Poetry Saturday: Lawrence Ferlinghetti meets Marc Chagall

I've always felt a certain affinity for Paris in the 1920's, and, as a child growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 70's felt disappointed at having missed the Beat boat of the 50's.

This is why I practically swooned this morning when I found that one of my favorite poems, which combines the Marc Chagall* (a painter working in Paris in the 20's) with Beat writer Lawrence Ferlinghetti, (co-founder of San Francisco's City Lights Bookstore) featured on Writers Almanac.

14

by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Don't let that horse
                                    eat that violin
    cried Chagall's mother
                                             But he
                        kept right on
                                                 painting

And became famous

And kept on painting
                                       The Horse With Violin In Mouth

And when he finally finished it
he jumped up upon the horse
                                                     and rode away
                  waving the violin

And then with a low bow gave it
to the first naked nude he ran across

And there were no strings
                                                 attached

What does this have to do with living in an ecovillage? Nothing, which is exactly the point. Trying to live sustainably is only one aspect of my life here. And that always feels just a bit surreal... :)

Love,
Alline

*The art of Marc Chagall looks like what you might see upon waking from a beautiful dream: the composition is scrambled with familiar figures and symbols, and riotous colors frame the memory. Chagall was born Moishe Shagal in 1887 in present day Belarus to a Jewish merchant family of modest means. His childhood in a small village was the subject of many of his works, which featured folkloric imagery such as Candlestick with the Burning Lights and the Fiddler on the Roof. He moved to St. Petersburg in 1907, where he studied art and first encountered the modern movements sweeping through Europe. In 1910 he was able to move to Paris, where he immersed himself in the École de Paris with the likes of Modigliani and Leger. Chagall's first solo show at Der Sturm Gallery in Berlin in 1914 firmly placed him among the talented avant garde artists of Europe. Chagall supported the Russian Revolution and became the first Commissar for Fine Arts. However, he resisted the power struggles and the direction the revolution was taking. He left the Soviet Union in 1923. During the 1920s he produced many etchings for book illustrations, including Gogol's Dead Souls and later a series of illustrations for the Bible. In the 1930s Chagall began working in stained glass and his work can be seen at the United Nations headquarters and in several buildings in Jerusalem. Chagall and his family fled Nazi-occupied Europe and lived in the United States from 1941-47. During this time he designed sets and costumes for ballets, such as Massine's Aleko 1942 and New York City Ballet's The Firebird 1945. Back in France in the 1950s, he began working with ceramics, and also produced the famous Paris series of paintings that feature magical scenes set against the Paris cityscape. You can also see some of the most spectacular murals produced by Chagall in the sixties at the Metropolitan Opera in Lincoln Center. Marc Chagall died in France in 1985, a little more than a decade after a museum dedicated to him was opened in Nice.

Bridges to Sustainability

Saturday Lunch at the Mercantile

Hi all. The following is a column written by our work exchanger Robby Boyer for the local weekly, The Memphis Democrat. That's Memphis, Missouri.


In the summer of 2010, I arrived at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage to help for six weeks on a natural building project. In the course of these weeks I grew fascinated with a community brave enough to experiment with the comforts of modernity that most Americans take for granted. This short six-week stay was just long enough to inspire to me completely change the focus of my doctoral dissertation research in Urban Planning at the University of Illinois. I have since reoriented my professional and academic life toward investigating Dancing Rabbit and other similar ecovillages, as well as promoting its mission of community-based sustainability.

Robby playing guitar on the porch of the Mercantile.

In departmental seminars, college lectures, high school assemblies, meetings with municipal urban planners, and even dinner conversations with my friends and family I’ve attempted to explain how residents of Dancing Rabbit have built a fifty-plus member community that generates its own electricity from the sun, cultivates the vast majority of its water from the sky, builds its homes using only recycled and/or locally harvested lumber, recycles all of its organic waste, and survives in rural Missouri with only three shared vehicles.

I returned this summer as both a researcher and an employee at the Milkweed Mercantile Eco Bed & Breakfast—a fascinating business that I will discuss further below. I’m finding that even as a life-long environmentalist and advocate for social change, that daily life at Dancing Rabbit is a challenge. While I am each day more and more encouraged by the successful (and sometimes unsuccessful) experiments in which the “Rabbits” have engaged, I have also encountered the challenges of routine change that come with new, more sustainable ways of living. For example, the amount of electricity I feel comfortable using is heavily dependent upon yesterday’s, today’s and tomorrow’s weather. Even as I type this article, I am reminded of the ‘low’ level of energy available in the community’s common house that has resulted from a rather old and inefficient refrigerator (soon to be replaced!). I’d very much like to wash my clothing at some point this week, but I am finding that this season’s energy shortage may force me to wash my clothing by hand—a relatively time consuming and unfamiliar task to a middle class suburban man.

