Ah, the confusion of spring weather! It seemed so clear in March that we were headed for an early, steady spring; but of course spring around here typically includes all sorts of weather swings, and up through this past week, the threat of a last frost lingered. We waited and waited to fill in the gaps in the brassica beds where earlier transplants had succumbed to the hard frosts of a few weeks ago… and now we’re in our standard last frost range and we’re looking toward a projected high of 90 later this week! As abrupt as the swing feels, by the calendar of past seasons we’re in about the right spot, and our tomato seedlings in paper pots are going to be very happy to start hardening off for the garden in the warm weather this week. Time to get the sweet corn and beans in the ground.

Ted here at Dancing Rabbit to offer you this week’s update.

Construction progress on our house this week included getting the first of the raw wool insulation for our addition’s ceiling installed. Four or five years ago a local sheep farmer offered to sell her fleeces for the cost of shearing, around $5 a head, and I readily jumped at the opportunity despite not having an immediate project to make use of the resource. Last weekend’s semi-annual land clean uncovered the large burlap-bagged bales of wool, almost lost but not forgotten, in the machine shed. The time had come to claim them: our project was ready! Some had ended up in ground contact with some of the burlap rotted away, but aside from some superficially rotted edges, the raw wool was moist but in good shape. Early in the week my crew and I moisturized our hands with all the lanolin as we spread the fleeces on large black tarps in the sun, fluffing and turning them every hour or two to allow the sun to dry them out. Now they’ll spend fifty or a hundred years or more keeping the temperature in our house right about where we want it.

Speaking of sheep, Dancing Rabbit welcomed its first livestock larger than chickens this week when Kyle brought home four full-fleeced ewes from a nearby farm. The morning rapidly developed from an excited neighborly welcoming into a minor rodeo. The ewes, understandably skittish from their transportation experience, all went along with the plan for a while, being walked on halters from the van toward their new fenced paddock. But with equally skittish dogs around, one finally jerked itself loose from its human lead en route, and in fear and confusion went a long way off on its own before it was caught again.

As you may know, sheep are most comfortable in a herd, and the lone ewe, back on tether but without fleecy friends, refused to go more than a few steps back across the fields toward her very distant companions. Weighing in around 200 pounds, and with four feet to hold her ground, she was not easily influenced. There seemed little option but to bring the truck out to the field, at which point four of us picked her up into the bed and ferried her more successfully back to the fenced enclosure to rejoin her compatriots.

The four are now settling into Ironweed’s orchard while awaiting group agreement to let them graze in the shared orchard near the entrance to Dancing Rabbit. I’m excited for the future, which I hope will bring more grazers before long! As a budding cheese maker, visions of goat and sheep cheeses aging in our root cellar seem to be floating constantly through my head now…

This weekend’s contra dance event Contra Culture brought in dancers from near and far and kept the dance floor in La Casa jumping at intervals through the weekend. While I’m not very comfortable with the gender and power dynamics in swing and other partnered social dance genres (namely, the expectation to lead smoothly), I fell in love with contra while living in Maine. Every dance is taught, so once you know the basics, the learning curve is a forgiving one. One piece that pushes our cultural standards is the contra norm of staring your partner or neighbor in the eye as you swing or turn with them, the purpose of which is to keep you from getting dizzy. The unity of everyone in the room dancing in unison, and continually progressing up and down the hall, dancing with new couples each round, is strongly reminiscent of the joy of living in community. The live fiddling and guitar (and the occasional upright bass) sweep me right off my feet.

This weekend’s event took the dance one step further with an emphasis on de-gendering the dancing roles. In place of the default assumption of men as leads and women as follows, each participant could self-select which role they wanted to dance, with leads donning an armband to signify their choice. Having danced mostly lead in contra prior to this weekend, I quickly found the wisdom in the callers’ recommendation to stick with whichever role you chose for the duration of a three-hour dance event. Switching mid-stream, as I eventually did, was extremely confusing!

I was a proud papa, watching my five-year-old Aurelia loving the dance all weekend, finding her own partners, and participating capably. She and new friend Lucy, three years of age and visiting for the weekend with her dad, partnered with each other for one square and made it through with some adept shadowing of the younger by one of the experienced dancers here for the weekend. Cheers to all participants for their inclusion.

Holding the dance weekend at Dancing Rabbit meant that we got to share some of what we do here during some workshops with participants. In addition to getting our groove on to the excellent live music, Sara and I each lead a short workshop in gardening and earthen plaster, respectively. The plasterers were ready to get dirty, and dove into stomping sand, mud and straw into a batch of plaster and then learning to apply it on our addition’s walls. We hope we’ll see lots of the weekend’s guests return for future events.

