Three or four years ago, when Dancing Rabbit was a group of friends with a vision, living in the city and having weekly meetings, some of us started visiting older communities to see what we could learn from them. At first, like many "community tourists" we had very high expectations of communities we visited, and were disappointed or even judgmental if their reality didn't perfectly reflect their ideals.
Now that we have a location, we find ourselves on the other side. As you may know, since we don't own land yet, the 8 of us are renting a 4-bedroom trailer from a local farm family. The life that visitors see is quite far from mainstream America, but also somewhat far from our sustainable ideal. We've got grid power, county water, flush toilets, and poor insulation. So far we haven't grown any food here. We buy our beans and grains by mail order, from a source that is at least regional and offers organic produce. Vegetables are a luxury item, however, we do buy them sometimes, from the grocery store, knowing full well that they were grown with pesticides and fertilizer, then trucked from Florida or California. We have one car for 7 adults, which we drive more than we'd like, and right now the best we can really say is that we're trying.
A reasonable observer who knew us well would probably forgive us these sins. As renters, we have little control over what kind of power and water the house will get. We haven't grown any food yet because it's the beginning of our first season. The spring garden is planted but there isn't anything to harvest except for the wild greens growing along the fence. We hope this will change in a few weeks to a month when our greens start coming in. (See "Rabbits in the Garden" in this issue). Meanwhile, we sometimes buy vegetables because we feel unhealthy without them. With so few people and having been here such a short time , there are a lot of services we can't provide for ourselves which are only available 30 miles away or farther. Sometimes we compromise our ideals in the short run for the benefit of the project in the long run; a lot of gasoline got burned in the course of our land search, not to mention moving across the country (see "Long Journey Home" in this issue). We're mindful of these compromises and don't feel great about them. However, we feel clear that we're choosing the best solutions right now and confident that we're committed to moving toward our ideal as rapidly as possible. In five years, we expect things to look altogether different.
We hope that visitors who don't know us will accept our situation, and will be equally accepting of other communities they visit.
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