All posts by : Ben

Howdy y’all. Ben here, writing to you on a cool morning from the mosquito-veiled hedgerows and hillsides of Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage, when I should be weeding and mulching. With the consistent occurrence of oppressive heat, I would normally use this time to accomplish something tangible, like raking mulch, moving animal paddocks, or beaming nice thoughts at my kale, but instead I’m regurgitating my thoughts for the week through this newsletter to be consumed by you, dear reader.

This past week has been fairly hot, though not the hottest we’ve seen or will see. After some fairly frequent rains, things have begun to dry off a bit. Out and about in the wider community, the hayfields have all been clipped, tedded, raked, and baled. For the first time in six years of raising dairy animals, we actually have hay up in a loft well before we need it. This more closely resembles my definition of insurance, rather than the form of legalized gambling that an actual insurance plan offers. That said, I’ve been having a hard time proving that I’m self-employed, for purposes of paying off an emergency room visit from April. If I could only get one state employee out here to see what it is I do all day, it might be clearer that I do, in fact, work for a living. But they’d have to catch me between the hours of 5:30 AM and 9:30 AM, because after that is my six-hour, unpaid coffee break.

If I weren’t doing this, I’d be just about caught up on my pasture management goals for last week. Oh well. What’s the point of a goal I can actually achieve anyways? After years of observation, consideration, mistakes, and reading expensive books, I’m working on some exciting (to me, at least) strategies for maximizing small spaces for animal nutrition and fertility dispersal, which require minimal fossil fuel use. This year, we’re shifting pigs, chickens, goats, and a cow on paddocks like a giant chess game. We follow up one critter with another to complete the graze, while letting the fowl act like little manure spreaders, and scything down and overseeding any unpalatable grasses and forbs. It’s not like many of these ideas haven’t been kicked around by others for decades, but like so many things that involve being married to a piece of land, implementing tools and strategies such as chicken tractors, and intensive rotational grazing, are awfully site specific. The unobservant farmer can take a wagonload of a hundred chickens and make nothing but a mess if all they have done is read some books.

Unlike factory farming, pasture-based animal agriculture requires that the steward/farmer be fully engaged with all variables in their project, everyday. It doesn’t leave a lot of time for other types of fun, but having  fun seems overrated in light of the possibility of being held in a detention center, or running out of water (along with 4 million of your close neighbors), or having essential medical services stripped away — all things which are happening now.

Yes, it is very hot, and I have a baseline distrust of folks who say they don’t mind the heat. Where are all these people at 3 o’clock in the afternoon? A little warmth is nice, and some excruciating heat at the right time can do a lot to ripen some of my favorite vegetables. (I’ve been having a recurring dream about eating okra.) But when someone says they’ve spent a season in Costa Rica, and they feel cold when the temperature dips below 60 ( I meet these people every year), that someone ought to spend a day loading and unloading wagon of hay in the Midwest. Especially if they consume beef or dairy. For vegans, I also recommend picking green beans some August afternoon.

Some well-designed irrigation infrastructure has helped me in my food growing endeavors, but so often it seems like my ability to work easefully outdoors all boils down to my choice in clothing. Firstly, and this is merely my fashion opinion, you got to wear shoes and a hat. Got to. With sturdy enough shoes and a big sombrero, most other clothes would be considered superfluous, were it not for our totally sensible and reasonable social norms. I observe that sometimes people show up at the ecovillage, see all the barefoot kids, and feel like they’ve been lied to their whole lives; like it’s just Big Shoe trying to earn a buck off the soles of us rubes who own and wear shoes regularly. Children are lighter than us. They exert less pressure on their feet. This place, like many rural areas, is speckled with dropped thorns, old fence wire, the occasional rusty nail, and excreta. Just don’t do it, folks. Both my children have lost a toenail, and both have stepped on honey locust thorns. I’ve performed minor home surgery on the older one, when her toe had a difficult meeting with a piece of hardware cloth.

This doesn’t mean one has to buy fancy shoes. Chaco, (and yes, I own two pairs of Chacos), charges twice as much money for essentially half of a shoe. I got a pair because you can send them in for repair, but after a couple of weeks without them, I ordered a spare secondhand pair, because it was going to be another month ’til the first pair got back. They were super nice on the phone. (I am not expecting an endorsement from the fine people at Chaco.) If I were to promote any line of footwear for homesteaders, it’d have to be Crocs, because they can be easily duct taped back together, they float, they clean up easy, they’re well-ventilated, and nobody ever looks good in them. The best feature is that weird little strap you can use to shift between Action Mode and Lounge Mode. The only drawback is that they can literally fill up with manure — not great for working in the chicken wagon. (I am expecting an endorsement from the fine people at Crocs.)

