Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: community, fire recovery, Glass Fire, home, wildfire
One year after the fire
This morning dawned at Monan’s Rill with a few pink clouds in a clear blue sky. As the sun rose, drops of yesterday’s rain still dripped from oak leaves, and clung to the tips of the new green grass that has germinated in the past few days.
It has been one year since the Glass Fire burned through Monan’s Rill with all its fiery force on the morning of September 28, 2020, transforming the land, the community, and all of our lives.
The days surrounding that hot, windy firestorm felt nothing like the pleasant post-rain sunshine and cool autumn breeze that surrounds us today, but the fire is still ever-present around us. The smell of burned wood meets our noses as the sun warms the rain-moistened char of downed limbs and stumps that ignited a year ago, smoldered for days, and continue to litter the ground.
Capacious empty holes yawn where homes once held generations of community members in all the beautiful messiness of their lives. Acres of formerly dense forest have been reduced to swaths of jagged stumps as our logger cuts down Douglas fir trees killed by the fire and hauls them to the mill to be transformed into lumber.
Yet just beyond the salvage logging area, native plants like Yerba Santa, roughleaf aster, and velvety goldenrod are thriving, their seeds, foliage, and blooms brought to life by the rejuvenating force of the fire.
And close to the land’s highest point near Diamond Mountain stands a vibrant living testament to what is possible with caring and appropriate land stewardship: the 6 acres that we burned in a prescribed fire in 2019 stayed healthy and untouched in the wildfire of 2020. The trees, ferns, and native grasses in that area continue to thrive while the heavily-torched, browned and blackened surrounding areas have barely begun to recover.
As all of us who are part of Monan’s Rill reflect on the fire and all that has transpired in the past year, our feelings and experiences are complex and paradoxical. We feel grief and gratitude, anger and sadness, turmoil and peace. We mourn all that can never be replaced, appreciate the ways that we continue to be held by the land and community, and embrace the openings for emergence and transformation that the fire has created.
Though there is so much more experienced and felt than can ever be documented, a few of us offer these words and images to mark this important anniversary:
One year ago today we woke up for the last time in our home. Our homes.
If I had ever replaced my candles I would light one!
Life continues to be grief-stricken, awkward, blessed, tiring, fragmented, and sweet. All of that.
I’m thinking tenderly of the community of people we held dear, who made up our lives and our sense of possibility – those who are by our sides trying to rebuild and those who have moved on. Trying to read the message underneath this sense of painful but also understandable scattering.
Giving thanks to all the helpers and givers and mentors and guides and companions I’ve found over this past year. I don’t see many in person! But I know you are there.
And the deer and the squirrels and the steller’s jays and the acorn woodpeckers and the oaks and the manzanita and the wild grasses are there. Giving thanks to the mountain.
– Amy
A year ago tonight, we had two of three cars
“Go-bags Loaded” and we
Believed our most “precious items”
safely packed, just in case
A year ago, tonight we
Watched the winds and fire cameras on our devices
And began considering the real possibility
That the fire in the Napa Valley might come
Our way….
A year ago, we were “whole”
22 adults living or about to be living in all our homes,
We were on the cusp of agreeing to a new financial structure
And it appeared that we had prepared our homes
So that they could be defended against a fire…
A year ago we had no idea what was coming our way
How each of our lives would be forever changed
Of what was lost that mattered
And what was lost that didn’t mean a thing
A year year later
We are oh so much smarter and wiser,
Oh so much more appreciative of what we had
And so very much reduced in numbers
And yet, something magical has remained
That out of the ashes of what was
Are very real “life nuggets” that remain
And a bond….even between those that left
That no fire could destroy
A year later, the land remains
Scarred but healing
The wildlife is returning
The forests will regenerate
Not as quickly as the grasses did.
But this time…we will assist and take
The wisdom that was seared into us…
And share what we’re learning
For future generations in this watershed
How it can be done
With love, sweat, and yes…tears.
– Ken
Most of all I miss the beautiful Tracy Yurt, built with love. A wonderful space to have lived in. Such a calming home on the land I call home, Monan’s Rill.
– Sue
The biggest impact to me was the loss of six people all within a few months of each other. We already knew they were all going to be moving on sometime in the next few years, but having that loss all at the same time on top of the loss of trees, house, and all possessions was a lot. The spirit of the community remained and I felt blessed for the buildings that did not burn because once I knew what had survived I felt pretty certain that the community would survive. I have always believed that the land would call the people together who were meant to be here and I continue to believe that. Although the structure of it changed, I did not lose my home.
