Metalhead Finds Magic at DR

by Kyle O’Malley

Kyle was a student in last year’s Permaculture Design Course at Dancing Rabbit. Below he shares some of his experience. This year’s course is happening Sept 17-25; find out more or register here.

How do you prepare for something outside of your comfort zone, as well as so far from how you normally live your life? In this case, if it’s a Permaculture Design Course (PDC) at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage, you can do what I did, and just wing the heck out of it.

I really didn't know what to expect from Dancing Rabbit, but I had to find out.

I had come to the realization that we, as a civilization in whole, are destroying our ecosystem. If you break it down by scaling Earth's age (4.6 billion years) to 46 years, then we as a species have only been here for four hours. Our Industrial Revolution began one minute ago. In that one minute, we destroyed 50% of the Earth's forests. How is that sustainable? It simply isn't.

Finding solutions to this and similar problems is what intrigued me about Dancing Rabbit (DR) and the PDC taught by Bill Wilson of Midwest Permaculture. I was part of the first permaculture course offered at Dancing Rabbit in September 2015. There’s a lot of information out there to study in the abstract, but here was a chance to see something real, something tangible. And with Bill and Sharon (a Dancing Rabbit member) as teachers, I knew something special was going to happen.

I hadn't been studying permaculture for very long, maybe a year, but what I was reading was getting to me. Have you ever read something that just... made too much sense in some chaotic way? It was baffling.

Permaculture isn't just growing food, it’s growing food the smartest way possible, as well as creating energy, and building better homes from materials that are more energy efficient. It’s learning how to measure the elevation changes on your land, and how to keep water where you need or want it. It’s everything you could need, all wrapped up in a nice little package, and held in a place that literally was doing the coursework. It was the ultimate learning environment, really.

Fitting all that into nine days was going to be rough, but Bill knew what he was doing.

On the first day what really struck me was my classmates. There were less than 20 people there, but the variety was extremely diverse. Where else would you find a metalhead, an ex-Marine, “hippies”, an Orthodox singer, medicine women, gardeners, a hair stylist, gamers, graphic designers, community leaders, and just about anything else you could think of, in one room? I was worried at first, being that we all were so different, but I always expect the worst and hope for the best. Very quickly it became apparent that even though we were so different, we were all there for the same reason.

After a brief orientation and review of our online seminars, we had time to set up our tents before heading to sleep. I already had mine up, and indulged in my usual habit of wandering. As a metalhead, I don't think I have ever even written (and you will never hear me vocalize) this word, but Dancing Rabbit was friggin' magical. Just walking some of the paths alone, in the dark, made me really envious of what was there.

There’s something about the place that made me want to absorb everything I saw and heard, and start working towards doing the same thing. I thought I had plans, and they just went out the window. I had a new goal, and it was to recreate what was going on here.

Most of the week was a bombardment of information paired with muggy hot days. I studied chemistry in college and associated everything with that, from soil to plant propagation. Biodynamic gardening is sort of my thing, and the information was just flowing and making sense. Bill did a great job explaining everything.

On the fourth day, we started the day off with alternate energy, or more accurately alternate-alternate energy, because we really weren't focusing on solar or wind. This is when I was introduced to wood gasification, and that pretty much changed the entire game for me. Again.

I can run gasoline-powered machines, with wood? What sorcery is this?! How had I never heard about this, if it's been around for decades?

All the information we were offered cemented the fact that there is a lot of work to be done but it is all entirely doable. As soon as the course was over and I was back in Indianapolis, I started a project to design and fabricate a wood-gasification machine that could power a greenhouse, and eventually an entire house. If I could only take one thing away from the PDC itself, it would be this: a way to stick it to big oil.

Even though the days were hot, Dancing Rabbit and all of the Rabbits were cool. I'm not treated as well as this even at home. Everyone I came across was open and talkative, and nobody ever seemed to be bothered by any questions.

I enjoyed seeing some of the residences. To actually feel the earthen floors with your feet, to feel how much cooler it was inside a strawbale house without any sort of air conditioning, was amazing. The more I experienced of the PDC the more I fell for Dancing Rabbit.

I had never experienced a community that small that seemed to get along and agree on things so civilized... I can't even get my buddies to do their own dishes, let alone even agree to disagree on half of anything.

Everyone at Dancing Rabbit has something to offer and teach, whether they know it or not. I wasn't really concerned about much before I went to Dancing Rabbit; now I may be reluctant but I'm up for about anything.

One thing that did worry me a little was meals. As I expected, the meals did tend to be on the vegetarian-friendly side of things, but what I didn't expect was for it to be on par with my Italian grandmother's cooking. Seeing as I love my grandma's cooking and my steak bloody, it was one of the most impressive experiences I've had eating anywhere.

After the nine days were up, it was hard to say goodbye to both my new friends and Dancing Rabbit. In that short amount of time, we spent a lot of time together, and they were all more than just someone who shared a powerful experience with me. I truly feel that even if I never see anyone from the course again, I will forever remember them.

I'm not good with names, but I memorized everyone from the course, and I wonder if they were as changed by Dancing Rabbit as I was. I think about Dancing Rabbit all the time: whether or not harvests were large enough to sustain everyone, and whether or not they’re getting enough rain, and is the rain staying where it’s needed, and whether coyotes are getting too close to the Rabbits’ food sources... the list goes on.

Never had I thought so much of a place or people before, and I think for the first time in my driving life, I made the 8-hour trek back to my town without my metal, and just reflected on the entire experience.

Sometimes winging it pays off.

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Kyle O’Malley is a bio-dynamic gardener born and raised in Indianapolis, Indiana. He studied chemistry at Ball State University, and has been developing microbe and nutrient solutions that best aid plants in reaching their genetic potential. His hobbies include working on computers, cars, and training his German shepherds.