As far as plastic clothing goes, shoes are about all I can handle. Nowadays, people are selling “technical garments”, but truth in marketing would describe these as “plastic pants”. If you technically sweat, I technically wouldn’t ensconce myself in a well-tailored ziploc bag. It’s like being marinated in one’s own bodily fluids. Go for cotton and linen. As a fair-skinned person, who is constantly up in some fine debris like hay or dried chicken manure, a long-sleeve, light-colored cotton shirt, a size or two too big, is my go-to for any type of field work. I like to complete the ensemble with a pair of underwear, which when not underneath a pair of pants is just some shorts without a pocket. Pockets are overrated. Just like zippers. When I have pockets, I put stuff in them, and I lose some of it. Then my pants get heavy, start falling down, and when I’m in town trying to find exact change for my ice cream, hunting for a dime, nickel, and two pennies, I shed little flecks of lint, hay, and dry manure. (Not to mention pieces of old corn and other weird stuff.) Better to just eliminate pockets altogether, I say. That way, nobody is constantly checking their phone to find out the weather, when it’s clearly hot and gonna stay that way for the next two and a half months.

I top the whole thing off with a wide brimmed straw hat, complete with chin cord, that I scored at the flea market for a buck. The chin cord is essential to keep the hat on my head when its breezy, because I gotta work in the wind, too. I’m also a fan of sunglasses. Really dark ones help me not only look cool, but actually feel cooler when its 99 degrees out. I met somebody once who swore they could strengthen their eyes just by squinting into the sun. Don’t ever do that.

My kids are something of fashion icons themselves. My daughter will wear almost anything, provided its impractical, gauzy, dirty, and falling apart. She’ll stick to an outfit for about two weeks or more, until she comes across something equally inappropriate for all conditions, like a hairnet fashioned out of an onion bag, knee-high fur boots, and my nasty old basketball jersey, all tied together with a poorly stitched satchel and some nylon baling twine. If you’re looking for an outfit that says: “homeschooled at the ecovillage; my best friends are grubs and caterpillars”, then this one’s for you. Arthur on the other hand, donned a sporty ensemble to the pond yesterday evening consisting of some scratched-up swimming goggles and a comically long stick. When he got into the pond, after walking a few hundred yards, he removed the goggles so he could “swim better”, but kept the stick. This playful little number just screams, “I’m going to gulp some pond water and chew cattail fluff, while my dad updates his project list from the dock”. Ooh la la.

Now of course, there’re always a few people who secretly (or openly) have no desire for clothing whatsoever. Arthur is like this, with the exception of tight pajama pants. (The tighter the better.) Sometimes Dancing Rabbit will get confused with the local nudist RV camp just outside of Memphis, but I assure you, we are not the same folks. If you’d like to leave yourself completely exposed to biting insects, solar radiation, and the fixed gaze of your clothesless comrades, I suggest looking them up. At Dancing Rabbit, I’d at least recommend a thick protective layer of dirt, if nothing else. I learned this technique from the pigs. I’m beginning to suspect it’s perfectly natural to cover up with whatever you got, and ignore the fashion judgements of others. I still smell like a herd of pigs just the same, but that doesn’t matter to anybody anyhow, and that’s something I really appreciate about my wider community.

If you’d like a chance to learn a thing or two about rotational grazing, gardening, and being an observant steward of the land, along with all the other cool things happening at Dancing Rabbit (including cutting edge fashion innovation), come visit us for a couple of weeks. You’ll meet lots of interesting people, enjoy some delicious homemade food, and get to swim in our natural pond.

Howdy y’all. Ben here, bringing you my recent observations from the sodden hollows and misty hills of Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage in northeast Missouri.

Humans are not generally the first thing I interact with in the morning, and that’s been working out for me pretty nicely so far, as well as for the humans. Every morning I am greeted by an ever-insatiable horde of chickens walking up the footpath from their cold season range, traipsing through the fog and mire for snackies. I emerge from my fitful sleep, and before mixing feed, or even pulling on boots I dash to the outhouse and do what people typically do in an outhouse, except that I chirp out in my chicken-voice, “OK chickens, I’ll get your snackies real soon, babies. I’ll get you your snackies.”

