Strawbales in Wales

We just got back from a week-long workshop in Wales, at the Center for Alternative Technology. Great center, nasty midges. I have oozing welts from the little buggers. I prefer the big green-eyed biting flies of Southern France, and I was advocating insecticide for them. (I mean I wanted to kill them all.)

The workshop was taught by Bee Rowan and Jakub Wihan of Amazon Nails. Bee is short, business-like, friendly and soft-spoken, formerly an auto-mechanic and now one of the most knowledgeable straw-bale builders in the world. Jakub is tall, often wide-eyed and grinning, with formal training as a modular building engineer and a recent M.Sc. in some ecological design discipline -- the newest recruit to the Amazon Nails team, apparently. The name "Amazon Nails" is a pun, by the way. For those of you who don't speak with a Yorkshire accent, imagine it being said, "ammuhz'n nails".

Charlie and I are ready to build things with bales, now! And we met a group of cool people on the course, some of whom may be building with us in the future. Perhaps one or two of them will be among the founders of our village!

The Beginning

Every journey has a beginning... although every beginning follows from a previous ending. We've just sold our house; we're about to move into a yurt; we're married and we want to have kids in a village that matches our dreams. My past includes growing up on a farm in the Green Mountains of Vermont, attending Buxton School, a communal boarding school, co-founding the Ecovillage Network of the Americas, and training as a life coach with Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks. My wife Charlie's past includes growing up near Dover in South-East England, playing landlady to her friends during her art degree at the University of Brighton, developing passion for Tai Chi that led her to an Acupuncture degree, and a passion for gardening that drives her toward greener pastures (and an ecovillage future!). We are both inspired by the movie 'Antonia's Line', a Dutch film about a woman who draws a community together around her over several generations on a farm.

This 'blog is the story of how we create an ecovillage together. A village is not just two people, though. The story of a village is the story of dozens of people twining together. Here at the beginning, we don't know all those people, and the people we do know might not live with us when we get there. None the less, those who post with us on this 'blog will be folks who share our story, as friends, as colleagues, or just as fellow travellers.