Abundance! The Newsletter of Abundant Dawn Community Issue #21, Fall-Winter 2002 Dear Readers, This is my first Abundant Dawn Newsletter. It is coming out about a month later than I had planned. With our population down to seven members, and our desire to continue as three pods rather than two, Abundant Dawn is actively seeking new members. We are taking time to seek people who share the values stated in our Vision Statement, and with whom we want to live for many years to come. This fall, we hosted a number of visitors, including Kali Taylor whom we recently invited to join us as a provisional member of Tekiah. Mark Dayspring Circle It has been a quiet summer and fall for us at Dayspring Circle. The big event was Rajal & Nina's departure, in August, for graduate school. The three of us feel like a small group now. We've been busy on our various projects individually, and have not done a great deal with the landscape of Dayspring. We still hope to put in the foundation for the guest cabin this fall. Finally forming a corporation for Dayspring is high on our list. Any day now, we expect the bulldozer to come and build our peripheral driveways - lightly graveled roads around each side of the circle. Currently, when we need to drive to our houses, we drive through the middle of the circle. Normally we park at the top in parking spaces and walk down, but it is none too soon to put an end to driving through the middle, as we're getting into the habit. Also, parking right by the house may become necessary at some point for aging members. Velma says, "The big event of this period in my life was assuredly the arrival of my front porch, which I am modestly quite certain is about the best porch in the whole world. It is about 12 feet by 19 feet, and has three hanging chairs and a hammock. It's made mostly of white oak, and has a reflective metal roof. It's pretty grand. The trailer overall is quite comfortable and looks quite a lot like a house now (if rather long and thin), which is a good thing, because I have neither money nor inspiration to build any time soon. The new garden bed by the front porch (about 8 x 15 feet) has been moderately successful, with masses of zinnias and sweet peppers. Unfortunately, the deer (or someone) ate back all the peppers early in the season. But after I installed a motion sensor sprayer, the peppers came back nicely, to produce a late crop. Petunias and morning glories in window boxes and planters were also quite successful. For the first time, I grew my plants from seed, and bought no little plants at all at the nursery. Other than that, life is relatively quiet, consisting of visiting Mom; some software development work and looking for more; studying professional skills; Fellowship for Intentional Community admin staff and online store work; Abundant Dawn structural and policy work; the work, social life and interpersonal struggle of the community; occasional visits to Dad and Kat; visits from siblings; and the pleasure of other friendships." Lester and Martha have designated Tuesdays for finishing up house-building tasks. The kitchen cabinets are complete now, built from oak that Nina milled from trees taken down to widen our access road. The cabinets are beautiful, and make the kitchen such a pleasant space to be in. Recently they also finished the insulating curtains for the large south- facing windows, and the living room floor mosaic. Other days of the week are focused more on individual pursuits. They enjoyed a week's vacation with daughter Bets and her family at a nearby state park with a lovely lake and lots of hiking trails. Lester and his daughter Barb have become incredible break bakers. With the large oven Lester built, they now bake up to 180 loaves a week the bread going to local restaurants and health food stores. It is also taken to the Roanoke Farmer's Market every Friday. Lester found time this summer to help teach a large group of kids and adults to make stilts in a workshop offered by a local artist who taught us all to walk on them after they were made. Many made costumes and were in a parade at our recent Floyd World Music Festival in late September. Martha created the living room mosaic with artistic assistance from Barb. She adds, "I call it my mandala- mosaic. I am very pleased with it even though my back screamed at me occasionally from sitting on the floor too long breaking pieces of tile and putting them in place. I have started assisting with a new program at Headstart in Floyd, a combination of parent support group and parent- child interaction program. I don't feel too knowledgeable in this arena, but love to spend time with kids as well as offering parents a time to grow in their important role. We will meet twice a week once we get the plan in place. I spent lots more time dancing this summer and fall, finding it most relaxing and fun. I am intrigued with clogging and may take a class in it soon. My bamboo-enclosed meditation garden has given me endless joy. The morning glories are abundant on the fence. I enjoy them each time I look out my kitchen window. Everything I planted there did well." Tekiah Tekiah has undergone some changes that will culminate this coming New Year in the creation of a new pod. Joy, Rainbow, Sumati and Mark realized that, whereas we all share a lot of core values in common, we differ sufficiently in some lifestyle preferences that we would do better to continue on as two separate pods. Joy and Rainbow will remain in Tekiah, while Mark and Sumati will start a new, as yet unnamed pod. Each pod faces the challenging and rewarding tasks of developing their respective visions and recruiting new members. Sumati and Mark will explore potential sites for their new pod. Tekiah looks forward to the end of November when Kali plans to join us as a provisional member. Having grown up and spent part of her adult life in the city, Kali found that she loves our beautiful land. During her long visit this fall, she enjoyed many phases of our work, from gardening to making hammocks. The hammock business continues to do well, providing much of Tekiah's financial sustenance throughout the year. Once again, Harmony-Gaiam ordered a substantial number of hemp hammocks for their catalogue, and an on-line company, hammocks.com, provided a fairly steady season-long stream of orders. We also earned part of our livelihood