The first cock has begun crowing as I run back to the house, and I wander around until I find the appropriate footwear and handwear for morning chores. The morning song and drone has changed in the past week or two. In my anti-meridian slogging I can hear the bark and chirp of robins, redwing blackbirds, and the staccato whine of fidgety sparrows; perhaps even the chittering of a squirrel that has moved into Caleb’s treehouse. I call it Squirrel Caleb.

On sunnier days, bluebirds alight on the portable electric netting containing the goatherd, the youngest of which cry and frolic, similar to my own human herdlings. Having loaded a cart with dogbones, organic layer mash, water, and communal food scraps, I roll downhill. Muscovy ducks nip along or briefly soar as the guardogs dance and pace along the barnyard fence line, sometimes sprinting off to ward away eagles, hawks, whitetail deer, blue herons, or the schoolbus. Chickens and ducks peck the verdant spires of grass while the hogs push their maws deep into the barn mire for a ball of earthworms, or a cache of crabgrass rhizomes. A nanny goat and wether slip out of the barn to call as the pigs and their babies bellow in breast deep mud. It is 6:57 AM and the agricultural zone of Dancing Rabbit has become a cacophony, if not a symphony — more Yoko Ono in tone and timbre than Mozart.

On some days the sun breaks through the veil of cloud, illuminating the maple buds, increasingly verdant grass, tiny patches of henbit, dandelion, and chickweed awakening from their slumber and contraction. Here we are, just passing through the keyhole of our season of hunger, emerging from a time of austerity. My being feels a deep want for green food again, so I grab at a clump of wintercress and snap off the tip of a walking onion, stuffing the whole emerald chunk of dirty, gritty nutrition into my face-hole. After transferring feed to various dishes, the squeal and moan subsides, and I trek my way back to the promise of coffee and waking children.

My day progresses. Sometimes it regresses. I feed my kids, or at least offer suggestions for breakfast, like eggs, since we are literally sitting on 44 dozen of them. Okay, I haven’t literally sat on all 44 dozen of them, but living in a 400 square-foot earthen hovel with hundreds of eggs resting within a dozen baskets causes me to eventually step on one, or smash a few in my hat or pocket.

When possible, I begin a project, like making paper pots for seedlings, adjusting fence, hauling water, haying goats, picking up mulch, fixing carts, hoeing up beds, sharpening tools, fixing things that broke (this week it was the charge controller for our off-grid electrical system), processing firewood, interacting with neighbors, compiling, soaking, washing, rinsing, wringing, or hanging laundry, sorting and cleaning eggs, butchering ducks and old hens, sprouting fodder oats, germinating seeds, fixing gates, picking up debris, tapping maple trees, starting bread, gathering sticks, showing rudimentary care and affection for my family and friends, supporting my math-averse child in her homeschool homework, looking for matching socks, foraging for nutrition, hauling compost, garden planning, posting to Instagram, making transactions on the phone with other farmers, pulling splinters out of my palm, looking for matching gloves, looking for the duct tape, processing my feelings, writing for the village, figuring out how much money I actually have, trying to get my three-year-old to go outside and then subsequently trying to get him off the roof, kneading the dough, making a new a handle for my hatchet, making a new snath for my scythe, peening and sharpening my scythe blade, sweeping, doing the dishes, paying debts associated with our simple lifestyle, apologizing (just kidding), or, perhaps, getting somebody else to do the dishes. (Because I’m a chef, not a cook, and apparently, I’m a bad communist to boot.) In the evening time, after having accomplished, on average, a half dozen of these tasks, I get sleepy, put on some music, and pass out, unless I can’t convince anyone else on the homestead to feed the dogs.

On the still spring nights, walking back through the twilight, I hear the shouts and barks of coyote packs and the song of spring peepers, perhaps interrupted by the passing of an evening train on the tracks two miles away, hooting into the night with its payload of coal. The owls screech and the tallgrass thatch rustles. I hear the electric pop of goat fence shorting out in the damp weeds, and the creak of the tool shed door hinges in the breeze. A woodcock calls its distinct interjection and a coon dog bays.

