I have not fallen off the face of the planet!
I'm sorry to my readers for the long break! Life has been chaotic to varying degrees for the past month. Its busyness shows no signs of letting up, but it does at least mostly seem to be stabilizing.
Lost Valley's summer Ecovillage and Permaculture Certificate Program (EPCP) started two weeks ago. There are twenty-one students here for it--mostly college-aged, though several are well outside of that range. Along with them have come a new wave of interns. So Lost Valley feels a lot different than it did a month ago! Plus, now is "conference season," so for shorter bursts there are even more people around. Today was the last day of True Colors, a week-long workshop for about forty teenagers and ten adults. Recently there have also been a couple of other conferences, including one for a small men's group and one for a high school culinary program, and there's been a smattering of concerts and other events. I gather that this will go on for several more months! Phew . . . The people who I suspect will be worn out most by the end are the kitchen staff (everyone contributes to cooking and cleaning during a week, but managing all of that, especially during conferences, is a tough job) and the Events Coordinator.
EPCP has been great so far. The course is eight weeks long. It covers much of the same material that the permaculture design course I took covers, plus a lot more--mostly, much more hands-on, more detail on certain subjects, and a lot of material on ecovillages that shorter permaculture courses don't really go into at all. There's a special Heart of Now workshop (that same personal growth workshop that I did) that's part of EPCP--which will happen at the end of this coming week.
There's another EPCP intern for the summer, Scott. What he and I do is support the students and instructors in a variety of ways, and act as liaisons between the course and the community. We facilitate certain kinds of communication, make sure that students are integrated into community upkeep (i.e. cooking, cleaning, doing other chores), etc. We also help facilitate hands-on activities and parts of other class sessions, and we participate in some other parts of the program. Scott is just here for the summer, but since I'm here for longer, I also have longer-term projects and am more involved with administrative aspects of the program. I'm learning a lot! Mostly enjoying it all a lot too.
I've been involved with two hands-on sessions so far. The first one was building a gabion basket--basically, a big raised bed of stones, smaller gravel, and compost--in the creek, which helps take some of the silt out of the water, and changes the course of the river a little bit to add more surface area for habitat for creek life. We planted a dogwood on top of the bed so that when the wire of the basket eventually rusts away, there will still be something to hold all the rocks in place. I also participated in a compost-building hands-on. Twenty-six people can gather a lot of material for a compost pile in half an hour!
The students are neat. Most of them are fairly mellow, but the group also has a great deal of energy and excitement around what they're learning and around bringing it out into the world. And there are some real characters! A few of them helped plan and carry out the community's Solstice celebration last weekend, and they made parts of it wonderfully theatrical. I can't believe some of the freestyle poetry/rap I hear sometimes, and there are some terrific musicians and dancers too. I think that three of the students play the banjo!
Some other recent or upcoming highlights/tidbits:
Lost Valley's summer Ecovillage and Permaculture Certificate Program (EPCP) started two weeks ago. There are twenty-one students here for it--mostly college-aged, though several are well outside of that range. Along with them have come a new wave of interns. So Lost Valley feels a lot different than it did a month ago! Plus, now is "conference season," so for shorter bursts there are even more people around. Today was the last day of True Colors, a week-long workshop for about forty teenagers and ten adults. Recently there have also been a couple of other conferences, including one for a small men's group and one for a high school culinary program, and there's been a smattering of concerts and other events. I gather that this will go on for several more months! Phew . . . The people who I suspect will be worn out most by the end are the kitchen staff (everyone contributes to cooking and cleaning during a week, but managing all of that, especially during conferences, is a tough job) and the Events Coordinator.
EPCP has been great so far. The course is eight weeks long. It covers much of the same material that the permaculture design course I took covers, plus a lot more--mostly, much more hands-on, more detail on certain subjects, and a lot of material on ecovillages that shorter permaculture courses don't really go into at all. There's a special Heart of Now workshop (that same personal growth workshop that I did) that's part of EPCP--which will happen at the end of this coming week.
There's another EPCP intern for the summer, Scott. What he and I do is support the students and instructors in a variety of ways, and act as liaisons between the course and the community. We facilitate certain kinds of communication, make sure that students are integrated into community upkeep (i.e. cooking, cleaning, doing other chores), etc. We also help facilitate hands-on activities and parts of other class sessions, and we participate in some other parts of the program. Scott is just here for the summer, but since I'm here for longer, I also have longer-term projects and am more involved with administrative aspects of the program. I'm learning a lot! Mostly enjoying it all a lot too.
I've been involved with two hands-on sessions so far. The first one was building a gabion basket--basically, a big raised bed of stones, smaller gravel, and compost--in the creek, which helps take some of the silt out of the water, and changes the course of the river a little bit to add more surface area for habitat for creek life. We planted a dogwood on top of the bed so that when the wire of the basket eventually rusts away, there will still be something to hold all the rocks in place. I also participated in a compost-building hands-on. Twenty-six people can gather a lot of material for a compost pile in half an hour!
The students are neat. Most of them are fairly mellow, but the group also has a great deal of energy and excitement around what they're learning and around bringing it out into the world. And there are some real characters! A few of them helped plan and carry out the community's Solstice celebration last weekend, and they made parts of it wonderfully theatrical. I can't believe some of the freestyle poetry/rap I hear sometimes, and there are some terrific musicians and dancers too. I think that three of the students play the banjo!
Some other recent or upcoming highlights/tidbits:
- My mom visited me the weekend before EPCP started. I regretted how busy I was with preparing for the course, but we had a great time. It was fun showing her my life right now!
- I had the unique honor of being asked to shave someone's head--followed by my first experience doing that!
- The Solstice celebration was really neat. The energy of the ritual felt a little strange to me--many people who came had never been to a ritual before (EPCP students) and were quiet. I learned later that many of those same people had found it to be a deeply moving experience, though. That evening we had a fire in the fire pit in the meadow, with drumming, dancing, singing, and other creative merry-making. It was one of the highest-energy, most freely-flowing drumming circles I've ever been to, and doing it on a clear, warm evening that turned into a starry night seemed to me to be a perfect way to celebrate the Solstice--a way that I can imagine ancestors having celebrated it all over the world.
- We've had one women's new moon circle so far and will have another this week. I went to the first one (indeed, took part in planning it) because I liked the idea of honoring what it means to be a woman and the connection between the cycles of the moon and of women. All of that did feel good in the circle, but what I really loved was spending some special, set-aside time with the other women of Lost Valley--most of the people who have been so important to me here.
- My short permaculture class with Heiko Koester ended. I enjoyed it a lot. The last session was on fruit trees. In the first two sessions, almost all of the material was new to me, and there was far more information than I could take in. In contrast, in the fruit trees session I already knew or had at least been exposed to probably half of the material, because of the reading I've done on my own inspired by my interest in fruit trees. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the vastness of the world of plants, because that world speaks in languages I'd like to learn but know very little of so far. It was exciting to notice that there's one tiny corner of that world (a significant one in permaculture) where I already have a decent vocabulary! I feel like fruit trees might be a big "in" for me into the plant world. I just get so excited thinking about fruit trees!
- When I first got to Lost Valley, Kerry, a garden intern, told me that here you have to get used to falling in love with people all the time, then letting them go. She's right . . . some people who have been really important to me have already left--including Kerry, though she'll return in October. My heart clenches up a little thinking about the looming departures of a couple of other dear friends. Thank goodness that wonderful new people are always arriving . . . Being here provides ongoing exercises in being present and then moving on to be present in the next moment!