July 4, 2008

For the last two weeks I've told you about Dancing Rabbit, an eco-village in Missouri that my family went to visit last summer. (Visit www.dancingrabbit.org for more information.) No, Im not procrastinating about my purging there really is a moral to the story.

There were three kids and a baby who lived at Dancing Rabbit while we were visiting. The three kids belonged to Jennifer. All three kids were well-socialized, polite, and all-around good kids. One of the most impacting days at Dancing Rabbit was when Jennifer gave us a tour of her home. Downstairs was a living room with a futon where Jennifer slept. Upstairs was a loft where the three kids slept. The kids each had their mattress for their bed, and then to divide the mattresses up, they made walls out of their toys. That's it - their only toys had to fit between their bed and their siblings'. And yet, those kids were bright, happy, and seemed to have everything they wanted. I realized that my main excuse for having too much stuff in my own house, that it's all the kids' stuff, and that kids need a lot of stuff, was invalid. Kids don't need stuff. They need love, attention, creativity, education, and whole lot of other things, but they certainly don't need stuff.

My kids also showed me then that they don't need stuff. At Dancing Rabbit, the words "I'm bored" never came out of their mouths. Who can be bored when there are bikes to ride, ponds to swim in, herbs to gather, cookies to bake, people to interact with, homes to build, pictures to draw, and music to dance to? They had the time of their lives. And, all the toys (and most the luggage we brought) never got brought in from the car. We had an unnecessary amount of stuff in our car - not to mention in our home in Colorado.

One of my favorite visuals from our trip was one day, when it was raining, yet very warm outside, three-year-old Ryan was barefoot, walking along the dirt road, covered in mud, picking flowers off the side of the road, and singing sweetly to himself. He looked like a perfectly happy little hippie-child. All he needed was some rain, mud and flowers.

The thing I loved most about Dancing Rabbit was living in community. It's the way people have lived for thousands of years. Living in your own house, on your own land, not knowing your neighbor, let alone working with them, is a modern, unnatural way to live. Why does everyone on our street have a lawn mower, when, really, just having one to share is plenty? Why do we all run our errands, make our meals, clean our houses and watch our children, when if we combined our efforts, we'd all be so much more efficient? Living in community is about sharing, helping, and working as a team, and I just so loved that. Socially, it was wonderful, too. I think about how far in advance my friends and I have to make plans to go out, just to make sure it fits into everyone's schedules, and that childcare is lined up for our kids. Well, when living in community, you can essentially "go out" every night - people who want to stay up late having fun, can. People who need their sleep can go home and get their sleep.

When raising kids, the saying, "it takes a village" is so true. I now see that the kids of Dancing Rabbit who are being raised by a village have so much fuller, more enriched lives. Instead of two adult role models, they have thirty, and each brings something special into that child's life. Of course, those kids were very close to their mother, who had all say on discipline and how her kids were to be raised, but you could tell each of the kids had other adults they felt close to, also. And, other adults they'd go to for certain things - Thomas for art projects, BJ for computer lessons. If Jennifer wasn't around when one of them fell off a bike and hurt themselves, another adult was right there to scoop them up, give them a band-aid and a hug. I could see that all of the kids were loved by all of the adults like family. How lucky those kids are to have so many people care about them that much.

Living in community is something that is once again gaining popularity in the United States. We even have an intentional community in development here in Estes Park. Mary's Meadow Cohousing (www.marysmeadowcohousing.com) will be over by Mary's Lake. While they intend to be built "green", I don't get the impression from their Web site that they will be as radical about sustainability as an Eco-Village is. But, they will still be an intentional community, and that was what appealed to me most about Dancing Rabbit.

So, what wasn't there to like about Dancing Rabbit? Well, at the top of the list are the ticks. More ticks than you can imagine. We'd go outside, walk across a field, and we'd have at least five ticks on us. These were dog ticks, which don't carry diseases like our own deer ticks, but they're still creepy and crawly and I don't like them one bit. I pulled 35 attached ticks off my family of five in seven days.

Dancing Rabbit was like nothing I've ever experienced before. It is a place that Josh and I still think about on a near-daily basis. We think about the great people we met, the lessons we learned about living responsibly and more sustainable on earth, and about how incredibly cool, and yet far-fetched at this point, it is to be living in a small community with its own food source, its own economic system, and, essentially, its own consensus-style "government".

It had a large impact on the kids, too; Aaron chose to write about Dancing Rabbit at a writer's workshop this year, and he's talked about it at Show-and-Tell at school. Ryan was only three years old when we went, and some of the things he remembers surprises me, as well. Both kids keep asking when we're going back. Aaron called it paradise.

And, we will go back. Next time we'll go for three weeks. We'll take the workshops we took the first week, and then live amongst the village the other two weeks, to really learn what life there is like. It would be very hard for my family to ever leave our beloved Rocky Mountains, but if we ever did, there's a good chance that this is where we'd go. If we were brave enough. I feel very strongly that the only difference between the Rabbits and us is that they were brave enough to make the choice to live this radical lifestyle... a decision that takes even more bravery when young kids are involved.

When we got home from Dancing Rabbit, we looked around our house. After a week with just the necessities and a few luxuries, everything in our house just looked so... excessive. Unnecessary. Wasteful. Burdensome. It occurred to us that we have so much stuff, we couldn't move to Dancing Rabbit if we wanted to. And then we felt trapped by our belongings. We could live as well and as freely as we did at Dancing Rabbit, if only we had about 75% less. And, so, House Purge was born.

Kristen Owen is a longtime blogger and registered eBay Trading Assistant. More information, topics, and helpful tips about House Purge can be read by going to the projects Web site at www.housepurge.com .