Is there coming a time in my life when I will feel lonely? Not likely when I’m living here. One of the things I’ve always appreciated, in theory, about this community is that no one lacks a voice who seeks it. It can be difficult to hone my focus through all the squawks, hisses, grunts, shouts, caterwauls, and chirps, but still, as a rule more than an exception, we tend to let folks make their favorite noises here. It serves the entire organism as a whole, and disregards the tastes and preferences of the individual. Me, I personally vacillate between whimpering and yelling, though I prefer to crow, and generally hope to avoid proselytizing.

My voice can only do so much in this context, and it is so important, in a day where social media provides an ear and an eye to so many voices — some of them full of hope, others full of hate — that I use my voice carefully, distinctly. While I truly benefit from writing my thoughts out once a month or so, it now feels better for me to to mute myself and let the whispers and shrieks speak for themselves.

I don’t know if humanity as a whole, as a global species/culture, will rise above its desire for consumption. There is this mytho-poetic image of the snake eating its own tail. Now I’ve met a lot of snakes, and I only ate one of them, but they don’t do that, just like lemmings don’t actually commit suicide. We’re the only species on this planet that actively consumes itself. Is the type of simple living that I promote here the solution? Naw, just a part of it. I have my flaws, and some of them, despite my dedication, lead toward a road to ruin. Y’all do important work too; and yet you’re probably as flawed as me. If we don’t have all the answers, we can still ask all the questions, and maybe asking questions is the biggest way we can care for this planet, and each other. Thanks for asking questions, and listening to the answers provided, within ourselves, and out there in the real world, or what’s left of it. I’m out, for now. Gotta plant these beets.

Would you like to visit Dancing Rabbit and hear from villagers one-on-one? Would you like to spend some time listening to nature’s symphony? Would you like to sneak out to the Fox Hole in the wee hours of the morning and hear Ben’s chicken-voice for yourself? You have a chance coming up soon! Our first visitor session of 2019 starts on April 14th, and we still have a few spots left — you could still have one of them, if you hurry. Click here to start on your application right now. During your visit you’ll get to sit in on a wide variety of workshops covering all kinds of interesting subjects, ranging from communication skills to natural building and renewable energy. Towards the end of the session it might be warm enough to take a dip in our swimming pond before heading in for a delicious homemade dinner, possibly in the company of a new life-long friend. The cost to come for two weeks is only about $50 a day, and that’s an excellent deal, once you factor in the costs of three squares a day, maintenance for tent platforms, and all the time and energy that workshop leaders, cooks, and non-profit staff put in to making everything possible. If you’ve been reading our weekly column for a while you probably know a thing or two about our village, and recognize many of the names, but there’s no substitute for visiting in person. Send in your application now, while you still have time to call in your vacation time at work, and make your travel arrangements. We can’t wait to meet you.

Howdy y’all. You know, whenever I have a hard time talking about what’s really going on — or worse, no idea what the other party could possibly be thinking — I like to discuss the weather instead. So I think I’ll start there.

Ben here, writing to y’all from the icy physical and emotional purgatory that is Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage, tucked away in the impassibly slippery rolling hills of Northeast Missouri. This has been the hardest winter I’ve ever experienced, maybe. Then again, I’ve been through some pretty hard ones. Everything outside is glazed over in a thick layer of perilous, unstable ice. As of this morning there is just a dash of snow on top. Making it to the barn, the outhouse, or the nearest “frost free” hydrant is like traversing a glassy stream of discarded banana peels beneath a veneer of deceptively fluffy little beads of ice. I’ve had hay carts fishtail about. I’ve seen bloody chins, and made unintentional snow angels upon the cold gravel. I’ve found it nearly impossible most days to make it off farm to stock up on necessities, like hay, dog food and other vittles.

Not only am I physically marooned here for the time being, but I’m emotionally and intellectually trapped; forced to confront daily the horrific news here. It is not lost on me that I have to be very conscious about my words, as do we all. Being careful with my words isn’t something I ever seem to do when speaking, (I also use a few more expletives than when I’m writing) and I don’t particularly enjoy writing, at least not about child sexual abuse. But somehow, for no understandable reason, that is what my week has been about. That and I think I want to take up bobsledding.

Knowing what to say to my children, my family, my friends, and neighbors is difficult. I hardly have words; hardly know what or how to think, and I know very little about where others are at. I’ve said it before, but this place is too disagreeable to form a cult around. There is no groupthink, no status quo statement that can speak for all of us. Our whole system of governance is based on taking into account nearly every present viewpoint on an issue and melding it all into something that isn’t particularly thrilling to anyone. (It’s called consensus, you should check it out.)

