A Morning in the Life of Gabriel

taking poetic license to be a spokesperson for her grandson
Gabriel Roth

I am 16 months old, and my grandmother, Nana, is writing this for me. This week, Nana and Grandpa have been visiting. They say that watching me and listening to me is better than any television show could ever be. This must be true, because they have never turned on the television, just the way Mommy and Daddy never turn on the television when I am in the room. (They say it might do something to my brain.)

I thought you might like to read about a morning in my life. Small as I am, Nana thinks that I am an interesting example of a person who lives a sustainable life style, although, obviously, my parents and I need to make some compromises now and then. Who doesn't?

Mommy and Daddy are musicians. Two of my first words were "violin" and "cello," the instruments they play. They decided to do this for a living because they love to do it. From what Nana tells me about "sustainable," this seems like making a sustainable career choice, because music does not wear out and never gets used up.

Would you like to hear about my morning? First, I woke up in my yellow room on the second floor of a brownstone in Brooklyn. While Mommy was changing me, I looked out the window. Mommy loves flowers, and has planted ferns and shade-loving flowers in our garden. She says there is a book called A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and when I look out the window at all the leaves I think it should be called Lots of Trees Grow in Brooklyn. Whenever I look out that window, I clap my hands together and say "mosquito," because often that's what we do in the garden. Sometimes I also say "bird" or "sparrow." There are lots of birds out there; I guess they like to eat the mosquitoes.

When I came downstairs to the kitchen, Nana fed me, because Mommy had to leave to go to work. Her work today is playing a Mozart quartet in a church. Daddy is away this week in Saratoga, where he is playing for the New York City Ballet. Mommy and Daddy travel to work on a subway train. We only use our car for long trips--for example, when we go to see my grandparents in Philadelphia or Oberlin, or when Mommy and I go to Saratoga next week to join Daddy. Daddy made sure the car he bought got what he called good mileage, and he's glad he did.

My favorite foods right now are bananas, yogurt, pears, kiwi, tofu, raisins, and some of the delicious things that come in jars marked "organic tropical fruit blend" or "organic chicken and wild rice." Some of these I can eat myself. But I always let the person who is feeding me know what I want to eat. I am very good at saying "no" when I am in my high chair. I guess my body knows what it needs, and, thank goodness, my family all seem to understand that.

After I got dressed today, Nana took me to the playground on Smith Street. I love Smith Street, which is right around the corner from where I live. You can see all the things that go that are in my picture books. My favorite things are taxis, fire engines, ambulances, mail trucks, garbage trucks, and motorcycles. Nana says she likes Smith Street because you can buy everything you want just by walking a couple of blocks. Sometimes you don't even need to give money: some nice Korean ladies around the corner always hand me a banana when we go to their fruit and vegetable shop. The best store, though, is a whole foods store near my playground, where my parents buy most of my food. They sometimes give me a banana to eat when we're in there, so I don't fuss.

Yesterday, I saw a wonderful thing. A street near the whole foods store was full of balloons! They made an arch over the street and hung from trees all along the sidewalk. I was out of my stroller by then, so I started running toward those balloons and saying "Wow! Neat!" Nana managed to keep up with me, and, when we went past the man who was blowing up balloons, he asked me what color I wanted. I said "orange," and he gave me a big orange one. Nana tied it to my wrist, but I untied it to see what would happen, and it floated up into a tree. The kind man gave me another, and this time Nana tied it to the stroller. All along the street, there were lots of people sitting on their stoops and having fun. Some people were having a "stoop sale" because they had things they didn't want any more that they hoped other people would want. Sometimes our block on Third Street has a party, too. But in the summer, people mostly just have fun sitting on their stoops. I like to sit up high on the stairs and blow bubbles to watch them float down.

The Carroll Street playground is only three blocks away from my house. It is so much fun to go there. It is nice and shady in the summer. I like to pick up the leaves that have fallen from the tall trees and give them to whoever is with me. I like to look at the flowers the people in the neighborhood have planted around the edges of the park. I draw things on the ground with sidewalk chalk. I get pushed on the swing. I climb on the jungle gym. Today, I saw a new thing on the jungle gym. At first, I said "ant," but Nana said it was a caterpillar. It was a very small one, not like the big fat one in my book. I loved that caterpillar. I loved it so much I leaned down and kissed it. I'm not sure whether the caterpillar liked that or not. It was kind of quiet afterwards for a while.

A little farther down the street is an arts center, where I sometimes go to music classes with Mommy and Daddy, "so I get to be with other children." We sing songs like "taxi, taxi, sitting in the back seat," and "slowly slowly slowly slowly goes the garden snail." The other children are sometimes kind of scary to me, because I usually am with big people instead. But I am getting used to them.

Sometimes Mommy goes into one of the stores on Smith Street and gets me clothes or books or sunscreen. (I need that because I have pale skin and red hair.) Yesterday, Nana and Grandpa walked a long way with me to a big bookstore, where there were lots of books and I was allowed to take them off the shelves to look at them. Mommy told Nana that she was amazed the bookstore was so "child-friendly," but I know why. While I was looking at the books, Nana and Grandpa found four books they couldn't resist buying for me.

