Monthly Archives: April 2011

Dissolution and Renewal

As the weather has warmed up my mind has been reeling with the physical tasks ahead of me.  How exactly am I going to build that cistern?  What kind of floor should go in the summer cabins? And on and on.  I can figure that stuff out and I’ll get it done, but the real question is how do you build a community?

There aren’t exactly manuals for what I’ve been attempting.  There are books that talk about successful communities, and some ideas can be drawn from them but every situation is different and every person is different.

So when the community meetings began to get serious and real or imagined divides began to show themselves I was not prepared for it like I should have been, nor did I have the emotional energy or time to deal with it.  In hindsight, it would seem that this was inevitable.  The group I’d assembled knew almost nothing about each other except that they shared a similar vision.  No one in the group other than Jessica was planning on moving out for at least a couple years, yet we were deciding policies and rules to live by before we’d decided if we even wanted to live together.

After giving it a lot of thought and discussing it with people I decided to call off the community meetings and simply aim for having a sustainable homestead.  If some day a good friend is in the right place and wants to move out I’ll consider inviting them and a community may happen organically like that, but until then I just need to focus on getting my own life sorted out.  Right now I need running water, not a pet policy.

I called everyone who had been attending the community meetings about a week ago after I made the decision to discontinue the ecovillage and I was pleasantly surprised at how understanding everyone was. I can’t tell you how much less stressed I’ve felt since then.  I’ve really been enjoying working in the garden, getting a tan,  and playing with Kita, the new puppy Jessica and I got.  I feel like I’m on the right track and have learned some important lessons.

Also, I feel that I should mention that the new puppy and the pet policy discussion were only passingly related.  The main issues and disputes were over entirely different things.  I mean just look at that face. 🙂