While in the past I’ve occasionally wanted the work I do writing for the newspaper and website to be financially compensated, I feel very fortunate to be able to offer my perspective, whatever that is, as a volunteer and as someone independent of our non-profit organization. I’m not selling anything, at least not today. What I can say is that, from where I’m standing, nothing makes sense anymore. As I see my friends and neighbors pulled into this ongoing investigation, including my own child, what I want is for this to be just another nightmare; something erased and made null by the light of day. But no, it’s a slippery h*ll-hole; one where I must navigate my own feelings of fear and betrayal, and show up to have the hard conversations with my own children explaining to them that those times when I told them that monsters don’t exist were well-meaning lies, that the world does contain in it some form of evil. The whole time I have to spin through the facts, rumors, self-created innuendo and conspiracy theories in order to reckon with the fact that something so horrible can happen — does happen — in every community, and has happened for all time.

Unlike some others, I did not move to community because I have an innate trust in humanity. I came here because I was sick of seeing how people treat each other and completely desecrate their own surroundings. I wanted to try something different. As a young father, I came here because I wanted an environment where the greatest risk my offspring could encounter was something physical, like falling off a sled, getting snagged on a barbed wire fence, or falling face first into frozen creek mud; something where they might shed some blood, but where they could also hold onto their hearts. (Not like the environment I grew up in.) Personally, without kids, I’d have chosen to sleep in a hollow log rather than Dancing Rabbit. It better suits my winning combination of self-important and self-defeating tendencies.

My days are filled with bumps and bruises. My little boy is almost three. He falls down, pinches his fingers between magnets (I stash a lot of magnets), somehow manages to clock himself in the eye with a toy truck, and he seems to get stung by bees more than anyone else I know. This stuff happens every day. In fact, anytime we get our strawbale home above sixty degrees, hornets fall out of the cracks in the ceiling, so he’s almost been stung twice this week. I tend to his wounds, no matter how superficial they seem, and I tell him that he will be okay. Maybe I distract him with a snack. Now, when I pick him up from his bumps and bruises, I feel like a liar. Sometimes I can hear the murmuring of others, folks who I do or do not know. I feel their questioning: whether we are doing enough, whether we are doing the right thing, whether or not it’s anybody else’s fault, other than the abuser, when children are abused. Sometimes I’m the one, murmuring these things to myself.

Well, I’ve lived here a long time, y’all. I am not to blame. This community is not to blame. After learning there may be a monster is your midst, finger pointing does little. Words fail. Actions speak volumes. I didn’t come here to talk, I came to this place to act, and I believe in justice for all people. How those scales tip is up to the individual. Crimes against children are the worst injustice, and I have no doubt that they will continue to occur among our species, being the sick, mixed up, traumatized bottle of humans that we are. If my words don’t work, if they fail us, well then I have a quote; and I hate quotes.

This one is commonly attributed to Mark Twain, but it actually belongs to Friedrich Nietzsche. Frankly, I prefer Twain to Nietzsche. Mark Twain was a local boy to here, and a fairly clever one. Nietzsche was a proto-Nazi, and a philosopher to boot. If anybody ever proclaims themselves a philosopher to you, I highly suggest finding different company, and if they quote Nietzsche, then just run as quick as you can. It’s difficult to escape the pretense, but here I go. What Nietzsche said was, “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” Cool, Fred. I get what you’re saying. But here’s the deal. My own child is being interviewed by the state. Of course, like anyone, I hope this isn’t true. I hope it’s all a bad dream. But as my granddaddy said to me, and I quote, “Boy, you can hope in one hand and [expletive] into the other. Tell me which one fills up faster.”

I don’t know what’s happening here. Information comes in at a trickle. But don’t ever doubt that I — that we — aren’t doing enough. As you know, we are cooperating with this investigation, and that comes with challenges. I strongly suggest that if anybody doubts my effort, my struggle, or the bigness of my compassion, that they come here, carefully shuffle a mile in my frigid boots across this forsaken tundra, and say it to my face.

