Ted and daughter Aurelia bring home the harvest
Written by Ted Sterling
[Recently printed in Communities Magazine, issue #151, Intimacy]
Since first I met Dancing Rabbit founder Tony Sirna at the Communities Conference in Willits, CA in 1998, I have understood that the “village” part of ecovillage here was meant as more than a euphemism. Dancing Rabbit was intended to be more or less like the village of popular conception– small, rural, surrounded and supported by agriculture and practical arts, and made up of villagers whose lives would doubtless be intertwined in many ways.
When I subsequently arrived at Dancing Rabbit for an internship in July 2001, I found a small (at that time, members numbers perhaps 10, and the village hosted upwards of 20 interns over the warm season) group of people with a lot of commitment to a beautiful vision. It was not a village yet. It did feel intimate, in the ways that we all worked together and relied on each other to feed ourselves, survive in our tents, and share very little sheltered space while trying to build some of the first structures. We were pioneering. Intimacy was born out of necessity, though aided by common purpose.