In other events, Morgan and new residency applicant Elea headed to the Prom at our local high school Saturday. Elea spent several hours with her team of stylists and fashion consultants preparing for the event in Mandy and Ryan’s new tent house down our way. She emerged radiant and the two headed off to the event in full form. Somehow Aurelia managed to come home with painted fingers and toes… no surprise there; she’s on a three-month bender of wearing almost nothing but fancy dresses. We don’t emphasize boy-girl cultural norms here with our kids, wanting to let them learn for themselves what feels comfortable; but some of these things seem to be built-in, as far as I can tell.

Ultimate Frisbee players finally got back on the field Thursday with enough players for a great short game. Several of our regulars have been out of town, so we’re itching to get into a steady schedule again. Sadly, it looks like we won’t be headed back to the Show-Me State Games tourney this summer owing to scheduling conflicts, but with our fab new full-size field to play on now, we’ll be ready to show our stuff again next year.

This second week of our first 2012 visitor session brought a number of new residency requests. The membership committee interviewed a lovely family of three from Chicago this week, recommending them to the group for residency beginning in June, and will interview two more this week and a third next. Despite membership having grown from 10 or so when I first came to Dancing Rabbit in 2001, to 62 and growing now, every new residency request still feels like an unexpected windfall. The larger we grow, the more ideas we convert from concept to reality. Nine years on now from taking the plunge myself, I remain proud of what we’re doing and excited to see and do ever more.

Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage is a growing village whose mission is to experiment in, and demonstrate, ecologically sustainable living. Our twice-monthly tours, 2nd and 4th Saturdays at 1p through October, are free and open to the public. The next will be Saturday, May 12. For more information, please check out our newly updated website at www.dancingrabbit.org, or give us a call at (660) 883-5511.

On a sunny day, in the early evening, just after dinner time, excitement is heard in the yards, paths and streets. Excited faces, hands clutching dollar bills, running feet, and lively laughter and chatter called to mind a scene from my suburban childhood. All that was missing, really, were the tinny strains of “Tarantella” growing louder and louder as the ice cream truck drew near. It was Dancing Rabbit’s first visit from “The Plant Man.” (That’s our nickname, not his, it goes along with “The Bucket Man”, “The Mail Lady”, “The Beer Guy”, “The One-Cow Dairy”, etc.) Mark Slaughter of Sunrise Farm in Kirksville brought us a pickup truck full of heirloom, organically grown vegetable and herb plants for sale. There was a collective gasp of admiration as we started unloading the plants for shopping; they were gorgeous.

Hello there, it’s Sam this week, bringing you the news from Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage.

Mark’s plants are not the only new growth taking root this week. A few of us have gotten seedlings from Missouri Wildflowers to bring some native blooms to attract and nourish wild creatures and beautify the village. Bri’s working on a native plant rain garden for the courtyard. The vegetable gardeners have been putting out seedlings, too, for a while now.

There’re also different kinds of roots and attachments forming with our first visitor session of the year. We have twelve folks flirting–with various levels of commitment–with the idea of moving to and becoming residents then members of Dancing Rabbit. Four of them have already spoken with the Membership and Residency Committee about starting the residency process, and will have interviews soon. One wexer, who was here in 2009 and has come back to work exchange again this year, is also applying for residency.

With all these people, it’s a good thing were’s making some progress on our future decision-making system. Fifty people is starting to feel like too many to have in one room and there is a general sentiment of fatigue with whole-group decision-making, so we’ve decided to change how we do things to take some of the strain off ourselves. We want to stay within the spirit of consensus, so we’re inventing a new way to apply those ideas to a larger group. It’s an exciting, pioneering thing to be a part of. I’ll keep you posted as we talk, then apply, then discover things we need to change about our new system.

We had one of our two annual land clean days on Saturday, during which folks pitched in to do beautification projects and generally tidy up around the village. My favorite improvement is the tidiness of the area around the bench by the road where I sit to wait for the school bus in the afternoons to greet the kids as they come home.

Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage is an intentional community and educational
nonprofit in Rutledge, northeast Missouri, focused on sustainable
living. We offer free tours to the public the second and fourth Saturday at 1pm from
April-October. For more information you can visit our website at www.dancingrabbit.org, “like” us on Facebook or give us a call at (660) 883-5511.

DR’s newest member, Julie, here with this week’s column. As I live my life, I often find that there are themes and lessons that are undeniably pronounced when I have the energy to think creatively about how interestingly life unfolds. For this week’s themes, I feel that both cycles and balance have been recurrent in my thoughts. We are but a few days away from our first visitor session of the season. Now that I have been here living at DR for a full year, experiencing the seasonal shift of swinging from a quiet and private fall and winter to opening our homes and lives to folks interested in living sustainably over the next 6 months is coming full circle. Our visitor sessions are a great way to inspire other people to take home the message of living more lightly upon the earth, and to recruit new members. At the same time, they remind us that we are doing something innovative and special, and I am looking forward to having my perspective renewed through the eyes of people seeing how we live for the first time. I am already enjoying the new residents and work exchangers who have brought along musical and artistic talents, as well as an obvious joy to be living here with us, even if they depart after a short stay.

