Abundance! The Newsletter of Abundant Dawn Community Issue 23, Fall 2003 Hello Readers, Summer is a hard time to make time to write a newsletter, so here is the fall issue, coming out just about five months after the spring issue. A lot has taken place since then at Abundant Dawn. We welcomed a new provisional member, Carla Royal, into Dayspring Circle just a few weeks ago. Velma has started a new job in Roanoke. Sumati's heifer Nandi gave birth to a healthy calf and is now giving milk. And we have slogged our way through a phenomenally wet spring and summer. Mark Landscape Upgrades near Main House We have held several work parties to fix up the outdoor space around the community house, attended by most or all Abundant Dawn members and usually one to several community visitors. We hired a friend with the needed skills to take down two large white pines that had been shading the south side of the house (and threatening to pummel the roof with broken limbs in the next bad storm). He cut all except the sawmill-worthy trunk of the larger tree, and all of us spent one hot afternoon hauling all those pine branches to a brush pile below the pond dam. We scoped out an expanded and improved parking area and ordered a large pile of gravel. Several of us spent an exhausting few hours trying to spread it out with hand tools - then our neighbor came by and kindly finished the job in a few minutes with his tractor. Now, four cars can park comfortably in this space, and there is no longer a temptation to park on the edge of the lawn. (Continual rain plus cars had turned this part of the lawn into a mud pit earlier this year. Now, with some sawdust mulch, it is recovering.) We pulled masses of poison ivy from the yard. We built steps on the path up the lawn to the house. We built another set of steps up the steep slope next to the root cellar, leading to partway up the pond dam along the Blueberry Path. This was a great improvement in the eyes of Dayspringers and others who commonly use that path, as it reroutes the walk so it doesn't wiggle through a parking lot, and the steps get one halfway up the hill, with seemingly no fuss and bother. Arriving at Abundant Dawn by Carla Royal Well, I finally made it. It's been a long road, yet in some ways, things seemed to happen over night. One day I'm a Raleigh, NC city girl and the next I'm living in a cabin on a little meadow in the woods. I've been here a few weeks and I'm still amazed by so many things. The sky is so much bluer here than in Raleigh; the moon, brighter; the wind, more alive. I step out my front door and see deer on a regular basis and as I walk down the trail from my cabin, I see wild turkeys, raccoons, turkey vultures, groundhogs, etc. Just the other night a bat visited me in my cabin for a while! Everyday I eat fresh food from the garden. I breathe clean air and drink pure water. I no longer have to exercise for exercise's sake, instead, I walk the land because I love it and I feel my body getting stronger. This is a slice of paradise! All the Abundant Dawn folks have graciously opened their home to me and welcomed me wholeheartedly. I'm really quite touched by the reception I've received. They want me to feel a part of things, and I'm beginning to. This is such a huge transition for me...by far the biggest I've ever made. I've spent most of my life trying to fit into conventional society but I could never quite get the hang of it. I always felt a bit on the fringes. I finally decided that I was sick of trying to live a life that wasn't me. While this life in Floyd is completely new to me, it feels right. I feel like I've come home. It will take me a while to get the rhythm of life here but it's a rhythm I've been longing for. I'm trying to get a little counseling practice going here (I've been in private practice in Raleigh for the past 13 years) and I want to start a small design services business (designing brochures, flyers, etc). I'm also looking for a part time job. I'd love to work with an artisan doing whatever needs to be done just to be around someone doing their craft. I'm interested in exploring my creative side and would love to dabble in crafts of all kinds. I'm also a singer and look forward to getting back into my music again. I can already see that Floyd is the perfect place for art and music. So I'm thrilled to be here and finally starting my new life...a life that's congruent with who I am. I've come home and I'm grateful. Visitors, Bonfires and Work Parties In the old days, the visitor team scheduled 2-3 day initial visits just whenever they could. This was awkward, as on the one hand it left the community feeling always on call to visitors, and on the other hand the visitor team could never count on most members being available to meet the visitors. In fact, it made the visitor team work almost impossible. So a year or two ago we agreed to try having scheduled visitor weekends, especially over spring/summer/fall. We still don't have all the kinks worked out, but it does seem an improvement. We try to schedule the weekends right after the three-week Twin Oaks visitor period, for the convenience of visitors, although this doesn't work for our schedule half the time, and we put it somewhere else. Visitors generally come Friday, and we have community dinner and a bonfire or campfire Friday evening. Sometimes it's a cookout. We've had s'mores a couple times. There's usually some music. Saturday we normally have a 3-hour community work party in the morning or afternoon, and Saturday evening we have community dinner. On Friday or Saturday, someone takes the visitors on a tour of the land. The visitors generally leave sometime Sunday. Other activities fit around this basic structure. Visitors who can't come at our scheduled times are sometimes invited for a tour, dinner and overnight, but without the expectation of all members meeting them. Summer Party On August 9, we held our annual summer full moon party, open to the wider Floyd community and other