end of summer update
The following is a guest post by my friend Moses
Hello friends,
It’s been a very busy spring and summer here at the Minnesota Ecovillage Project. Since acquiring our parcel of Land in March, we’ve felt the urgency of preparing to spend winter here. When we’re not stuck in the mud we’ve often been in a mad dash to get land cleared, trails cut, structures built, and countless other projects as we establish a foothold for our burgeoning Community. Our diligence in important tasks such as documenting and sharing our progress has been sporadic at best as we grappled with the existential fear of not being ready for the inevitable cold and snow. As temperatures dip and the earliest leaves begin to turn bright red, we now feel secure in our progress and ready to broadcast ourselves again.
Before I update you on this progress, I’d like to invite you to come visit us! We are ready to host guests for day trips and overnight camping. Fill out this form if you’re interested, and we’d love to see you up here!
Picking up from Micah’s summer solstice update, our outdoor kitchen/event space has grown into a state of functional incompletion. It now houses our kitchen, pantry, dining table, and outdoor sofa. The deck is the energetic hub of the Village, holding us from early morning coffee to late night movies. Hammocks and swings go up and down throughout the day, and you never know when someone (often Micah) will sit down and start playing the piano we acquired for free on a recent journey to the Cities. The wind blowing through the nearby Aspens provides a constant, soothing backdrop to our gatherings. Over the last fortnight this space has hosted morning yoga and sound bath, crafting groups, somatic healing with Lisa, board games, movie nights, planning meetings, a birthday party, a dance party, and a screening of our friend Nathaniel’s new YouTube puppet show. Even now we marvel at what we’ve built; reflecting on the effort, cooperation, and tenacity it’s taken to raise such a grand structure up out of the early summer mud.
Every evening we bring our scattered members and guests together by ringing the dinner bell. After serving ourselves we sing a song of gratitude and take turns speaking on a chosen prompt. One night we may name something a friend did that we are grateful for, the next we could talk about a fear we are working to overcome. Our dinner guests often use this time as a way to learn about our experiences, asking us our favorite and least favorite things about living here, or what’s surprised us since being up here. Baby Wonder insistently reminds us to “sing!” and “talk!” if we take too long to settle into our evening routine. Rebekah’s meals are always delicious, the view is superb, and the company can’t be beat. Our neighbor Dylan dines with us whenever he’s in town, and we can convince our neighbor Terry to stick around for dinner by throwing burgers or brats on the grill.
This is our most structured playground but it’s far from the only one. The splash of human bodies entering our swimming pond can be heard from early morning to well past sundown. The hottest days are reliably met with the sound of kids playing in the pond throughout the day, and Wonder is equally joyful swimming with her floaties on or shoveling sand on the beach. Hesitant villagers are often reminded that “nobody has ever regretted a pond dip”, a deeply persuasive argument because it rings true. The pond is one of the best places to watch clouds from, and retains cold pockets no matter how warm it gets. The beach has a delightfully relaxing hot tub on one side and a bonfire pit on the other, making it a popular spot for both solo decompression and our most boisterous gatherings.
We also love to gather and play in the Lower Tamarack River, which runs through the southwest corner of the Land. I’ll leave Micah’s invitation here as enticement.
As the summer wore on, two things became clear: we needed an indoor common space for winter, and we didn’t have the capacity for a second large-scale construction project before it came. As possibilities for this space were tossed around and discarded, Ellen became convinced we could rescue and inhabit a building scheduled for demolition, and began hunting for one with dogged determination. Free farmhouses, mobile homes, and other modular structures pop up on Marketplace with shocking regularity for a reason: old buildings are expensive to demolish and even more expensive to move. Height and distance limitations eliminated many of our most promising leads, and each possible solution requires its own round of calls to area building movers to see who has the capability and willingness to move this particular building to our neck of the woods. As frustration and uncertainty mounted, another lead was followed, and this one seemed promising–a modular building that housed a church youth group in the far northern reaches of the Twin Cities metro area. Fortunately, several movers said they’d be up to the task, and we were able to find one who took the work of preparing a site for the building off of our plate. I’m writing this update from the concrete pad that our common house will come to rest on later this week!! Making the space suited to our uses is a mammoth task, but it is undertaken with the knowledge that we now have a warm, dry space to gather through the winter months.
Big changes are coming to the village in the coming weeks–we have infrastructure in place for a well and grid electricity, and soon after the common house is delivered we will have outside electricity and running water from right under our feet. These are positive, exciting developments; it also marks the end of an era for us. Raising a village out of the mud with friends old and new has made for the best summer ever. Living without the amenities of modern society has been difficult at times but also very illuminating: the ingredients we truly need to thrive are: food, water, shelter; friends, nature; work, rest, and play. We thank you for your interest and continued support, we hope to see you up here with us soon.
Love from the Village,
Moses