Spring is typically a demanding time of year, brimming with irresistible urges to commence construction and gardening projects. Clay tamping for an entryway to Ted and Sara’s was dovetailed into a social pit-stop, and some felt inspired to offer a hand while chatting away. That particular experience was the perfect illustration of the marriage between work and play, and I hope to carry that ideal into my life in a more observable way. Designing a metaphorical time management plan where the limbs of work and social/fun time are fairly balanced has been somewhat of a challenge for me. Knowing when to stop building the fenced garden and raised beds, and when to create leisure time isn’t as easy as it may sound when you don’t have a clock to punch, or have specified hours of labor assigned to you. I’ve been so diligently plugging away at my projects that only when I stopped, did I realize how hard all of my fellow community mates were working right alongside me. I feel that I have caught “Spring Fever”, and have been so enlivened by the luxury of fair weather to pursue projects in, that I had almost forgotten to engage in all of the other lovely activities that accompany this time of year. Walking on the land has always been a favorite on-farm endeavor that I indulged in, and (successfully) hunting for morels was a true joy this past week. My suspicion of beginners luck was soon replaced by the title “Mushroom Master Extraordinaire” as my partner Dan and I gathered what he deemed was the most impressive collection of morels he has ever procured in his 5 seasons of gathering. This discovery of a new love brought me back to myself, as it’s easy to get lost in the melee of Spring. Rumor has it that multiple groups have gone out and found upwards of 30 mushrooms, but as to the locations of those treasures, well, we consider that to be a highly guarded secret.

Attempting to lead a life that is guided with the goal of sustainability can be anything but easy when faced with the obstacle of changing weather patterns. Unforgiving weather has had us scrambling to protect our gardens this week from the frost’s looming potential for destroying a portion of our livelihood. Spring that came a month early has left tender unfurled foliage vulnerable and in need of earnest attention in the face of such a threat. Row cover was in short supply as we devised creative ways to insulate plants with mountains of straw in the hopes that it was heaped heavily enough as to prevent the wind from whisking it away. We are hoping that this imbalance is a fluke, and that future gardening seasons will debut with the graciousness we have come to rely upon for our sustenance. If these anomalies become a seasonal pattern, we will surely need to develop new ways of protecting our trees and perennials in our pursuit to synchronize our actions as a careful and calculated response to our environment.

Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage is an intentional community and educational nonprofit in Rutledge, northeast Missouri, focused on sustainable living. We offer free tours to the public twice monthly from April-October. Our next tour of the year will be April 28th at 1pm. Meanwhile, for more information you can visit our website www.dancingrabbit.org, or give us a call at (660) 883-5511.

If you have lived, worked, played or stayed at Dancing Rabbit before for any length of time, please save the date for our 15th Land Day Reunion!

We’ll be celebrating 15 years of Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage history with storytelling, music, dance, food, fun, and reconnection with Rabbits new and old.

Join us October 5-7, 2012 as we enjoy potlucks, photos, dance parties, campfires, talent (or no-talent) shows, and much more, including burning the last two of our original mortgages!

Our 10th Land Day Reunion in 2007 was a smash, with over 100 people attending, and we hope to have even more people show up this year. Bring your significant others and family to this weekend of community and help us celebrate sustainable living.

To get all the details and updates you should make sure you are on our mailing list.

You can also join our event on Facebook.

Details to follow in the upcoming months. We hope to see you there!

After an early summer, it is with a mixture of regret and relief that I’m settling back into spring.  Cob here with the weekly update about what’s been going on at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage.  The cooler weather has been a relief for the early spring plantings of brassicas, peas, early lettuces, and other plants which don’t fair so well in baking heat.  Presumably there will be enough of that in the coming months to keep us supplied in eggplant and peppers.  The biggest adjustment for me personally has been to remember that the pond got COLD again!

The beautiful weather provided plenty of opportunity to work outdoors pruning trees, turning over garden beds, clearing weeds, hauling bales of straw for mulch, and otherwise providing a solid stream of business for anyone willing to offer massage.  Usually I don’t feel this busy (and sore) until there are a lot more people on farm for the summer…and while some new work exchangers (wexers for short) have arrived, many rabbits were traveling for the holidays and our overall numbers still feel small and intimate.  This provided a nice atmosphere for a few celebrations this past week.  One of the clear favorites was a combination egg-dyeing led by Nani, and hair-styling/dyeing salon led by Elea. 