friends and acquaintances. Despite the rainy weather, we had about 30 guests. It's normally an outdoor party, but anticipating the rain, Martha, Joy, Velma, Carla, and Ren‚e (Tekiah's summer intern) cleaned up the community house and made it ready for more people than usual inside. We've never seen the community house looking so good. The potluck food was excellent and abundant. Large cinnamon rolls from The Grateful Bread (Lester's bread company) were especially popular. We skipped our usual campfire by the river, due to the weather, but there was music with guitar, mandolin, and singing in the living room before we all went home. Garden Report With everyone so busy with other activities, much of the gardening fell to Earth Pod this year. Mark managed to keep about one third of the fenced garden in the river field under cultivation. Sumati got many tomato, onion and other vegetable seedlings started in flats in cold frames, and grew some vegetables in the Cabin garden. We held several successful garden work parties planting and digging potatoes (our all-time favorite crop!), and putting the garden to bed for the winter. After four years of drought, this year was quite possibly the rainiest in living memory. The sun scarcely shone at all throughout the cold drizzly month of May. Thereafter, whenever the sun did emerge, its heat seemed to brew torrential thunderstorms at least twice a week, and the soil was rarely dry enough to till, until near the end of August! Fortunately, some areas were under a heavy standing cover crop, which Mark scythed in May. We parted the resulting mulch to create narrow planting rows, into which we "mudded- in" tomato, pepper, sweet potato, celery and winter squash seedlings. Saturated airless soil, high humidity and limited sunshine caused disease in the tomatoes and reduced growth and yield of some vegetables. The continual pounding rains compacted our normally mellow soil, so that it came up in cinder- block-sized chunks when we dug for potatoes! Yet the garden did give us fine crops of potatoes, sweet potatoes, snap peas, cauliflower, and snap beans. Sweet corn, another Abundant Dawn favorite, did well too - if only the weather had allowed us to plant more! Sumati grew some beautiful bright-purple pole beans, basil and lettuce in the cabin garden. By midsummer, Mark was getting burned out with awkward weather and too little time, so he started planting cover crops in the river garden, in any idle patch of ground he could prepare between rains. Borrowing an idea from a research project, he planted some sorghum-sudangrass hybrid mixed with cow peas - and the hybrid grass reached a height of six feet within 60 days after planting! (No, it is NOT genetically engineered!) The cover crops will make it easier to prepare ground and begin planting next year, whatever the weather brings. The sun finally came out in its full glory in early September, and we are bringing in the final fruits of our efforts. We escaped the full fury of Hurricane Isabel, though it rained and blew hard enough that night to get our attention and break a few small branches. It has been a difficult growing season for all farmers in our region, and we are grateful for what we have been able to grow. Dayspring Circle The big news of this particular newsletter cycle is that Carla Royal visited and joined Dayspring. She is living temporarily in the old Cabin, which Nina and Rajal lived in, in the Cabin Meadow. And we are planning to start very soon building our guest cabin, in Dayspring meadow, which will be Carla's next temporary home once it's finished. Carla joins us with two dogs, Buttercup and Chelsea. We completed a circular path around the center of Dayspring, and are starting the process of building other paths to join in. We invested in a self-propelled walk-behind mower, which has made the task of mowing our hilly lawns and paths much easier. Velma dug up all the Canadian thistles she could find in the meadow, and hopes she has given them a serious setback. We also pulled more poison ivy than we would have guessed was there from the center of the circle. The deer ate most of the plants in the constructed wetlands, but now that we've put a motion-activated sprayer there, they are starting to grow back. Velma says, "In June, Mom moved to the nursing home in Floyd, via a few days in the hospital. She's fairly detached, but there's still some connection. She still walks with assistance. She doesn't sing or whistle anymore, and her response to my singing and whistling to her is more variable. The difference between a 15 minute trip and an hour is a huge improvement in my life, and the nursing home is more appropriate to where she's at now than the assisted living would be (in fact, she couldn't live there anymore). "Early in September, I took on a full time job in Roanoke. This was overdue, and I think it's a good job (software development, of course). And, it's a huge change--adding about 60 hours a week into what was already a very full life. The drive is an hour and 15 minutes at least. It doesn't seem oppressive the way the drive to assisted living in Salem did. But I leave home before 7, and get home at 6:30 at the earliest. I hope I'll join the health club across the street, and work out several lunchtimes. The most positive aspect of this is, of course, paying my bills, but I think it will be professionally satisfying and challenging, and I should have the opportunity to see fine live theater more often. "I don't want to give anything else up--so for now I'm going to see if I can fit Mom, the rest of my family, Abundant Dawn, the Fellowship for Intentional Community, floydcrafts.com, communitymade.com, home, garden, and friends into the time that's left evenings and weekends. I don't think I'll bake cookies this Christmas, though... "My own little garden out my front door got a late start between weather and me. But now it is a lovely and satisfying wild mass of morning glories, marigolds, snapdragons, and