Blog 3

I wrote Blog 3 from the Fingerlakes Project Workshop on sustainability and education that is held at Ithaca College every Spring. There are speakers discussing sustainability from different disciplines and programs around the world. Click on the program to learn more about the various topics. The first night of workshop, we dined at a restaurant that only serves local organic food.

The Moosewood restaurant has been here since the first time that I lived in Ithaca, when I was attending Cornell for a summer program in 1992. I stayed to work on my dissertation. I lived in cooperative house called Schyler House. I loved team cooking and our house motto which was, “Bad meals make good compost.” I left Ithaca right around the time the first ecovillage meetings started up.

For the past year, I have been involved in the planning of a third neighborhood here at Ecovillage Ithaca, Tree.
I have also been able to draw on my expertise in Public Relations to help to support a new charter school, New Roots, dedicated to sustainability and social justice.
Over the years, I have been involved in various cohousing and community efforts, including the start up meetings for what would grow into a cohousing neighborhood in Blacksburg, Virginia called Shawdowlake.

Shortly after I first moved to Hilo in 1998, I toured several sites with a famous Ecovillage architect, who told me that from the time that we were standing on the land until occupancy, it would be six years of meetings. My daughter, Malia, was a baby then. I was working full time as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at UH Hilo, and that’s not how I wanted to spend my nonexistent spare time.

When Malia became old enough to start school, I wanted to avoid Malia getting Nature Defecit Disorder, so she attended several alternative schools in Puna including a Sudbury- influenced school.

We lived in a house with screen walls, buckets for composting toilets, and walked about a half mile to our car. To see a nearby community with similar structures, check out Gaia Yoga Gardens.

However, I found it challenging to maintain a professional career while battling back the jungle. One night our little home was surrounded by wild boar caught in traps; they were squealing angrily while rats and centipedes crawled across our bed. So we moved back to Hilo and tried to create a life with less driving. I enrolled Malia in the school just up the street from our home in central Hilo. It was better, but I still wasn’t experiencing the levels connection and intimacy I that I have felt in community.

After my pneumonia and the vent opening in the volcano last spring, I realized that I might have left Hawaii to heal. So as soon as the semester ended, we visited Ecovillage Ithaca I went on the tour, which is the first step necessary for being able to live here, I decided to ask the spirits of this land for permission to be here. I swam out into the middle of the pond to listen to the spirits of the land. I was floating when my cell phone rang. Malia was playing at the home of one of the fifteen girls her age her age that lived here, so I thought I better check to see if the call was about her. The call was coming from that number so I answered it. The mom told me that they had subletted their home for ten days, but the people just canceled and it was all paid for, so she invited us to stay there while they traveled. I took that as a clear sign.