— Linda
Today marks the 1 year anniversary of the glass fire. I don’t know how to write about this past year. It is clear that I am still very much in the middle of a story that I don’t really know how to tell. That has always been the purpose of all the photo documentation— it’s the closest to a story that I can share. I took this photo tonight of a volunteer sunflower growing in the footprint of the barn, specifically where the milking room was. And I guess this year has been full of finding beauty, life and hope in the most unexpected, impacted places.This flower still made its way to life after the big equipment came and scooped everything away. Wendell Berry wrote, “There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.” This is a sacred place. This is a place of heartache, of healing, of home. What is clear to me about the story I am in is that the setting is here, on this land. The characters and plot will develop and unravel and change and I will lose my place, reread the same line over and over again, get paper cuts, leave water marks and break in the spine….but the Where is the part of the story that I understand. I feel so lucky to have even one true part revealed.
— e
Throughout my adult life I’ve always tried to remember, appreciate and understand how lucky I have been in this life. Since the fire that appreciation and understanding has only rooted itself more firmly into my existence. I’m thankful and honored to be such a fortunate human being.
— Bill
At the beginning of this anniversary day, several of us gathered on Zoom in the darkness before dawn to sit in silence, together and alone, guided by Amy with a koan and a poem:
____
After the great fire in 1374 at the Engaku-ji Temple, scholars came to see what had happened to the great library. The teacher, standing amidst the ashes and rubble, said that nothing had been destroyed. “What are you talking about?” the scholars and students asked. He held up his hand and said,
“The covers were burned but you can still hold the teachings in your hands.”
____
“The Singing Bowl”
by Malcolm Guite
Begin the song exactly where you are.
Remain within the world of which you’re made.
Call nothing common in the earth or air.
Accept it all and let it be for good.
Start with the very breath you breathe in now.
This moment’s pulse, this rhythm in your blood.
And listen to it, ringing soft and low.
Stay with the music, words will come in time.
Slow down your breathing. Keep it deep and slow.
Become an open singing bowl, whose chime
is richness rising out of emptiness.
And timelessness resounding into time.
And when the heart is full of quietness
Begin the song exactly where you are.
____
We are all so grateful for everyone who has supported and accompanied us on the journey of this past year, and we look forward to continuing to walk with you as we rebuild and reimagine our relationships to each other and the land and the future of this community.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: community, fire recovery, Glass Fire, home, intentional community, renewal, wildfire
Goodbye to the Structures of Our Lives
Just two weeks ago, seven months after the Glass Fire, excavators finally arrived at the Rill to clear away our burn debris – the remains of our homes, barn, community toy shed, wood sheds, cars, well, hot tub, greenhouse, garden shed, play structures… Our memories. Our lives the way they were. So often social media leans towards the light, the bright and shiny and resilient. So over these two weeks, to honor the grieving process, Amy posted just a photo or two or three per day of our beloved burned structures on our Instagram page, with small passages of gratitude and memory (with help from Thea and e), to say goodbye. To make room for and honor the shadow that we know is there, so we can move wholeheartedly forward with rebuilding and re-visioning the Rill.
Now we are posting them here. The goodbye passages have been edited and altered and extended at times from their social media incarnation, because of the collective nature that the project became. Other people’s words and memories are in some places woven in.
Thank you for being on this journey of shadow and light, with us.
Garden House. Thank you for sheltering us. Thank you for the beauty, the polished wood and broad panes of glass, for the late-night fire watches in the downstairs office, the happy hours amidst cascades of flowers, the parrot who once regaled us naughty cries, and for the garden – a masterpiece created over time. Goodbye.
Patio House and Ridge House. Thank you for sheltering us. Thank you for standing watch over the rill and the valley, for being at the end of the Daffodil Path. Thank you Ridge House, the first of all the houses at Monan’s Rill. For the massive stone chimney built by group effort, your whimsical art, your purple walls and the massive Mother Tree that stood outside your wall of windows and then didn’t. Thank you Patio House for housing so many families and growing better over the years, with gorgeous decks, your shady patio and many entrances. Goodbye.