zinnias in bloom (as well as basil, peppers, cucumbers, and Chinese cabbage)." Martha adds: "I've had a great summer. . I made a solo trip to Ocracoke, North Carolina in late June for a 5 day retreat by the ocean. Each day I received a treasured 'gift from the sea'. It was a glorious week filled with fun, silent walks, and recommitment. Then in July, Lester and I spent a week with music and dance at Warren Wilson College near Asheville, North Carolina where I took clogging and flat- footing lessons and had a great time listening to music and dancing all week. Later we had a relaxing week with Bets, Steve and kids at a nearby state park. My time at home has been filled with gardening, playing the piano, and enjoying our many visitors. Tekiah For Tekiah, spring and summer are often busy times and this summer definitely went by in a blur of activity. Both Joy and Rainbow have made some short trips and Joy took a longer trip to Dancing Rabbit Community with the Star family in May. Many Abundancers went to Warren Wilson College in May to see Mo graduate. We had fun. Our businesses have been challenging this year. Luckily, we had two interns during the summer who provided young enthusiastic energy. It was especially fun when they were both here. Our hemp cloth distributor suddenly ran out of the cloth we needed, and finding sufficient quality supplies for the hammock business has been an ongoing struggle. The cloth we found was acceptable and yet, since we didn't have time to test it, we are unsure how sturdy it is for our purposes. The fruit share we do for the local CSA, found the picking slim again this summer. We went from the famine of drought to the "feast" of amazingly abundant amounts of water. One orchard where we pick cherries had 9 inches of rain in 9 days. I have talked to several local farmers who said that their yields were less this year than last. This was definitely true for fruit. Many summer fruit tended to be watery and tasteless, or would rot and mold before they could be picked. So September found us scrambling to meet our commitment of fruit. Joy is still excited about doing co-empowerment workshops. After one that she did at the Twin Oaks Communities Conference, she was invited to present at the Unity Fest at The Farm in October. Re-enlivening and creating a newsletter for ISL (Institute for Sustainable Living) as well as working on the website (www.co-empowerment.org) are tasks on her list for the fall and winter. The first full workshop will happen just before the New Year. Rainbow and Joy are continuing to challenge each other by doing a cleansing diet together. Hopefully, we will compost many things to nurture the seeds we want to grow. Rainbow adds, "It's been a turbulent few months for me. On July 9th, I had to make the decision to have my cat put down. We shared over 12 good years together as best friends and companions. It has been very difficult for me to find my way without him by my side and I'm still struggling to get my feet back on the ground and move forward with my life. Everybody here at Abundant Dawn has been incredibly supportive during this time and I'm deeply grateful to all of my fellow communards as well as all of my friends who sent me letters of support and encouragement. I'm especially grateful to Joy for carrying some of my work load along with all of her own during the initial few weeks, so that I could take some time to grieve and take care of myself. "At the beginning of August, I took over the care of a young cat belonging to a friend of mine, who needed a good home for a while. Patrick (the new cat) is very affectionate, curious and fun-loving and provides for some comic relief along with occasional moments of frustration (he likes to trip people up and do all sorts of annoying things when he wants attention). Although Patrick is not my new long-term companion, he's good company until my new feline soulmate finds his way to me (or I to him). When that day arrives, Patrick will either go back to his mom or be adopted by someone else in the community. "I now also have another horse enthusiast to share my vision of having horses here at Abundant Dawn. Carla, our newest member, joined our community a few weeks ago as part of Dayspring Circle along with her two dogs, Chelsea and Buttercup (who are just the sweetest, most lovable girls!). It's wonderful to have two sweet and beautiful dogs here and another animal lover to talk, scheme, play and share stories with." Earth Pod Earth Pod has taken on a substantial part of home food production this year, including gardening, dairying, and canning, freezing and drying some of the harvest. Sumati's cow Nandi gave birth to a healthy calf in May, which has meant two milkings a day since then, and a very busy summer for Sumati. We have also continued to think about and discuss the future of our pod, how we would like it to grow and evolve, how soon to start building, and where. As things get less hectic this fall, we plan to spend some time with some other experienced communitarians to get some new ideas and visions of how we might want to shape our pod. Mark has continued to stay busy with agricultural pursuits, from home gardening and community supported agriculture, to research, newsletter writing, and even a little teaching. This summer, the head of the Horticulture Department at Virginia Tech coordinated a one-week intensive course on organic horticulture. He invited Mark to teach a two-hour session on soil management, and the course was quite successful overall. After a busy summer, Mark is looking forward to taking some time off during October. Finishing this newsletter was one of several tasks to complete before he could leave; getting the garlic planted for next year is another. Abundant Dawn Community P.O. Box 433 Floyd, VA 24091 This newsletter is also available in a print version. If you don't want to receive this newsletter in the future, email info@abundantdawn.org, or send a postcard to the mailing address above.