Personal Peak Prep - Community Building

This guest post is about the personal activities and preparations of someone who’s name you might recognize, but who wishes to remain nameless here. I’ve separated it into multiple posts based on topic.

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Community Building:

Of the things that are the most rewarding, joining a local church and
broadening our circle of friends has got to top the list. Our church
is, what you might call a ‘hippy church,’ where the focus is less on
religiosity and more on communal support. The best thing one can say
about any “service” is that (to quote a movie) “It makes me want to be a
better man (woman).” It does. The minister is thoughtful, poetical,
ecumenical, insightful, personal, and a farmer to boot. We are
constantly reminded of our connection to the Earth, the seasons, and our
interdependency to each other. But that’s only one circle of people
we’ve come to know.

The other is that we’ve become founding members of a local
sustainability group, and through there, found ‘survival buddies,’ for
lack of a better term. These are the types of folks you can have for
dinner and they hate to go home. After reviewing all the ‘Doomer News’
of the day, we go on to pragmatics. From the pragmatics of survival, we
go onto sick humor. With a few beers or glasses of wine, we can spend
an entirely enjoyable evening, learn a bunch of useful things, catch up
on facts about the world we might have missed, and leave with a smile on
our faces. They leave LATE, and no one notices how late it actually is
until we say “Boy, I had no idea!” and we still hate to leave each
other. We’ve started getting together regularly. There are about a
dozen of us so far.

Also, through the sustainability group I’ve gone on energy tours and
seen some pretty cool homes with people who have lived this way (off the
grid) for decades. I’ve started a bunch of free courses for people
wanting to learn homesteading skills like raising livestock, canning,
knitting, cheese making, seed saving, etc. They are for beginners so
there is no expectation that you have to be an expert to offer them,
which expand the range (and enthusiasm) of teachers enormously. I’ve
learned to do a number of things through these courses and held one
myself on raising chickens. I’ve also taken over the responsibility for
Sustainable Movie Night, and will be showing a number of great movies
(again, totally free) all winter long, once a month. There are also
‘bag sews’ which allows local companies to stop buying as many paper
bags and circulate these handmade cloth ones, instead.

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