I believe in justice. That’s what ultimately motivates my existence here. And I’ve been thinking about predator/prey relationships a lot lately. Just a little bit ago, I went out into the still winter silence to get some air; get away from this screen full of words. My daughter was sitting still as the ice, her outstretched, ungloved hands full of grain, training the chickadees to come, trust her, and take oats from her hand. The chickadees know she’s big, scary, and dangerous. But with time, they gather at her feet, and next to her body, taking the offerings she’s scattered. Up in the gray sky a bald eagle is soaring, hunting. The lazing barnyard dogs take notice, pirouet and bark, scaring it off from the huddled groups of chickens and ducks. The chickadees can do nothing but trust. This is a harsh winter, and they must risk their own lives to take the oats, to see to it that they have a future in this place, that they can go on to rear their young in the springtime that must eventually burst forth. The eagle is not a monster. The eagle is the same as the chickadee. It takes great risks to tear forth and dislodge a piece of meat from the icy landscape. It only does what it does in order to survive, in order to provide for its unhatched offspring.

There aren’t any monsters in the natural world. Monsters are a human construct, and only humans can become monsters. But it is only we humans who can do battle with the monsters, ourselves. No chickadee, nor eagle, nor trained dog can balance out the scales of justice, only we can. And things aren’t going to get any better if we don’t. That’s why most of us are here. I don’t want to defend myself, or my family, or my friends and neighbors, no more than I want to offend any of them either. I’d rather live by deed than by word, and so I will stop offering any more words to y’all. What I can do is be honest and compassionate with myself and with my family. And I think I know how to do that. But I honestly do not know what’s going on, or how this is going to impact the community I’ve helped to nurture into being, and the not knowing, that’s what’s killing me.

Editor’s Note: This is one person’s valuable take on the most challenging situation Dancing Rabbit has ever faced. As always, other folks in the village have a range of different points of view.

Howdy y’all. Ben here, your favorite manure-encrusted freelance writer (emphasis on the free), bringing the latest news from Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage in cold, dreary Northeast Missouri. I’m encrusted in manure for a few reasons. One is that my work area this afternoon is a somewhat rare combination of icy yet muddy conditions; it’s like scrabbling over frozen chunks of waterlogged earth frosted in a thin veil of poultry leavings, which have been warmed over by a balmy sun. It has a consistency similar to a grainy, watered down layer of your favorite, copyrighted and trademarked boxed gelatin dessert product. Also, my New Year’s resolution for 2018 was better manure management, a sword upon which I have fallen many times in the past few months, being as I’m awful busy. Finally, I just like to get a little manure all over myself sometimes; often in community it can be difficult for folks to perceive my personal bubble when I’m too clean, and an aura of mephitic debris does wonders in this regard.

Bodily cleanliness is a spectrum. I try to maintain a balance somewhere dead in the center between utter filth and hygiene practices that waste resources and destroy my beneficial microbes. With the pond out of service until sometime around May, I occasionally take a bath using about a quart and a pint of warm water and a rag. I hit up all the essential areas, and I rely on friction, not soap. I think soap is kind of a scam. I wouldn’t describe myself as “clean” so much as “not that gross”. And yes, we do have a community shower co-op here at Dancing Rabbit — I’m just too stubborn to use it. Being cantankerous is my superpower. If I was less stubborn than I am, I probably wouldn’t have made it this far.

Of course, I wouldn’t toil needlessly in the droppings of chickens and pigs. This is pay dirt: the biological fuel that will heat the new hoophouse and nourish the gardens and pastures. Short of being able to eat homegrown food year round, manure is the most profitable part of farming. These compost piles are my savings account. I imagine that by the time my children are ready for college, they’ll be as valuable as tuition, especially if humans continue stripping nutrients from the earth and consuming land at the current unsustainable rate.

In a culture where people (okay, just some people — the ones who use the most resources) have access to innumerable lifestyle options, choosing to power down one’s consumption appears to be a step backward. In this world of artificially intelligent robot assistants, next day air-mailed anything, dating apps, and cheap, industrialized food I consider my life here to be both fulfilling and even appealing. It may not be for everyone, but eventually everyone is going to have to live this way. I prefer voluntary adaptation to a simpler life rather than experiencing “resource scarcity” later on, say ten or fifteen years down the road, when the conventional, First World way of life becomes impossible at our current rate of pollution and resource extraction. People are capable of change over time, but often the process is slow.

I haven’t given myself over to meditation or other non-corporeal activities in earnest, and I don’t believe breatharianism (the belief that humans can live on a magical life force called prana, rather than food and water) is the answer to resource consumption, but I do often contemplate stuff while I’m mucking out hog stalls and spreading mulch. Having “less” shouldn’t lead to a diminished quality of life. My assets merely look and smell different.

