The March Hare: July 1996
Issue 8

Aaron&Cecil&Halle'&Rachel F&Rachel K&Star&Tony

Aaron Corbin

I am Aaron. I was born at 9:37 p.m., March 30, 1973. I did most of my growing up in rural Iowa. I think I will always consider the Great Plains my home. I have followed Dancing Rabbit's progress since its inception, and after four months of living with its core members and attending its meeting I, with joyful confidence, am glad to be a part of the organization. My love for Mother Nature started at an early age in the ponds, river bottoms, fields, and woods of the Mississippi Fly Way. I am happy I have found a way to return to a lifestyle so full of personal rewards for me and my family. With Dancing Rabbit's help, hopefully my great- great-grandchildren can know the pleasures of whiling away a summer's day knee deep in pond water, covered in mud, looking a turtle eye to eye while the sun turns their backs a golden brown.

The more I learn the harder I find it is for me to draw lines between me and nature, between nature and the Earth, Between the Earth and life, Between life and you, Between you and me. For me these things are all tied together and balanced off of each other. Dancing Rabbit can help me do my share in the balancing effort. This is why I am dedicated to its success.

Cecil Scheib

Here are a few quick biographical notes about myself to encourage some epistolary action. I go by the name Cecil, though my birth name was Jonah. I'm coming up on 26 years of age, and grew up in the 'burbs between Baltimore and Washington, D.C.‹a very nice planned city called Columbia. I attended the University of Maryland and the University of Montana as a music major, and then transferred to Stanford, switched my major to civil/environmental engineering, and graduated in 1992. And yes, I did wear a sun dress and have my head shaved in a plus sign at my graduation. Since then, I've worked a lot of odd jobs (the oddest was being a research engineer in Concord, CA, helping to keep Giardia out of "your" water. The ones I've enjoyed the most have been farm work (I've done row crops, large-scale gardening, and orchard work) and construction (I've been doing a lot of that recently).

My community experience comes from Synergy, a student co-op in Palo Alto, CA, and from visiting Sandhill, Tekiah, Acorn, Twin Oaks, Ganas, the Farm, EarthCyclers, Monan's Rill, for periods of time ranging from one day to six weeks. Last summer I lived at Sandhill farm in Missouri and built a strawbale chicken coop. It was a good experience for me, and hopefully I built it well enough that it wasn't a bad experience for the chickens. I think Sandhill's chickens are scared of me because I used to play trombone in their enclosed yard area and they really hated that‹even the good songs like "Louie Louie." On the other hand, sometimes I think the chickens like me because I'm vegan and I think they can pick up on that. Actually, I don't think chickens notice, but I think other animals with better senses of smell can tell from my body odor (of which there is plenty, believe me) that I haven't been eating any of their compatriots this decade.

Aside from DR, the biggest work in my life the past year has been building a relationship with Star, my partner. I met her while she was at Acorn Community in Virginia and we fell way deep in love. We have big goals for what our beautiful relationship can look like, and we spend a lot of time and energy working towards them.

So anyway, what excites me about Dancing Rabbit is: the chance to live my life without making the earth an ugly place; the chance to share my life with other people; the chance to work hard on something I really care about; the chance to try to do something great and maybe fail. In particular, I look forward to gardening, building eco- structures, helping raise someone else's kids (including my goddaughter Kayleigh, Dave and Fredi's daughter), having a lot of fun with other people, and using the conflict resolution and human interaction techniques that I've been studying to create a little subculture where people communicate well.

Halle' Bennett

My name is Halle. I am a midwife who was born in Tennessee. I believe that living in Dancing Rabbit is a wonderful way to manifest my ideals of a peaceful world through community, honoring childbirth and motherhood, and raising children in a socially responsible society.

I am currently carrying DR's first love child - due sometime in November.

Rachel Katz

Rachel has been involved with Dancing Rabbit for several years now, after first encountering the group at Synergy while attending Stanford. Rachel is now working hard on many projects, including Women Defending Ourselves, a collective that teaches self defense and assertiveness to women in order to stop violence against women in our society.