I live in a wonderful neighborhood. There are so many people busily going up and down the sidewalk all the time, with packages, strollers, dogs, and bicycles--old people, young people, and babies. The people are many different colors, like my babysitters. My babysitter Danielle, for example, looks very different from my mommy. Mommy has light skin and blond hair, but Danielle has dark skin and black hair. Mommy and Daddy say that people in this neighborhood come from all over the world. No wonder I do not understand everybody all the time, because sometimes they speak languages I do not know. Lydia, another babysitter, is teaching me Spanish. My favorite word is "luna" (moon). I call the ball Lydia and I play with "bola."

I was quite hungry when I got home today. While I was eating lunch, I asked for "Pete Seeger! Pete Seeger!" Mommy says I always ask for the Pete Seeger CD. Today I heard the whole CD five times in a row. His voice makes me feel happy. I can say the words to some of the songs, and sometimes, after lunch, Mommy or Nana dances with me when Pete Seeger is singing. Yesterday, I drew a picture for him with colored pencils, and Nana is going to send it to him. At the bottom of the picture, Nana wrote something I said: "Pete Seeger--like that!"

I wonder what we are going to do this afternoon. If it's sunny, maybe we will go to the Brooklyn Botanical Garden again. I like to run on the grass there and look at the fish and turtles in the pond. When Mommy said we were going there a few days ago, I said "pretty flowers." Nana and Grandpa think I am very smart because of that, but they don't have any idea how much I know.

I know a lot of things because I notice a lot of things. I like to look at a rainbow made of silk threads that hangs in Daddy's study. Uncle Christopher bought it at the Eugene Saturday Market. I always say "pretty colors" and then find each color. I like green a lot. And, of course, yellow and red and orange. There are other things in my house that I notice, especially in my books. I have almost a hundred books, I suppose. Ever since I was a month or so old, Mommy and Daddy have read to me. I love books about animals. Sometimes I lean down and kiss the pictures of the animals. I also try to kiss my cat, Lola, but usually she runs away. She is very soft.

I always notice when a truck goes by, or a subway train comes out of the tunnel just beyond our street, or a plane or helicopter flies in the sky. I know that, not from looking, but from hearing.

I hope that I will remember to notice things when I am older, too. Nana says that is the first step to living sustainably. I hope that I'll always make lots of room in my brain and my heart for the things around me, just the way I do now.

--Gabriel Roth

Nancy Roth, grandmother of Gabriel and mother of his father Michael and his uncle Christopher (a.k.a. Chris, editor of this magazine), is the author of many books, as well as articles in past issues of TL. An Episcopal priest, she also leads workshops on prayer, Christian yoga, and many other topics. For details about her writing and her work, see her website: www.RevNancyRoth.org .

 

©2004 Talking Leaves
Late Summer/Fall 2004
Volume 14, Number 3
A Day in the Life: The Many Faces of Eco-Community

A Day (or a few thousand) in the Life of an International Stove Consultant

Aprovecho Research Center's present manifestation on planet earth is focused mainly on two independent but interrelated areas. The first is our 40-acre home base near Cottage Grove, Oregon, where we get to play with all our schemes of making the world a more sustainable place. The second is our growing number of international projects working towards building fuel-efficient wood stoves for the 2-billion-plus people on the planet who cook with biomass. As well as consuming large amounts of wood, traditional stoves often smoke a lot, causing numerous health conditions for the user and any innocent bystanders in the immediate environment (i.e., children of users). Much of our funding comes from groups interested in both slowing deforestation and reducing the smoke that increases the probability of respiratory illness, which is the leading cause of death for children under five. Stoves we have designed are presently being built in about 15 countries, mainly in Central America and Africa. They do the cooking for only about 100,000 of those 2 billion in need, but our numbers are growing daily. Our projects vary in detail, from institutional-sized stoves in Africa for tea plantations that feed 40,000 people a day (the plantations, not the stoves) to small family stoves being built and sold outside Jose Cruz's house in Honduras. In all of the projects, we try to follow some common guidelines.

There are two extreme lines of thought in international aid work as to the role westerners such as us Aprovecho consultants should play in the development of the resource-deprived parts of the world. One view contends that we should stay out of the developing world's business, having done enough damage already with the liberalization of markets over the past centuries and the subsequent draining of those countries' resources to our own ends. This viewpoint believes that local communities will decide what is best for themselves, and, if given the chance, will do the right thing. The other extreme believes that we in the resource-inundated world have the experience and the answers to lead the third world down the correct path. At Aprovecho, we fall somewhere in between. While we certainly do not have all the answers as to how stove projects should be run, we do have something that most of my friends in Central America do not have: leisure time, given to us by the inundation of resources, to research the science involved behind the technologies we are working with. For me to refrain from speaking my mind on what I have had the luxury to research, for fear of insulting a community, is a waste of the resources that I have available to me and not helping anyone. Similarly, my friends south of the border have an advantage that I do not have, and that is the daily experience using these technologies and a survival-based need to make these technologies work well. We therefore have struck a balance between the two lines of thought that, so far, is working well for us. Aprovecho plays the role of technical assistance with no qualms about the fact that we have the experience and knowledge of the science behind the technologies along with the ability to learn from the breadth of our projects, spread around the world. But once we are done advising, it is always a local Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) that sees the project through on a daily basis and receives the lion's share of the praise or blame for the project's success. Along with this, we made a strong commitment with our funders to continually return to past projects to find out what has worked and what has not, an aspect often missing in relief work.