On Saturday we held a condensed-version Jewish Seder (the feast of the Passover) with a great family-style potluck meal and Old Testament storytelling.  This was followed by a glorious Easter morning egg-hunt organized for all the youngsters in the tri-communities by Dave’s mother Cindy (who is here visiting and getting some solid grandma time with the new baby).  Those of us preparing the Common House for our weekly scheduling meeting enjoyed listening to classical sacred music for the holiday courtesy of my ipod streaming the broadcast from my old hometown public radio station WXXI.org in Rochester NY.  Ostrichtron also made co’s annual appearance at the conclusion of the Easter-egg hunt, offering adults and children alike a fresh new orange in exchange for a pebble or rock.  As Ostrichtron’s shrouded figure faded into the distance one of the children whispered in awe, “who was that?!”…and the legend continues.

As you may have read in prior news, there is a possibility that Dancing Rabbit will be the location for a reality-TV show.  This has certainly caused no small amount of excitement and trepidation on our parts, and I can’t help but keep imagining a film crew watching me all the time as I’ve gone through my normal daily and weekly routines.  The wariness of unintentional consequences (usually in relation to thinking about the shows that seem to be popular on TV these days) and the excitement of sharing our vision for sustainability and the very real power of community has generally faded to be replaced by bewilderment.  Why would anyone want to sit and watch?  Watching the train-wreck of people shouting their frustrations as each other might be mildly interesting, but watching people talk about their feelings and find ways to reach agreement?  Sure this is valuable from a social or educational standpoint, but entertainment?  Really?  People would watch that?

Having reached this stage of detachment about having a camera crew underfoot, it’s been much easier to become distracted by the plans and anticipated progress of the next few weeks, which include things like an annual spring land clean, a work party for clearing invasive garlic mustard plants, our first official public tour of the season, our first three-week visitor session for 2012, new road work providing wet-weather access to the new common house construction site and Crooked Route neighborhood, and a flood of new wexers for the season! 

Meanwhile, a few more days of relative quiet to spend working on de-nailing boards to be used for siding on our (increasingly complete) house, one more day to enjoy the kids home on spring break (see “de-nailing” above), and wonder what this year will ultimately be remembered for in Dancing Rabbit lore.  2011 was definitely the year of the woodshed, as many dwellings were lacking one until recently…ah the irony of a mild/dry winter!  So far 2012 is shaping up as the year of the clothesline…five solid large-capacity clotheslines have been constructed this spring already.  Is this really newsworthy?  Maybe not.  Cause for intense personal satisfaction and improved quality of life?  Definitely. 

Do new clothes lines make for gripping TV viewing?  We’ll all find out soon enough I suppose.  What would change for you if you were displayed on national television?  What wouldn’t change?  What would you think about differently, and why?  What would you do more of or at least do with a stronger sense of purpose and conviction?  If you happen to ponder these questions this week, I’d be interested in your responses.

Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage is an intentional community in Rutledge, northeast Missouri, practicing sustainable living among 50+ members. There’s lots to see, so start thinking about a spring tour now! We offer them the second and fourth Saturday each month for much of the year.  The first tour in 2012 is April 14th at 1:00pm…no reservations are necessary. For more information, please see our website at www.dancingrabbit.org, visit our blog The March Hare at blog.dancingrabbit.org, or give us a call at (660) 883-5511.

Hi everyone! This is Alline writing this week for Dancing Rabbit.

As always, it feels next to impossible to encapsulate a week in the life at DR in a few short columns. However, I am your dedicated reporter and, like the Girl Scout I once was, vow to do my best.

The big news, which really isn’t news at all, is the weather. The old axiom “everyone talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it” doesn’t hold true here. I’ve never been in a more weather-aware environment than Dancing Rabbit, where everything from our electricity and our food sources to our entertainment is weather-dependent. When the sun peeks out we all get excited, run outside and dig in our gardens. When the temperature hits the near 90’s, as it did yesterday, well, we all head out to the pond for a swim. April schmapril – it feels like summer!

In other news, the annual immigration of Work Exchangers has begun. More details next week on the individuals who are joining us for awhile to learn about and participate in organic gardening and construction, embracing many aspects of traditional, conventional and alternative techniques. We’re excited to meet the new cast of characters who will undoubtedly enliven our work scenes and entertain us for the next few months!

As Tereza alluded to last week, a television production company’s development director and his casting guru spent a very busy day interviewing and hanging out with many members and residents of Dancing Rabbit, and generally getting a feel for what life is like here in our little community. They were here to see if they could perhaps craft a 13- (or even 26-) episode season of our lives.

I think it is fair to say that Rabbits are, in general, excited about the concept of some sort of television coverage of life here at the ecovillage. The 30-Days episode, made back in 2005, continues to air periodically and still generates lots of interest. (Information on that show can be found here and answers to questions about it can be found here ). While parts of the episode were extremely contrived, on a whole the Spurlock team did a good job of presenting our Ecological Covenants and being respectful about our lives here in our little village.

