Retreat is in the air here. The Dancing Rabbit community comes together each winter to consider our overall direction and goals for the coming year. We’ll participate in a series of meetings in February to determine our community’s path for the year, as well as joining in all sorts of activities that will help deepen each other’s knowing and understanding of our friends and neighbors. We’ll also attempt to hold the interests of the non-profit organization, Dancing Rabbit, Inc., in its educational mission to tell the world about Dancing Rabbit, demonstrate what we’re up to, and support the growth of a village of 500-1000 people.
This year’s retreat planning committee has posted extensive sign-ups for various support roles during retreat, and generally set us up for a week’s worth of meetings in two stretches. A variety of village committees are preparing their presentations with facts and figures on the past year and the year upcoming, with an eye toward any questions they’d like the villagers’ input on. Given that we’re in meetings for most of the day during retreat, there is also an option to sign up for group meals cooked by community friends or on-farm non-participants, so that we don’t have to figure out cooking alongside our meeting schedule.
Though we experience occasional interludes of warmer weather, this winter continues to hold plenty of cold and wintry for us to sample. This morning we awoke to a fine layer of ice coating the world, though the rain starting in the middle of the night sounded liquid enough. Thankfully it had mostly melted by mid-afternoon, so we could stop skidding and sliding on the iced roads and paths for the time being, and so that our wind turbine blades could de-ice and start producing power again. I’m hoping for a quick ultimate frisbee game in this warm snap.
In keeping with the winter rhythm, I took advantage of this past week’s generally clear weather to split some of the log sections I cut up months ago, with which to replenish the dwindling supply of firewood for our two buildings in our shed. It felt good to see the wood stack in the shed grow rather than diminish this week, and the outdoor, physical work is essential to my well being this time of year.
Sara, Aurelia and I are slowly settling into our enlarged home. I got Aurelia’s bed mounted on her newly-built loft, and last night Zane came for a sleepover, helping test out plans for how to include guest sleeping facilities in Aurelia’s room. It is a distinct pleasure to have a little more breathing room in our home space after three years of construction, and for Aurelia to have at last a bit of space to call her own and use in her own way. I hope to get back to work on the heated cob bench this week, having brought a bucket of cob into the greenhouse to thaw some days ago.
Former member Liat arrived early this past week to refill the village with her abundant energy and ability to draw people out of their routines. Liat and Aurelia wrote a book together during a hangout Thursday. Saturday she hung out with me at Ironweed as I made both my weekly batch of yogurt and also a batch of farmhouse cheddar cheese. Cheesemaking seems to require lots of wait time peppered with a handful of brief work episodes to culture the milk, curdle it, cut the curd, mill and salt it, and press the cheese, so overall it lends itself to hanging out and catching up with a good friend you haven’t seen in a while.
Nathan tirelessly petitioned individual villagers each of several days this week to show up for broom ball on one or another of the frozen ponds in the village. We had good games each of several days running in the brief late afternoon interval between when the school bus brings some of the kids home and when it gets too dark to play. Having broken my eating coop’s one broom my first day out, which I had also been relying on for my house, I am now in the market for some sturdier brooms, and I’m thinking about growing some broom corn again.
That leads to thoughts of seed– Alyssa brought over our individual part of the group order from Fedco, a seed cooperative based up in Maine that offers a lot of organic, open-pollinated, and heirloom varieties. I came to terms with just how much snap bean seed we’d bought, and am now preparing myself mentally for prepping new beds and growing a whole mess of beans this year. I can’t get enough dilly beans in winter, so I’m looking forward to planting, harvesting, and preserving the abundance. I’ll need to get started on onions and artichokes in the next couple weeks already, so I’m hoping to take advantage of the current thaw to mix up some potting soil from materials I gathered last season.
I was pleased to see a report this past week from the Dancing Rabbit Vehicle Coop (DRVC), which currently shares two sedans and a truck among 58 members and will soon acquire an electric Nissan Leaf. Among other figures, it reported that the average member drove 874 miles in 2012. Some of us do rent or borrow cars when traveling to visit family, adding some miles to that figure, but I believe our car cooperative and the ridesharing it promotes is keeping Dancing Rabbit’s per capita average at about 10% the national average of 10-15,000 miles driven per person per year.
We’d love to hear more about our readers’ local experiences with car sharing—please share your stories on our blog at blog.dancingrabbit.org, to let us know how well it’s going where you live.
Public tours of Dancing Rabbit will start again in April; meanwhile keep up with our happenings, including new postings for work exchange positions, via our website at www.dancingrabbit.org, or give us a call at (660) 883-5511, and we’ll do our best to get right back to you. Happy February from all of us here at Dancing Rabbit!