Enough pontificating, here is a short history and example of one of our projects:

While Aprovecho has been in the stove- building business since its birth some 25 years ago, it has really only been in the last six years that we have had what I would call a rebirth. It was at this time that Larry Winiarski got asked to do a three-week consultancy on a stove project in Honduran Central America being run by Trees Water and People, out of Colorado. As the universe would have it, a hurricane hit Honduras a couple months before the consultancy was to happen, greatly focusing the world's attention on Honduras' needs and giving Peter Scott and myself the impetus to travel the 4,000 miles overland to help out on what was to be the first in a indeterminate line of stove projects. Peter and I were fledgling Appropriate Technology geeks and had the freedom at that time in our lives to spend a bit of our own money as well as some raised by our members and turn a three- week consultancy that probably would not have amounted to much into a six- month pilot project. This would turn out to be one of our most successful endeavors and set the stage for the myriad projects we now have. Because international projects are often competing with many other groups for support, they are often working on a shoestring budget and funds tend to go to those who will do it for less. Also, I have seen a somewhat insidious tendency in some international aid to not return to the possibility of past failures. A part of international aid work is to look generous to the folks back home, and returning to failed projects just does not do for that end. From the start, we made an agreement with our funders that we would only start these projects if we could return to learn from and correct our mistakes. While it has been hard at times returning to a community we had come to love, not knowing if we created a monster or not, this commitment to return has worked out incredibly for us, and has resulted in our projects being rated by third party groups such as the European Union as among the most successful aid projects in Central America.

The stove we developed in Honduras has come to be known as the Justa Stove, named after Dona Justa Nunez, a matriarch and our guide in the first community we worked in. This stove works well as a multipurpose stove for cooking tortillas as well as multiple pots, and has received reports of saving up to two-thirds of the fuel previously used in their traditional stoves. We have now been returning to this project in Honduras to work with the local NGO Ahdesa at least once a year for the past six years, and Ahdesa is pretty much self-sufficient now in running that project. While this stove has been an incredible success, it has some down sides that we hope to address in our present work in Honduras. While it is great for tortillas and multi-pot cooking, it is not as ideal as possible for a single pot cooking situation. It also costs about $40 in materials, which puts it out of the price range for the majority of Hondurans. Also, while it is an aesthetically pleasing stove, it takes about 4 hours to build, and this limits the number of stoves we are able to put out to about 2,000-3,000 stoves a year. Our next step in Honduras will be developing a simpler and inexpensive stove that should cost as little as $5, be more efficient for single pot cooking, and be producible hopefully by the hundreds per day. We just got a $130,000 grant from the EPA to make this a reality, so you will have to keep in touch with us to see how it goes.

Mike writes: "Mike Hatfield grew up in Roseburg, OR and presently lives outside Cottage Grove. He has worked for seven years as an international stove consultant and appropriate technology instructor at Aprovecho Research Center. Among the primary focuses of study about which he claims to have at least a modicum of expertise/experience include bio-diesel and straight vegetable oil use in diesel vehicles, bike repair, solar hot water heating, fuel efficient biomass use, composting toilets, and passive solar architecture/natural building. Also on the list of topics he feels free to blather about are small-scale water and photovoltaic systems, water catchment, alternatives to electric refrigeration, and solar dehydration."

 

©2004 Talking Leaves
Late Summer/Fall 2004
Volume 14, Number 3
A Day in the Life: The Many Faces of Eco-Community

A Day in the Life at Aprovecho Research Center

As I wake up to the cool breeze blowing through the window of my cabin, the dawn chorus is just wrapping up its morning symphony. Summer is a busy time here, and I try to make use of the early morning hours to get my outdoor work done. Strolling down the hill I bid "good morning" to Desta as she makes her way down to milk the goats and let out the ducks and chickens. We can expect about a gallon of milk per day as well as a dozen and a half duck and chicken eggs.

I spend a good hour watering vegetables, fruits, and flowers in our 2 acre organic garden. The sweet spicy smell of basil drifts up to me as I make my way around the raised beds. The sun is just now starting to peek down into the garden. After poking around in the greenhouses looking for an elusive ripe tomato, I begin gathering ingredients to start a new batch of compost tea. We have a small 5 gallon KIS brewer and I have been experimenting with different tea recipes over the past few years. Today I will try a mixture of kelp extract, molasses, fish emulsion, humic acid, bone meal, and oyster shell flour. Once all of that is added to the brewer, I turn on the aerator and add a mix of our best composts from last season. The tea will be ready to apply later this evening. I leave behind the sweet smell and gentle gurgling of the compost tea and head up into our strawbale-insulated dormitory to check the time.

It's eight-thirty and our interns are bustling about the kitchen making breakfast and getting ready for their morning class session at nine. Every spring, summer, and fall we run a ten-week hands-on internship program in sustainable living skills. The courses focus on organic gardening, sustainable forestry, appropriate technology, permaculture, and various other holistic living skills. Today the interns will be heading out into our forest with Matthew, our forester. They're sure to have a good time wandering through our beautiful 40 acres learning about the inner workings of our private moss- covered paradise.

Back in the kitchen Jason and David are hard at work preparing lunch for everybody. I spend the rest of my morning catching up on my chores and bringing food scraps down to our ducks and chickens. Lunch, as always, is spectacular--a smorgasbord of fresh garden veggies, garlic breadsticks, and homemade goat cheese pizza. After lunch I head back down to the garden to make sure none of the plants are thirsty. The bright airy sounds of an acoustic guitar drift down to me as I take a detour from my watering to savor the summer delights of our raspberry beds. The interns are relaxing before their afternoon class. Soon they head back into the cool shade of their forest classroom, and I retreat into the moderately cool shade of my office to exchange my gardening hat for my thinking cap.