However, we are not believers that “any publicity is good publicity.” After our 30-Days experience we came to understand that the reality portion of “Reality TV” is to be taken with a very large grain of salt. And quite frankly, our means of communication, which strives to be thoughtful and non-violent (in the form of Marshall Rosenberg’s Non-Violent Communication), might not make for good entertainment. There is very little screaming, yelling or dish-throwing here. In fact, the only dish-throwing I’ve seen in my 12 years here is when builders deliberately smash ceramic plates and cups and bowls, in order to use the pieces in mosaics…but I digress.

On the other hand, Dave-the-Development-Director told us that he would like to make “a TV series where we would make people think “hmmmmm…what would my life be like as a Rabbit?” He also acknowledged that “…unlike to the two stereotypical city people in the 30 Days episode, (viewers) would be people who are generally interested and exploring this new way of life.” Education is a big part of Dancing Rabbit’s mission – done well this would be a great way of reaching a huge audience.

The question then becomes “do I really want to expose my life on TV?” Even as an extrovert I admit to having more than a few qualms about that. Not only do I generally view people appearing in reality series as attention-seeking and narcissistic, but also wonder about their judgment (or lack thereof). There is also the lack of control in the editing process – the editors are going for “good TV” which is not always the same thing as “real,” nor do they care about any fallout their drama might produce in our individual lives.

I am grateful to the Outreach Team, which is doing a fantastic job of weighing the pros and cons. We’ll see where this path leads us; we don’t yet know if it will be to a dead end or to a more-aware-of-the-ecovillage-movement public. Stay tuned!

Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage is an intentional community and educational nonprofit in Rutledge, northeast Missouri, focused on sustainable living. We offer free tours to the public twice monthly from April-October. Our first tour of the year will be April 14 at 1pm. Meanwhile, for more information you can visit our website www.dancingrabbit.org, or give us a call at (660) 883-5511.

Greetings! Tereza here, writing her first ever column in the 11+ years she’s lived at Dancing Rabbit!

Of course the top story continues to be the weather. The unseasonably warm temperatures mean folks are outdoors a lot, playing, hanging out–why, some of them are even working! (For those who may not know, this is a joke. Most Rabbits work their fluffy little tails off most of the time.) We’re prepping and planting and pruning, getting ready for another year of growing food for ourselves and our community-mates. Rumors in this area involve Cob pruning the raspberry bushes near the Community Building, and both Tom and Thomas experiencing invasions of cruel pea-shoot-nibbling varmints. Alline also announced at Sunday meeting the excellent news that she and Kurt harvested their very first asparagus spear! Hooray for spring!

Usually when it’s this warm outside there are oodles of short-term folks around, so having just our usual March population numbers on-farm makes for a relatively slow, low-key feeling. But we know we’re heading into the high season when we get our first trickle of new residents and work exchangers (WEXers), and it’s already seeming more like a stream! Former WEXer Haley finally finished school (and got her wisdom teeth out the same day, I hear) before returning as a resident last week, new resident SunGee came ready with a large yurt-like tent she plans to live in for the warmer months, and by my count at least 3 new WEXers are showing up this coming week. Welcome and welcome back, y’all! We’re excited that you’re joining us in our grand experiment and look forward to getting to know you!

The long awaited return of part singing was also welcomed this week. Over the years it has been difficult to find a critical mass of folks who are interested in learning and practicing different parts of songs in order to create beautiful harmony together. (I should mention that other key factors include being willing, able, and having enough time to commit to doing it– no wonder it’s taken so long to rekindle!) It’s been over a decade since I’ve personally done that kind of singing, and boy howdy, was I rusty. It was super fun, though, and despite several of us still having scratchy voices from the never-ending chest and cough crud that had been making the rounds, we sounded pretty good! I hope we can maintain our momentum in the busy weeks to come.

One of the most interesting events I heard about last week was a dance/birthday party for one of our youngest neighbors at Red Earth Farms, which was announced as “including dancing baby goats”. Now maybe I misunderstood, and I unfortunately wasn’t able to attend, but just imagining tiny goats frolicking around with all my little friends made my day much brighter!

Some of us participated in another interesting event this week, called a restorative circle. It’s a method of engaging with conflict by gathering everyone involved, communicating very clearly with one another about the impacts of the conflict, and making action plans to address various needs. You can read more about it at http://www.restorativecircles.org. It was a fascinating process, and I hope it will become another tool we can use for addressing this crucial and often difficult aspect of living together.

