Howdy folks. Ben here, relaying to you another communique from Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage, though weary from a typical morning of tromping through mud, visiting my sheep, and seeking a dry roll of toilet paper.
As a gardener who doesn’t believe in watering his garden except in extreme emergencies (I am selecting for seeds that handle neglect), I am much pleased with the minor squall that rolled across us yesterday afternoon. As a person building his own home out of mud pies, I am somewhat saddened by the suddenly sodden nature of our construction zone. After yet another improvised single-person trenching in the downpour work party, I can happily report that I have staved off foundational flooding on a particularly tricky below grade corner of my home. At this moment, after the fourteen hours with a trenching shovel, my sandals still feel like a pair of squishy, muddy fish tied to my feet.
The Summer Solstice has come and gone, and once again I have watched my circadian rhythms go aflutter with the current preponderance of daylight. Readers of my previous correspondences might recall that I am often unaware of what all is going on at Dancing Rabbit, being trapped as I am in the often nearsighted business of managing a micro-sustainable homestead. This is particularly true at this time of year, when some sort of ancient survival instinct is triggered in me and I am unable to stop working, thinking, and doing. Don’t worry about me; I’ll start eating three meals a day again this winter. Hopefully I needn’t poke any more holes in my belt. Actually, the conditions I operate under may lead to the development of some type of easily consumable superfood. I’m thinking some combination of miso, coffee, Gatorade, and gravy that can be loaded into a drinking tube.
Glancing at the calendar I am suddenly aware that I am nearing the one-year anniversary of the groundbreaking of my house, the Foxhole. Although I haven’t conditioned myself to mixing two batches of cob before breakfast yet, the time is nigh. I do take breaks, most of them in the outhouse, which serves a double function for me. The primary function I’m sure you understand, and the secondary is as a sensory deprivation chamber.
I am making hay while the sun shines, quite literally, and with no help from any moving parts other than my elbows, my knees, and a couple of wheels. If conditions are right, I calculate that I can make approximately one week of stored winter forage for our animals with six hours of labor, utilizing a scythe, a rake, a pitchfork, and a cart. Is this economically feasible? I don’t really care. It’s more fun to me than working some other job to make the money to buy some hay that I know little about. I am also considering some other forms of winter fodder that can be gathered and stored, such and nettle hay (40% protein, I read it on the internet), buckwheat hay, honey locust pods, and perhaps my own small scale silage fermented in steel drums with corn, sunflower, sorghum, and sunchoke stalks. They probably don’t make much mention of these things in ag school, but I didn’t go there. Of course, I didn’t need to study too many books to figure out that cows need grass and chickens need space, and that eggs needn’t travel 2,000 miles to be eaten.
Though gathering food and firewood, collecting solar energy, catching water, and building a comfortable, practical home may all seem to be efforts in self-sufficiency, I would like to impress upon the reader that these activities aren’t merely provisions for my own survival. As a communitarian, and a human being alive at this time in history, I consider my survival mutualized. That is to say that from the personal, to the family, to the wider community, on through to the regional and global levels, we humans are not self-sufficient; we simply cannot be. I would perish without the animals I depend on for food and livelihood, the people who care for me and barter their own surplus for mine, and all the other entities, seen and unseen, who participate in our collective survival. I could raise all my own grain, make robes of buckskin, and flint-knap arrowheads and still need to relinquish my control to the larger ecosystem, and the smaller ring of comrades who support our mutual survival. I may be an individualist, but I am not blind to cooperation.
When will the toil end up here on my little hill of dirt? Probably never, and I like it that way. My work, frantic as it may sometimes be, keeps me connected to the very things I want to preserve for the future. Until recent times, I have been unaware of the properties of the different grasses, unable to read the sky for a weather forecast, unlearned in the variations of birdsong and frogsong. It keeps me connected to my human family too, as we all muddle about our business, processing greens for winter nourishment, catching sheep in a challenging game of red rover with my fellow part time shepherds, and the inexorable human powered migration of buckets to and fro across the village, transporting clay, compost, water, and the occasional chicken viscera (all of these things truly the stuff of life, or at least the stuff of my life) from where it was to where it needs to be.
I do look forward to rocking on my porch when I’m old and making the young’uns listen to me, no matter how off-topic I get; but in order to achieve this life goal, I need to put in the work now.
Yammering to folks about what you did and what you learned is a privilege, in my book, and one I do not consider open to all comers. I try not to offer advice in my young age, merely speculation. July marks year one for my clan and me in the terms of the rest of our lives. We built a little home and a little farm, and now the real work begins. Even if I continue to work as hard as I do and receive the support I have been getting, I will have a full lifetime of work ahead of me before I can take a rest that is actually restorative (that is to say, not until I reach the age where I ought to be dead). Like I said, I’m fine with that. And even if I run out of work to perform for myself, there will always be ways in which I can, and have to, contribute to the survival of our whole planet…even if that simply means telling folks what to do and how to do it.
Now give those chickens some more space, and pull your pants up!