For twenty-five years now Aprovecho has been designing, researching, and building fuel-efficient wood burning stoves. We send consultants all over the world to help people to incorporate our designs into their own stoves. I have spent the past month working with Dean, our head of research, on a paper titled "Design Principles for Wood Burning Cook Stoves." This paper is being written for the EPA in an attempt to put the knowledge we have gained in stove theory into the public domain. I have been chunking away for a few hours now making final revisions to the booklet. Time sure flies sitting in front of a computer. The dinner bell is clanging away and I head down to the strawbale to see what sort of meal the interns have concocted tonight. Once again I am pleased by another delicious organic feast. One certainly feels well fed here.

I head back to the garden, which thankfully is starting to cool off now. After a bit more watering and setting up the sprinkler for the night, I check in on the compost tea. It's been about twelve hours since the brew started and the tea has a dark brown color and a sweet earthy aroma. It is ready to be diluted and applied. As I water the tea into the vegetable beds I can't help but to imagine myself as a vegetable. After a long day growing in the hot sun what could be better than a drink of sweet rejuvenating tea? All of the soil around my roots is being stimulated by a boost from the bacteria, fungi, and minerals in the tea. Lipton never made it this good.

The garden is going to sleep now and I, like the garden, take my rest with the setting of the sun. Pulling myself up the hill one last time I manage to clear a space for myself on the bed. I give a quick thought, a mental review, on the particulars of seed starting, as that is the class I will be teaching in the morning. A cool breeze brings the smell of blackberry blossoms in through the window as I drift off to sleep.

Aprovecho is a non-profit organization located in Cottage Grove, OR. For more information on their internship program, stove work, becoming a member, or anything else please check out their website and feel free to contact them at (541) 942-8198, www.aprovecho.net).

Gardener Jeremy Roth has been involved with Aprovecho for the past five years. He has also spent time working with native plant nurseries and managing a CSA and Market Farm in the Portland Area.

 

©2004 Talking Leaves
Late Summer/Fall 2004
Volume 14, Number 3
A Day in the Life: The Many Faces of Eco-Community

A Day in the Life at Earthaven Ecovillage

I wake up when it's getting light out and the birds are beginning their morning chirps and trills. I gaze up through the window-screen opening in my bedroom wall towards the high trunks and leaves of the tulip poplars outside the tiny dwelling my mom and I call home. Now that it's summer, the leaves are full and luxurious. It's still cool at this hour. I love this mountain forest and these tulip poplars. I know the brace and curve of every branch I see from my bed in winter. I love how in early spring the branches wear the barest, most imperceptible hint of green for weeks and weeks, then sprout tiny buds for a few days, then become a lush impenetrable wall of leaves almost overnight.

I get up and head for the composting toilet, an unusual one at Earthaven because it's inside our house, not outside, and moreover, inside an actual bathroom. In this community, my mom and I live in comparative utility luxury, as we have hot and cold running water and a shower. Many people at Earthaven live in temporary small huts with no running water, and walk to the shower and bathtub behind the kitchen building. Others are building real two-bedroom houses with real indoor bathrooms. But many are still living in travel trailers, canvas yurts, or even camper shells until they can save enough money to clear their homesites and build homes.

I look outside to check the water level in the roof water catchment tank behind the house. There is almost always enough to take a shower in the summer, when it rains every few days. Not so in the winter, when we go without showers for several days until it rains enough fill up the tanks again.

Next I check our tri-metric meter on the wall. Is there enough power to take a shower? Like every household at Earthaven, we're off the grid. Our power comes from solar panels, an inverter, and an array of batteries up the slope in our yard behind us. We do have enough battery storage this morning to run lots of water, since running water for a shower or using the garden hose activates the pressure pump, which runs for 10 minutes straight. We also have enough power today to run the blender, the juicer, the computer, the printer, and even the vacuum cleaner (though never all at once!). In the summer, if it's sunny even just half a day, we get enough power to run these appliances all day and into the night. But in the winter we're much more conservative. With a series of rainy, snowy, or overcast days, we've got to ration our power use, or else turn on the generator, which isn't great because it runs on gasoline. Living in an aspiring ecovillage with our own utilities, we count every watt, watch every drop.

There's enough water and power for a shower today. Good!

I say hello to my mom when she gets up. We live in a 512- sq.-ft. passive-solar storage building. It's beautiful. It was constructed partly from lumber milled from trees growing on the land, with recycled cellulose insulation and a green metal roof. The outside is finished in golden poplar clapboard. The windows are trimmed in forest green. Most homes at Earthaven are small because they're built with savings or small personal loans. We don't qualify for construction loans from banks since, although all members own the whole 320 acres, no one has title to an individual homesite. We lease our homesites instead. We don't want mortgages or bank loans anyway, since we're going for economic self-sufficiency. Some of our older or more affluent members make loans to other members for their home construction costs.

So our house is small because we built it without a loan. My mom and I sleep essentially outside, in 8 ft. x 8 ft. sleeping porches on the deck that runs behind the building. Some of the walls of these temporary bedrooms are of uninsulated clapboard, with window screening stapled across the places where the wall stops. Last winter we wore long johns, wool socks, and wool hats to bed and snuggled under down comforters. In a few weeks we'll renovate the sleeping porches, adding walls, windows, and insulation. By the time I see the bare branches of the poplars again, we'll have real bedrooms, with closets even.

