Sam here, with your weekly update from Dancing Rabbit. Thanksgiving at DR has changed over just the four times I’ve been here to experience it. Besides a different feel each year and a changing cast of cooks and eaters, there’s a general trend toward folks celebrating in smaller groups, instead of everyone coming together in the common house great room.
For one thing, the great room isn’t big enough for everyone to eat in anymore; there’re too many of us. Also, with our increasing numbers there’s also more tendency toward forming bonds with subsets of individuals and with the passage of time, there’re more finished kitchens and homes in the village. These two things have combined so more of us prefer to celebrate Thanksgiving in smaller, more personal venues.
I’m not sure what they had to eat over in the great room. I wasn’t there. I hear they had three kinds of meat, though, which is another thing that’s changed a lot since I’ve been at DR. I can’t even tell you what the weather was like on Thanksgiving day, I was too busy cooking to notice.
Thanksgiving has been one of my favorite holidays to celebrate at Dancing Rabbit. In general, it’s the most import holiday for me philosophically, for the same reasons I enjoy life at DR: attention to gratitude.
In trying to live sustainably, we often find ourselves thinking about how to consume less while maintaining an acceptable standard of living. We challenge what things are necessary to harvest, manufacture, ship, and dispose of in order to live happy and satisfying lives and provide adequately for our and our children’s needs. Dancing Rabbit is a supportive place for folks who wish to explore and experiment with what exactly is enough.
We ask ourselves questions: How warm does my house need to be? How fancy do my meals need to be? How much non-local food do I need? How often do I need to travel? How much media consumption suits me? How much stuff do I need to store to feel safe? How big does my house need to be? Do I need my own kitchen? Do I need my own bathroom?
Then, we can try reducing each of those things individually or in batches, to a bare minimum, experiencing a winter burning as little wood as possible in a one room apartment, for example. Or in a small yurt.
Once I moved from one 13′ diameter room to a 16×16′ cabin with an 8×14′ loft, I felt such gratitude for the ampleness of space. I had room to put a table in my house and it made me practically giddy to sit on a chair to eat, work, or play a board game.
I also started burning enough wood to keep the temperature in the 60s during the day, and it fills me with gratitude to get dressed in the morning…outside the quilts and without tears.
Thanks to the trees for your wood. Thanks to the other inhabitants of this land for sharing such an abundance of space with me and my house. Thanks to Dancing Rabbit for providing a safe container to experiment with what is really necessary in my life. Thanks to Dancing Rabbit also for the shared infrastructure that allows me to have a smaller personal impact. Thanks to y’all for reading. May your lives be full of gratitude and a sense of abundance.
Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage is an intentional community of more than 70 people, practicing ecologically sustainable living in Rutledge, Missouri. There are no more Saturday tours until spring. For more information please see our website at www.dancingrabbit.org, or give us a call at (660) 883-5511. Find us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/DancingRabbitEcovillage.