Howdy and Happy Thanksgivukkah from Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage! Ben here, taking my turn to blow our own collective horn at you for a few brief paragraphs.
Yes, Thanksgivukkah is finally upon us, an event some Jewish scholars are calling “once in an eternity”, due to the ever fluctuating nature of the Jewish lunar-based calendar system. This is it folks, the convergence of Thanksgiving and Hanukkah. Thanksgivukkah is a welcome distraction in my life, because I usually spend this week pondering the historical accuracy of the first Thanksgiving story I was taught in school, then routinely justifying our way of life to Mae’s family in Sioux Falls. Brrr.
If I am to trust the mathematical experts and religious scholars, (sometimes a tall order) this dual holiday will not occur for another 70,000 years, so I am taking full advantage. Though I am not Jewish, and can sometimes be ungrateful, I declare now my full intention to spend November 28th reflecting on Thanksgivukkah.
Understanding only the rudiments of Hanukkah, I decided to inform myself. Skimming through Wikipedia.org this morning I learned of “The Miracle of the Oil”, an event which went down after the Maccabees rededicated their temple and discovered that the forces of Antiochus IV had desecrated their sacred lamp oil. There was only a one-day supply of oil, and the Maccabees would need eight-days worth to replenish their reserves. (It took that long to press the olives, I guess.) Then, boom! Miracle. The oil lasted longer than was reasonable to expect.
This story feels relevant to the modern epoch, only reversed. It seems to me like our global energy consumption is predicated on an eight day supply of oil, but in reality we can only afford to burn it for one more day. Though I doubt that the Maccabees had much knowledge of carbon emissions, it feels like they may have had something to teach us all about conservative energy use. Of course I’m drawing a pretty long, winding parallel here, and perhaps if there are any Rabbinical readers out there (or even just eight-year-olds in Hebrew school) they can do me the service of correcting my interpretation. Nevertheless, moving in territory with which I am more familiar, I do intend to dedicate my gratitude towards some of what I have to be thankful for.
Which, in typical hack writer fashion, I will do right here: Firstly, I am thankful to live in a community where renewable energy is demonstrated as the only viable choice for the long term. I give thanks that we have covenants here at Dancing Rabbit which support the creation of a fully functioning, sustainable village, where my neighbors value their energy in more ways than the mere financial cost. I am thankful that no one yet has discovered a way to give coal power away for free.
As always, I am thankful for my bicycle, which has taken me to more interesting places than any car. I am thankful for the cars that are constantly dropping quality tools and hardware on the roadside, easily detected if one is astride a vehicle which travels slowly enough.
I don’t live in a yurt anymore, having helped build our strawbale house, so I must certainly be thankful for that, though I often miss hearing the train at night in my bed. The tradeoff is that I can now own houseplants.
I am thankful for running water, whatever that means. To me it means that we keep our barrel of water up high, so that when we open the spigot, it runs into our vessels. My water runs so well we have to haul another bucket almost every day.
I’m thankful for freezing temperatures, mainly because I don’t own a freezer, but it also makes firewood rounds more brittle for splitting.
Every morning that I hear gunshots I’m thankful I wasn’t born a deer.
I’m thankful for the library in our common house, which is a nice addendum to the living encyclopedia of knowledge present here at Dancing Rabbit.
I am thankful that our household energy system is too meager for us to view an entire movie on our laptop in one sitting, thus making me a more avid reader. Now when we want entertainment we just sit around the lightbulb, thankful for it. Althea, our four-year old, wonders where the wax goes when we turn it on, and believes that all electronics are powered by placing them in the sun, for which I am thankful, as I am that she is committed to collecting freshly laid eggs even on single digit mornings.
I am thankful for Jerusalem artichokes, which can’t be destroyed by errant chickens or even by errant gardeners.
Mostly though, I am thankful not to live anywhere near this Black Friday business. I am thankful that my child is not exposed to advertising, or even the seemingly commonplace toy aisles lined with chintzy plastic. I’m glad to live in a place where I can confidently enter a retail establishment, should I so choose, and not be thrown asunder by herds of people battling for doodads. That may be fine, or even expected to occur in some suburban big box, but I am truly grateful that these things don’t happen in Northeast Missouri. There are too few people living here to behave that way.
And besides it seems that most of my neighbors, be they friends living here in the tri-communities, or just others in our wider regional community, place value on a lot more than holiday gifts during this time of year. Still, I could use some newish-to-new wool socks, as long as you don’t have to knock anyone down for them.
Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage is an intentional community in northeast Missouri, practicing ecologically sustainable living. We offer free public tours on the second and fourth Saturdays of the month from April-October. Tours are over for this year, but you can still come by on Thursday nights for pizza at the Milkweed Mercantile, from 4–9! For more information about DR you can visit our website www.dancingrabbit.org, read our blog, The March Hare, at www.marchhareblog.com, or email us at dancingrabbit@ic.org.