Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you all?

Good question. We cook for each other, I guess?

"What does cooking have to do with writing?" our social media coordinator asked, after I made some vague suggestion that we make a video, with a voiceover of text from this article.

Lately, I've been putting off both cooking and writing, and then throwing something together at the last minute with the ingredients I have. Cooking and writing are both highly contextualized conversations with available materials.

From an evolutionary perspective, as I understand it, cooking represented a kind of externalization of the metabolism, applying heat with fire or sun; caloric energy that otherwise would have to be supplied by the organs of digestion themselves. You put things around you into a pot, and stir.

It's been hot lately. Reid Miller, a contra dance caller who had been to Dancing Rabbit several times before, was stopping through, so on Thursday at 8pm, with fans blowing, and refreshing drinks and snacks ready, the village came together in the building we call Casa, to spin each other around in circles.

I played the mandolin. Brumby sang out the melodies on the violin, Taylor pounded out danceable rhythms on the Bodhran, Eric held down chords on the guitar, all of us listening to and making adjustments for each other, adding slight improvisations or idiosyncrasies into the mix. Sure you can have a recipe, but the best music will always be made up in the moment, with whatever sounds you find growing close by.

There were moments, despite the heat, that felt like the floating coolness of swimming through a deeper, more night-chilled part of a pond. People moved towards each other, then away, at one point making spirals, ducking under arms, with patterns that, like the Effigy Mounds in Iowa, necessitate a bird's eye view, or imaginative projection, to really apprehend.

"Can I write about this?" I asked Alis, who was standing beside a felled pin oak, the latest ingredient in the construction of the new Critter kitchen. He'd used the chainsaw to cut the branches down to little rose-colored eyes, like it was a sun-burned aspen. It was early in the morning, and I was late because I'd gotten lost and tried to bushwhack my way to the tractor sounds. "Do you know what that is?" he asked, pointing to a repeating, pinnate alternation of leaves. I didn't. It was a walnut tree.

He let me replace the blade on the chainsaw, using a wrench to turn hexagonal screws much like the ones on the crankshaft of my bike, and a screwdriver to add tension to the blade. I cut up part of the trunk he didn't want to use, pouring sweat, then went to play music with Scout.

"See, I'm not even thinking about what I'm going to play," Reid said, when he helped us run through some of the songs we would use. "I'm listening. We're having a conversation."

I visited a drummer in Colorado (sorry to hop around different subjects, but the heat is stirring all these different ideas together) and he loaned me one of his bikes, and took me up and down steep, rutted mountain paths through lodgepole pines. Most of the time we didn't talk, but once I said something like, "I don't like competing with people. I'm into collaboration, the open sharing of knowledge and skills." I think this was in reference to me having a hard time keeping up, but trying to learn. We were going fast, but we weren't racing. He gave me tips on when to change gears, or adjust the compression.

A recent DR work exchanger does front-end web design. We talked about it during our mutual cleaning shift in the Common House, because one of my online jobs is teaching kids how to code. I'm interested in how the open source movement in software development benefits from, and lives in tension with, commercial applications. Writing code or designing websites is like cooking; combining the results of many patient, collective harvests. Code can go through developmental cycles of crowd-sourced development. Food and software are better if it isn't bought wholesale from a store, if you source some of the ingredients locally, and treat it like music, or a conversation. "Want to code together sometime?" I asked.

I didn't cook much Friday night. There were leftovers, and we were trying not to add heat to the Ironweed Kitchen. There were some eggplants that were going bad, though, and some onions I wanted to use, along with some slightly desiccated wine cap mushrooms growing in the mulch bed, so I sautéed them together on low heat for a while, having sliced the eggplant and sprinkled it with salt, letting it set to draw out the moisture (everything was sweating). I used fresh borage that had self-seeded in the garden in a salad, with pears and apples from nearby trees.

Eating, when food is locally sourced, is listening to the land. Cooking, rather than buying processed foods, is kind of like using open source recipes to code your own website, or play your own songs. Cooking in a cooperative kitchen lets me learn and improve in a collaborative environment where we all listen to each other, and make adjustments.

Chad Hines is a member of the agroforestry project starting up at DR. We thank him for the great live music we had for contra dancing last week! He is also a steady attendee of Maker’s Morning, a once or twice a month gathering of creative crafters, where he entertains us with beautiful and elaborate pencil illustrations.