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Dancing Rabbit News 7-15

Greetings from Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage. Liat here to share with you that which I remember from the past week. It was a very busy week filled with parties, work, new residents, and many visitors.

Papa Bear celebrated his thirtieth birthday with a rocking karaoke party. He rented a karaoke machine complete with music and microphones. Almost everyone in the village showed up to sing, laugh, and be merry. We had rappers, country singers, show tunes, and even a handful of love songs. I hear a few people even stayed up singing till around 4am; by then I was happily sound asleep.

The following day was the anniversary of the day I moved to Dancing Rabbit. Some days it feels like I have been here way longer than that. In one year I have made many good friends, started an organic garden, and learned how to build my own house. In honor of being here for one year, I decided to have an open house (because some people here had not yet seen the inside of my home) and house naming party. In the past months, most people have called my home either “The Bus” or “Liat’s Bus.” Most of the houses here have names and I thought it was time to have an official name for my home. My friends and neighbors wrote their suggestions on a chalk board and then, after compiling a list of over thirty names we began to vote on our favorites. The winner of the final vote was Aubergine; the French word for Eggplant. It is fitting because the roof of my house is a dark purple.

Alline, along with help from many friends, officially launched the Milkweed Mercantile website! This is very exciting because I have seen her work on it for many months. If you are interested in seeing the many amazing eco. products being sold at the Mercantile, you can now check them out at www.milkweedmercantile.com .

Jennifer has been continuing to work on the addition to the Timberframe. I heard Zimmerman’s Excavating earth moving machinery more than once this past week. I hear that next week we might have a dance party on the site in order to stomp down the dirt.

We had three new residence arrive this past week. Tim arrived on Monday with his two cats and is settled into a cozy tent. Then, on Friday, Ma’ikwe and her son Jibraun moved here; they have made their temporary home in Sky House. Dan S. who was a member a few years ago returned this week as a guest, but there is rumor that he will soon be applying for residency. On the topic of residency, there is already one visitor this month who is applying to return and another who is strongly contemplating asking to become part of this community.

There were an astounding amount of people receiving tours this week. A group of about fifty high school students who are part of an Upward Bound program taking place at Truman State University received a tour from Ted. Then, on Saturday there was a good turnout for our regular tour despite the rain.

An outstanding amount of people wandered through as guest of Dancing Rabbit members this week. Alyssa and Bear had four of their friends here for a few days. Two women who recently graduated from Wash-U have been here helping out as many people here as possible. I hosted a person who contacted me a few weeks ago through couchsurfer.com which is an online community where people can share their hospitality and also find a free and friendly place to stay while traveling. The evening he stayed over, a small group of us checked out the moons of Jupiter with a telescope outside of Thistledown after bottling and starting a new batch of home brews. Iron Weed had a new work exchanger, named Travis show up on Friday; he will be staying with us for about a month. Also, Heather, a freelance filmographer from New York has been with us for a full week shooting footage for a show which will be aired on the Food Network.

On a final note, I have to give a great big hand to everyone who has been working on planting trees. We have a total of sixteen hundred trees to plant this year. We planed on getting them in the ground a few months ago, but due to the heavy rains we were unable to follow our plans this spring. We have had groups ranging from three to ten people going out the past few weeks and have now crossed the halfway point. It feels good to see the infant trees lining the field. I can hardly imagine what they will look like in ten or so years.

Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage is a nonprofit and a residential community that demonstrates ecological sustainability in Rutledge, MO. We offer tours on 2nd and 4th Saturdays of the month at 1pm. Our next tour will be on July 26th. Please call us at (660) 883-5511 to let us know you plan to attend. For more information about Dancing Rabbit, please see our website at www.dancingrabbit.org, or come join one of our tours.

http://www.dancingrabbit.org