Katie and their fellow visitors.

By Katie Sumner

I’ve struggled with figuring out what exactly to write about my visitor session to Dancing Rabbit in October of 2018 for many months, especially as that was not my first DR experience. Is it too much to say that both trips were transformative? That, like swales carved into long compacted clay ground, it helped to guide the flow of my life and reinvigorate me?

I don’t think so.

My first trip was in 2017, to the Permaculture Design Course held in September of that year. While I was indeed deeply interested in learning about permaculture, I had an ulterior motive; I wanted to learn about the village I had read about as a late teen, in my first exposure to both earthen building and the idea of living communally. As a country person transplanted to the suburbs and just about at my ropes end in the soul-killing monotony of minimum wage retail work, the idea of Dancing Rabbit was a sudden life preserver. Pardon the phrase, but I decided to kill two birds with one stone.

The PDC literally saved my life. I learned so much, not just about permaculture but about what drives me, about what my soul needs to survive. I didn’t have the language then to understand that I am nonbinary, but suddenly I was around people who understood, who asked what pronouns I used, who existed without ingrained societal shame surrounding their bodies. I swam naked under the band of the Milky Way, heat lightning flickering between dark mountains of cloud, and glow worms dotting the muddy shore of the pond like little lanterns. We swam and laughed, and peace of a sort I’d never known flowed over me.

And then I was back in the suburbs. The surroundings were the same, but everything within me had shifted. I was like a seed that had finally broken a long dormancy only to be moved into the shade. I wilted pretty quickly and ended up in the hospital for, well, there’s no happy way to put it, suicidal ideation. But the mindset that had sparked at DR, a spiritual growth, somehow understood that this was exactly what was supposed to be happening. Growing pains, you know? I went with the flow, like water to a swale. I remained open to the experience and the rawness, and I learned from my fellow residents that we are all human, and that what was driving the most of our suffering was a desperate need to be connected, to feel loved and appreciated, and that we could make a difference with the time that we have in these bodies.

I reemerged with a profound gratitude for the life I live, even though it was radically different than how I’d imagined it. As I went about my days at work and at home, Dancing Rabbit pranced about my mind. In early 2018 I decided to go back for a visitor session, to see if Dancing Rabbit could be a place that I could root into.

I was nervous. What sort of welcome would I receive after a year’s absence? Would anyone even remember me? Driving past Zimmerman’s brought a swell of happiness and nostalgia, as did crunching up the gravel path towards the Milkweed Mercantile. And then a happy shout of “you’re back!”. Prairie, a lovely soul who had attended the PDC with me leapt up from her seat on the Mercantile porch and enveloped me in a hug.

That was a better welcome than I’d even allowed myself to imagine (Prairie, I will forever be grateful for that first hug!). But it didn’t stop there; A fellow classmate from my PDC was there with his family and there were more hugs and disbelief that we’d met again after so long and without any planning. I felt once again the hand of something beyond me guiding me, whispering in my ear ‘go with the flow’. I made another friend so quickly it blew my mind; a traveler from New York. We bonded over our love of greyhounds and the frigid conditions we shared in the tiny cabin we had rented. We ended up deciding to share a room in the Mercantile so that we could thaw. I met a fellow birding friend to share stupid bird jokes with (this is a rarity, let me tell you).

My visitor group bonded quickly into a wonderfully strange and giggly fellowship. Together we learned the history of Dancing Rabbit, attended workshops both on the inner and outer functioning of a community, and shared meals and songs with Rabbits. It was, frankly, beautiful. We discussed plans and dreams, insecurities and hopes. We were all given permission to be vulnerable and what a freedom that is in comparison to the outer world that demands masks be worn at all times.

I left with friendships and new songs, and a further honing of the idea of what I wanted my life to be. Hardly a month later, I applied for residency, yet I went back and forth on it. I felt torn in two between my family and friends in Ohio, and the life I envisioned at Dancing Rabbit. I reached a state of such anxiety about the whole thing that I eventually decided that the time wasn’t right. Immediately I felt at peace, and bombarded with ideas that I could put into motion to help heal the land of my little suburb. What about food forests instead of bush honeysuckle? Perennial vegetables lining paths of wild ginger and ramps beneath an understory of pawpaws, chestnuts, persimmon, and highbush cranberry? Maybe I could reintroduce amphibians back to the plat? What about coneflowers, little bluestem, asters, and butterfly weed in my yard’s sunny patch? They could bloom there...and so could I. Maybe I’m a creature of part sun and part shade, to continue with my gardening similes. And maybe, just maybe, that’s okay.

I realized that so many of my local friends share similar interests in the natural world, and also a similar feeling of disconnectedness that modern life is so adept at bringing about. What if I started a permaculture group here? What if I opened my home and heart to community where it exists around me? The possibilities suddenly seemed, and seem, endless.   

Dancing Rabbit helped me see the opportunities that surround me and that happiness shines within no matter what my external circumstances may be, and for that I will always be grateful. I could not have come to those deeply felt realizations without traveling the path that I did. Though I rescinded my residency to focus on what I can do at home, Dancing Rabbit will always be a part of my life and I imagine that I will migrate back and forth between suburbs and rustling prairie many, many more times. Perhaps one day the flow will lead me to permanently set down roots and if that day comes, I shall welcome it with open arms and a grateful heart, and the knowledge that I did precisely what I was supposed to do.

Would you like to have an experience like Katie's? Come join us for a Sustainable Living Visitor Program of your very own.

Katie lives in Ohio and works at a bookstore. They love permaculture and animals of all kinds.