While snowflakes are dropping on our lively hairs we manage to keep at least one room warm and get that feeling bit by bit of making this house a wonderful home and place to work from. The cats are also feeling at home and walking over the dinner table while we are trying all the time to teach them not to do that. It is cozy with all this cats and often I have two or three keeping me warm during those cold nights. Although me and my friend / co-steward of the house in Vrav are minimizing the usage of wood to burn, our bedrooms do have stoves but I get to bed mostly just with a warm water bottle without burning the stove. It has been hard work to get out there to find and chop dead wood so we decided to dig in the shared wallet we have created and ordered a cubic to be sure for the coldest days to stay warm inside.
Working and having fun together in the village
We started to exchange resources and time with our closest neighbors and help eachother with all kinds of works, like wood-collecting and chopping, sharing food, recipes and knowledge about how to make and repair things ourselves as we reduce our waste and grow the change we so much want to see. We are exchanginig quality time with neighbors and help eachother with certain economical, social and psychological issues and grow by that a lot of love, art and our favorite homemade bread (next blog you can witness what is made). We became a bit like a social center sometimes as we want to give villagers the opportunity to experience a healthy environment, but we cannot be operating like this here in the stage of development we’re in now. I wish to open more places so that we can have more fun and less attraction will go to the house we live in and where we work from.
Collecting natural medicines
Next to buying some etheric oils to support our health the village is full of rosehips so we are collecting them to boost our immune system and make daily chai from those delicious fruits. It protects us from getting the flu as its full of vitamine C. In the closest city Vidin there was a break out of this thing called influenca so we are happy to have avoided us to get sick as well.
First guests from Warmshowers
Two weeks ago we got our first guests from Warmshowers staying over for a night. They were a couple who just got married and they were on their honeymoon biketour. It was interesting to see how our guests were coping with the available infrastructure. Although we are not yet having basic facilities like running water it was a great time and the villagers who already became like family adored our guests as well.
Click here the Facebookpage of the weddingtrip of Alice and Baptiste
Repaircafe
As our guests were bikers we happily borrowed their tools to repair a bike that we are taking care of, but unfortunately the tire is flat again so we are looking forward to receive the next people who will come by bike so that we can fix it again. In the meantime we bought for the toollibrary some basic tools like a drill and electric saw and we want to extend this with more and more tools so that we can become more helpful also for future places that will be opened here and in the region.
Playing the bureaucracy cards
Recently I went to the process of officially getting myself registered again so for the first time in five years I got a health insurance and am having bureaucratically a roof above my head. I don’t want to but obviously we don’t get lebensraum on this round bubbly planet without being able to be controlled by some people who think they need to be above others. So, yeah I am back in that game and I would soon also register We The Future as an offical non profit organisation or religion as I prefer to play the cards well and make use of its mechanisms positively. Hereby I am inspired by a fellow Dutch man called Bob Radstake who made just made religion called ‘no idea’ and who’s prophets go’s as ‘idiots’.
Holding daily meetings to uphold the community aspect
In order to smoothen the work process we started to have daily meetings where we reflect the day before and get into dialogue about the things to do. We got ourself the habit to use a talking stick which makes it possible to really let eachother speak. This is also handy in case of our neighbors who start to get also a bit involved in the work we want to do.
Dragon dreaming
After the dreaming phase we started to write down what we want to work on in and around the house which resulted in the following list so far:
- Running water by fixing the well and connecting a pump
- Natural pharmacy with herbal tinctures/etheric oils & elderberry sirup
- Permaculture garden with herbs, vegetables/fruit/nut orchard and little animalfarm
- Attracting other bees rather then only cultivating bees for honey production
- Having some beehives
- DIY bikewasher
- Composttoilet
- Rainwatercollecter
- Outdoor kitchen and shower (after the winter)
- Extend Toollibrary
- Lectures of all kinds that supports knowdlege about DIY projects, gnosis and permaculture
- Bathroom with boiler and solarshower
- Seedbank with organic/non gmo seeds
- Plant a fruitforest
- Repair and make benches in the village
- Community garden
- Pedestrian path with flowers and art that will give subliminal messages
- Grow Limets* with the cooperation of Darlimets
- Open more locations (based on solidariy economy principle of stewarding a house in exchange for maintaining and improving its propertyand usage of land) in and around Vrav to organize a diy/repair/exchange/zero-waste cafe/faircoop/spiritual practises, etc..
- One place which is most probably going to be stewarded after the winter by WeTheFuture is going to be in a village 70 km away from here in Rachiba where we will make a large permaculture designed land, connect this to a fruitforest and all sort of social eco activities that will regenerate the land and could become a signigicant location where an ecological and spiritual equilibrium can be practised.
Lots of love,
Freddy, Valentine, Svetlina, Vasco, Gavrilka, Velena, Jurgi and everybody else who regenerates life in Vrav
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