At Dancing Rabbit, we like to work together.

  

Hi folks, Vick here. I’m a member of Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage, and I have lived and thrived here for over five years now. I love to share anecdotes about the amazing lives we enjoy, and I thought it might interest you to know what it’s ACTUALLY like living in a community of around fifty people in the remote hills of northeast Missouri, (including an inside scoop on some of the details that I wish I’d known about before I visited back in 2014). I put together a little series of the top five things I love about living in this beautiful place. Let’s start off with number five:

5. Living more sustainably became infinitely easier for me when I started collaborating with other people.

It won't come as a shock to you that ecological sustainability is our community’s raison d’etre. I bet you know how important it is for our global culture to make some major changes, and you’ve probably already made some adjustments to your routine to live more lightly.

We do A LOT at Dancing Rabbit to leave fewer footprints and more handprints. But you know as well as I do that most people can live a little greener without spending a penny or moving very far out of their comfort zone. When I moved to Dancing Rabbit, I learned something crucial that changed my mindset: having other people around to support you can mean the difference between failure and success, when you’re making substantial changes to enhance your lifestyle. (I could apply this to many areas of my life, not just the sustainability aspect.)

Take composting human waste, for instance. Joseph Jenkins has made plenty of detailed information about his humanure system available for free. Just about anyone, anywhere, should be able to learn how to do it without much more effort than a google search. Doing it as a community, instead of on an individual homestead, acts as a benefit multiplier. Everyone gets involved. We share a village-wide system, which is maintained by a champion we colloquially call the Humey Star. (And they are a star, believe me.) Everyone, including the hundreds of people who visit us every year, who drops a deuce in our village can do so without wasting an ounce of water. Working together makes that possible.

There are lots of other examples I could mention. I haven’t made a car insurance payment or changed an engine’s oil in years, because I belong to a vehicle co-op and others have volunteered to take care of those kinds of tasks for me. There are many folks here who eat three delicious, nutritious, homemade meals a day, even though they only cook once a week or so themselves, because they’re part of one of the many meal co-ops operating here. We share scads of other resources, as well, ranging from a tractor to public showers. Beyond that, I have access to thousands of hours of combined experience in just about any discipline you might imagine, in the form of knowledgeable neighbors I can consult about whatever interests me — they’re like a walking, talking, laughing library. 

In a nutshell, I don’t have to reinvent the wheel, or take the whole world on my own shoulders, in order to live a more sustainable lifestyle. Collaborating with kindred spirits at Dancing Rabbit opened doors for me that otherwise would have remained closed forever. This is one of the most awesome opportunities our community has to offer, and if you ask me, it’s the main point our demonstration project is trying to make: we need one another to keep hope for our planet alive, as well as to achieve our dreams. The way I see it, there hasn’t been such a thing as a natural world without the influence of human beings for millennia, and there never will be again — if we want our descendants to have a habitable place to live in, we’re going to have to work together. 

If you’ve been longing for a sense of community, and you’d love to dive deep into sustainability with a group of like-minded people, I invite you to check out our two-week visitor program. Don’t worry if you can’t come for that long, because we also have a condensed Ecovillage Weekend Experience coming up in September. I can’t wait to meet you!