Delicious… Our arrival to Full Bloom
New Community Resident’s Journal—Week 1 by Elena Zubulake
It’s hard to believe we’ve only been here less than a week… a week tomorrow to be exact. So much has happened, from our late-night-exhausted-after-21-hours-of-driving-with-two-kitties arrival, to today— my first day on a computer since arriving on the first day of Aquarius in our new mountain community home.
To put it quite honestly, “arriving” at Full Bloom Community, has been pretty much everything I could have wanted it to be and more, and the ancient part of my being so stomach-churning-hungry for village is already feeling deeply fed by being here only 6 short winter days.
I do realize in saying that the risk of “speaking too soon” or the natural tendency of NRE–new relationship energy–to predominate the field at the beginning of any new intimacy or love based relationship, be it a partner, a new job, or in this case, a new village. But I will take the risk, knowing that mountains crumble and ice melts, and even go out on a limb to say, “yes, indeed, I am falling in love”. After all, we are here to at least give falling in love with a village of human and non-human companions a good ol’ try-on-for-size.
“Being Fed” could be the most beautifully fitting metaphor for our time here thus far. Sitting here now, eating Victor’s left over birthday cake, inspired by the orange cake his grandmother used to make him when he was a kid. A cake created by my own hands and the enthusiastic hands of two tow headed girls and a boy in a kitchen full of the busy-ness of midday, a lunch of greens from the green house, bread from the bakery, an egg salad with lovage from the garden and eggs from the chickens out in the pasture. People winding in and out from brush burning up the hillside. All whilst, trying to keep the “secret” of the cake making from Victor’s sight.
I have been fed abundantly every day since arriving by food created in a kitchen full of story— the story of a community coming together, the daily comings and goings, the meetings and the partings, the baking of many loaves of bread, the kids getting taller, a place where visions have been made, where arguments have brewed, and ultimately where an older-kind-of-family-every-day-loving has found a little root from which to sprout. The abundance of a community begins right here.
How do I know all this? Because the food and connection here feel delicious. The succulent lamb from up the road, the perfectly cooked salmon that Jacob caught this summer, the roasted potatoes with a little of this very earth still in their essence, the sweet chard from the green house….
….the perfectly cooked heart share circle that left my belly full and round, the delectable laughter seasoning our first breakfast here after awakening and finding our way to the kitchen, the spicy-ness of the impromptu “fashion show”, the bitterness of an interaction with a visitor followed by the sweetness of a curious inquiry into what happened, and the ongoing crossing of paths that just makes daily life more interesting, diverse, and delightful. And sacred.
You pull together some quality ingredients, just a few, and a delicious stew of possibility is created. I feel that and look forward to more as Victor and I live into our own deliciousness and see how it can add a new flavor to this already well cooked stew.
I just heard Ryan call out from downstairs that they are making lamb meatballs for dinner. Yum!!!
Climbing the curve of Permaculture
I have several interesting and sometimes tiresome dialogues going on in my head about growing food. As I’m weeding bed after bed of vegetables sometimes in the hot sun questions roll through my mind like: “Is this really having any significant impact on the state of the world?”, “Should I just leave organic vegetable growing to those that are actually really good at it?”, or “Is any form of annual based agriculture a net contribution to the eco-system with all its tilling, inputs, and deer fencing?” Those questions can certainly take the wind out of my sail particularly on a hot day and when my back starts to ache bedding over the onion bed. Yet I do want to attempt to answer those questions, I want to feel even more connected to the why of vegetable growing. So I thought I would share my musings and my struggles with you so as to not feel as alone in the matter because I know I’m not alone.
My dear friend and land mate Rosie helping me hoe the potato bed.
The questions I have pinballing around in my mind around seem to have their root in a deep intention of mine to do no harm and to be have a positive impact on my environment. That’s my intention and then there’s reality. As mentioned above there’s several practices that are less than ideal in terms of truly doing no harm whether that harm is in the form of disturbing elk migration patterns or disturbing soil ecology through big tractors till blending up the earth. People seem to have a lot of hope around organic agriculture and I do as well and yet I feel move to point out that there’s quite a ways to go on the learning curve (especially for me personally) to get the point that human food growing actually has a net positive impact on the ecology. The hope for me lies in all the various incredible people I know or read about that are plugging away and steadily moving along that curve on differing fronts. And with the world as it is the opportunities for cross fertilization and collaboration are immense.
