Ecovillage Heading South – in a good way!

I’m not hearing the high traveling skeins of migrating geese anymore.  They must be well past us now, in their journey to their wintering grounds.  It is amazing to hear their indistinct high-up honking, even through the clouds, and then to catch glimpses of them in ‘V’s so large, that there are smaller ‘v’s branching out from the bigger one.  Many connected small dots in a thinner atmosphere.

There are lower flying geese and swans too, but invariably they’re headed the wrong way.  Making quite a flap, but going north.  (This is not a scientific observation, but I swear it’s a consistent one.)

Honking has become part of the vernacular around here.  It started when one of us was complimenting another for good leadership.  “HONK” she emailed ...HONK, HONK!  ... with an accompanying explanation that geese flying in formation and following a leader, honk as they go, holding the group together while backing up the leader.

Now, quite frequently, I’m getting and sending email ‘honks’.  And I’ve painted HONK on the side of my wheelbarrow so I can barrow and honk, at any time, in any direction. 

Wild poultry are inspiring for an Ecovillage, I reckon.

From the internet; http://www.loc.gov/rr/scitech/mysteries/geese.html
Scientists have determined that the V-shaped formation that geese use when migrating serves two important purposes:
 First, it conserves their energy. Each bird flies slightly above the bird in front of him, resulting in a reduction of wind resistance. The birds take turns being in the front, falling back when they get tired. In this way, the geese can fly for a long time before they must stop for rest.
The second benefit to the V formation is that it is easy to keep track of every bird in the group. Fighter pilots often use this formation for the same reason.

There are a couple of ideas I like in there.

‘Taking turns being in front, falling back when tired’, is one.

 That’s what I call “dynamic leadership” I see that at work around here. And a good thing, too!  Creating an ecovillage is tiring. But there’s lots of honking around here on Clean-up Tuesdays organised by our carpenter...  and the barn is looking much more tidy and useable. 

When we take turns coming up with energy for initiatives, we can contribute our best, and then fall back later and allow another in our group to do the same. 

That strategy speaks to an imperative for each person to know where their own strengths are, and to offer only those.  If I fly in front, and not because I want to, but because I feel I should and that I’m afraid that if I don’t, no-one else will ... then I’m exhausting myself and not serving the group.  And I may be denying the strengths of others, too.

And those swans going north?  I’ve figured them out ... they’re Trumpeter Swans ...a considerable number of them winter in the Fraser Valley at Agassiz. (They were endangered, but their numbers are improving.)  I guess they do the Circle Farm Tour in a counterclockwise direction. http://circlefarmtour.com/index.php?page_id=13

The other idea that strikes me as fine, is that ‘it is easy to keep track of every bird in the group’.  This is another appropriate Ecovillage principle. And when Chuck Durrett comes in January to help us plan our village site plan, I’m going to be sure to contribute a lot around this one. Let’s plan our homes so the living room windows face each other and we can keep a close eye on our neighbours’ doings.

Just kidding! 

This is where Ecovillagers are different from geese, who have no sense of humour!

HONK!

Learning

I’ve made an error in writing in my latest Tale ...Three Seeds.  

In it, among other things,   I talked about how I was learning more about vegetable gardening from watching and listening to the gardeners around me, here in the Ecovillage.  (How wise and generous they all are!)  My Tales are my very personal observations.  But at the end of the last story...’Three Seeds’, I switched  to a ‘we’ in writing about how we would garden next year, instead of how “I’ will ... (avoiding so much soil disturbance with digging, contributing carbon to the atmosphere ...  etc) 

I’d like to take the ‘we’s back and substitute “I”s, please. I made a mistake. I apologise to my fellows.

I’m writing this, because of a reaction from a reader, who noted with concern, that he wouldn’t want to be in an Ecovillager and have to garden by consensus.

(And here I thought I was writing about cougars, and burning vs not-burning!)

At this Ecovillage, we may aim to make decisions for the group by consensus, but we don’t garden that way ...  at least I don't think we do.  Heaven forbid!

I couldn’t live here myself, if that were the case.  If I couldn’t make my own private nest in my house either,  if I couldn’t decline to lend my favourite digging fork, if I thought other villagers were peeking in my recycling bags to make sure I hadn’t put in Number 5-6 plastic or who would insist that I till or not till, burn or not burn, plant or not plant ground cover.

Consensus decision making in our village isn’t about that for me.  But it is about a whole lot of experiences that make this a truly remarkable, expanding, stretching, growing, hurting, and healing place to be.

As I learn more, would you like me to share  with you with more Tales?  They won’t be accurate or right.  You’ll have to figure them out.

CKNW Interview

Today, Michael was interviewed on CKNW by Anna Gebauer about the history and some of the latest developments at the Ecovillage. Listen here to the interview.