Time for morning chores. First I bury kitchen scraps in the garden. Soon we'll have compost bins to turn this valuable stuff into good soil. Before Earthaven's land was covered in a forest of poplar, oak, and hickory (now 70 years old), most slopes were fields where Appalachian farmers grew corn, and since corn is a heavy feeder, our soil is quite depleted. So we return all biomass to the soil, chipping up our brush, making brush piles, returning our kitchen scraps and human waste to the Earth.

Next I empty the buckets from the concrete vault under the compost toilet. Pee gets mixed one-to-ten with water and poured in our garden. The sawdust-covered poop gets poured into the latest of a series of 32-gallon plastic trash cans, where it will sit for a year and become compost for our flower gardens.

I'm going to theTrading Post store for stamps this morning, and will do some errands in the Hut Hamlet while I'm near there. As I walk down the sun-dappled gravel road, I cross over our first low-water vehicle bridge. We're very proud of this bridge. Finally last year we had the labor, funds, and expertise to build it over our first stream crossing and stop stirring up silt and choking the fish downstream every time we drove through it. But we're still driving through the second and third streams, so we have two more bridges to build.

Earthaven has been essentially a construction zone for nine years, and as I walk down the road to the center of the village I pass by various stacks of lumber and other recycled materials. Some Earthaven folks are protective of these storage sites, considering them "highly valuable salvage"; others are simply embarrassed, considering them nothing more than unsightly piles of junk.

I pass the lumberyard and say hello to some folks coming the other way. I cross the second stream over a rock causeway. I turn onto another road leading uphill and climb some rock steps, passing under the deck that runs from the second floor of the timber-framed White Owl Lodge to its adjacent gazebo/water tower. I go left to enter the Trading Post, a small store and Internet café where members can get a morning cup of coffee, snacks, basic supplies, and see their email if they don't have computers (or electricity) at home.

After picking up the stamps, and after saying goodbye to some pals, I go back down the stone steps, and walk down a beautiful stone footpath leading to a wooden footbridge across our third stream. Now I'm in the Hut Hamlet, the community's first neighborhood. Each hut is tiny: 200 sq. ft. or less. Most have earth-plastered walls in peach, apricot, or yellow hues, and green metal roofs. I stop off at the Mud Hut, our small visitor registration building, and pick up our mail. I check the message board, the ride-to-town-board, and the barter board, and pick up some Leap sheets, the forms we fill out to record our quarterly labor hours to the community.

At the Hut Hamlet kitchen/dining room I post some committee minutes on various clipboards hanging on the wall, and say hello to more folks. I drop off a notice reading, "Garden labor needed/plant fruit trees," on the dining room end of the kitchen butcher block island, the customary place for notes like this.

I walk across the wooden footbridge again and down the stone path, the rock causeway over the middle stream, the long gravel road, and over our bridge. I've had six hugs already this morning and haven't even had breakfast yet.

Back home, I fix a quick meal and start the morning's work on Communities magazine. It's so sunny today I can run my computer, printer, even the fax machine. And it's getting hot! It's cooler here in my office than it is outside, though.

At 2:00 o'clock I've got a promotions meeting in a neighborhood just beyond the Hut Hamlet, but I want to drop off a second copy of the committee minutes at the Council Hall first. This 13-sided timber-framed building on the far side of the lumberyard is where we hold monthly business meetings, many committee meetings, and social events like birthday parties and dances. In December some of our young people and work exchangers put on a play there, spoofing Earthaven royally. Almost all 60 of us were there, as well as many neighbors. We laughed nearly nonstop at the young actors' antics and visual puns--and especially the parodies of creeping mold and mildew, crowded breakfasts in the Hut Hamlet kitchen, and the "shadow side" of our consensus process. At the end the actors said we work too hard here and need to have more fun, and right then and there invited us all "on stage" in the center of the Council Hall's wooden floor, handed us drums, and invited us to join them dancing and drumming. It was one of our finest moments.

I spend a few minutes in the Council Hall enjoying the small herd of lively toddlers at the Forest Children's Program. Various parents take turns offering supervision and homeschooling activities for children of members and neighbors two days a week.

I walk through the Hut Hamlet past the large cleared field which a couple of members are leasing from Earthaven as a market garden. My mom and I eat salad greens from it regularly. I pass the sauna and swimming hole, and hear the splashes of people cooling off in the creek. I continue on to the A&A House, a massive three-story residence beyond the Hut Hamlet where our promotions committee is meeting. This large building houses an extended family, guest rooms, workshop space, a crafts room, and Earthaven's library. It was constructed almost entirely of recycled plywood pallets for shipping cranberry juice. I'm not kidding!

In the promotions meeting my friends and I discuss Earthaven's display ad, brochure, newsletter, and which conferences and fairs we may exhibit at this year. We talk about larger issues--do we want to invite the public or community seekers to visit Earthaven, or do we want to spend our energy cleaning up the place first and making it more hospitable? We decide to do both. What about inexpensive reed-matting fences to cover up our storage sites of highly valuable salvage?

Back home again I type up minutes of the meeting, then get ready for dinner. I'll be eating at home tonight. But last winter my mom and I walked to the White Owl for the dinner co-op, where we paid a small amount for a near-gourmet meal with the co-op's 12 members. Sometimes the menu included shiitake mushrooms grown on oak logs by other Earthaven members. We always had a wonderful time; the conversation was congenial and stimulating. It was the cheapest, most enjoyable family-style almost-gourmet restaurant I'd ever gone to, and we didn't even have to leave the village.

