Newsletter of December 2016, January and February 2017
Dear everyone,
After a sunny and bright beginning to autumn where we have fully enjoyed the wonders of our garden, we have now been seriously freshened up by the first winter winds! The outdoors work hasn’t diminished in intensity, especially with the clearing and brush cutting of the future living areas… We are spending a good amount of our time around a wood stove we found in the barn.
Nights are cold and we are discovering or rediscovering the happiness of sleeping in 10 degress or less under a nice pile of blankets.
Numerous visitors came to give a hand, some just to help out on the different work and others to experiment with the possibility of joining the family. Beautiful encounters, great shared moments in music or silence, delicious meals, various and surprising, a lot of concrete progress: the garden becoming bigger and bigger with the preparation of «buttes» for the next year, the isolation of certain parts of the house with straw and sawdust, clearing of different areas, planning of a Tiny House, installation of a caravan for Lucy and many other things.
In the middle of November we are still receiving some visitors before closing the doors for winter. Many reasons for that: with the cold and the rain, the interior space becomes quite small and community life more challenging, some members are leaving for the winter and others concentrate on the construction of the Tiny House (and get ready to organise a participative worksite next year).
We hope to open the doors again next spring, we will communicate the precise date in 2017! Until then, for the ones who really wish to join Eotopia, we invite you to re-think the pillars written in the website and take this time to experiment on your side. We realised that the people who correspond most with the project are the ones who, while reading the website find themselves saying things like: «Wow, this is exactly what I wanted to do» or «I found my tribe!».
Talking about the website, you might already know we got hacked a month ago… we have now recovered the website but we are missing some parts which we will be working on as soon as possible.
During a reunion we had, we took the chance to express our feelings about the four and a half months spent on the site and we can say that if difficulties exist and that community life is challenging at times, we are globally very happy and very grateful towards these experiences. What comes out strongly as well is the trust we all share about this project. Adding to that, the positive feelings of the majority of the people who came to visit (25 in total), it looks like our little utopia has some beautiful days ahead of her!
To get impregnated by our story, here are some pictures : Facebook album
Lot of gratitude for all the ones who came to help us and all the others who support us from a distance!
Lots of love for you all, great hibernation and see you next year!
The Eotopia Family