Natural Building participants working on the new garden wall designs.

As I write this, my heart is full after just returning from Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage for the Natural Building Workshop. I came to learn natural building, but I feel like I am taking much more with me—a deeper, embodied understanding not only of how to build with natural materials such as clay, sand, straw and wood, but also how to create regenerative human habitation and connection with the living Earth.

When I reflect on this experience, a few things really stand out to me. The first is the groundbreaking and pioneering spirit of Dancing Rabbit. So many of us living in this age recognize that modern culture is not working for us and we are recognizing the critical importance of creating a new vision for the future. A vision where humans can live in harmony with nature, restore nature, live regeneratively, and learn how to rebuild not only our relationship with the natural Earth but with each other. But the details of how to do this are often lost. To me, Dancing Rabbit offers one such powerful, tangible, and time-tested model of how we can create a more hopeful vision for the future by attending to our living, being, and inhabiting the present. In an age where so many things seem to be going in a direction that harms the living Earth and choices often seem limited, Dancing Rabbit offers a future-focused model to inspire generations to come. 

A big part of creating that present and future vision starts with the spaces we inhabit daily. Part of what I learned through our workshop and what was modeled so beautifully at Dancing Rabbit as a whole, was how important our homes and daily living are for enacting other kinds of sustainable living practices.

I grew interested in natural building for its empowering, democratic, and ecologically oriented nature. But some of the naturally-built places I’ve visited prior have often been models rather than real, lived-in places. I appreciated the way in which we not only learned about the natural building techniques, but also, how we saw the outcomes of those techniques—and how they ultimately changed visitors and residents’ interaction with their surroundings. This lesson was demonstrated so powerfully through simply staying in the village but also the multiple tours of residences, where we talked about their winter and summer performance, and how they functioned in relationship to other sustainable systems (water collection, solar power, heating, permaculture practices, gardens, living roofs, animal husbandry, and more). Thus, one of the major lessons was how much our daily living circumstances can facilitate—or hinder—ecologically-based living.

A third major takeaway was empowerment, tools and resources. As a woman living in a very rural and conservative area, I have not been actively discouraged from engaging in any kind of building or construction. These are skill sets that have been largely out of my reach, despite my best efforts to learn over the years. As we worked through the material in the course, I could feel the excitement building within me. Our two fantastic instructors talked with me about my ideas for building a small cob house at my homestead, gave me resources, and encouraged me as I learned and experimented. It was just a matter of knowing that I can do this—and now I have both the mindset and the tools to be successful. And that alone is such an incredible feeling—to feel empowered and ready to build!

To me, the natural building course taught much more than just natural building. It taught us how to live differently, how to pay more attention to our surroundings, to consider not only what we build but who we build it with, what we use to build, and why we build it. It taught me that I can create anything that I set my mind to, and in doing so, I am not only transforming my relationship to nature, but also, my relationship with my own community and myself. This was an incredibly transformative and powerful experience and one that I would highly recommend to anyone who is considering natural building. There are many places where you can learn the fundamentals of natural building—but far less where you can learn some of the embedded lessons of place, inhabitation, and community.

By Dana O’Driscoll

 

There are still workshops and visitor programs coming up this fall! Our fifth visitor program starts October 9 for two weeks and a three-day natural building workshop starts September 15. Visit the www.dancingrabbit.org website for more information and to register.