Hill House and Studio. Thank you for sheltering us. Thank you for being a sweet spot way up on the hill. For your green roof, cool downstairs, for the root cellar, and the broad deck like a wonderland, under the Dragon Tree. Thank you for the sweet sanctuary of your Studio. Goodbye.
Oak Corner. Thank you for sheltering us. Thank you for your resilience, for holding so many families over the years, for allowing so much laughter and life to roll through your halls. Thank you for morning coffee on your lovely expansive deck, sunlight piercing the fog. That late afternoon iced tea brewed on your deck, enjoyed while the sun was setting, was divine too. Good neighbors rattling your screen door, delivering the best eggs. Half-buried matchbox cars, tucked in your foundation, memories of all the kids that played under your porch. Goodbye.
Barn. Thank you for sheltering our beloved animals. Thank you for calling us to the steady rhythm of daily chores, where we often overlapped into impromptu conversations. Thank you for storing a cider press we could drag out in the autumn. Thank you for your heavy sliding door, your hay dust in the morning light, and for holding our bursting, aching hearts as we learned lessons of life and death. Goodbye.
The Longhouse (West Wing, Long House, Pooh Corner). Thank you for sheltering us. Thank you for your innovation, versatility, your devotion to community, your willingness to change. Thank you for the long sinuous stretch of yourself, your holdfast nature, your attention to the raucous red-winged blackbirds, the stately grebes, and the occasional heron on the pond. Thank you for the cool air that flowed through and around you at night, from the forest to the pond, like a quiet caressThank you for your hospitality – warm muffins and sparkling holiday trees and good books and a place to run and ask when we needed something at the Hub. Goodbye.
Coyote House. Thank you for sheltering us. Thank you for your solidity, up there at the top of the hill, watching the edge of the forest. For the ample carport, which stored so many people’s camping gear and tools and bikes. Thank you for the brilliant blue tiles, the rock wall at your base, the roomy closets, the claw foot tub, the dreamy sleeping porch under the starlit sky. Goodbye.
Manzanita House. Thank you for sheltering us. Thank you for being our cabin in the woods, our light-filled refuge, our original hub. Thank you for the welcoming front stoop. Thank you for the tall windows that allowed us to track the moon, and therefore our place in this world. Thank you for your roomy kitchen, and the loft that became a nest for growing children. Thank you for being so close to the road, so neighbors could wave and smile and easily stop by. Thank you for your tall ceilings echoing our laughter, tears, and merry shouts. Thank you for your expansive deck inviting us to play in the forest. Thank you for the crackling of deer hoof on live oak leaves, and for the birdsong. Goodbye.
The Yurt. Thank you for sheltering us. Thank you for being our most recent, and most astonishing, house. Thank you for the craft. For your circular embrace. For the many kinds of wood you held, bringing the forest inside. Thank you for having an ideal layout for games of tag with a toddler, for the built-in bookshelves and built-in bed Thank you for your broad dome of light, for your attention to detail, and for being a joyful, companionable gateway to the garden. Goodbye.
Garden sheds and greenhouse. Thank you for nurturing thousands of seedlings that became food for our community and flowers to delight our hearts. Thank you for storing the seeds and tools and equipment and infinite varieties of irrigation supplies that oscillated between chaos and order and chaos again. Thank you for anchoring garden committee meetings and Monday night barbecues and workdays and blind wine tastings and all the in-between conversations around your long wooden table with its rounded end, hosting laugher and tears and heated debates and hugs. Goodbye.
All the Other Assorted Structures of Our Lives: chairs, fences, cars, woodsheds, hot tub, well, toy shed, play structures (including the hollow tree at the bend that was an ancient, friendly playhouse), the Caboose (first a darkroom, later a writing/dreaming sanctuary), the Poultry Palace, the Round Table under the grand garden oak…. The debris cleanup contractors did not know what to do with you when they arrived. What are these odds and ends of people’s lives that don’t obey the rules of being tidily next to private houses? What is this place? “It’s community,” you whispered, and they shook their heads and we smiled. Thank you, Caboose and table and coop and sheds and playhouse with the poppies stenciled on your side and all the rest, for evolving alongside and amidst us, following your own logic (a logic held in stories), for meeting so many needs, for being our companions. Goodbye.
