Foursome enjoys connection with Mother Earth

Each morning before heading into Albuquerque and Santa Fe for their white collar jobs, four 30-something residents of Sunflower River perform chores to make sure their livestock and extensive vegetable garden are set for the day.

"We feed everybody, check water for all the animals, play with the dog, check on the baby birds we're raising in the barn, refill their food and water and make sure everybody looks healthy and vigorous," said Kat Heatherington, 32. "(We) water the cold frames, check water in the toad ponds and water seedlings in the greenhouse."

Those tasks are a welcomed part of the routine for the four stewards of Sunflower River, a 4-acre farm just south of Albuquerque.

And they are far removed from the residents' day jobs as a university academic adviser, a software developer, a nursing student and a lab testing company worker.

Starting the day working on the grounds is a way to connect with the garden and livestock.

"It's my opportunity to live every day in the moment with the garden, with the rabbits and with the chickens - to stop each day and do a routine to take care of the land which would take care of me," said Tristan Fin, 36. "That brings a great amount of peace. It's a morning meditation for me."

Sunflower River is part of a cooperative housing trend called intentional communities, a term used to describe a variety of housing configurations including ecovillages, co-housing, residential land trusts, communes, student co-ops, urban housing cooperatives, alternative communities and other similar projects where residents work toward a common, shared vision, according to the Intentional Communities Web site, www.ic.org.

There are 1,607 intentional communities in the United States registered on the Web site. Arizona and New Mexico each have 43 in various stages of development.

Fin and Heatherington, along with Alan Post, 32, and Jenny Rice, 31, purchased the farm as a group in September 2007, with the dream of creating an intentional community where the foursome could grow their own vegetables and raise livestock to sustain themselves, as well as provide food for purchase in their community. They sell organic eggs to friends and are raising Thanksgiving turkeys for sale.

"We're getting our lives in line with our ethics," Heatherington said. "We're getting in line with our core belief in sustainability as operating as part of the ecosystem, instead of acting upon it."

The group is earnest in its intent to limit reliance on commercial food production, and use of non-renewable resources.

"Our goal is to be as self-sufficient as we can, but we don't mean existing in a bubble," Heatherington said. "We want to make as much food as we can make and help support the community by making that food available which is produced locally, and not dependent on foreign oil and interstate system trucking. We want to provide good, healthy, pesticide- and hormone-free food. That is incredibly important."

Sunflower River is growing a variety of vegetables including peas, carrots, broccoli, spinach, and at least 10 herbs. Summer planting will include tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, corn, squash and five kinds of beans.

There are also 11 fruit trees on site, including apricot, peach, apple, mulberry and cherry, with more planned including a soapberry tree for making soap.

The stewards at Sunflower River are using permaculture gardening techniques including organic farming, and are raising chickens, turkeys and rabbits for meat and sale, harvesting rain water and using water conservation techniques, and converting as much as they can to solar energy. A straw bale community building is also in the works.

Living simple and green is a lifestyle for the foursome. Post bikes to the train stop for his ride into Santa Fe, and Heatherington takes the bus or train. They don't watch television.

"We're firmly conservationists. We recycle gray water. We use cloth napkins. We buy organic food, until we get our own vegetable garden produce rolling in sufficiently to not need it," Heatherington said.

"We conserve electricity in every way possible. Our house is very well-insulated. One of the first things we did when we moved in was double our attic insulation, thereby halving our gas bill for the rest of our lives."

The group also makes their own music, with members who enjoy singing while playing the hammer dulcimer, didgeridoo and drums.

The alternative living extends to living space: Heatherington and Post live in a yurt, a 200-square-foot insulated, portable, circular structure comprised of lattice woodwork with a raised roof. It's located behind the small house on the property. A wood stove in its center provides heat in the winter.

Heatherington built the yurt with the intention of living in it temporarily while building a strawbale or adobe cabin as part of another intentional community/ecovillage, which never came to fruition.

"I love living in a circle, and living in the open celebration of so much wood-work," she said.

Creating a community has presented challenges for the group.

"We definitely came into this with more enthusiasm than skills," Rice said. "There has been quite an array of things we'd do differently next time. But it was fun to learn at the same time."

The residents at Sunflower River had different paths that led them to choose living in an intentional community.

Fin said he was raised by older parents who lived during the Depression and raised him with those ethics.

"I came into life with the ethic that we grew our own food to save money, and we enjoyed doing it," Fin said. "When I went to college and had to buy food from the grocery stores, it was bland tasteless stuff. A garden is so much better."

Fin also was attracted to the community aspect.

"I don't have a lot of blood family, so the community is my family," Fin said. "And this is a way of building a sustainable family for myself. I'm hoping to grow and learn, and I certainly feel I learn something every day from here. I also focus on the environmental piece of treading lightly on the land and taking care of Mother Earth. That's what is important."

Heatherington said she was attracted to the concept of an intentional community on both an ecological and social level.

"Living in a community and sharing resources is lighter on the earth, and I have dreams too big to accomplish without joining with other people who share those dreams and want to manifest them as well," Heatherington said. Rice said she was attracted to the concept of intentional communities because of her desire to have children and raise them in a healthy lifestyle.

"I wanted to be growing my own food, home-schooling, and being self-sufficient," she said. "And I want to be able to be as healthy as possible."

Rice worked several years as a chef, so she is grateful for having ready access to organic produce and products. And she enjoys cooking gourmet foods from scratch.

"We made yogurt this past weekend," she said.

Post said his path began as a personal transformation a few years ago, after reading the "How to Save the World" blog of David Pollard, a writer and environmentalist.

"He was doing a lot of writing on intentional communities, social justice, and ecological issues," Post said. "And it struck a chord with me and I decided to manifest the kinds of changes he was advocating in my own life."

Post got rid of his car and began riding his bicycle everywhere. He limited dining out and began fixing his own meals at home and started shopping at second-hand stores.

"I really looked at my spending habits and my level of consumption, and stopped measuring my self-esteem in the number of things I owned," he said.

"This is for us a process both here at Sunflower River in the changes we bring to the land and soil and also the changes in our mind and the way we relate to the world as a whole - at the farm and beyond it."

To learn more about Sunflower River, arrange a tour, or to participate in a work day contact: Yarrow@sunflowerriver.org

For more information on intentional communities:
http://www.ic.org/

And for information on Worldwide Opportunities on Organic
Farms (WWOOF): http://www.wwoofusa.org

Joy Slagowski may be reached at 623-876-2514, or jslagowski@yourwestvalley.com.