Everyone's birthday gets celebrated at the Mercantile. This was Grant's day...

My excitement about Dancing Rabbit is, in part, the result of my concern for the long environmental and economic emergency of global climate change. All available information I can access paints a rather pessimist picture in the coming decades. But here’s some good news: I am convinced that the vast majority of the physical technology needed to overcome the humanity’s environmental challenges already exists. Humanity has already invented all of the “stuff”—the solar panels, wind turbines, solar ovens, composting toilets, etc.—that we need to live comfortably and at lower impacts on the earth. The real challenge now is how we use this stuff and how we live together, and this will require some routine change. Routine change is hard.

Overcoming the environmental challenges of the twenty-first century will require lots of it, but I’d personally prefer experimenting with small routine changes now than be forced to make terribly uncomfortable routine changes when, for example, gasoline prices approach $10/gallon, or a new climactic reality overwhelms even our “emergency” resources.

For ideologically motivated folks like the residents of Dancing Rabbit, routine change is the new reality. For the vast majority of humans, however, routine change is a taxing endeavor. I have trouble imagining most of my friends and family living at Dancing Rabbit for even longer than one week, let alone a lifetime. This summer, however, I have been encouraged by my experience at the Milkweed Mercantile Eco Bed & Breakfast (The “Mercantile”) and its role as a “bridge” between the radical routine change in the Dancing Rabbit community and guests exploring new ways to live more “sustainably”. It is only appropriate that such a transitional space would manifest in a B&B. The facility exposes guests to energy, water, food, transportation, heating/cooling, and feeding systems of noticeably different, yet comfortably similar dynamics. A guest at the Mercantile, for example, will find many of the same comforts they would find in any other B&B: clean white sheets, large comfortable beds, impeccably clean bathrooms, a delicious and hearty breakfast, a hot shower, running water, a pleasant selection of cold beer, wireless internet, and yes, light switches connected to functioning lights.

The solar & wind powered Milkweed Mercantile (the porch is still under construction!). That yellow thing in front (in the DR courtyard0 is not a tanning booth, but a community-sized solar oven.

More observant guests, however, will realize that all the electricity is generated by solar panels on-site, all the water is harvested from rain and purified on-site, the air is “conditioned” by straw bale insulated walls, the water is heated in a wood-fire furnace, the food is mostly grown locally, and everything that falls in the toilet is recycled—after a long and careful composting process. Managing such a business and keeping it affordable (under $100/night) for guests is far from conventional. Each morning, for example, my responsibilities include closing the windows of the B&B, a seemingly counter-intuitive routine given the summer’s extreme heat and that the building has no air conditioning unit. But closing the windows effectively traps the cool evening air inside the highly insulated walls so that the air in the inn remains cool relative to the heat outside. Staff at the Mercantile must also monitor rainfall, rotate the compost container, make cooking decisions based on the weather, collect burning material for the water boiler, and make sure to do the inn’s laundry in time for it to dry in the afternoon sun.

Alline and Kurt (aka "The Milkweeds") owners & proprietors of the Milkweed Mercantile.

The owners of the Mercantile (hey! that's us!) comment that a more sustainable living situation does not require deprivation. Indeed, my experience living and working at Dancing Rabbit has exposed me to an abundant, rewarding, and fun lifestyle that simultaneously offers me the chance to be a better global citizen. While I do not expect the world to dive into radically new living practices overnight, I do think that radical change is necessary if we expect to avoid catastrophic change in the next few decades. I’m hopeful that places like Dancing Rabbit and the Milkweed Mecantile can offer solutions that allow humanity to live together peacefully, abundantly, and in good health for millennia to come. I would also encourage any individual, with even the slightest curiosity in environmental innovation, to take a tour of the community and/or spend at night at the inn.

Making a Living, or Making a Life?

Hi readers.