I’ve been really feeling these days how much we need each other if to do the learning and work it takes to move beyond a high impact agriculture into a permaculture. Growing our own vegetables is a start, planting a food forest hedgrerow is one too but its just a start. I am grateful to be supported in the ways that I am on this challenging journey towards living in harmony with the land.
So maybe I should relish the fact that there’s still so much journeying to experience, eat some strawberries and just keep learning.
Thanks for reading,
Ryan
My wife Eden (7 months pregnant) helping weed the community garden
Easter at Full Bloom
My wife Eden loves Easter. I’ve never been a huge fan. It conjures up to mind pastel colors, bad candy, and disturbing Easter bunnies trying to ride on the coat tails of Santa but failing miserably. Coupled with a lot of commercialization and a general lack of “spiritedness” or reverence for the sacred. After sweet little Easter egg hunt on Sunday things are shifting around a bit in my world. First off the egg dying was a great excuse to get together and make some fun art together. We used these natural dyes that our friend Leah makes (check her out at http://bit.ly/1mvuq7T ) and made all sorts of truly gorgeous eggs. Disentangling all my less than favorable notions of Easter I found myself engaged in a process of turning this blank, yet profoundly shaped object, a chicken egg, into a piece of art.
Easter Morning after we had another epic waffle and whip cream community brunch, Eden and I went into the community garden and started to delicately and somewhat mischievously place these egg shaped art pieces in the shade of rocks, on top of sprinkler heads and in the coil of the garden hose. Then the kids were unleashed and that was the biggest joy: to see them totally transfixed, carrying their baskets and joyously grabbing eggs from here and there. In that moment I realized how simple and a profound of a ceremony we had created. I didn’t think of it as such initially, but that’s truly what it is. Its a sequence of events, of movements that bring the community of humans in closer contact with the mystery and the beauty of this life. The realization also hit me that ceremonies can be fun and a chance to bring more art and a magic into our lives.
Our community member Sky with her basket of eggs
Kids from the neighborhood on the hunt in the community garden
The Stories We Hold Inside
Human beings are wired to tell stories. Whether we admit it or not we are constantly telling stories about others, ourselves and every situation we enter into. “Nobody is doing as much work as I am”, “I’m not doing enough”, “They don’t like me”, “This room was poorly decorated” and on and on. The funny thing is we often believe these stories, we buy into them lock, stock and barrel which affects how we relate to another, to a group, to “the world” as we perceive it. We’re often quite unaware of the story we have operating at any given moment, but it sure has a profound impact on the quality of our relationships and interactions with others and “the world”.
I’ve come to believe that for a community (or family, or marriage, or friendship for that matter) to thrive we need to become aware of those stories and to bring them out of the shadows and to check them out in the sometimes harsh and exposing light of day. There’s no denying, it can be a truly vulnerable act to share your internal world in that way, but it can also be incredibly liberating and it can create a much greater sense of connection and ease in the relationship after the initial wave of shame or awkwardness. Sharing in this way can deeply feed, empower, and clear a relationship in unforeseen ways, making space for deeper and more authentic connection free of the static of assumptions and “story”.
At Full Bloom we have a commitment to “Clear Communication” in our Resident Agreements that everyone who lives here signs. Its a commitment to speak directly to a person if their behavior has upset you and you feel estranged or “charged” as a result. And if you need help to address the person you are requested to seek support from a neutral third party to facilitate the interaction. Sometimes there isn’t much of a “charge” so to speak but there are those stories that are subtly at work in the relationship and that’s where I’m thinking we could use more work on here at Full Bloom. We already have a structure for working with such dynamics (we meet twice a month in a “Matrix Circle” where in there is an opportunity to directly express to another community member anything that is present in your relationship within the presence of whole group witnessing).
