Life ain't all peaches and tofu-cream at Dancing Rabbit. We go through all the regular hardships and challenges that folks in the "outside" world go through, plus a few more related to our chosen lifestyle here. Before I go any farther, I want to make it clear that I'm not complaining: I love living at Dancing Rabbit, and am far happier now than I've been in years. But that doesn't mean that life here is easy, comfortable, or fun all the time. One must make trade-offs to live in a budding eco-village and intentional community like ours, and what follows are some of the major challenges that I've come across while living at DR.
1. Manual labor, and lots of it. In our quest to move towards ecological sustainability, we have replaced many energy-intensive or resource-intensive processes with labor-intensive processes. For example, we do most of our soil cultivation by hand--using spading forks and shovels--rather than using machinery such as roto-tillers and tractors. Likewise for planting and harvesting. This makes for a huge resource/embodied energy savings over using large machinery, parts, and fuel, but it also makes for a lot of human labor. Many other day-to-day activities at DR, such as mowing the grass with sickles and scythes, building our own houses, and cooking all of our own fresh food require a large amount of time and manual labor. The amount and types of manual labor that we do here have led to many people's having trouble with tendonitis and other repetitive stress injuries.
2. Fewer frilly comforts. We don't have personal cars--we share rides and we bicycle a lot. This means that we can't always just go somewhere right when we want to go. We don't have houses full of electricity-hungry devices. We get by on considerably less electricity than your average American, but we also don't have televisions in every room, video game systems, dish washing machines, electric heaters, air-conditioners, and so forth. We don't often eat foods that take an inordinate amount of time to prepare (among other things, this is code for "we don't eat a lot of tofu, because it takes way too long to make fresh tofu"). Our houses are comfortable, but simple. We don't have air-conditioners to cool off our houses in the summer, or big central heating units to warm them in winter. We have windows and fans to make the summer livable, and wood stoves to get us through the winter. Most of the time we're comfortable enough, but sometimes the weather can become almost too much to deal with. It gets really hot in the summer and pretty darn cold in the winter. During July and part of August people are noticeably cranky and stressed from the heat.
3. Diet largely determined by season and regional availability. We attempt to eat mostly in-season and bioregional foods; consequently, we may go for weeks without fresh fruit, or without onions, garlic, or potatoes. For many vegetarians and vegans, a particularly difficult aspect of trying to eat in-season and bioregionally is the relative scarcity of fruit and the type of fruit available. Citrus fruit and bananas, two mainstays of many healthy vegetarians' diets, cannot be grown in this area because the winters are too cold. We do grow peaches, apples, strawberries, blackberries, black raspberries, mulberries, and cherries, but the lack of the tropical fruits to which we Americans have grown so accustomed is hard-felt by many. Another challenge associated with food (for those of us in the Cattail foodco-op) is cooking for 30 or more people during the height of visitor season during the summer...over a wood stove...in 95- or 100-degree heat.
4. Set of complex systems and social interactions to deal with. With 15 members, 4 long-term residents, a half dozen interns, and a whole host of temporary visitors, we end up needing some fairly complex systems to deal with things like paying people for their labor, making sure everyone gets fed, scheduling the use of vehicles, deciding who will cook on which day of the week, scheduling work teams, and keeping common areas clean.
We also end up with lots of complex social interactions (which are usually wonderful), but when there is some sort of personal conflict in the community things can get tense and we all have to be willing to try our best to work things out. We make all of our group decisions by consensus, which means that we propose decisions until we find something that everyone can agree with, rather than having a "majority rules" sort of voting system. This can be time-consuming and adds yet another wrinkle to our social interactions (but it's certainly preferable to many other decision-making processes). It can take a few months for new people to become familiar with all of the systems at Dancing Rabbit, and maybe a few months more to become comfortable utilizing those systems.
5. Location in an isolated, rural area. Our village is located some 40 miles from the nearest airport, 200 miles from the nearest large airport, and 50 miles from the nearest bus and train stations. It's not easy to get out to other places, and it ends up being fairly expensive. The ride to the bus station through our vehicle co-op often ends up costing more than the bus ticket itself, and the same is true for train tickets. The nearest town with a bank, hardware store, and clothing store is 11 miles away, which makes for a good hour's bicycle ride (each direction) or an $11.00 vehicle ride (total). Most folks make it into that town about once a month. The 'town' of Rutledge (100 people, a general store, a post office, and a car garage) is 3 miles away, and many folks make at least one trip a week there to mail packages or go to the general store to get ice cream, chocolate, or other goodies we don't produce at DR. We have a decent amount of contact with the locals in Rutledge, but for the most part we're isolated (geographically as well as culturally) from mainstream society.
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