What follows is the text from a column in the local (Memphis, MO) Democrat. Dancing Rabbit submits a column each week. It's about something I think about a lot - the following is rather brief, for two reasons:

1. It goes in the local rural Missouri newspaper, who's readers often think we're a bunch of freaks. We started the column years ago as a form of transparency - here is what we're doing, and why. Our column is often about what we're growing in our gardens, what we're canning, how we car share, our visitor program. Interesting, but safe. I'm a little bored with this, so am trying to gently stretch the boundaries.
2. The column is not my own personal sounding board - it is for Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage info. I figure I can expand on my ideas here, where it is all about ME.

The following appears in the January 8, 2009 edition of the Memphis Democrat:

This is Alline again, enjoying the opportunity to chat with you weekly (at least until the rest of the column writers return!).Thank you so much for your many thoughtful replies to last week’s inquiry about what you would like to see in future columns. I will share them with the other writers and we will address them in the coming weeks.

Now, however, I am facing what can only be called writer’s block. Except that I’m not exactly blocked – I’m overwhelmed. Writing as a representative of Dancing Rabbit is a bit, well, intimidating. I can only express my own views, and try my best to be as inoffensive as possible. And frankly, either you are interested in what we’re doing, or you’re not. But how to share the details of our lives without coming across as “greener than thou”? That’s the part I’m not clear on. So I can only plow ahead, give it my best shot, and hope for the best (and mix as many metaphors as possible).

A question that came up several times was how do we support ourselves, how much money do we need to live here, and what did we do for a living before we arrived at Dancing Rabbit? While I could easily list the numerous ways we all craft a living here, it seems more important to look at the big picture. By leaving the world of high rents/mortgages, 40-hour jobs, commuting and consuming we are able, for the most part, to live on smaller incomes. This does not mean that we do not work – I’ve never worked harder in my life! What it means is that our time, our energy are directed towards different priorities. We are working for ourselves, and our lives, instead of our “jobs.”

It is not a simple leap to make. None of us here at Dancing Rabbit will ever earn the salaries that we earned with “real” jobs. For that reason alone it is challenging for people with debt to move here. But by giving up our “big jobs” we get more time – time to nurture a garden and preserve the food at the end of the growing season, time to build our own homes, time to learn, and time with our partners and families. It is our way of embodying the over-used but still meaningful Gandhi quote “ Be the change that you want to see in the world.”

Because our disposable incomes are fairly low (we are all independent from one another financially, so this varies from person to person), we don’t have the coolest clothes, or the latest styles – in fact, if you were to mention the names Jimmy Choo or Manolo Blahnik you would get blank stares (but mention Chacos, Birks or Muck Boots, well, we’re your people!). We are trying to find real value in our lives, find what is good and true, without buying in (literally) to what advertising, movies, magazines and TV say we should value.

We don’t have hot cars, either. We’re really excited when they run and aren’t covered in mud – to heck with fancy paint jobs, rims that twirl or spoilers. We share them, which is often inconvenient – but we each save thousands of dollars a year by working together.

Strawbale construction. Notice all of the reclaimed (i.e.: de-nailed, used) lumber.
Photos from the Milkweed Mercantile construction.

By building our homes using materials that are primarily reclaimed, reused or sustainably harvested/produced, our costs are significantly less than those incurred with conventional construction (although they often take more time to build). By cooking with whole foods (i.e.: dried beans, fresh vegetables, homemade pasta and bread, cakes from scratch) instead of buying packaged mixes and already-prepared ingredients we get to eat healthier and for less money. Yes, it takes more time. But that is one of the choices we’ve made. Many Rabbits belong to a food co-op, where each member only has to cook one day a week – the rest of the days a fabulous meal is waiting for you every evening at 6:30. Do you always like what has been prepared? Possibly not. But it’s that prioritizing thing again.

Do I miss central heat and air conditioning, with that oh-so-handy timer so that the house can be warm before I get up in the morning? You bet I do – especially when I’m carrying in firewood. But it’s one of a million little trade-offs that I’m willing to make.

In the end, though, it is really not about the money. While one can certainly live here inexpensively, Dancing Rabbit is not intended to be solely a place for cheap living – our mission is to live sustainably and to share what we are learning. In exchange for membership and the opportunity to live on the land trust at incredibly inexpensive rates, each member is expected to participate in our growing community, and to contribute time and skills enabling our village to function well. This is also a lot of work – it is much easier to move to a community where everything is already decided. But what is it worth to be able to design a village based on principles and values that are important to us as individuals and to the health of the planet? To misquote the MasterCard commercial: for us, it’s priceless.