Don’t tell us
how to love, don’t tell us
how to grieve, or what
to grieve for, or how loss
shouldn’t sit down like a gray
bundle of dust in the deepest
pockets of our energy, don’t laugh at our belief
that money isn’t
everything, don’t tell us
how to behave in
anger, in longing, in loss, in home-
sickness, don’t tell us,
dear friends.
——
Goodbye, house.
Goodbye, sweet and beautiful house,
we shouted, and it shouted back,
goodbye to you, and lifted itself
down from the town, and set off
like a packet of clouds across
the harbor’s sandy ring,
the tossing bell, the untowned point—and turned
lightly, wordlessly,
into the keep of the wind
where it floats still—
where it plunges and rises still
on the black and dreamy sea.
From Mary Oliver, “On Losing a House,” in Michigan Quarterly Review, August 2017
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: bioblitz, biodiversity, community, fire recovery, Glass Fire, intentional community, wildfire
Spring at the Rill has been lively! We’ve been able to watch the lush recovery of our land in real time. Birdlife, fungi, lizards and snakes, jackrabbits, new fawns, oak shoots, stump-sprouting toyon and madrone, honeybees (finally), and the flowers. The flowers! If you have been following us on Instagram you have seen some of the flowers. We were told they would come and we were not let down.
In charcoal-rich places where we reseeded, we have also welcomed a lush carpet of native grass, with small dabs of lupine and poppy. We will seed more before the rains next fall, after our salvage logging is done. We are removing burned firs on the southern slope of our ridge, in order to restore an oak savannah ecosystem. (Many thanks to Pepperwood Preserve for treading this tender ground before us – it hurts to see any tress come down, even when we know there is a larger reason.)
We have also been growing ourselves as human beings through this time. We held a small Easter gathering, to celebrate community. We are working with Kate Sassoon, a community facilitator rich in experiences with different kinds of cooperative groups, to reground in consensus decision-making for the long rebuilding road ahead. And we also have started planning and visioning our rebuild with the help of the amazing Robin Stephani of 8th Wave, a local architecture firm devoted to climate- and fire-resilient, affordable Sonoma County housing.
This coming Saturday, May 1st, we are celebrating spring in the way we know best – by connecting with the land and each other. We are hosting a Bioblitz, a citizen science project that brings teams of people together to gather information about local biodiversity. You can read about it in this lovely Press-Democrat article:
https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/lifestyle/watch-for-wildlife-at-burned-down-monans-rill-this-saturday/
And if there is space left, you can sign up though our link tree here: https://linktr.ee/monansrill
While all this life is blossoming, we don’t want to sugarcoat the process. There’s a lot of hard physical and emotional work going on. Just today, the excavators arrived to start the debris cleanup on all of our burnt homes, well, garden shed, barn, community toy shed, and more. It still hurts. We are so grateful for all the ongoing support, through our GoFundMe, through our community workdays, and through sheer emotional connection. Thank you so much.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: climate resilience, community, earth, fire recovery, intentional community, rebuilding, wildfire
Community Renewal
It is hard to capture the tumult and sadness and hope and laughter of the past few months at Monan’s Rill. Though we have had to stop holding community workdays, we are still gathering every Saturday to do the work of repair and rejuvenation that we can do on our own. We have salvaged garden tools and fencing, built a new goat shed, trenched for water and septic and internet lines, removed dead trees where we can and hauled brush to careful burn piles, dug out invasive grasses and reseeded with native grasses and lupine and poppy. This weekend we pruned and mulched the raspberries, which are already sprouting!
We also have been meeting regularly, often over Zoom, to use consensus as we face this moment. We also gathered on Zoom for our Winter Solstice celebration, and for Christmas Day storytelling, and New Year’s Eve bingo!
And we have walked the land. As individuals and in small groups, we have meditated, sang, cried, rested on the healing earth. We also set up a Building and Design Committee and walked possible house sites, imagining the future. We are on our way.
You can still give to the Rill. Everything we have received through the GoFundMe has helped the efforts above, and every donation will help keep us going.
You can also sign up to receive our new e-newsletter. We will keep you up to date on our renewal work, and let you know when we can open for community workdays again. They were such big, beautiful, joyous and helpful events! And you can also follow us on Instagram @monansrill.
Thank you for everything you have done to help keep this dream alive.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: climate resilience, community, fire recovery, intentional community, wildfire
Fire Recovery at the Rill
It’s been over a month now since the Glass Fire took our homes and scorched our land, and we are busy doing the healing and recovery work, sustained by relationships with our broader community and by our connection to this land.