Rachel Freifelder

I'm an ecologist, working on a Ph.D. in agroecology, and I hope to spend a lot of time at DR planning and working on our gardens and edible landscaping. I love plants wild or domestic, playing guitar, climbing rocks, and cooking tasty vegan food for the friends I live and laugh with.

Star Ray

My name is Starling Ray and I have been involved with Dancing Rabbit since I first fell in love with Cecil a year ago. I met him as he came through the intentional community where I lived (Acorn) last spring and then spent the summer sending and receiving long, gushy letters through the mail to and from him. At the end of the summer, he came back to Virginia and we had to decide if we were going to continue our relationship. After much deliberation, we decided that I would leave Acorn and come to Berkeley to live in Skyhouse (Dancing Rabbit headquarters). I had never been to Northern California before I arrived here in November with my jet- lagged cat and maximum baggage allowed, and it has been an adventure. Moving into three communities at once (GreenPLAN, Skyhouse, and Dancing Rabbit), sharing space with a relatively new lover, and having left many friends in Virginia was certainly a stress on our relationship, and I didn't take Dancing Rabbit too seriously until recently. When it came down to "who is moving to Illinois?" Cecil and I did some major processing about what we want from our lives, and realized that DR has the potential to fulfill our dreams of building community, living sustainably and settling down with the same folks to build interpersonal skills and mostly To Have Fun!

Recently I realized that Aaron, Halle, the baby that is coming, Tony, Rachel and even the non-Skyhouse Dancing Rabbits had really grown on me and that I am anxious to be part of their lives. That's a big draw too.

Tony Sirna

My name is Tony Sirna and I'm a 23-year-old white male radical freak ecologist. I grew up in suburban Detroit, which I always say isn't as much fun as it sounds. My parents were pretty much white, middle-class, just-before-the-hippies people who, I realize now, gave me a pretty good childhood. They enabled me to go to Stanford University, where I first became involved in Dancing Rabbit.

At Stanford, I moved into my first communal space: Synergy. Synergy is an on-campus student co-op of about 35 people (at the time‹now 44 in a bigger house). It has always focused on alternative lifestyles and has operated by consensus. My first year there was a magical experience. I was ready and open for a change in my life and learning new things and here I was dropped into a loving, caring, vibrant community of feminists, environmentalists, nudists, communitarians, socialists, and a variety of radical and not- so-radical freaks. It was an environment for experimentation and growth, and I did much of both.

In three years at Synergy I learned (or began to learn) many skills: bio-intensive gardening, consensus process, vegan cooking, biking, personal expression, listening, group process, etc. I also began to redefine (or maybe just define for the first time) my value system and set the groundwork for my future lifestyle. I realized that I felt passionately about life, the environment, equality and egalitarianism, animal rights, open sexuality, free expression, strong interpersonal community values, etc.

It was only recently, as I have had to leave Synergy for "the real world" that I realized that it is interpersonal relationships, in-depth discussions, and just being around other cool people that truly makes me happy.

So after talking to Cecil and Dave (both Synners and now Rabbits) about DR I realized that here was my goal, here was my life, and here was how I could change the world and be happy too. Since then I have decided that all the problems we see (violence, poverty, loneliness, isms, etc.) are all so intertwined that it is impossible to address just one of them or even a few of them. But through community we can address the heart of all of them, which is human interactions with each other and the environment, and thus build a whole new society where all these issues can be addressed. It sounds grandiose, but I believe that community is the best way to address the root causes of the worlds problems and not just the symptoms. So working towards DR is activism in the broadest, widesweeping sense.

So now here I am graduated from Stanford and working as a computer programmer, temporarily selling my soul and buying into the system to save money for DR. I now live at GreenPLAN with some other Rabbits and am trying to maintain a strong healthy relationship with my partner, Rachel Katz.