After dinner I've got several choices. There may be a video at one of our members' homes, or a weekly dance and contact improvisation session at the Council Hall.

Or maybe I could go to another committee meeting, just to sit in and learn a few things. Last year I was on the site planning committee. The other committee members were four knowledgeable guys who know how to drive the tractor and operate the excavator. I learned about cool stuff like land-use planning, water runoff, erosion control, storing biomass, and stream remediation.

But this evening I decide to go see a friend at Earthaven, because (sigh) we aren't getting along so well lately and we have to make some time to work it out, and this is hard. So my friend and I visit, and tell each other what we feel and what we need, and what we wish the other would do instead. And end up in a hug, understanding each other just a little bit better.

I walk back down the gravel road. It's cooled off; the air feels wonderful. The moon is full, so I don't need a flashlight. The night is friendly, the fireflies are winking along the ground, and I'm at home in community. Like everyone here, I'm perfectly safe walking anywhere around our forest mountain village at night. As I near our house I see my mom has left a light on for me (low-watt, compact florescent).

I climb into bed, and gaze out my window-screen wall at the moonlight between the poplar leaves.

As you can see, living at Earthaven isn't all sustainable systems and natural buildings. It's also hugs, challenges, hard work, congenial times, fights, and conflict. And meetings, meetings, meetings.

Committing to this place is financially difficult for many. It's also really hard work, physically. We've got lots of trenches to dig and brush to haul. And it's sure hard work emotionally. Sometimes it's quite painful. And, as in most intentional communities, you can never hide. All of you is revealed to everyone. You know each other's foibles and shining qualities like the closest of kin. You fight. You cry. You hug. You love each other. Sometimes you can't bear being here. But most of the time you know you're extremely lucky. Unlike most North Americans, you get to live your values with like-hearted friends doing the same.

I drift off to sleep to the chirpings of cicadas in pulsating waves. Planting myself at Earthaven, I realize, is the hardest thing I've ever done.

And the best thing I've ever done.

Diana Leafe Christian is editor of Communities magazine (see: www.ic.org), and author of Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities (New Society Publishers, 2003; see excerpt and review in TL's Fall/Winter 2003/2004 issue).

 

©2004 Talking Leaves
Late Summer/Fall 2004
Volume 14, Number 3
A Day in the Life: The Many Faces of Eco-Communit

A Day in the Life at Lost Valley Educational Center

A Few Moments in the Life

I'm standing in the creek, watching the ripples move past me downstream. Raising my eyes above the surface, I see overhanging tree limbs swaying in the breeze. Reflected in the water, those same tree limbs turn into serpents, their curving bodies undulating rapidly side to side. Leaves outlined against blue sky turn into fantastic pulsating images in the water, moving both upstream and downstream at once, appearing and disappearing with each passing ripple. I am relaxed, and not anxious to fit what I am experiencing into any kind of preconceived box. I could identify those trees by genus and species, as well as the birds occasionally flitting in and out of them, but for now, I don't want to. Instead, I find myself wondering which is more "real": the concrete reality I see above the water, or the endlessly pulsing, equally beautiful web of vibrant patterns I see reflected on its surface? If the reflection is equally real, and if it's actually just one perception of a reality that is open to many other ways of perceiving and experiencing it as well, the whole idea of a separate me observing an objective external reality is an illusion.

I've never taken what our society considers to be mind-altering drugs, but in moments like this one, it seems to me that nothing could be more fantastic or psychedelic than what I am perceiving right now. Within those tree branches, leaves, and water molecules--and within my own sensory organs and blood cells--similar hard-to-pin-down, pulsating, fluid realities predominate. I'm part of a set of patterns--everything is--and much more than our individual forms and separate bodies, that vital embodiment of pattern and of relationship is what we always are. That individual tree branch will not endure--nor will the bird perched upon it--but the dance of life to which it is giving perfect expression will endure for as long as life does.

And what, I wonder, is not life? Later that evening, gazing through binoculars at the seemingly millions of stars, galaxies, and planets now visible in the night sky, I see those same patterns, and find that same sense of wonderment at the awesome complexity and mystery of reality. I was not yet alive when most of the starlight I am perceiving was emitted, and most of what I am now perceiving is no longer an accurate representation of what was emitting it--some of which no longer even exists. Most of what is there, I know, is empty space, and even those dense clusters of energy sending light my way (like everything else we see as solid) are also mostly empty space. But both of these statements presuppose certain assumptions about time and space: that they're linear and quantifiable. What if they aren't?

All of this, I am certain, is more than our minds and our senses can encompass. Even our minds and our senses themselves are beyond our fathoming. In relation to the vastness of space, each one of us humans seems like an insignificant speck, but considered from the level of bacteria, or from the level of the deoxyribonucleic acid which has brought the fine art of patterning to a pinnacle, we each are almost unimaginably huge. These patterns, operating at the smallest submicroscopic level, have found a way to self-replicate and to manifest us, and their drive for survival is often stronger than we can understand.

It seems a miracle to me that the riot of cooperative biological coexistence that is the human body exists in the first place, let alone that each of us engages in the dance of life with other equally miraculous assemblages (people, plants, animals, soils, and every other part of this reality we perceive). We understand the nature of this pattern of relationship at the deepest level--we have to, in order to take part--but we can never explain it. It has many names: love is one of them.

