

When, at the end of our visit, Marqis nervously asked me what I thought, the only real conversation we had was how fast we could get ourselves back. A communal living activist was born that week, and I’ve never looked back.

I came to Dancing Rabbit for the first time about a year and a half after we moved to East Wind. Our son, Jibran, learned to walk in the old trailer, following around Jack, DR’s first toddler, who was a couple months older. DR, back then, wasn’t much to look at. There was a piece of land—nice, but not as spectacularly beautiful as East Wind’s property, a few out-buildings and that funky cramped trailer. The gardens were just getting started and I’m sure the pond was nice, but it was way too cold on that first spring visit to test that theory out.

I’d been living at East Wind for long enough at that point that the charm had worn off. I was still sold on community, thoroughly imprinted with the idea that resource sharing was essential for real sustainability, and still (to this day) deeply grateful for the chance to raise my son communally for those first years, but the cracks were showing for me in the social scene there. I also had bigger dreams of the mission a community could set itself to influence the broader culture.

Dancing Rabbit's vision and mission resonated with me immediately. I remember listening to Cecil and Tony talk about what could be, and the calm certainty that something would be, across that country road on that property, and I started to see the real potential of it all. In contrast to East Wind, the home brew was as much about the “home” as the “brew”. I felt immediately that these guys understood something about the non-glamorous work it takes to see your passion come alive, and the importance of mundane things like connecting with the local culture, getting grounded on your land and learning skills our grandparents would just as soon forget.

I was impressed early on with the balance the DR founders seemed to be able to strike. Here were young energetic visionaries who had a remarkably practical side. When Tony said there would be a village some day, I believed him.

We went away again because my family had other things we needed to explore. I focused for a number of years on my own personal growth (partly because I, too, was a young idealist but I didn’t have the “practical” piece down very well yet). We had student loans to finish paying off and the idea of living in rural Missouri and paying even current bills seemed fantastical. I also needed to test my my strong urge to start a community.

I was back at DR for the summer of 2003, and I almost stayed. Marqis and I had been split up at that point for years; he was in Albuquerque, NM, and felt like he wanted roots there. We’d been trying to co-parent long distance and it just wasn’t working. I still couldn’t see how I was going to swing Dancing Rabbit financially, and there were not yet any other kids here for Jibran. Reluctantly, I moved to the big city and tried my hand at starting an urban ecovillage there.

The trials and joys of starting a community are another story that I won’t repeat here. But at some point it dawned on me that it seemed like I kept trying to recreate Dancing Rabbit wherever I went. It took a few more years to exhaust the possibilities of what I was attempting in Albuquerque, but once I did, it seemed inevitable that my attention would wander back to northeast Missouri.

At about the time I found myself growing restless in New Mexico, the invitation to Dancing Rabbit's ten-year reunion landed in my inbox. I don’t remember “making” the decision to come to the reunion. I just wrote it on my calendar and that was that. Last October, I found myself sitting under the big tent with a hundred other people and I can actually remember thinking—and feeling—it’s time to come Home.

Looking around, I realized that I was sitting in the middle of that village Tony had promised ten years before on that first visit to DR. He and several hundred others (including myself in multiple short stints over the years) had made good on the promise. There were kids running all over the place (Jibran lost in the pack somewhere) and I had finally gotten far enough along on my own practicals that I could see it working.

And so last spring, I found myself at Dancing Rabbit in April visiting once again. In July our U-haul arrived, and I am finally adding my own energy to making this village a reality.

March Hare Summer/Fall 2008 Issue 57

The Road Home		It’s a Foundation!
Low-Tech Solutions		Urine Composting
The Life of Brian		Representing Water
Popcorn, My Love

Come see our past issues for lots of Dancing Rabbit information.