I’m realizing how much I and, I believe many of us, skirt around direct expression of our stories about each other because we don’t want to “hurt” each other. Yet it turns out it can be more hurtful to continue to carry an unchecked out story than to come clean. In the end there’s no way around discomfort if you want to create and maintain a truly thriving, authentic, and intimate relationship with another. And I don’t know about you, but that’s pretty much on the top of my list of wants for this lifetime.
Thanks for reading and I invite your feedback.
Ryan
Women’s Natural Building Workshop on the Horizon
If you’ve read many of my posts you’ve gathered that there is a strong emphasis here at Full Bloom on the importance of building structures in a way the reflects the deeper values of the emerging ecologically based culture. These values include: using locally and sustainably sourced materials, staying connected to the rhthyms and patterns of the natural world, and creating a sense of belonging to a place and/or bio-region to name just a few.
The inside of me and my wife Eden’s Strawbale home.
There’s another value that’s becoming a significant and perhaps understated value in the emergent natural building culture: gender equality.
For quite some time now the art and trade of building has been dominated my the male half or our species and we’re excited about being able to shift that imbalance and see what happens. How would our structures look and feel like if more of them were designed and built by women? For centuries we’ve missed out on the God’s knows how many cool ideas by not having women be an integral part of the our building culture. All I know is that diversity is a good thing for any system/culture wanting to thrive.
So in the spirit of supporting more diversity and continuing to evolve this art form called “natural building” Full Bloom will be hosting a 10 day women’s natural building workshop given by our friend, neighbor, and master builder Lydia Doleman. The women will be building a load bearing strawbale structure that will most likely be used as a massage room and healing space.
Lydia plastering one of the “cob” structures here at Full Bloom
Its all very gratifying to be a part of the unfolding of a building culture that actually reflects my deepest values of equality and natural beauty. If you want to learn from about the workshop you can visit Lydia’s site: www.theflyinghammer.com.
“We must raise both the ceiling and the floor.”
― Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead
Let the Mapping Begin!
Last weekend, almost 30 members of our rural community in the Little Applegate Valley got together for our first ever community mapping event. It was relaxed, fun and even exciting. My wife and I got there 20 minutes late but that was no biggie since one of the organizers was also late due to daylight savings time. So we didn’t miss anything formal, just a bunch of friends and neighbors getting a chance to chat and catch up on how the winter was and how the spring was looking. The purpose of the meeting was to start a dialogue and explore what resources of all types we have to offer to each other now and plan to offer in the future. The group consisted of a sampling of farms from our valley but not every farm or homesteader from our valley was able to be invited due to space constraints. 
So, after a more formal introduction we let the mapping begin. This wasn’t the type of map I usually think of when I hear the word map. We were about to map a wide range of things not just geographical locations. Then we would group the like items out of that brainstorm to make sense of all the information. Our wonderful community organizer whose inspiration had called us all together had already prepped 10 large sheets of butcher paper to brainstorm on with different headings on each. Headings such as: Historic Sites, Communication and Culture, On Site Businesses and Education, social services, Big Dreams. 
We then broke out into small groups based on which farm we were from and spent 5 minutes in our group brainstorming around what our group had to offer under that heading. So that took about an hour. This was called assessment. We were asked to be specific. If under education we wrote Music Lessons, we would also write the name of the person who was able and offering. Under communication, we would note which person’s Twitter account or which business webpage. As the minutes ticked away we listed whatever came to mind for each topic. And wow, at the end of it all, there was so much information on each piece of paper. I felt amazed by how much was being offered by all these different people and the places they loved and the things they loved to do. I could not help but be excited by all the potential being expressed. It also blew me away that this was only a sample of the valley community but far from an exhaustive group. It was clear to me that this was just part of the story. And it was just the beginning of our story. Our story of who we are and what we do and how we want to do it together. Every community ought to do this. Let the mapping begin!
Permaculture: the Love Story of the Land: Part 1
When we came to this land, bright eyed and tender handed, we came with a dream of farming, of raising our food and our families in a sustainable way, and we saw permaculture as part of that way. Unlike the buzzword ‘sustainability’ that has been co-opted by corporate media, permaculture offers a very clear set of principles to follow, including a code of ethics. Why does this practice appeal to me and my friends, and to an emergent culture of these last few generations? What permaculture offers is a blueprint for how to relate not only to land, but to each other.
