Howdy y’all, from Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage. This is your neighbor (in some sense) Ben, bringing news that might be more important than this year’s football season, celebrity presidential candidacies, or the gradual yet total clamor of pundits and talking heads hopelessly yammering themselves blue in the face to convince fine folk like you and I that we’re wrong to hope and work for a peaceful planet. What’s the big news?
I seen a goose! And a woolly bear caterpillar! The summer has come and gone, seemingly quickly, and the impending autumn is dropping hints to that effect. The honey locust trees hold their sugary protein-rich podded quarry out on near leafless limbs. Hedgeapples thud sharply at random moments on the multiple tin roofs out here on the old fence line. The temperature is perfect for human habitation. We got the windows open all day.
And though the nearing fall is lighting a hot fire under my metaphorical saucepot, I recognize that there are many days and weeks remaining before the snow flies. Still I can read a change in the seasons among the ripening, oily clusters of hazelnuts and in the steady increase of shagginess of our kid goats.
I’m not dormant, not dead yet, but perhaps a bit feeble at the tail end of a long season of growing and building, much like the rain-spoiled roots of suddenly drought-stricken kale in the garden. Or perhaps not fully actualized, like the languishing, underripe cowpeas a bed over.
Yeah, I’m maudlin at times. This simple life takes a toll. And though every year I spend here at Dancing Rabbit brings around a larger family of friends we have and sometimes haven’t met before, I am more preoccupied with the friends I’ve lost or will lose. It might come natural to folks like me who raise animals partly for meat.
[Editor’s note: The following few paragraphs talk about butchering. If you prefer not to read about that subject, please skip ahead to the * * *]
We Critters have just separated out our first batch of roosters for an early morning butchering session tomorrow. Yes, I know, it’s the springtime of death. And I’m sure I can hear some of the big boys, raising thousands more “head of stock” than myself, sneering about sensitive ecovillagers such as myself who might have a misgiving or two before going forth into our seasonal periods of slaughter, but just like my human community here, I remain prideful about how close knit I am with my animal friends, even though our difference in needs can make things emotionally complex.
Well for one thing, we do not ship our animals to a facility for butchering. We Critters do it ourselves, in a place the animals are familiar with. For me at least, helping to raise livestock is a hands on, heart to heart experience. I can get excited about collard greens. I can beam pride when I harvest a two foot daikon radish, or a fat sweet potato. I can get angry when a bed of potatoes rots, or cry when one of my favorite trees dies, but these things don’t touch my soul like a duck, or a chicken, or a billy goat. Some of these critters have become my most trusted confidantes.
Many gardeners certainly interact with their vegetables the way I do these animals. They tend to them daily, water them, feed them, even encourage them with song and dance. Unfortunately for my garden, I do not. Not this year, at least. But I don’t know anyone who makes a salad, or a pot of borscht, and sighs, because they’re eating their friends. Not even here at the ecovillage. If butchery is like losing a dear friend, then milking is sort of like trying to maintain and improve a relationship.
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The fact is that regardless of whatever baggage I or the goat is bringing to our morning breakfast milking date, we’ve got to find ways of working together and receiving feedback. Over time, we become more at ease with each other, or at least better able to read the subtleties of each other’s body language, or perhaps just bodily functions. On the cold mornings, milking the goats can be a sort of mutual cuddle session, and that’s nice. Luckily, my actual romantic partnership doesn’t involve kicking, pulling by the horns, fly bites, or licking my sweat for mineral sustenance.
A summer’s bounty of seed litters the paths, fields, courtyards and gardens here. Our goat tribe eagerly anticipates their next paddock, chockfull of ripe, rattling partridge pea pods, their legs and faces covered in cocklebur. Big wild sunflowers bow their heads and offer genetic material to goldfinches.
Humans, child and adult alike, instinctually tug at seed heads of grass and sprinkle them as they walk. We are a grass spreading species. Many of our finest autumn olives have gone from fruit-laden to bird dispersed. I vaguely curse the little flock of sparrows that sits in a nearby pin oak and steals our organic chicken grains. As I walk I sometimes put acorns in my hat and pockets, then forget about them until they spill all over the floor and roll behind the bed.
Flowers, trees, fungi, and to some extent animals, really have no choice whether or not to replicate themselves, it is just the right set of circumstances which allows them to do so, like hours of sunlight, pollination, proximity, etc. Well, you probably took biology. You probably paid more attention than I did too.
Humans, on the other hand, simply have a lot more choice in terms of reproduction. At least that’s the way I think it ought to be. Some folks here at DR choose not to procreate for ecological reasons. Because we are a community that is open to families (we have midwives, after all) these folks can still interact with kids of all ages, probably as much or more than the average parent whose children are away at public school and its associated activities all week.
We all get to fulfill a variety of roles in the lives of community kids. My daughter Althea currently has something like ten grandparents, fifteen sets of aunts and uncles and about a dozen siblings here, not related by blood. Still, Mae and I figure that children are sort of like cows, in that you can’t just keep one, and one cow is pretty much the same amount of work as twenty, so we’ve decided to go ahead and make another one. Another human, that is.
You see, I don’t think humans are the problem in the world. Well, okay, sometimes they are. But the only thing that can keep them in check are other humans, at least on this Earthly plane. If the amphibians could rise up and stop us from destroying their habitat, they would have done so by now. I have a lot of faith in people, especially the young’uns, to pilot a lighter, more peaceful course for civilization. I have a lot of knowledge to the contrary, that sometimes people will do the cheapest, meanest, most harmful things to attain resources, power, and dominance, but that way of life is on its way out, I think.
Creating a brand new human life is a big wager in a future that can seem uncertain, but I cannot believe that the world is going to be a worse place tomorrow than it was today. It seems like a downright wonderful place when I’m away from mass media, out in a field somewhere, staring at nothing but the wind in an old cottonwood tree. I’ll bet that humanity makes it through the next century. Go ahead and call my bluff.
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Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage is an intentional community and nonprofit outside Rutledge, in northeast Missouri, focused on demonstrating sustainable living possibilities. Find out more about us by visiting our website, reading our blog, or emailing us.