I start writing the beginning of this essay on an excursion organized around three compelling elements in my life: gardening, music, and friendship. I follow the Willamette River north to visit a gardener and plant breeder who selects and crosses open-pollinated and heirloom vegetables to create new, regionally-appropriate, delicious, nutritious varieties. With no artificial genetic engineering or high technology involved, but through careful observation, intelligent planning, selection for desirable characteristics, occasional hand-pollination, and a welcoming of spontaneous surprises, he creates space in his abundantly diverse garden for DNA to find new modes of expression in our food plants. Those food plants become us--and they become the bees and other pollinators, the soil, and the rest of the whole web of organisms with whom they interact. Through his subtle actions as a gardener, as he aligns himself with the patterns within his plants' storehouse of genetic material, he sets off ripples in the world like the ones which pass me in the creek. They help shape my perception of reality--and perhaps yours, and perhaps everyone's. There is no telling what effects a ripple will have as its energy is gradually transmuted into other forms we may no longer recognize as that particular ripple.

After stopping by the garden to tour, talk, taste, and pull a few weeds, I proceed to the house of some other friends. In between walks to the river and a hike in an old growth forest, we play music together, exploring new chords in odd tunings on our guitars. We attend an evening concert by two other musician friends, losing ourselves in the music and also trying to figure out their chord progressions. Something about music is as compelling as the force that holds the planets, stars, and galaxies within their relationships to one another. I remember that scientists have analyzed the universe using musical models and discovered that "the music of the spheres" and "celestial harmonies" are no abstract expressions, but instead literal representations of reality. All heavenly bodies vibrate and establish their orbits and relationships at musical harmonics. In fact, every level of physical existence, from the super-galactic to the sub-atomic, could be described in musical notation--although this would be a rather monumental task, and I wouldn't suggest anyone try it, since we would consume all remaining trees and rivers on the planet in the process of producing even a single copy of the score.

On the second afternoon of my visit, I borrow my friend's laptop computer and write the beginnings of the essay. I start with the intention of describing "a day in the life" at Lost Valley, but this exercise seems suddenly unnecessary, an indulgence in the illusion of surface reality that I already know to be false. I planned to follow one summer day's activities: waking up, exploring a path through the woods, turning off the irrigation water, harvesting some vegetables, meeting friends and new volunteers to work in our organic vegetable gardens, soaking ourselves under a hose repeatedly to stay comfortable in the heat, coming in to eat lunch with the rest of the community, making phone calls to arrange for printing new t-shirts, answering mail and email, editing a few articles for Talking Leaves, doing more garden work, cleaning the main kitchen after dinner, meeting with the rest of the community in a "purpose circle," playing my guitar--first with others, then alone as I prepare to go to sleep. I intended to describe various birds, plants, animals, weather changes, and people--and their attendant personal and interpersonal energies--encountered throughout the day, as well as my own feelings--of longing, contentment, discomfort, peace, separateness, connection, and wholeness.

But I already wrote a similar article, about an early spring day at Lost Valley, for the Summer 2004 Communities magazine (check the TL and Lost Valley websites for links to it, if details are what you're after). What interest me now are the patterns within and beyond the details.

A few nights later, as candles flicker on an altar in the middle of the yurt in which we are meeting, I describe my amorphous mini-essay to several fellow community-members in our well-being circle. I am holding an abalone shell just as riddled with holes and just as full of magic as the rest of reality seems to be. They like what I have to say. I realize that there is no turning back. These "moments in the life"--and the meanderings they have made through my body, mind, and spirit--are what I was meant to share this time.

TL editor and Lost Valley vegetable gardener Chris Roth keeps one foot in the world of detail-oriented practicality and one foot in the world of contemplation and pattern--which explains a lot of what comes out of his mouth (when his foot's not in it).

 

©2004 Talking Leaves
Late Summer/Fall 2004
Volume 14, Number 3
A Day in the Life: The Many Faces of Eco-Community

Notes from the Editor: Imitation: the Sincerest Form of Flattery

Our theme this issue is inspired by the Summer 2004 "Day in the Life" edition of Communities magazine, to which two Lost Valley community members (Chris and Dianne) contributed articles. For our own "Day in the Life" issue, Communities editor Diana Leafe Christian has reciprocated by offering a description of a day in her own life at Earthaven Ecovillage. Many other readers also share their accounts in the pages which follow. Please enjoy them--and if they inspire you to write your own, please do so and send it to us; we are contemplating a follow-up issue on this same theme in the not-too-distant future.

Submissions Requested:
Transformation/
Endings and Beginnings

In honor of the election season, our theme for the next issue is transformation. You may address this theme on a personal, social, political, ecological, biological, geological, spiritual, linguistic, artistic, or any other level you choose. What does transformation mean to you? What endings and/or beginnings have you observed or experienced? As usual, we're interested in exploring how this theme is reflected in interconnections among the personal, the collective, the natural world and all of its parts.

Articles can be anywhere from 750 to 3500 words in length. We also welcome poems, letters, artwork, and other forms of creative expression. If possible, please send us photos or other illustrations to accompany your writing. See our home page for submission details. Our tentative deadline is October 7, but submissions after that are also welcome. The issue itself will be published most likely in late November or early December. We hope to hear from you!

Thanks again for reading TL. If you're not a subscriber yet, please subscribe. With the form on page 53, you can also send TL to your friends. We continue to need funds to keep these leaves talking. Without putting too fine a point on it, we are running severely below our projected income for the year. Can you help? We appreciate your involvement and support!

