reVillaging: Practicing How to Be-Long in Place
reVillaging is an invitation to reimagine how we meet our needs together – not only as humans, but as kin within living places. It’s a call to slowly reassemble the forgotten know-how of village life – those practical, relational, and metabolic skills that help communities endure and adapt, even when the world around them is unraveling.
“I believe a desirable future depends on our deliberately choosing a life of action over a life of consumption, on our engendering a lifestyle which will enable us to be spontaneous, independent, yet related to each other, rather than maintaining a lifestyle which only allows us to produce and consume.”
– Ivan Illich
reVillaging is for practicing futures of shared sufficiency in the already-turbulent present.
As we relearn the practical, providential skills needed to reclaim our labor and live well in an era of endings, we may also notice dropped threads and salvage shards of wisdom. Together, we can create material and conceptual containers for vital new-old cultures.
We are offering a series of workshops, which will be an opportunity to re-learn some of these essential skills. Connect with others in our bioregion of Vermont to form stronger community support and discuss how these skills are situated in a broader context.
We chose the specific topics of each of these workshop offerings because they address essential needs of life, while exploring low-tech, affordable ways of releasing resources, working with what we have, and walking in both worlds.
If you are curious about trying your hand at these skills, or if you are just one for more movement while you meet folks and talk, this is an excellent way to engage with otherWise!
Upcoming Workshops
Crafty Construction: Salvage Glass Greenhouse
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In this workshop, we will come together for a weekend to learn a creative approach to framing a small bespoke wooden structure that will allow us to piece together salvaged windows into a workable greenhouse. Discarded and cracked windows that can no longer serve as working windows in a house due to problems with insulation or even just aesthetics can find new life sheltering our seeds. We will discuss sourcing windows, cleaning them up, and putting them together. read more
Log Culturing for Living Systems with Douglas Hallam & Matty Adams
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Using wood that we provisioned earlier in the winter in our chainsawing workshop, we will begin to prepare for spring food production by inoculating our logs with shiitake mushroom mycelium. Developing a strong relationship with our fungal kin is a key practice in forming diverse, resilient community food networks because they are so quick, easy and passive to grow. Understanding general fungal biology and cultivation is also a great skill to develop for a variety of applications from recycling/composting various forms of organic excess, rehabilitating polluted landscapes, creating biomaterials such as certain forms of synthetic leather or insulation, art, medicine… read more
Chainsawing for Forest Citizens
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In **Chainsawing for Forest Citizens**, we will cover fundamentals of chainsawing, including proper technique, safety, and honorable harvesting. We will be cutting logs for later application as substrate for shiitake inoculation. In the spring, we invite you to join us again to use these winter wood provisions to set up a mushroom yard in another workshop. This four-hour workshop will be a winter solstice adaptation of [Pine Hill Voices’ Chainsawing for Greenhorns Course](https://www.pinehillvoices.love/woodlands). We will be focusing primarily on learning and practicing chainsaw fundamentals, with a slight focus on applying these skills in a way that sets us up to… read more
Past events
Camp Kindling
For five summer days during a hot July in Vermont, otherWise was delighted to host our first iteration of Camp Kindling – a multi-age outdoor exploration of otherWays of living, growing, coexisting and learning in our world. We immersed in the simple sweetness of slow, warm summer adventures – with a subtle twist. Together, we enjoyed the excitement of planning and executing treasure-hunt forest excursions, swimming in a cool lake, and cooking over a fire. And we engaged in deep reflection and speculative world-building through discussion of the book My Ishmael that encouraged us all to take a look at what we’ve been taught to see as normal.
Crafty Construction
This workshop aimed to empower the aspiring DIY communitarian by elucidating the opaque first steps of setting up a sufficient, autonomous life, from scratch. We showed that with a little bit of cash, a few friends, some borrowed tools, and some cunning, it is possible to create a home-base from which to expand your visions – in just one weekend.
Cosmolocal Solar Workshop Series
Considering where the energy that powers our everyday lives comes from is an important exercise when thinking about crafting sustainable ways of living that are alternative to our energy-blind society. These considerations are going to look very different for everyone, based on their own values, needs, and abilities. Yet, they can thought of in the same vein as any evaluation of the appropriateness of a technology: Can this be deployed in a manner that supports the sustainable, convivial, communities we need? Can that happen while reducing the pain, suffering, or extraction in other places, other communities?