Permaculture encourages us to observe, explore, and interact with our natural environment- a practice that has been undervalued as more and more of our society had to leave the farm and take industrial jobs in the city. Observation, observation, observation you will often see in permaculture texts. You must know the territory before expecting to know how to work with it. And when you do interact, you receive valuable feedback, which helps you understand even more deeply. Working with, rather than making something work for you; creating relationships that lead to greater health within the entire system, rather than just extracting or taking what you need and leaving the system to repair itself (or not) is a fundamental shift from the way industrial systems operate.
These very same principles are what we long for in our human relationships. Just as we have rejected the archaic idea that children are just blank slates to be filled with our knowledge and ideas, it becomes unethical to just ‘do what ever you want’ to the land. Our land has a deep history, stories to tell of the animals, humans, water, fire, and geology that has shaped it.
That’s me, Eden, observing and interacting with our land here at Full Bloom
We long for true intimacy with our land and with each other. We want to know another for who they are, not just our idea of who we think they are. We are done with the fairy tale ideas of boy-meets-girl and happily-ever-after for we see they are bound to fail; they work only as longs as everyone involved does what they are supposed to, and we all know how well that turns out with humans. True relationship that allows all humans involved to flourish, that leads to mutual benefits, is based on non-coercive interactions and deep honoring of what is true and present for each individual. …part 2 to come…
“It is our collective responsibility to protect and nurture the global family, to support its weaker members and to preserve and tend to the environment in which we all live”
The Dalai Lama
Potluck and Sauna Night…..Yumminess on many levels
After the completion of the community sauna we established what is fast becoming one of the highlights of the week here at Full Bloom: Potluck and Sauna night. Its a night where we put out an invitation to our broader community to come and join us for a meal, catch up on the valley happenings, and then go for a nice sweat. This past Friday we were blessed with some seriously talented and fun musicians who busted into a music jam and sing along. Singing, playing instruments, and dancing is such a natural thing to do at a gathering and yet there’s part of me that’s still getting used to it. I just didn’t grow up with it. When it happens here I’m so grateful and reminded that I want to build it into our lives here more often. I believe it to be foundational to the long-term viability of an intentional community to have plenty of singing, dancing, and music creation happening. Its the ultimate soul food and part of us begins to starve without it.. We are wired to spend time together in “musical communion”, its one of the most powerful ways of breaking the trance of separation, of our neurosis.
Last Friday night’s sauna was the first time we took a sauna with the tile work and entryway mosaic completed. As you can imagine its a wonderful image to just be absorbed by while in a sauna.
The Greenhouse Advantage
At Full Bloom we a have a pretty extreme climate leading to a relatively short growing season. We’ve been know to have a frost as late as Early June and as early as early October leading barely a 4 month frost free growing window. But that’s outside. The Greenhouse changes everything; it gives us another two months on either side. For several years now we’ve been able to get a major head start on our tomatoes in the raised bed in the greenhouse planting them in April and still harvesting tomatoes in December.
Every year I do dance with the greenhouse to get in our winter salad greens sown just after the hot weather crops like peppers, and eggplants begin to slow down in early October. Its taken years to get that timing down ( and develop the nerve to pull that pepper plant that may have one or two peppers still to ripen) and this year I was very proud of myself for clearing the bed space and sewing tons of arugula and salad mix for our enjoyment during the winter (note: outdoor greens can end up getting pretty much killed during the winters here. Especially when it gets down to 6 degrees like it did this past December.)
Given the extreme productivity and season extension power of a greenhouse I’ve been pondering lately how we can add another to the land here and/or build a “field house” for the agricultural fields outside of the central area. These can be put up for minimal cost and can really increase production and protect crops of frost damage.
An example of a “field house”. A no frills green house that one can even drive a tractor through for cultivation.
Well that’s it for now. Off to the greenhouse, cause its basically already spring down there and its time to prep the soil and start sowing some spinach and lettuce.
Till next time……Ryan