What? Why? How? And now?
Thank you to so many of you for your messages of support and inquiry into our progress. There have been many changes since we last updated the website. Until recently we have been engaged in an experiment of living together in a house near Kerikeri. This phase of our research was a steep learning curve into the reality of building and sustaining community. Our ideals and values were very much put to the test. We learned that in our current cultural and societal paradigm, income and resource sharing, limited privacy and space, collective decision making and self-leadership take an enormous amount of maturity, consciousness, communication and commitment.
Thankfully, the arrogance and naivety we embarked on this journey with, believing we could ‘succeed’ where others had ‘failed’, has been well and truly knocked out of us! With the wisdom of experience, we now have a renewed respect, awareness and humility for the enormity of what creating conscious community actually takes.Every one of us in the core group has developed a deeper clarity of where we sit in relation to our initial dreaming of community.
As a result, the core group now consists of Robyn, Cameron and Jocelyn. When the 3 of us left the house in Kerikeri in November, we spent time harvesting the learnings from the experiment , reviewing the vision and regrouping.
Then with the illness and subsequent passing in early January of David, Robyn’s husband, life presented us with the opportunity for truly living the heart of community; showing us that community is not about a physical place or a mental construct; it’s about being there for each other, coming together naturally as whanau. Throughout this sacred time of caring for Dave before and after his death, we experienced a deepening of the bonds of kinship between us, our families and the heart communities we belong to. This has stimulated an even greater desire to begin the revolution of conscious community, where we are fully participating in and taking responsibility for developing a culture of purpose, love, authenticity, co-operation and service. We have strengthened our resolve to build community on a firm foundation of integrated spiritual values so that we can live the truth of the inter-connectedness of all life.
For the time being, our search for land and new members is on hold. Nevertheless, our commitment to developing a sustainable community is still the focus of our lives. At present our next step is not clear. We are looking forward to the regenerating effect of travel and exploration into other communities, trusting that this will lead to the natural emergence of a clear direction forward.
At this stage, because of our travel plans, communication via the internet will be intermittent.
Chooks, health and sustainability
I am pretty sure many of you have heard of Joel Salatin and his egg-mobile. The simple and smart idea of moving chickens around your pasture, following herbivores (aka cattle, horses) a couple days delayed, so that the fly larva in the manure can hatch and the chooks can get their protein hit. While at the same time spreading the manure around, eating lots of fresh grass and bugs.
Mother nature obviously has the copyright of this purely advantageous system. It sanitizes the pasture for the herbivores, the chooks always have fresh ground to roam around and balance their diet, the fertility of the pasture increases due to heaps of nitrogen rich chook manure and it creates the healthiest egg you can imagine as a by-product.
Did you know that eggs from hens which are allowed to feed on insects and green plants can contain omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids in the beneficial ration of one-to-one, but commercial supermarket eggs fed mostly on grain can contain as much as 19x more omega-6 than omega-3.
It is no surprise thats eggs from pasture fed chickens constitute the most complete, nutritious and economical form of animal protein available and are valued by traditional cultures throughout the world.
In our little world up in Kerikeri, renting a place which is sitting amongst a beautiful organic orchard, we dont have cattle, but we have our own small eggmobile, inhabited by around 30 happy chooks (some mongrels and few varieties of heritage breeds with the bulk being Barred Rocks) who get a fresh area of orchard every 2nd day. They are happy as and are love scratching around the trees. It is so cool to watch when they come out their house in the early morning and go on they hunt for snails and bugs. And I tell it is so entertaining to see a hen find a snail, trying to find a quite place where she can devour her treat while being chased by the others. That is bound to make you smile and laugh!
We are learning much form our chooks, get the tastiest eggs in abundance, sell a bit of surplus and can confirm that can be truly a sustainable way of keeping chooks, especially if you can find a way to grow your own grain, eg. using pasture cropping methods by Colin Seis or growing grains using Fukuoka's method of rotation system for dry rice/barely. But this will have to wait till we are blessed with being the caretakers of some land of our own.
So whats all this about?
We are a group of people committed to establishing an intentional community in Northland. Our goal is the co-creation of a holistic and truly sustainable community model for living in peace. We want to focus our energies on our inner journeys, on regenerative ways of caring for the Earth, being of service and celebrating life. Crucial to our vision is to heal the wounds and conditioning we all have, so that we learn to relate from a place of deep trust and connectedness.
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