Songs of Summer: A Dancing Rabbit Update

I don’t know about you, but I really look forward to the “fat” time of year. This is the time when abundance verges on overwhelm, and we do all of the work (fun) that is needed to preserve our bounty for the coming year. The corn is hip-height; the tomato plants stretch their limbs upward and outward at an almost real-time perceptible pace and the summer squash is threatening us with suffocation if we don’t run for our lives. Oh, and the hearty volunteer plants. Summer is here!

It’s Julie here, writing to you this week with a good night’s rest behind me, and a love for writing within me. This past Sunday, farmer Dan Durica harvested the first three tomatoes of the season from his hoop house, and sweetly gave me two of them! In another few weeks, our gardens will be bursting with so much produce that one would need to be impeached from a rational state of being to not be flooded with a sense of warm gratitude.

I can’t convey how wonderful it feels to not have to wear 5 pairs of pants to walk outside! This past winter seems as though it was a very well-written and -directed Sundance Film Festival documentary that happened to some Antarctic ecovillage. That wasn’t us. We were merely observers of those poor souls with frozen pipes, -35 degree windchills, unplowed roads, and dwindling firewood supplies.

There has been a noticeable increase in live music here at DR as of late. I feel so darn lucky to live in a place where culture migrates to us, and we have the opportunity to immerse ourselves in top-notch entertainment without having to walk more than a few paces from our doorsteps.

Dancing Rabbit is a unique place to live in that we seem to be one of the largest destination points for musicians traveling within a 50 mile radius of us. I guess to entertainers we are the most interesting thing on their trek through so many miles of farmland. We were lucky to have been entertained on Friday by singer and songwriter Mark Mazziotti from Red Earth Farms, Brockell Briddle, a local singer and violin player, and The Human Revolution.

The Human Revolution sang many original songs that were performed in front of thousands of people before us, with personal and eco-political themes that we felt honored to bear witness to. I can’t think of anyone who would disagree with the idea of wanting healthier babies, healthier bodies, and cleaner air to breathe as the result of cleaner and more stringent environmental practices.

One of the songs The Human Revolution performed was about the recent federal deregulation to grow hemp. It is now up to individual states to decide for themselves if they wish to grow this crop. Grown for industrial purposes for over 12,000 years, hemp is supremely versatile in that it produces many food items, such as oil, milk, nut butter, salad dressing, flour, and cereal. Hemp is also a superior plant for clothing, rope, animal bedding and feed, paper, biofuels, biodegradable plastic, and oil-based paint. It’s even used as a replacement for wood in construction, and as a substitute for fiberglass in insulation when mixed with lime. The list of uses hemp provides is exhaustive. Now that this plant is slowly becoming legalized, I encourage you to consider contacting your state representatives in support of producing a crop that will reduce the use of pesticides, the clear-cutting of our forests, and the production of plastics that will remain in landfills for hundreds of thousands of years to come.

It was refreshing to listen to music that not only moved me on a personal level, but on an educational, environmental, and political level as well. It’s not too often that the music I listen to directly inspires me to research the latest laws surrounding a politically charged topic. I believe our world could be a different place if mainstream music would inspire us all the way the way The Human Revolution did for me.