through the fruit share, which Joy managed in conjunction with the Community Supported Agriculture program at Seven Springs Farm. She extended the fruit share to a fifteen week season in 2002, through the end of September. Unfortunately, the untimely May frost, the summer drought, and various pests and diseases made for a very difficult season for fruit, and we struggled to provide our sharers the amount and quality of fruit that we desired. Mark has had a very busy summer and fall. He continues to work two days a week in the CSA program at Seven Springs Farm, and has attended several agricultural meetings and events. He also spent a little time this summer in the hammock shop and in the garden. He finally went back to the doctor and submitted to a painless but somewhat expensive medical test to determine cause and treatment of his intermittent heart arrythmia. In September, Mark's elderly uncle in Hampstead, MD died. Although they hardly knew each other, his uncle's passing has added new challenges dealing with the estate, and attempting to plan a better future for his uncle's 50-acre farm than to let it get built up in suburban tract housing. His older brother Niels has been very supportive in all this, and the two of them spent a week in Hampstead near the end of October cleaning up the house and making arrangements for the estate. On Saturday the 26th, Niels and Mark joined more than 100,000 other citizens at a peace rally and march in Washington, DC, held in opposition to a possible US attack on Iraq. Sumati is still happily living with Mark in the Red Cabin, teaching yoga, taking care of her cows, gardening, and trying to get into the hammock shop more often. She is looking forward to scouting out a new pod site. Sumati's cow Yarrow, who gave us fresh milk daily from May of 2000 until late summer of 2002, died on September 16, 2002 after feeling indisposed for about ten days. She was 15 years old. A kind friend with a backhoe helped us bury her the next day. We are not getting any milk right now. However, Nandi, Yarrow's two and one-half year old daughter, may be pregnant from our neighbor's bull. Shanti is still spunky at about 20 years. The cows, and all of us as well, are enjoying the great barn that Nina, Lester and others built. It is full of hay, which Sumati bought from local farmers for the winter. Meanwhile, the autumn rains have revived the grass which had suffered all summer from drought, and the cows have better grazing now than in many moons. Rainbow says, "Time has passed quickly here in my new home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Six months have gone by already and my cat and I are settling in well. In addition to making hammocks, gardening, and doing routine chores, I have begun taking on some of the financial accounting and order processing for the hammock business. Joy was delighted to be able to pass these on to me so she could lighten her work load a little. "The tendonitis in my arms continues to bother me and often limits my ability to do certain types of work. I am hopeful that this, too, will clear up over time as I continue to work on taking better care of myself. "I feel very blessed to be part of Tekiah and Abundant Dawn, and the larger community of Floyd. Floyd is definitely a happening place, with lots of alternative folk including craftspeople, healers, musicians, artists, etc. selling their creations and offering their services. I have made a number of connections with some locals already, and am looking forward to getting more involved in the Floyd scene over time." Joy notes that "Even though this summer was very difficult for the fruit share and the garden in general, it was for me a time of becoming stronger within myself. I am grateful that I feel better able to deal with the many current interpersonal struggles that life has presented me. "My son Mo is starting his last year at Warren Wilson College. As well as his academic degree he will also leave well on his way to becoming a journeyman electrician. He chose to go to Guatemala and Mexico on a school-sponsored trip this spring. This summer, he was fortunate to sail for three weeks, then travel to Canada. It is wonderful to watch him blossom. "Mo and I traveled together to Sundance in June. This year the dance was 4 days long and no one was allowed to dry fast because of the drought and fires in the area (less than 100 miles away) The smoke created the reddest sunsets I have ever seen, sometimes starting by 3 pm. "After coming here several times this summer to help with hammock production, the Twin Oakers returned recently to help create this year's Samhain ritual. Even though there were many glitches, I was pleased to find myself keeping the overview without micromanaging. We created a wonderful atmosphere and the ritual went smoothly. We are eagerly planning for next year. "My connection with my Goddess son, Willow, and his parents has continued to grow. We have started discussing a family "contract" to delineate some of our common values, and have taken Star as the family name. "I have continued, with folks from Twin Oaks, to develop the Co-empowerment workshop. Lately, we have been looking at an exercise in complaining with a purpose where one is encouraged to complain vehemently with the understanding that, once one has defined a major issue, s/he will take at least one next step towards changing it. We plan to have the web site www.co-empowerment.org up by the first of the year." Legal, Financial and Structural Policy Work After some eight years of hard work, we seem to have basically completed the work of making a legal-financial- structural framework for Abundant Dawn. This reflects the efforts of the committee and the community as a whole, and is a cause for wonderful jubilation. The Velma and Rajal committee worked harder than usual the first half of this year, with Rajal's impending departure. The following policies are essentially complete, though there may be some revisions in the future: Vision Statement, Land Covenant, Community Structure and Pods, Membership, Conflict Resolution, Major Crisis, Financial Overview, Formula Agreement, Financial Miscellaneous, Bylaws, On-Land Businesses, Dwellings, Pod Dissolution, and End of AD As We Know It (community dissolution). Somewhat outside of the legal-financial-structure area, we also have written policies on