I come from Vermont. Well, that is, I was born in Easton, PA, on January 26, 1969, but I pretty much grew up in Vermont. How I got from there to here is a long roundabout story. Got some green beans to snap while I tell it? OK, here goes.
One of the experiences that broadened my early horizons was a journey that my family took when I was eight. My parents sold our house in Easton, bought and converted an old Sunbeam bread truck, packed up our belongings, and we headed west looking for a new home. My brother Alec and I were homeschooled while we were on the road that summer, and I still remember visiting caves and parks on the way, reading the Narnia chronicles, and learning math from figuring out our (dismal) gas mileage. A sign of my parents' influence is that on the ceiling of the truck was a map where, along with our route, my father had marked every nuclear power plant in the country so that we could give them a wide berth.
We slowly made our way as far west as Missouri, where we encountered chiggers and bluegrass music. The Fates decided I was not to live in the Show-Me State yet. In a mysterious decision involving a phone call during an Ozark Mountain Daredevils concert, we turned around and headed back east, landing in North Carolina. The following year we moved to Vermont, where my brother and I grew up running around in the woods, milking the goats, helping with the bees and chickens and pigs, and biking to town to go swimming and see our friends.
Early on I was interested in languages. As soon as I could I started studying French, then Latin, then some Italian. I went to Bates College in Maine, where I majored in English and spent my junior year in Florence and London. That was where I became a vegetarian, and got my first taste of teaching English. I also got my first taste of hitch-hiking across Europe and camping in people's fields. What fun! I'd never felt such freedom and excitement.
When I returned to college for my senior year, I wanted a new language with a new alphabet. It was 1989, walls were coming down all over eastern Europe, and Gorbachev was at the helm in Russia. I felt like it would be good for more Americans to speak Russian. Why not me? A few months later, Russian felt more natural on my tongue than any other foreign language. I went overseas for a five-week college program in a provincial town called Orel, which I promptly fell in love with. I knew I'd be back.
A year later, just after the attempted putch of 1991, I returned to Orel to teach English and study Russian. Over the following nine years I lived and worked with groups in Russia, Ukraine, Hungary, and Croatia, organizing educational exchanges, helping to run grant programs for environmentalists, creating activist training programs, playing percussion while wearing a jester costume and walking on stilts, and working to form a land-based sustainable international activist community.
I became fluent in Russian and adept at pretending to speak other Slavic languages. As I began learning to facilitate, I discovered I was good at helping people from different countries understand each other and cooperate toward a common goal. I became certified in teaching English as a foreign language and got a thrill out of creating a special curriculum for sustainable energy activists from nine countries. I taught Ultimate Frisbee everywhere I went. I got arrested twice for sitting down: first in the Czech Republic, in front of the gates to the Temelin nuclear power plant (after fifty of us refused to pay a fine and twenty of us staged a hunger strike, they let us go); and later I spent a night in solitary confinement in a Scottish jail cell for sitting on the sidewalk at a Reclaim the Streets action in Edinburgh. I learned to write grant proposals. I hitch-hiked around a lot, sometimes beating the train to my destination.
In 1998 I got my first real experience of community when I joined the Sustainable Europe Tour and traveled around Europe with fifteen other artists/activists from all over the continent. That was my introduction to street theater, fire-breathing, samba bands, action climbing, hanging from tripods, and critical mass bike rides. I loved the feeling of belonging to a community, making decisions together and making music together.
I also went each year to Ecotopia, the annual gathering of young (mostly) European environmental activists, held in a new country every year, and organized and run collectively by participants. Each time, I learned more about consensus decision making and about creating community. I began organizing workshops and gathering information on the idea of setting up a more permanent activist community somewhere in central Europe. I was captivated by the idea of living in community with like-minded people, supporting each other's activism, and living according to our ecological principles. It seemed like community was what my activists friends needed to keep them from succumbing to burnout.
Realizing that it might be a good idea to live in an existing community for a while before trying to found one, I came back to the states briefly in 1998. Enter Dancing Rabbit, stage left. Having heard of DR while visiting Twin Oaks, a community in Virginia, I came out here to see what these ecovillage folks were doing. After a week of helping lay the floor in the timber frame and plaster Allium, I felt a real kinship with the people here-especially Tony, Cecil, and Jeffrey-and felt inspired by their commitment. In fact I felt so aligned with what was going on here that I was tempted to join there and then. But I had personal reasons to return to TO, and I felt a real calling to make this attempt at forming an eastern European activist community.
So after several months as a resident at TO, in the summer of 1999 I went back to Europe, this time with my new partner Alyosha. Trying to cut down on air travel, we took a Polish cargo ship, but that's a whole 'nother story. Ask me about it sometime.
For a few months we lived on the Istrian peninsula in Croatia, trying to get this activist community off the ground. Why that didn't work out is another long, fascinating story that I'll tell you sometime. Eventually we made our way back to the US (again via cargo ship). I landed a job in Amherst, MA working for a "deep ecology" based nonprofit called Sacred Earth Network, helping support environmental groups in Russia.
…And it only took a couple of years of paying exorbitant rent, relying on cars, and feeling disconnected from my food, before I made a beeline back to community. My favorite community: Dancing Rabbit.
The people are the real reason I came here. I realized I desperately need to be surrounded by folks who share the same ideals and dreams as I do. That's what keeps me sane, gives me energy, and fuels my creative impulses.
I still freelance for Sacred Earth Network, writing grants and helping organize their programs. In summer 2002 I even brought Cecil over to Siberia with me to install the first solar panels in the Altai Republic. I also do development work with the Fellowship for Intentional Community, as well as lots of other things at DR: maple sugaring, playing ultimate, pet committee, kid committee, swimming in the pond, singing, visiting friends at Sandhill, facilitation, baking bread, fundraising, and of course doing construction on Skyhouse… because lo and behold, after all these years, I find myself a member of the Skyhouse subcommunity, spending time building relationships with the very people who first attracted me here.
What excites me most about living here is our vision of being a larger village, encompassing numerous sub-communities and other groupings. I want us to be a clear and visible demonstration of a thoughtful and compassionate way to live on this Earth. Sometimes I miss doing art, theater and music for performance. We do some of that here, and I want to do more! I believe such "cultural activism" can be a powerful agent for change. I also miss sharing spiritual deep ecology practices with others. Maybe I'll find a way to do that here too.
My favorite activities this week: baking bread with dried tomatoes and herbs
from our gardens, tapping the maple trees and seeing the sap run,
working on plans to raise money for our new common house, and
snuggling with friends while watching a movie at Milkweeds Cinema.
It doesn't get much better than this.
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