Back by popular demand, Nathan Brown joins us for a second guest appearance to take us on another fascinating journey to Dancing Rabbit Eco-Village in NE Missouri. During this show, we will focus upon: What Nathan loves about his life at DR; Personal growth work that he does; and his business as a business consultant/coach, and how his business ties into his life at Dancing Rabbit. Nathan’s work/play serves and promotes The Great Turning from our current Industrial-Corporate Age toward the formation of a Life-Sustaining Age. Nathan Brown is a eco social entrepreneur, healer, & social change activist living at Dancing Rabbit Eco-Village.

Tune in on September 2, at 4:00 p.m.!

• First and foremost, finish my cob house. I expect it will be complete by the end of June. Hopefully earlier.
• Start a garden. I’ve been reading Gaia’s Garden for inspiration, and I’d love to do something akin to a food forest. I’m excited by the idea of a permacultural garden: a self-sustaining family of fruit trees and shrubs, perennial vegetables and flowers, etc.
• Build an outdoor kitchen. This one’s up in the air at this point and depends on a few other factors, but I want to either start eating on my own or with a few others outside of my current food co-op this year.
• Start a subcommunity…? (This one’s related to the above item.)
• Build a rocket stove (or two) for cooking. I expect I’ll be doing this even if the outdoor kitchen doesn’t happen.
• Build an outdoor earthen (or brick?) oven. I’d love to have an outdoor oven for baking bread and more importantly, pizza…
• Make pizza. Lots of pizza.
• Get some goats. Some folks want to start a goat co-op, and I want to make sure this actually happens…
• Chickens….? Chicken tractor…? Maybe… maybe next year…
• Do more DRTV and other videos. I took off nearly all of last year and I want to get more videos cranked out…
• Find some new income opportunities.
• Ferment a bunch of stuff. Miso, tempeh, natto, sauerkraut, milkweed pod pickles…
• Innoculate mushrooms… Shiitakes for sure, but hopefully others, too… (First I’ll have to finish reading Mycelium Running.)
• Learn more about wild edibles.
• Get more into woodworking. (I just made a simple mallet this morning…)
• Help other people with their building projects.
• Take more photos around Dancing Rabbit…
• Take more photos at the Dog and Gun flea market…

Onward and upward.

Sean recently got himself 70 acres of land with two friends to start a food forest / farming community called The Good Life Farm, and it sounds like quite an exciting prospect. We toured the property, and I met his comrades Melissa and Garrett. (I also found out that I had met Melissa’s sister Ellen at Dancing Rabbit earlier in the year when the Burning Kumquats made a visit. What a small world! I love the intermingling of circles that I have encountered while living at DR.)

Over the visit, I had the chance to see a local natural builder’s light clay straw home in the works. It was a two floor timberframe beauty with fantastic woodwork, with materials coming from the surrounding land. Inside was an utterly gigantic masonry stove, complete with a little pie-baking oven along the back side. Gorgeous. It was inspiring to see. My exposure to natural building projects had thus far been limited to Dancing Rabbit, so it was great to see projects in a different part of the country.

Other visit highlights included eating roadkill deer meat. (It’s not too uncommon to find and eat roadkill, although of course your average Joe probably wouldn’t be into it. But as long as the condition of the animal is sound, it’s good eatin’. Really.)

We met up with Chris of EcoVillage at Ithaca to share stories about her community and my own, which was fun. It’s always a welcome opportunity to talk with folks from other intentional communities. (And I found out that I’m not the only one that doesn’t like ‘EcoVillage’s’ name.)

I contemplated if I would enjoy living near Ithaca throughout the trip. There are tons of great people, lots of local foods, natural building, permaculture, etc. stuff happening. Plus it’s more like my type of environment what with the greater wealth of wooded land. But towards the end of the three days, I realized how much I had come to appreciate northeastern Missouri. There’s something appealing about being in the middle of nowhere. I’m not sure if I could really explain it. Maybe it’s that I love the complete absence of city lights in the distance, which is not the case in this area of upstate NY.

Anyway, good times.

Here’s the article: Alumnus finds fulfillment living in a sustainable community

It’s been cold this past week after that unusually warm weekend, so those couple days of warm weather were more of a tease than anything. Today felt pretty good, with a temperature somewhere in the 40s, but the energy was different. It really felt like spring was officially creeping up on us. People were out and about and working. Liat here started digging a trench for her schoolbus-turned-house, and I lent a hand for a while. Kids were running amok and playing outside. Green grass shoots are popping up out of the ground. And Skyhouse visitors and a guest recently showed up, a very sure sign that it’s almost that time again.

I anticipate this spring season. I am excited about being able to spend more time outside. Spring will have definitely arrived when the ratio of time spent outdoors to indoors is greater.

This week, I plan to start the next DRTV video. I should have started sooner than I am, but the idea behind this latest vignette is to highlight individuals’ plans for the upcoming season, how they have been preparing, how they’ve been keeping busy throughout winter, etc. Hopefully this video will shed light on the how life here is much more in sync with the seasons than elsewhere.