Thea writes: life is already coming back to the land. and new ideas are germinating for how we can renew and restore and revitalize our intentional community after wildfire. we are dreaming about mycoremediation and forest stewardship, replanting our garden and a new south-facing orchard, building a greenhouse and a barn that are more functional and spacious than what burned, bringing animals back to the land, and making heaps and heaps of biodynamic compost. we are dreaming about new homes with flexible floor plans that allow for different household configurations over time, built with cutting edge materials that are ecologically friendly, fire resistant, and support energy efficient heating and cooling, with rainwater catchment on every roof.
We are also working with fire ecologists, our local Resource Conservation District, and CoRenewal to learn about the way fire moved across the land, and to heal the land through bioremediation.
NRCS helped us tested the water infiltration for the soil on our burned chaparral hillsides, and were relieved to find that the water soaked in pretty quickly. Here’s hoping for gentle rains that soak into this bare slope and allow the soil to stay put while the plants regenerate.
Tomorrow Taylor Bright from CoRenewal will be guiding us in the placement of a novel technology called mycowattles. These will help researchers (and us!) understand how fungi can protect sensitive aquatic ecosystems from the toxic ash and debris of buildings burned in catastrophic wildfires
We held our first post-wildfire community workday this past weekend, to dig a trench and lay a new spring line. It felt so good to all of us to be together on the land, and return to the rhythm of community work and gathering that has been established for more than four decades. The nature of the work and the topics for discussion have changed dramatically, but the heart of Monan’s Rill is still alive and well. We will be working and meeting on the land every Saturday for at least the next month, and welcome helping hands to join us. Workday is 9am-12pm, and you can stick around for BYO lunch and afternoon meeting if you like. We hope to get an organized volunteer sign up process in place soon, but in the meantime please contact info@monansrill.org if you would like to join us. We’d love to have you!
And sign up here to receive our Monan’s Rill newsletter, when we get it going! https://mailchi.mp/f27c758d4d3d/monansrill
Lastly, if you have already made a gift to help us recover and rebuild @monansrill, thank you! And if you haven’t yet, please consider a generous contribution today. You can help us build a model for fire adapted, climate resilient, and joyful community living in healthy relationship with each other and the land. https://www.gofundme.com/f/SupportMonansRill
#lifeatmonansrill #wildfirerecovery #intentionalcommunity #intentionalliving #firerecovery #climateresilience
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: community, intentional community, wildfire
Please Support our Glass Fire Recovery
Dear world –
We are so sad to tell you that Monan’s Rill has experienced devastating losses in the Glass Fire, which is still burning in Napa and Sonoma Counties. We are all safe, figuring out next steps as a community, but 12 of our 13 homes have burned in the fire, and the land looks very different now.
The only home left standing was handbuilt by two of the founders, Russ and Mary Jorgensen. In addition to this one home, Monan’s Rill’s community building, shop with tools and equipment, and recently installed rainwater catchment system and solar array are still intact. These will be the seeds of a beautiful rebuilding of the community, but there is so much to rebuild, and we will need your help.
https://www.gofundme.com/f/SupportMonansRill
We know the wildflowers will be rampant in the spring. We know the oaks and madrones are resilient. And we will be moving forward with vision and dedication to place, ecology, and care for one another.
Support Monan’s Rill’s recovery by giving as generously as you can to this GoFundMe, organized by family and friends:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/SupportMonansRill
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: community, fire preparation, intentional community, sonoma county, wildfire
Fire Drill
Note: Melinda drafted this blog post in advance of the LNU Lightning Complex Fire, which at the time of writing is still burning towards Middletown and in western, heavily-timbered parts of Sonoma County. None of our fire preparation had adequately considered the kind of intense lightning events that hit the Bay Area on August 16-17, 2020. We are so lucky that any small fires in our watershed region were put out swiftly and that we never had to evacuate. And we now have a new fire watch plan for forecasts of dry summer lightning. We are, once again, newly thankful for safety, clean air, clean water, food grown from our own hands, and one another. We hope all who are reading this are safe at this time. – Amy
“HONK! HONK! HOOONNNK!” The sound of car horns begins its ascent up the mountain through the community as an emergency alarm is started. This method of quickly communicating a message has been established here at the Rill for over 30 years—in times before cellular service and when this method was the only quick way to get a message sent over a 20-acre span of household nooks. My husband looks over at me and says, “It’s time.”
