Interdependence
Inquiries, Honorings, and Reckonings
Conversations with Rachel and NikiAnne
January 8-22, 2025
FREE online event
Life is complex. Community just adds another layer.
Hungry for some honest, authentic insight into community living? Join residents NikiAnne Feinberg and Rachel Fee for intimate conversations about the gifts, challenges, and abundant growth opportunities available in communal living.
Explore the interstitial spaces of our collaborative ecovillage experiment, taking deep dives, inviting dialog, and answering questions regarding Earthaven’s culture of interdependence. Each conversation is standalone and through the series, they will reveal the richness and complexity of Earthaven’s cultural topsoil.
Conversations
Belonging
“I think part of what a culture of domination has done is raise the romantic relationship up as the single most important bond, when of course the single most important bond is that of community.”
-Bell Hooks
Our fractured culture has left us disconnected and lonely at unprecedented levels. What does it mean to belong? To yourself, the land, a people or culture? Is it an active or passive role? What is OUR role in our belonging? What does secure attachment to community look like? How do we cultivate belonging? Together we’ll explore these questions and more, speaking from personal experiments in communal living.
Wednesday, January 8, 7-8:30 pm
Village Mothering/Village Auntying
What if you didn’t have to do it alone? We’ve all heard the phrase “It takes a village”. Indeed it does, but what does that really mean for our relationships? Siloed into nuclear families for generations, we now must remember and uncover the path for expanding the web of connection and support no matter how bumbling and awkward our first steps forward are. Join us in frank and insightful dialogue with a village mother and a village auntie, speaking to the tender heart of the chosen family, child-rearing, and the gifts and challenges of auntying.
Saturday, January 11, 4:30-6 pm
Land-based Life, Hand-built Homes
Systems, Infrastructure, and Agriculture: The Bone of the Earthaven Experiment
Why are responsibility and creativity intrinsically intertwined when it comes to a land-based life? What are the roles of ecologically sound systems and building principles as well as regenerative agriculture within the community fabric at Earthaven? You are invited to a conversational encounter on the joys and griefs of shared infrastructure, the opportunity and the burden of maintenance, and how it is all an invitation to be in greater connection with the land. What does it really look like to have a life that is made from our lived experiences? How radical is the act of staying?
Tuesday, January 14, 7-8:30 pm
Mid-life: Discernment and the Sacred Sorting
It doesn’t have to be a crisis, but it is a reckoning. How are we consolidating and re-directing our life energy to express its highest purpose? What are we coming to terms with as the dew of youth fades and we ripen with experience? What about these bodies? Let’s share tales of our time in the refiner’s fire and hold space for wisdom in the humility and deep-rootedness of midlife.
Saturday, January 18, 4:30-6 pm
Cultivating the Community Mind
Shedding Hyper-Individualism
How do a bunch of cultural orphans from diverse backgrounds come to hold shared values? How do we make the shift from independent to interdependent?
De-conditioning from our individualistic culture might be the most uncomfortable and rewarding aspect of community. True collaboration and care for the collective necessitates greater transparency, vulnerability, and trust. Let’s talk about class, economics, mutual aid, sharing, and asking for help in community. Join us for awkwardly honest and transparent dialogue on topics we’ve been told are best kept private.
Wednesday, January 22, 7-8:30 pm
Facilitators
Rachel Fee
Instructor
Rachel is a clinical herbalist, farmer, and mother of four nearly grown children. She was in clinical practice for fifteen years, practicing her own system of “mutt” herbalism that synthesizes her background in Traditional Western Herbalism, Ayurveda, and Southern Folk Medicine. These days her greatest joy and purpose is found in tending the land collaboratively, raising animals for food, as well as herb and vegetable gardening. She’s especially passionate about building soil and creating diverse ecosystems of year-round forage for her animals, resilience of all kinds, and being of service to this wild experiment that is Earthaven.
NikiAnne Feinberg
Founder, Facilitator
Throughout the last two decades, NikiAnne has dedicated much of her life energy to facilitating transformative learning journeys, particularly in community settings, and with folks in transition — between vocations; stages of life, including death; and those working to live into new, more life-giving stories of the world and themselves. In all her work, NikiAnne partners with the ancestors, the natural world, the power of ritual, and others to best serve the whole.
This event has concluded.