Hi, this is Sam, and I’ve been a grumpy bunny all week. I’m sure some really great things happened to and around me, but still, the grumpiness. Maybe that means it’s time for a “This Week at DR” column that’s not all bright sides and fruit trees. Maybe it’s time to let you hear the Dancing Rabbit Blues.
Well since my baby left me (ba-dum)… Just kidding. I do enjoy blues, though, and was thrilled to go on a date with my sweetie in Memphis to see Trampled Under Foot. We had a really nice time and at $12 a ticket door price, it was a bargain. Here’s the Dancing Rabbit downside: taking a vehicle co-op (DRVC) car to Memphis from here costs about $20, so with two people in the car that almost doubled our admission price. It’s true that for a person like me who doesn’t use the cars overmuch, it still ends up being less expensive than owning my own vehicle, but sometimes that DRVC bill feels like a punch in the gut for this working single parent.
Another economic downside that hit me this week is the cost of decision-making. We try to be very mindful and exhaustively inclusive about the making of any decisions that affect all or lots of us here. It’s a really nice idea, and it takes a huge number of people-hours. Huge. Lately we’ve been moving more and more toward showing our appreciation for the people who do this work (which is not always all of us) by paying them for their time. That’s nice; it’s a hard job, I think they should get paid. On the other hand, it’s making my bills go up and that is hard to swallow. In a community of 60-something people, my portion of the cost of consensus is more than what I pay for a generous term life insurance policy. Oof.
I do some of that paid decision-making work, and I do some volunteer committee work, but committees are so not my thing. I hardly ever got into fights as a kid, so I never got slapped with the “does not play well with others” label, but that’s mostly because I kept to myself, from preschool on. Sure, I played team sports: I was a good right fielder (sometimes catcher) and an even better soccer fullback. Get the picture? Contemplative, solitary, defensive, waiting patiently for the right moment to thwart your score.
All that’s just to give you an idea how unnatural it feels to me to sit at a table with three other people making decisions that could more easily be made by one. I love the idea of everyone having a say, of checks and balances, and multiple perspectives… It’s just not an environment I personally thrive in. At DR we’re expected to do this kind of work, though; it’s part of the price of living here, and for me, it’s one of the downsides.
One of the upsides to living at Dancing Rabbit is meeting people from all over who think we’re really cool, or at least worth checking out. We’ve had a couple of student groups come lately, working on projects or just expanding their worldview, and more are coming soon. Our first visitor session starts soon, too, the same day as the lunar eclipse, actually, and the tent platform crew was out repairing those this week.
Visitor sessions are great because they bring us new friends, give us a sense of purpose, and introduce us to the next batch of new residents. It’s kind of like a game; I always wonder when I first meet them, who will be the ones that “stick”. Some visitors come and never leave, while others go home and wrap things up with their current life so they can come join us. Some of the ones we really like don’t come back though, while others might get all the way through to membership and then decide DR just isn’t really for them. It’s a bummer, especially if we’ve formed a bond while they were here.
The weather was good this week. Unfortunately, my work (DR, income, and parenting) required me to be inside, on my computer, for much of the nice days. It kills me to be doing stupid computer work when it’s gorgeous outside and other people are gardening, processing firewood, building, or tending their animals. Unfortunately, contrary to how some of our readers might imagine it, Dancing Rabbit is not (nor ever shall be) a self-sufficient community. We do not grow anywhere near all of our own food.
Since we have to bring food in from outside, that means we have to send something out in exchange, and currently that something we send out is money. In order to have the money to buy the food, we must bring money into the community. That means that a lucky few of us get to telecommute, and consequently spend our beautiful Saturdays stuck on the computer, working. Boo.
I did, however get my work done on Saturday and spent a few hours in my garden on Sunday. I discovered that I must have been being really lazy when I “harvested” the sunchokes in the fall because there were enough good ones still in the ground to make a sizable contribution to dinner. The fact that my lazy past self, the ground, and the plants had conspired to give me such a nice surprise really tickled me. My garden strategy is based mainly on fail-safe techniques, because I’m prone to bouts of laziness, busyness, and grumpiness. Sunchokes did not disappoint as a plant that will give me food despite myself, and they improved the soil texture in the process.
I know we usually talk about what actually happened at DR in these columns, but I spent the week mostly holed up in my room, so if anything interesting happened, I missed it. You’ll have to settle for this report from the gloomy desk of a grumpy bunny, until next week.
Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage is an intentional community and nonprofit outside Rutledge, in northeast Missouri, focused on demonstrating sustainable living possibilities. While we dream of spring, when tours will begin again, you can find out more about us by visiting our website, reading our blog, or emailing us.