It’s Easter weekend: a time for reflection on renewal, blessings and hope.
I am awash with fresh insights following a fascinating community mediation about the dual occupancy (accessory dwelling unit) issue on this community.
Sometimes people leave intentional communities. See “Leaving Utopia”, click here: Leaving Utopia – MARY GARDEN
Things are different now. We’re settled in, the toilet is built, the deck is a daily marvel and my three books have been birthed and are now for sale.
I realise that I can no longer turn my back on the goings-on in my own immediate community and focus only on other communities.
There is much to learn from this small eco-village and much that needs to change.
The Jarlanbah archives
With the help of my elderly artist neighbour, Shirley, a founding resident, I have been exploring the Jarlanbah archives from the early 1990s.
What a tale they have to tell us!
Robyn Francis
The birth of this community in 1993 was accompanied by deep reflection and much dreaming, bearing in mind the state of the Earth and a deep desire to care for Nature in all her wondrous beauty. The developer was completely aligned with these ambitious social and environmental objectives. The designer, eminent Permaculture educator and designer, Robyn Francis, keeps in regular contact with many of us and recently has been helping us understand the deeper intent of our founding principles with respect to intergenerational equity, density, community infrastructure, inclusion and sustainability.
She’s reminded us of the strong focus on inclusion in the founding documents. Given that today there’s a lot of exclusionary thinking about in the world, it’s a salutary reminder!
Those of us who live on Jarlanbah are blessed to have Robyn as a neighbour. Awarded NSW Rural Woman of the Year a few years ago, she’s a Permaculture designer and educator of international eminence.
For Robyn’s award-winning teaching, education, training and design work, see:
and
https://www.abc.net.au/rn/utopias/dream_machine/docos/jarlanbah.htm
How I wish I could have been part of that early planning process!
The far-thinking developer, John Hunter, his planners and designers (and then the first residents) spent long hours exploring alternatives for the social and physical design of this place. It was a dream that was both far-looking and practical; resilient and able to be modified.
We’ve lost our way”¦
For reasons that I will explore in this blog, I believe that we’ve lost our way here in the Jarlanbah Permaculture Hamlet.
But I am confident that it’s not too late to bring the original vision up-to-date, realign with it and and move forward in cooperation, self-reliance and harmony.
I’ve pasted in below the poster that used to be on our sign at the front gate: the original dream. The sign went missing but the dream is still alive in the hearts and minds of many early
Jarlanbah Hamleteers. And the newbies are now learning what our founding mothers and fathers had in mind.
The details of the dream are spelled out in a detailed Management Statement and fascinating early newsletters, which I will also post for people to read.
We need to understand our history here.
I need to understand it!
Blessings on you all this Easter weekend! May we all live in peace, cooperation and harmony.
The promise, if not (yet) the reality”¦