So. This morning the five women who live in the Green Acres Eco-pod decided to begin the process of figuring out a “five-year plan.” And, we discovered that podmate Rebecca, a woman who like me has lived a long time, years ago actually directed formal planning sessions for companies! (I had no idea!)
“We’ll see what I can remember,” she muttered, and laughed, as she took charge.
Last Saturday, she and podmate Brie spent the day in Indianapolis at the Indiana Small Farm Conference, and returned with this new season’s new tools: two scythes on each end, one big and one small; a tool for grafting, second from left, and a machete in its protective case.
This morning we began our meeting with my presentation of a Green Acres Permaculture vision (in the large circle, first photo) as dreamed up by three participants in a three day brain storming session during the week-long practicum aspect of the two-week Permaculture Design Course that I took back in 2006. The “vision and values” embedded there got transferred over to the Green Acres Neighborhood Ecovillage website a few years ago.
We all agreed that that that the GANE website needs to be updated to reflect new realities, included the revised name that we came up with this morning: Green Acres Permaculture Village. I will be tackling that job in the near future.
Here’s Brie, Leah, and Katarina, sitting around during this morning’s meeting to outline first steps of our new five year action plan for the Green Acres Permaculture Village.
A few minutes after this I took this photo Katarina, looking at her laptop, exclaimed: “Oh wow! Today is International Women’s Day!” How fitting, then, that we women would be the ones who are taking the next steps in this evolving new template for suburban living.
When I got home, I opened my laptop to to Facebook. There it was, the usual synchronicity! — this one from two old friends. Brooke Williams had posted an article by his wife, the naturalist and author Terry Tempest Williams, included on bookriot.com as part of International Women’s Day! In the article, Terry wrote movingly of her mother and her grandmothers, the evolving nature of the books each was drawn to over time. Oh wow, again! For one of her grandmothers, Mimi, also happens to have been my spiritual grandmother, with whom I spent endless hours over long lunches discussing the kind of deep, culturally taboo subjects posed by the book that, Terry discovered afterwards, Mimi had squirreled between the mattress and box springs of her death bed before she died. Go, Mimi! With women like these as our foremothers, how could we not continue to be infused with the holy spirit?
Terry Tempest Williams: On Women and Books
