My life has been moving along pretty smoothly lately, and the “what’s next” steps have been falling into place pretty smoothly too. Liz here, with an update on village life at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage.

Things are hopping over at our SubHub natural building project this spring and it promises to be a busy and productive summer. There’s a trend I’ve noticed where several times a year the SubHub building crew will get what I call “shed fever,” where we notice a need for several different sheds for our project and we get the itch to build them. And there is a natural affection for the shed as a structure in general that is more universal than I would have imagined. But because there isn’t room in our building schedule to create them, so far our awareness hasn't paid off in real storage structures being built.

Until this spring, that is. And oh what a shed we built! It is a large enough structure that we decided to send out a building notification to the DR community. I dubbed it our Tool Palace. It is 28 feet by 14 feet, with a shed style metal roof. We built the walls out of whole pallets stacked next to, and on top of, one another (no posts). We put a bond beam at the top of the walls to hold them together and to support the roof. We then attached sanded pallet boards on the diagonal on the outside of the structure. It is big enough and solid enough that the thought occurred to more than one of us that it would make great work exchanger housing for three seasons. Now we have a place to move all of our tools and materials out of SubHub, which has been getting more crowded as we finish each room inside and we have had to move all of our tools and supplies to the hall, and keep lumber outside under tarps. As we move everything out of the hall, it becomes possible to build the cordwood floor for it.

After several years of describing in words what our west-side, covered patio was going to look like, we finally started building it! My plan was to build a brick floor patio with a living roof (a roof covered in soil and planted with plants) over it to create a shady spot in the summer for an outdoor kitchen and people gatherings. There would be a straw bale and cob plaster sitting wall surrounding it. Last year Alis excavated a trench for it and we filled the trench with gravel. This year, in preparation for teaching part of the natural building workshop, we started three weeks in advance, building a stem (foundation) wall out of free concrete blocks and hoisting hefty osage posts in place to support the heavy roof. Students in the workshop stacked straw bales on top of the stem wall, stomped cob plaster batches, and put two layers of plaster over the straw.

For the last four years, my son, Graham, and I have been taking one afternoon of the natural building workshop each year and introducing students to cob plaster. This year I was invited to be a full instructor. We had 18 students in the workshop, so we divided the group into three smaller groups and rotated them between building a garden wall at the front of the village, building an earthbag foundation over at Mark’s house, working on the patio sitting wall over at SubHub, and doing finish plastering with Alis over at Mae’s house. Graham was my co-instructor over at SubHub, with anyone from the SubHub crew invited to observe if they had an inclination to teach someday. Our newest crew member, Laurie, who came to DR as a work exchanger and who I hired as soon as her internship was done, observed and helped out the first day of class. I usually host coffee in the morning for DR’s visitor programs and smaller workshops, so I decided to do that with the natural building workshop as well. I was plenty tired by the end of the five-day event, but I enjoyed hanging out with all the students.

This group of students was particularly curious about life at DR and so I was inspired to offer a Q&A one morning at coffee hour. There were many good questions, including a handful of more difficult questions, such as why was our community mostly white? And what were we doing to create more diversity, equity and inclusion within our community? I try to make the point that my answers in situations like this are my opinions only, and that there are different answers that my fellow community members might provide if they were there. So I tried not to answer for the whole of DR, but just for me, saying that in my opinion, our community had work to do around diversity and racism, and that I, as a white person, had self-development work to do around these issues.

The nights have been chilly this summer, which makes for some sound, restful sleeping. I think cooler weather helps our productivity, as we are usually working outside in the summer, with all the heat, humidity and insects. There has been a family of foxes playing in the evenings over by SubHub and sadly, we lost one of them last week, killed by a community dog. As I paint the trim of the Tool Palace, I am again amazed at how quickly birds leave evidence of resting on the new building and many different insects have already made homes in the new structure, such as several kinds of ants, carpenter bees, and several kinds of spiders.

Today our second two-week visitor program started and this year we are trying an experiment to overlap the first weekend of each visitor program with the three-day Ecovillage Experience, which means there are a lot of people here right now! Lots of coffee to be made! Luckily, I enjoy meeting people from all over the country and answering questions about what life is like at Dancing Rabbit.

And so, dear reader, it feels like a good time to end with a quote, this time from John Lewis, an American politician and civil rights activist who served in the US House of Representatives for Georgia's 5th congressional district from 1987 until his death in 2020: 

“Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Do not become bitter or hostile. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble. We will find a way to make a way out of no way.”

Liz Hackney is the editor of this newsletter. She is working to restore some sense of balance and ease in her life after the month leading up to, and including, the recent five-day natural building workshop.