Conflict is inevitable in any group, and the ways we deal with it at DR are wide ranging. Some people prefer the time honored method of ignoring it and hoping it will go away. This rarely works well long term, however, so trying to communicate directly with the other participant(s) in the conflict is usually an excellent idea. Many folks first address themselves: figuring out what went on for them, what needs they were trying to meet that led them to act the way they did, and letting themselves actually feel whatever feelings they have about the situation. This is usually best done alone, or with a friend. Talking about it, crying, blowing off steam, basically doing whatever it takes to get the feelings out in a safe way without the other party present, makes it less likely that you’ll emotionally blast them. Unless you’re dealing with an ascended spiritual master (and quite frankly they aren’t too thick on the ground these days), that kind of blasting usually makes the situation worse. Both solo inner work and talking with a friend will often lead to more openness to the other person’s perspective, which can make a huge difference in how things feel once face to face communication happens.

If for any reason someone doesn’t feel able to meet with the other party on their own, there are almost always uninvolved folks who can be asked to step in and assist. We have a Conflict Resolution Team that maintains a list of Rabbits and friends from nearby communities who are willing to serve as mediators, and the Team is mandated to step in if a conflict arises that is significantly impacting the whole community. Very rarely an interpersonal conflict gets to the point where we bring it to the community at large; I can think of only a few times that this has happened in my lengthy tenure here. (The restorative circle held this week was not community-wide.)

One important note is that we have a standing agreement to solve conflicts non-violently. This sometimes leads to jokes about going across the road (i.e., off DR property) in order to fight it out, but we seriously are very committed to taking care of and supporting one another when conflict arises. I’m pretty impressed with how we engage with conflict at DR, especially as compared to the mainstream culture, and am glad to have witnessed yet another method that might help us continue to improve in this area.

Finally, a two-person film crew came to check DR out as a possible location for a documentary-type TV show about us. Exciting! Scary! I wasn’t involved with their short visit, but Alline was, so since she’s next in the rotation to write about DR happenings anyway, I’m going to let her share all the juicy details next week. If we’re lucky, she might even tell the truth, or at least that’s what she said when I asked her about it!

Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage is an intentional community and educational nonprofit in Rutledge, northeast Missouri, focused on sustainable living. We offer free tours to the public twice monthly from April-October. Our first tour of the year will be April 14 at 1pm. Meanwhile, for more information you can visit our website www.dancingrabbit.org, read our blog The March Hare at blog.dancingrabbit.org, or give us a call at (660) 883-5511.

There was no putting off the fruit tree pruning any longer this week. It seemed to me that the peach tree in our courtyard, a two-trunked specimen that grew from the pit of a peach we ate while working on the kitchen foundation in 2004, went from bud break to bloom inside of a week. As I feverishly worked to finish the pruning of the ten trees we manage near our house, I was prodded constantly by the buds surrounding me, which seemed to pop open in the moments between glances. Sara put several sprays of peach and plum blossoms in vases around the kitchen, and within a few hours, each looked like a perfect still life for the illustration of a Chinese poem.

As the last days of winter draw to a close with afternoon temperatures in the 70s and 80s for the past ten days, I find myself wondering over and over whether we’ve already seen the last hard frost of the year– or whether, instead, we’ll watch all the exuberantly flowering fruit trees and vibrant pea sprouts face certain doom when more seasonal temperatures resume. At the moment I’m thinking the odds are about 50-50.

Despite every concern about climate shift, I can’t help voting for a long, fruitful growing season that has already begun. Sleeping with the windows open and being serenaded by the raucous peeper party in the pond nearby has done a lot to improve my spirits after an extended illness the previous week.

Ted here to bring you this week’s update from Dancing Rabbit.

A week ago the web team hosted an afternoon-evening party to work on all kinds of loose ends on the new Dancing Rabbit website it has been busily working on for months. After a few last-minute pleas to test various pages and proofread new content, our new website went live this week! It is the culmination of five years or more of effort toward improving the experience for visitors to our site, and to mounting the site on a new platform that will allow those with lesser tech skills to update content. Three cheers! Be sure to check out the new look at www.dancingrabbit.org.

Other signs of spring cleaning are everywhere, along with some capital improvements. An ambitious team of volunteers has taken on an overall cleanup of our front circle drive in preparation for rerouting the drive and widening turns. We’re hoping to ease the flow of larger vehicles in the future, especially in delivering building materials for our new common house beginning later this year. We also expect to gravel an area alongside our machine shed and convert its east wall into a two-bay garage for working on our vehicles in-house. Two small grain bins that have served for storage since 1997 will soon get picked up and tucked behind the machine shed, so a deadline approaches to remove our stored belongings or see them off on a dump run later this week.

After all this work has taken place, resources will be stored in a more orderly fashion in the newly mowed resource yard at one end of the drive, and then a landscaping crew will spring into action to beautify the entrance to the village. Whew! And it isn’t even April yet!