 

©2004 Talking Leaves
Late Summer/Fall 2004
Volume 14, Number 3
A Day in the Life: The Many Faces of Eco-Community

The Way Life Should Be: The Ecovillage and Permaculture Design Course 2004

Seventeen passionate nature lovers have converged as one to join the Eco- village and Permaculture Certificate Program at Lost Valley Educational Center from June 23-August 13 in Dexter, OR. From New York to Iowa City, to L.A., and Eugene, people with a depth of reverence towards nature form a unique learning community for the summer. The morning begins with a brass chime undulating up the meadow while the aroma of a wonderful bounty awaits the eco-pioneers in the outdoor classroom. You can see the sun rise through dew drops on golden grass. Song sparrows and black-capped chickadees sing their song to the morning. Laughter resonates with the rising light as the warmed earth releases her deep pungency from the pine forest floor. As people gather, the group becomes present to focus on the lessons of the day. An eco-revolutionary, Joshua Smith, sits before us, a man with a deep knowledge of Permaculture applications and principles. He inspires a true sense of urgency to restore the balance of natural systems which have been destroyed through improper resource use and the disregard of nature's systematic design processes and expertise. Meanwhile, the earth breathes and moves though this land in new and old rhythms. In this time of great change, Permaculture asks us to return to the inherent values of life: care of the earth and care of its people.

Rick Valley, land steward at Lost Valley, guides us into the "new forest," a place where old growth once reigned. We stop at a place where the forest is overcrowded. Often, when a forest is clearcut, it loses the ability to be a fully functional ecosystem, unless properly managed. We prune and harvest the thick undergrowth to create fences, furniture, wildlife habitat, and mushroom inoculation logs. We leave cuttings as mulch to feed new forest growth. The space between trees will now allow the older trees to move towards an old growth stage.

The forest is our life blood. In a mature grove, the forest transpires hundreds of gallons of water through each tree, every day. These trees are recycling the foundation of life. With a Permaculture Design approach, we are given the tools to be effective stewards of ecosystem function and facilitate a process towards more harmonious landscapes. Humanity has its place in nature, and we should recognize this place. The trees are our elders; the birds, our guides. Observation teaches us to comprehend our environment though many different senses. This skill allows permaculturalists to gather information in ways traditional people have done whose lives depend upon the land. Prevailing winds, sun and energy movement throughout the site, species, and temperature all have to do with "reading" the land. This is how we ground ourselves in the experience of really looking at each site as a system of interrelated parts.

When lunch time arrives, the community enjoys a home-cooked vegetarian meal. Homegrown organic salad greens are drizzled with creative and delicious dressings. We engage in a demonstration on Vermiculture, which is the ability of worms to produce beneficial castings in order to improve soil. Lunch time not only provides a forum for participants to teach others, but also allows the Permaculture community to connect with Lost Valley community members. The interaction within the two communities is exciting for all. After lunch, people go off to relax, stroll through the gardens, and graze wild berry patches. The course participants make their way towards the swale project that we are building to restore wetland habitat. We work in the summer's heat to gather camas seeds, lay rock for the trail, and level the swale--or "little valley."

Marc Tobin and Tammy Davis, our hosts, advise us day to day on our projects. Tammy has taught us to raise bees, make herbal salves, and grow edible mushrooms. Marc demonstrates his skills in group dynamics and coordinates our learning experiences. Peter Reppe teaches us about the ecological impacts of our individual choices. As we live our day to day lives here at Lost Valley, Peter encourages us to consider economies of scale and life cycle assessment. Each principle allows us to see the overall impact of actions, from the production of a product through its use and eventual disposal. As we live on this land, we are learning the importance of reducing consumption as opposed to simply recycling products.

This day would not be complete without mentioning yesterday. A neighbor, Bill Burwell, greeted us with the rapture of a forest dweller. His family bought a scarred clearcut when he was four years old. Fifty-one years later, his stories are the tales of the land. They tell of the Kalapuya people who preceded us here. As we stood there listening to Bill, we were intrigued by his self-taught expertise in sustainable forest management, historical knowledge of place, and his house, which he had built with on-site materials and with his own two hands. We rode in Bill's pickup down the mountain to gather blueberries from Bill's organic family farm. We will use the blueberries for baking; we know the kitchen interns will be excited to create a recipe.

Here at Lost Valley, we are learning to work together. The process of this begins with us. As Joshua states, "We have a commitment to untangle ourselves from the ego." This is our largest obstacle when approaching sustainability. Cooperation is a requirement in all self-perpetuating life systems. Thus, interdependence is a key function in nature. Likewise, we all have unique gifts, that if we add to the collective, the collective will be fuller. The sun sets more slowly in the open land. Cool creek water washes the day's sweat as our bodies are cleansed and revitalized. Children play in the distance and represent the voices of the inheritors of this mysterious and revolving planet earth. When the moon rises, the guitar, fiddle, zither, and didgeridoo can be heard along with the songs that echo in this valley. We love celebrating the fruits of summer

Lindsey White is a student with the Audubon Expedition Institute (now a division of Lesley University). She participated in the Ecovillage and Permaculture Certificate Program as part of her fourth-year environmental studies degree.

 

©2004 Talking Leaves
Late Summer/Fall 2004
Volume 14, Number 3
A Day in the Life: The Many Faces of Eco-Community