Life is busy when I look at all the things that happen in a two-week timeframe at my home, Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage. When the lives of 50 or so people are woven together, there are plenty of activities and happenings to share with you, dearest reader.
Liz here, with the latest from a rural ecovillage in Northeast Missouri.
Sit still for a day and something new is announced via email to the village. People looking for lost items, items to share, or fellow members to join them in an activity they have planned. Random acts of kindness are alive and well here. From sauna users taking turns starting the fire to heat the space, or PK and Robey bringing several truck loads of kindling for the village from a nearby town, or Ciaran harvesting mushrooms and offering them to Rabbits. People who need help with physical work, like Graham raising some timber framing, can call for work parties.
People here can ask the community for items to borrow, to pick up prescriptions for them, or offer items that they don’t need anymore, that someone else might, like a futon, or frozen mangoes.
Rabbits co-created an enormous community meal on Thanksgiving, called the Good Food and Gratitude Feast. Alline, Alex and Arune coordinated 38 Rabbits to bring side dishes and heritage turkeys raised by Ben at Fox Holler Farm, along with serving and clean up tasks.
Emails about meeting topics for our Village Council weekly meetings go out with background info, or notes from the last meeting. The village is currently considering a proposal that spells out guidelines around transitional housing at DR.
Things continue to progress with the building of the straw bale house we call the Hub. A propane tank was delivered and installed. The last of the grid electrical work was done, connecting us, at long last, to the village power grid. I can now connect the solar panels, and feedback extra power generated to the grid.
An important part of the winter season is firing up the Hub’s masonry heater (next week’s Substack blog will have a detailed video about the masonry heater and how it works as a super efficient wood burning stove). Keeping a fire going once a day keeps all of the cob plaster that surrounds the heater “charged up” so it can release heat for the next 24 hours. There is so much more cob plaster in the building from building the bathroom wall (two months of mixing cob plaster daily went into that wall), that I am observing how much more the building can absorb and regulate temperature compared to last year. This is done by how warm rooms in the building feel at different outside temperatures and also by touching the interior walls at different spots in the building to see how warm they feel.
Additionally, there is the warmth that enters the building through passive solar process. The entire building is situated to take full advantage of low winter sun rays shining through south facing windows in the winter and heating up the air and materials like the wood trim and kitchen table and slate tiles, earth floor in the living room, etc. that retain that heat and release it slowly over time into the building.
Keeping the Hub warm also keeps Rebecca, our visiting social media coordinator, warm as well, while she stays in the Sunset loft for several weeks. Stocking wood inside, keeping an eye on firewood inventory, and responding to the daily temperature fluctuations (no fire on days in the 50s) gives my days just about all the structure I can handle at this darkest time of the year.
Tomorrow I will start my next winter project. Javi cut wafers with a chainsaw from different sized logs of different species of trees, like cutting slices of salami. I will lay the wafers cut side up to form the surface of a cordwood floor in the hall. The wafers will be painted with borax, a transparent substance that discourages insects and mold, and then brushed with tung oil, highlighting the wood grain of each piece, and making everything pop, visually.
My artistic projects are created within this matrix of people, in this place, with all these exchanges of energy and helpfulness. And although I have a tendency to hold myself to the side, rather than jumping into the middle of it, it affects me, nonetheless, in the positive, and I am grateful for being here.
Liz Hackney is the editor of this newsletter as well as the owner/builder of the Hub building. After five years of working on the project, she still finds joy creating and building. Articles and photos of the project can be found at thehubcollective.substack.com.