The driveway re-routing is hoped to take place at the same time as the impending installation of the next sections of village road, including the southern portion of the road around our future town center, where the building of our new common house will soon get under way. That will connect to Crooked Route, which runs through Grassroots, the “new” neighborhood that is now nearly full.

Having pulled 19 acres of land on the west slope of the village out of CRP last fall to accommodate the desire for more and larger agricultural leases, we’ve lately formed a new agriculture committee, which is trying to establish some infrastructure, ground rules, and guiding principles for the use of these areas before the wagons cross into the new territory (can you tell Aurelia’s been into Little House On The Prairie lately?). At issue are questions about how to preserve access to such land for future village residents while making best use of the land meanwhile. Knowing we need to get underway with lots of soil amendment, we’re also mapping out which slopes are too steep for tillage, and should therefore be in perennial shrubs and trees, versus those that might be good for grazing or larger plantings of annuals. As always, there is a lot to figure out.

We’re just on the cusp of our yearly population boom. A handful of residents accepted last fall to begin residency this spring will soon arrive, including a family with two girls who will further complexify the youth scene here and also bring the youth gender balance closer to parity. Aurelia is excited for more new playmates and school mates.

Our first group of visitors will arrive before long, and work exchangers and interns will soon start trickling in as well. So many surprises and new relationships to build, so much information to share with newcomers to the village– this lifestyle doesn’t seem to slow down much!

A handful of residents departed for a week in Texas in connection with a showing of Mandy and Ryan’s community documentary Within Reach at an arts festival in Austin. Katherine was excited to visit friends, and prior to departing, Jordan prepped and planted a string of garden plots around Sparky’s house, where he’s staying. We look forward to their safe return.

Kurt and Alline hosted a St. Patrick’s Day dinner at the Mercantile, complete with corned beef, potatoes, and a very tasty homemade cheesecake. They are perfecting all sorts of holiday meals and treats, and becoming ever more indispensable in the village’s social scene.

Alyssa and I got together last weekend for a date to make cheese, and ended up with two rounds of farmhouse cheddar. We made use of some supplies still remaining in our fridge from a cheese-making workshop at the Mercantile a bit over a year ago, and rapidly came up with the intentions both to start making cheese regularly, and to acquire a cheese press and other materials we’ll need. Now that we have a root cellar, I intend to devote a section of it to serve as a cheese cave. Yum.

I haven’t heard the tallies of syrup per hour worked from the annual cooperative maple tapping effort, but I do know that the advent of summery weather signaled and official end to the season recently. We send out our sweet thanks to neighbors Bob and Angela Neese and Dale and Christine Heaton for allowing us to tap the silver maple trees on their land– this year’s run was a sight better than last year’s, and we couldn’t get much sap without the generosity of our neighbors.

Lastly this week, I’m pleased to report that a handful of ultimate players inaugurated play on our new, regulation-size field after our Sunday meeting. With a bunch of stakes related to the installation of the new road sections now peppered about the old playing field, the new field north of town center welcomed us just in time with visions of countless games to come.

Now to get back out to the garden and prepare more beds! We hope you are making good use of the fantastic weather, and that we’ll see you here for a visit before long.

Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage is an intentional community and educational nonprofit in Rutledge, northeast Missouri, focused on sustainable living. We offer free tours to the public twice monthly from April-October. Our first tour of the year will be April 14 at 1pm. Meanwhile, for more information you can visit our website (see above), read our blog The March Hare at blog.dancingrabbit.org, or give us a call at (660) 883-5511.

Hello peepers! This is Sam. Yesterday afternoon my wonderfully thoughtful housemate must have built a fire to welcome me home from the website-building work party (more on that later) and when I got there it was so hot I had to open the windows to get to sleep comfortably. It was a welcome treat to snuggle and read with my son and hear the spring frogs singing to us from Cattail Pond. This week’s forecast looks great for playing outside, walking barefoot, sitting on the porch swing, and shooing the kids outside so I can get some work done in my home office.

Raising a bent for a new home. Many hands make light work.

Work parties are one of my favorite parts of community life. This past week we had a very short one to raise a bent for Sharon and Dennis’s timber-frame home-in-progress. It only takes a few minutes, provided the pulleys and other preparations are well made beforehand, and provided lots of people show up. It’s such a pleasure to be a part of a job done with our friends and neighbors that results in a visible, tangible accomplishment like a formerly horizontal bent now vertical, and a work site one big step closer to being a home. What better way is there to invest 15 minutes of my time?

We had another work party this week, this one more indoors, less visceral, and longer. We are getting close to the deadline for launch of our redesigned, largely rewritten, website. It’s been a long time coming, and I will be glad when it’s done. The Web Team has gotten help from community members to write, edit and proofread written content, submit and sort through pictures, and make suggestions about the look and layout of the site. At the work party, we got closer to being ready to launch with the help of the folks who showed up to pitch in and enjoy the company and music from afternoon into evening. We also ate snacks.