Environmental Building Standards, Other Environmental Standards (in process), Fire Standards, Forestry, Food System, Pets, Recycling, Process and Facilitation (in progress), Minute-Taking, Labor (partial), Visitors, and a fair number of tidily recorded individual decisions in various other areas. Although this is a wonderful landmark for all of us, there is definitely a great deal of related work yet to be done. Our corporate notebook needs some updating, and there are a few minor loose threads to finish up in the above documents. The policy documents are updated in the notebook, but they need to be made web-accessible and searchable for members. We need to reform a lot of the policy work into contracts: a contract between each pod and the community, a contract between each householder, their pod, and the community, a membership agreement, and possibly a formal covenants document to attach to the contracts. We also want to make this work more available to other communities and forming communities. Outside of the area of legal financial core structure, other remaining tasks include: finishing up our land plan, working on environmental standards, working on our agreements about guests and who is on the land, working on our agreements around confidentiality, and more work on animals, pets, and animal care standards. It seems that there is no particular end-point to the work that could be done. However, we are going to do it more slowly. The committee (which is now Joy and Velma, as Joy has worked with Velma and Rajal some of the time over the last couple of years) is going to put in less hours. Also, the community is going to meet for congresses every four months rather than every two. The Main Garden The main community garden by the river sorely missed Ann, rainfall and effective ground-level fencing in about that order, and our harvest showed the impact. Nevertheless management-by-committee was better than nothing, and we got some good food from this garden. Below-normal rainfalls in April through August forced us to use the irrigation system regularly to keep things alive and green. We got several crops growing pretty well and then whole chunks of vegetation got mowed back overnight. Critters! We set large Hav-a-Hart traps and caught three raccoons that probably climbed over the fence with their flexible, hand-like paws. Then woodchucks, rabbits and opossums squeezed under the fence to consume more foliage, munching the soybeans to nubbins. With the severe drought parching the surrounding fields and woods, who can blame the animals for coming to our irrigated organic oasis? Mark put chicken wire fencing around the soybeans to protect them, but a plague of Japanese beetles made short work of their regrowth. Tomatoes, peppers and garlic did well, whereas potatoes, onions and leeks suffered from drought, beetles and root maggots. Lester and Martha did a nice job planting and tending the sweet corn. Although coons returned to devour the first planting, we trapped them and thus saved the other four plantings. We got to eat corn on the cob from August until early October. With the help of Rainbow, Sumati, Kali and several industrious visitors and guests, Mark got fall carrots, beets and greens established, and planted cover crops after corn and potatoes. A number of good soaking rains in September and October made all the difference for these fall plantings. We had to disguise the vegetables from the hungry wildlife by covering them with floating row covers supported on wire hoops. Since October, we have gotten a nice amount of carrots and bok choy from these beds. Next year, we plan to reinforce the fence by adding a strip of chicken wire folded so that part of it lies flat on the ground and the rest extends a foot or two up the existing fence. Grass growth will firmly anchor the chicken wire so animals can't easily dig under it. The Cabin Meadow Garden Report by Sumati When we moved to the Red Cabin two years ago, Mark and I decided to fence the small garden near our new dwelling, since deer like to graze in the meadow and would otherwise eat anything we plant. After removing and transplanting most of the peppermint, we dug five short rows of raised beds with a small circular bed not far from the gate. During the first year, the little circle was dominated by some parsnips transplanted from our main garden near the river. The parsnips grew very tall, made flowers which attract beneficial insects, and then scattered seed so that this winter we will have parsnips to dig. The first year our major crop was yellow keeper tomatoes. There was also abundant lettuce in season, some tasty pole beans, a little broccoli, lots of summer squash and some greens. We planted St John's Wort and some other medicinal herbs, while calendula flowers joined the parsnips in the circle. This year I let a few volunteer wild evening primrose plants grow, as deer had eaten the ones I had planted outside the fence. I'd never grown much evening primrose before, and was unprepared for the huge bushes they became. They crowded everything including the walking paths, and attracted Japanese beetles by the hundreds. After I collected the yellow flowers for tincture, I cut back the big plants to make room for fall greens, turnips and radishes. Meanwhile we had a good crop of spring lettuce and a few other greens. The circular bed now has poppies, sage, fennel and oregano along with the parsnips and calendula. We planted a nice bed of bush beans, another bed of flour corn and scarlet runner beans, and some soybeans for seed to make up for the total loss in the main garden. When the two hills of zucchini started to die from squash vine borer, we piled buckets of compost around their stems to encourage re-rooting, and they went on to produce a few more squash until frost. In the summer, we harvested a nice crop of garlic (planted last fall), made some of the St John's wort into tincture, and harvested a few beets, turnips, and other vegetables and herbs. This fall, the celeriac are growing into nice roots for winter, and the fall greens and radishes have already provided some good harvests. Recently, we installed row covers to protect the greens from the coming cold weather. In October, we planted some more garlic and made a new compost pile to fertilize the soil next year. Abundant Dawn Community P.O. Box 433 Floyd, VA 24091