Three Seeds

I look out of my sunroom (soon-to-be art studio) windows southward, to Vedder Mountain.  There’s snow on dem thar hills.  If I were to stand on tiptoe, I’m sure I could reach up and touch it, but I don’t want to.

From my vantage place on the second floor, I look down and see my neighbour has rototilled a second patch of the Community Garden.  I’m glad to see his enthusiasm carrying on. 

We new residents have been dying to stake a claim in the garden so we can begin imagining what we’ll plant when  a) we have time b) it’s spring c) we’ve selected seeds from the catalogues.

I had already spread fall rye seed onto the first area he’d dug up.  I’ve not ever been a full-scale veggie grower before, but I have learned with other kinds of gardening, not to leave the soil naked and exposed.

After the fact, I asked our experienced Korean gardener what we should have done to get the soil ready for next year’s growing.  The soil is only this deep, he gestures with his hands, it needs protecting, not chewing up.  He tells me that if we’d burned the grass, instead of tilling,  we wouldn’t have disturbed the soil’s microbial system so much, and we’ve have added needed ‘charcoal’ as well. 

But not every farmer here agrees with him.  Another, says that burning contributes more carbon dioxide to the over-burdened atmosphere.  And someone else shakes her head and says the ground was much too wet for tilling.

Ah, well! We do our best with what we have at hand.

I’m thinking that opinions have always varied a lot around growing techniques.  Some gardeners use only native species,  plant according to the phases of the moon,  the Farmer’s Almanac, or how their Dad used to do it.  Others use a soil thermometer, intuition, or science.  It seems to me, many methods can have success. 

The Korean gardener looks at the second lot of cover-crop seeds I’ve spread ... fall rye, winter wheat and peas.  ‘All for the birds, this late in the year’, he laughs.  There is an old tradition, he tells me.  Plant three seeds in each hole ... one for the soil, one for the birds, one for you. 

After he’s gone, I look closely at the ground in the garden.  The birds haven’t taken more than their share of the scattered seeds (yet).  Even though we’ve had some frost and some sleety rain, the peas as well as the grains are germinating. 

Can you imagine how a seed wants to grow when it’s so cold? 

Nature’s imperative.

We think we know, and we don’t. It’s humbling. 

Humbling, like knowing a cougar has been spotted behind the gas station today.  And he came this way, through the park next-door and into our back field. There might even have been two, in the far pasture. And if they had cared to, they could have taken one of our children with them.  But they didn’t.

How can a cougar come here like that, so brazenly, when all this is ours, and he doesn’t belong?

One of our well-read villagers gives me a fragment of Systems Theory to hold for a moment.  Big organisations are like discreet organisms, they have self–protective mechanisms for their own survival, she reports. Like the Big Banks in a financial crisis.  Like companies that sell us on a ‘green solution’ of less packaging, but then use advertising to impel us to buy more products, more frequently.

Like Nature, who lets us garden and live in villages, but sends a cougar through on a whim, on the same day the peas are sprouting in cold earth.

So, in the spring, we won’t till when the soil is wet.  We’ll burn the grass to add potash.  And mulch and deepen the soil so our digging doesn’t disturb the micro-systems. We’ll save on carbon in the atmosphere by not driving to the store to buy vegetables.

We’ll laugh when the birds eat our seeds and feel blessed when a cougar passes through our garden, unnoticed. 

Fall in Leaves

We've been enjoying Ann's village tales this fall: here is one from November 8, 2009.  May we enjoy reading many more of her village tales on our Community Street South blog!

My house is nearing completion and it seems that the smallest things can cause the most trouble. Like a thingey adaptor attachment for the end of the track lighting in the living room. It’s the one I don’t have, that the electrician needs immediately, from the store that’s closed indefinitely for renovations. I’ve been into town (Chilliwack), back and forth now, four separate times in search of the thingey device and other necessary whingummies. As I’m a creature of habit, I take the same road each time ... I’m in a hurry and I’m imagining it’s the shortest route.


I travel along the skirt edge of Vedder Mountain, with farms and houses on one side and forested slopes on the other. I still can’t get over how the flat land on which the road lies, angles up sharply on the outside of the right-hand ditch and instantly becomes Mountain. I know that eons ago, the (mighty) Fraser was a torrent in a deep gully between two mountain ranges and has silted up year after year so that we, and all the farms in valley, are ‘floating’ upwards on the rising soil level. It’s still an astounding phenomenon, even when I understand it.

And the colours that the trees turn each year, are no less astounding for happening the same way, every year. The section of road between Yarrow and the Chilliwack River bridge is a favourite of mine ... with small, neat farms, modest but charming homesteads and paddocks with horses and/or ducks.

