Wabi-sabi is the name I and my fellow sub-communitarians have adopted for our collective here at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage. Our small sub-community formed two winters ago, when several of us gathered to talk about forming a collective to share our interests and work on common projects together, including gardening and possibly building a kitchen to house a food co-op. Our community within a community would also be a tight network of support for each other.
In the spring, we began to more seriously discuss the prospect of building a kitchen, and over the summer we started eating with each other outdoors on Thomas’s warren (a.k.a. leasehold), using a simple rocket stove for cooking. The kitchen design began to take shape over those months. It would be a roughly bean-shaped structure with indoor cooking, dining, and social space, with a sheltered porch for outdoor cooking in the summer, and surrounded by gardens. Since we all have similar ecological ideals, it was not difficult to determine that we wanted to use mostly hand tools to build, and use as many local and natural materials as possible. (We even discussed the possibility of trying not to use any plastic in the construction at all — that would be quite a challenge, though… but it’s possible, I think.)