Alyson over at Red Earth Farms is going to pass her sourdough bread making knowledge (and starters) on to an apprentice so she can spend more time homesteading (and working on Dancing Rabbit’s capital campaign for the new common house). An apprentice has started training, so it looks like “Alyson bread” will become “Julie bread” or maybe “Julie’s Alyson bread”. It’s hard to say what we’ll call it, but I’m sure it will be delicious. There’s also another baker over at Red Earth. We got our first taste of “Chad bread” this week. Chad bakes in a wood-fired oven, and aims for a less expensive pan loaf for sandwiches. My son and I devoured half a loaf for breakfast. I hope Chad considers his trial run a success and keeps bringing us bread weekly; With deliveries every Wednesday and Sunday, we’ll be good in bread all week,. The economy in the tri-communities area keeps on growing and sustainability keeps becoming more accessible.

Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage is an intentional community of more than 50 people and growing. We practice ecologically sustainable living in Rutledge, Northeast Missouri. We offer free tours to the public from April-October. For more information, see our website at www.dancingrabbit.org, visit our blog The March Hare at blog.dancingrabbit.org, find us on FaceBook at www.facebook.com/DancingRabbitEcovillage, follow us on Twitter at twitter.com/dancingrabbit or give us a call at (660) 883-5511.

I have heard many cries in the distance this week, ranging from “Bent Raising” to “Ultimate Frisbee”. These warmer days have afforded an opportunity for not only more work, but play as well. After the responsibility of retreat (intense meetings for 2 weeks), it seemed that people wanted to subsequently rejoice in the benefits of living in community. Julie here for this week’s column.

The biggest event this week (and definitely the most fun in my humble opinion) was the grand opening of the Casa de Cultura. Bear has been working tirelessly on completing this beautiful structure, with an eye for aesthetics and fine detail. I was very impressed! Rachel is the dancer whose vision has been materialized in the form of this dance hall’s completion. Inside, the wall-length mirror doubled the perceived size of our community as we contra danced and cake-walked (think musical chairs with cakes as prizes). Some of the chair antics had people laughing so hard they were in tears. I had so much fun at the opening that I had to wonder at the power of community and sugar when combined. A spellbinding unification, that. We had a game of Charades, with Nani, who just gave birth last week, acting out the phrase “Homebirth, Naturally”, which is the name of the Midwifery company here at Dancing Rabbit. Her beautiful newborn daughter Abigail is such a perfect angel, and she blessed the evening with her radiant presence, and might have even enjoyed Tony and Nani’s rendition of Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead or Alive” on karaoke. To see all of the happy and smiling faces was cause for such jubilation for me, and I personally wouldn’t argue against a weekly grand opening.

The Silver Maple trees have slowed their sap flow for the time being, but we have our fingers crossed that we’ll have one last sugar run before they stop completely. Between Dancing Rabbit, and Sandhill Farm, we have collected about 850 gallons of sap. That equates to about 17 gallons of delicious maple syrup to divide amongst whoever wished to participate in the tapping, collecting, and boiling of the sap. This is something I’ve wanted to do for many years, but was unable to do before coming here to DR, so you can only imagine the overwhelming gratitude I have at this time. I admit that pouring the clear sap into the stainless steel boiler was actually fun for me, and I would do it all year long if nature permitted.

Joining the ranks are four more residents applying for membership just in the past 30 days. It’s exciting to witness progress, since our efforts to build the new Common House are going to support members as our numbers swell. With 11 new residents arriving in Spring to join the existing residents and members, we are looking forward to exciting growth to add to the plethora of skills and contagious enthusiasm already present here in the village.

Many of us have started some of our seeds with the mindset of warm sunny days that are scything a path to us as you read this. I love the approach of Spring, because it is an irresistible metaphor for renewal, growth, love, perseverance, and the passing of the torch to the next generation of life. If I had the privilege of a seasonal request, (premature though it may be) mine would be for us to delight in this epic chapter of the cycle of life, and to mark its passing with a prolonged bow and nod–but preferably a song and dance–to acknowledge it for the wonderment it truly is. There is a Spring in each of us, and I hope that you may find it full and alive, leaping wildly in the recesses of your heart, and unfettered within the rich soils of your garden.

Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage is an intentional community in Rutledge, northeast Missouri, practicing sustainable living among 50+ members. There’s lots to see, so start thinking about a spring tour now! We’ll start offering them again in mid-April. Meanwhile, for more information, please see our website (in the midst of a major rebuild) at www.dancingrabbit.org, visit our blog The March Hare atwww.blog.dancingrabbit.org, or give us a call at (660) 883-5511 .