Photos

Hello all,

The weekend has been pretty slow, we've had a lot of free time, which has been spent mostly by us all laying on the floor in our big group space and doing our reading homework. Classes start the day after tomorrow! Tomorrow is going to be spent doing more group sharing - this time about education history and learning styles, which is really exciting. I can hardly believe that there was time scheduled for this before classes started. I've already been talking a lot about school and learning with people here and a lot of people seem to be coming from a similar place as me, so I know we'll all be able to support one another. How sustainable of us.

Today there was a craft fair put on by the Ecovillage Training (EVT) group, who are 30 people from around the world who are here for an intensive month-long course to learn about ecovillages and how they work. A lot of them are involved in some sort of sustainable program or community at home, and are here to bring the knowledge they gain back to that group. I got two really beautiful necklaces there, and had some good talks with some of the EVT people. We've been doing our dances (the sacred dance and the ceilidh) with them, but haven't had a lot of time to get to know one another. After the craft fair four of the EVT members did presentations on their communities from home. It's really inspiring to be around all these people who are so committed to sustainability. Later, our teacher for "Applied Sustainable Ecovillage Living," Jonathan Dawson, gave a presentation about the Global Ecovillage Network (he is the secretary of this organization, I think), and talked about different ecovillages around the world and what they are like, and showed lots of pictures. I learned that in Thailand, people ordain trees as monks and tie yellow cloth the color of a monk's robe around them so that people won't hurt them or cut them down. He also talked about how two big ideas that come out a lot in ecovillage living are the reclaiming of power from professionals (through things like construction of one's own dwellings), and also the preservation of traditional skills and knowledge (in virtually any field) because it does no one any good to rely on methods of production that could potentially become obsolete were we to run out of fuels, which is basically on of the big assumptions that ecovillages are running on (that we will run out of oil and other fuels at some point). I am not doing a very good job of describing all of this, but it's fascinating. Just tell me if you ever want to talk about it, I'm sure I'll get better at explaining it all after I have lived here longer.

I've put a little link to where my pictures are on the right side of this blog, but you can just click on this too. Right now a lot of them are of the people I am here with, but I promise I'll have more pictures of The Park and Cluny and everything as I get more settled.

Love,
Nora

P.S. Probably one of the most exciting moments of my entire life occurred earlier today when I realized that Dolly Parton had a tour date in Glasgow in a couple of weeks. It's sold out though, which I think happened in a matter of days. I had no idea. I'll just have to wait to see her in a more reasonable place, like the USA.