Today is our first Monan’s Rill Fire Drill. Living in community is much different than living alone in a single family household. With each California fire over the last few years, my family and I have taken it on, on our own. The Northern California firestorm of 2017 was a major wake up call for us; it nearly took our lives as we plowed our vehicles through the enflamed forest of Mendocino County. Each year since has been fraught with anxiety and fear, but this year feels different. Being held on a piece of land with stellar humans who put plans of preparedness into place is soothing for my spirit.
I am a new resident here on the land. I have been connected with this community for the better part of a decade now, but am just starting to truly dip my toes into what it is like to actually live amongst these particular neighbors, on this particular piece of land.
Jon and I look over the Fire Drill list that was dropped into everyone’s mail slots over a week ago to prepare. “Remove furniture away from windows, remove burnable items 30ft away from the outside of the home, turn off propane tank.” Many of these things (like turning off the propane) are mimed so that we can learn in our bodies what would need to be done in the event of an evacuation. I like lists, I love plans, so this whole thing puts me at ease with a since of joy and purpose.
As part of the Drill, after checking in with our immediate neighbors, we head to the community HUB. This building holds the heartbeat of the land. It is where we hold social gatherings, potlucks, celebrations, and meetings, and share information. (Well, the community did all those things pre-Covid…now we hold gatherings in open air spaces with safe distancing). In front of the building Chris and Rick are holding down a “command center,” to inform us of the events we are responding to. “There is a fire in the Northeast with winds heading in this direction; we believe everyone should evacuate,” says Chris. He is holding his role well as director of communications on the land. On the large white board pulled in front of the doors, he and Rick are checking off each family, indicating when they evacuate the land and where they will be heading—making sure every community member gets out safely.
To evacuate, we drive out on a road I have not yet driven. The car goes around new twists and turns, and I can’t help but be in awe of the new scenery. My body has a tint of a quiver of anxiety, remembering the 2 a.m. drive we made out of the Mendocino fire… how my foot could barely keep the pedal engaged due to shaking, from the amount of adrenaline pumping through my system, flames all around the car that was barely keeping my babies safe from harm. I breathe deeply, reminding my body that I am safe now, allowing my mind to enjoy that this time it is just a Drill…and how lovely it is to be somewhere where there are plans and escape routes in place.
After hitting the main road, we circle back around to the main driveway to the Rill, to debrief back at the HUB. I see Ken and Uta, a family I love deeply, behind us, and my heart sighs with relief—happy to know they are safe…even if it is “only” a drill.
We all sit in a circle at the front of the hub, our chairs and bodies a Covid-safe distance apart. Chris is facilitating the circle and conversation. People begin to raise hands to share their experiences and consider what worked and what didn’t. One thing we quickly realized is the need to change communication tactics—to utilize cellular devices we have access to now, instead of just car horns. It is awkward to be confronted with the slowness of collective adaptation, but it is something that is good to talk about out loud.
Tensions rise and fall; we ride waves of highs and lows in the circle space. Tears are shed, anger is raised and then diffused. I can feel the layered stress and PTSD from the multiple years of California fires—many of which have come scarily close to the Rill, threatening an almost 50-year old community that is more than a collection of individual homes. (The 2017 Tubbs Fire burned across the ridge about 2 miles away; the 2019 Kincade Fire reached land about 6-7 miles away.) We re-anchor and remember to breathe (I am sending a special thank you to Penny, who always has a pulse-read on the emotional tone of the group). We all learn and grow and start to develop better systems for the future.
As I walk back up to our home, I feel a surge of relief to have done the drill together. To witness that I am not alone in my anxieties that appear during fire season, and that I am no longer alone in planning and preparing and making sure my family is safe. Additionally, my concept of family is rapidly expanding. Each one of these households now holds people that I am growing to deeply love and see as an important role-provider for what makes this community what it is.
I have only officially lived here for two months now. Every other week brings a new insight that I get to receive, that is uncovering for me the joys, and challenges, that come with living in community together on such a massive piece of land. The experience here is vast and deep, and continues to become richer with every twist and turn in the road.
–Melinda Phoenix