The mountain side is mostly big-leaf maple, cedar, fir, and hemlock with undergrowth of snowberry, oregon grape and ferns. The farm gardens on the other side of the road have an abundance of all sorts of species of trees and shrubs with more decorative leaves and forms and in many more hues. (We humans like variety, and the unusual, don’t we?)

I notice an escapee from civilized cultivation has hopped over the road and into freedom ... hops! ... it’s shinnying the telephone poles on the wild side. The Fraser Valley used to have many acres of hops in tidy rows. What happened? Do we drink less beer now?

(I don’t think so) Where do they grow hops now? China?

This time of year has always felt more like a brand new beginning, than January 1st. In long past years, it used to feel that way because I was either going to off to a fresh experience of school myself, or sending my offspring.

Now I feel the freshness of the season in a different way ... from the energy emanating from the extravagance of colour in the trees around me ... from the forest getting ready for winter

The colours change in first subtle ways, allowing a mellowing of their green and then they let loose with splendid colours. Each kind of bush, shrub and tree reveals its separate character by its different shades. Nature doesn’t hold back; she’s showy, joyous and exuberant.

I have always known I would enjoy having a handmade house, but I never imagined just how I would have it. And I’ve always dreamed of living in community, but didn’t know how that would come, either. And now, I’m finding a new beginning, in my new house, in a new village in the same way as a forest in fall. In joyous, mature, living colour.

And there are other new beginnings all around me ... construction zones are becoming homes, weedy fields tilled into rectangles and strangers turning into friends. I look out my window at night and see lighted windows where there were none only weeks ago. The routes through the farm are been trod by many feet into pathways.

Our village’s new beginning is like mine. Not freshly new-born, but from the energy of experience, change, consolidation and maturity. Long worked for, long yearned for.

Makes me want to paint the village red.

A Sign of the ...

We’ve had a storm front moving through and up the Fraser Valley.... it’s the Pineapple Express, bringing unexpectedly warm air, but with a wicked velocity that whips our dream-Hawaiian smiles off our faces, before we even have them. And last night, in the howling gale, the forces that be, neatly excised our Yarrow Ecovillage sign from its frame. 

And it’s totally vanished.  I’m guessing it’s stuck in a fir tree halfway up Majuba Hill.  Or ...   it could be on the freeway, battling rush-hour traffic.

Lois and I had been deliberate in our building methods when we put the sign up a month or so back.  We used a shoe-maker’s hammer and tacks to put the thing up (ie. We ‘cobbled’ it together).... only intending it to be temporary, meaning it to give us a sense of how big, within which sight-lines, how high, and what style a permanent sign should be.

“The ‘temporary’ becomes the ‘permanent’ in a quick snooze, doesn’t it?” we mused.  Let’s do a really bad job, we said, so that we can still have a nice, permanent, a better sign in the foreseeable future. 

I had been hoping that the terrible construction (I refused to use a level, for example, even though I have one)   would grate on the nerves of the really good carpenters who frequent our premises, and then inspire them.   No such luck, but then, a good wind!

I’ve been working up a little heat recently ... and it isn’t only from raking leaves ... and there are a lot of leaves!   As I’m not yet in my house, and there’s been delay after delay, (through no-one’s fault, I hasten to add ... an ecovillage is a complicated beast, let’s face it!) I’m getting a little warm under the collar.  I can see a little blush of heat on other people’s faces too.

It’s not surprising.  We have a lot on our plates. 

But what I notice in myself and others, too, are the stories we tell about ourselves.  About how YES is confused and disorganized ... has made a series of mistakes...has meetings that go around in unproductive circles ...  is bad at conflict resolution or holding individuals to account ... and isn’t good at being a landlord.  (I’m only hitting the highlights, aren’t I?  There’s a lot more, isn’t here?  But you get my drift.)

Of course, we make mistakes.  And have done many things badly. 

Of course.   

Get over it.

We’re humans, doing our best.  I don’t want us to believe that stories are the ‘truth’ about us.

There are a great many things we do well. The greatest, in my view, is that we care for one another. 

  I’m taking the loss of the sign as a Sign.

Let the wind blow away those tired old stories we tell.  Let’s construct a bright, new, permanent sign with new stories attached. 

And I’m not saying that we forget the past.  I saying we make our stories tell of what we have learned from the past.  And we tell stories of the future that are about what we are building.  Our Shared Dream.   

The festive holidays are coming soon ... let’s fill them with glowing lights and yummy food and special treats and invite our friends, new and old, to join us.  We have many accomplishments this year.  Let’s collect those stories and share them, and then let’s celebrate our being together.

Ah! women,

Amen