I’m sure that someone, somewhere (probably here) could take a look at the trees we’re planting, the soil we’re building, and the bellies we’re filling and put a dollar amount on them. In that way, I’m no different than anyone else who’s on a daily grind for capital. The difference is that in leaving behind some of the trappings of First World life, like cell phone service, central heat, firsthand clothing and goods, running water and convenience food, I am better able to afford this level of simplicity. While it could be argued that I’m still chasing after worldly, material things, I’d like to think that those worldly items are going to exist long after I’m gone and nourish generations to come.

The truth is that my updates are composed in hopes that folks from the affluent “western world” will see the beauty in the form of simple living we promote here and adopt a lifestyle which not only values limiting resource consumption, but actually walks that talk as well. But just because we’re building utopia doesn’t mean we don’t import all of the trappings of our former lives. Dancing Rabbit doesn’t exist in a bubble. I am keenly aware that the ice caps are melting, that asylum seeking children are being kept in cages, that environmental protections are being cast aside in the name of short-term profit, and that our nation boasts one of the biggest industrialized prison systems in the world.

Every meal I take I recognize the privileges being here has given me. I have access to land (albeit pretty run down land), which means that I can feed and be fed. Even in the dark days of winter, and without refrigeration, I can get into my box of winter tomatoes and eat organic produce that didn’t come at a price of thousands of miles of transportation and the exploitation of migrant workers. There’s a lot to be grateful for here, but it would be harder to appreciate if not tinged with the knowledge that we have to build more sustainable systems and cultures than the status quo provides.

That said, and I know I’m probably not supposed to say this, the simple life is no walk in the park. For the past week and a few days I’ve been in a fairly deep isolated state, if you don’t count the critters. My family is away traveling for awhile, and my already tenuous mood is further affected by the perpetual veil of gloom that has settled over our region. Still, humans or not, I am prone to despondency this time of year. (And no, I haven’t tried yoga.) Some of it is seasonal, and some of it comes with just being me, I think. Experiencing fragile emotional health isn’t always easy in community, either. While there are number of ways folks here uplift and support each other, I find a lot of “growth work” difficult to engage in, as if I’m not already doing my best just to show up for my daily responsibilities. Still, if you’re into it, that’s cool, I guess.

I’m not entirely powerless, even when I’m depressed. I do my best to consume vitamin D, stay away from the news, and find joy in tromping through the mud with buckets of turnips amidst squealing pigs and squawking chickens. Sometimes I walk our big, energetic livestock guardian dogs and go pick up kindling out in the woods. Sometimes neighbors comes by for a meal — usually a huge pot of the same stew I’ve been working through for days — or I see Ted working on the fly rafters of the barn, which will hopefully be roofed before we enter the coldest part of the season. My children will return from Nebraska, which is stressful in its own right, but at least it’s distracting. When I’m more optimistic about my mental health situation, I see my own depression as being something of a superpower too. It’s like a unique form of vision that’s unobscured by trite niceties.

There’s things to do and that need done to make the world a better place, and I’d be willing to bet that almost a third of them are actually somewhat fun. Firewood needs processed. I have to sprout grains for the animals and drag cartloads of straw through the muck. I have to make phone calls to various hay brokers (pretending to be normal), and find just the right nails to keep the barn roof from turning into an enormous kite. I’ve been wearing the same two to three pairs of pants for the last week, and I need to rearrange the order. I also want to give the dogs some scratchings. As surely as the days are technically growing longer on this other side of winter solstice, this malaise will burn away, eventually.  The goats will drop kids, the pigs will grow fat, and the peppergrass and chickweed will start sprouting here and there. Already the daily yield of eggs is increasing to nearly two dozen a day. I’ll be ordering seeds and trees by the month’s end.

One time, an acquaintance of mine told me that “you can’t save the world by being dirty.” This is probably true, in the literal sense. But having a protective layer of filth is more of a mindset than a reality. I didn’t come here to be happy; when I am, it’s just one of the perks of building an alternative to the self-cannibalizing nature of our global economy. As a pessimist, I find myself motivated to try harder at doing good. Whether your glass is half full or half empty, we all need access to clean water.

If your New Year’s resolution is to help make the world a little more sustainable, consider joining us in May for our annual Permaculture Design Course. By then the pond should be warm enough to swim in, and Ben’s mephitic aura won’t be quite so pungent. You’ll get a chance to learn about a variety of climate change solutions from some of the folks you’ve been reading about each week, and earn some hands-on experience along the way. We hope to see you then!