One year after the Ecovillage Launch Gathering, we held the third founding gathering, this time with seven participants and three visitors helping with the cooking and natural building work.
The flyer and schedule for the week, including:
Tour of the land
Full moon ritual
Clay plastering workshop
Vision sharing at the river beach
Nelas wine festival
Portuguese lesson
Nelas vegetable market
Ecovillage mapping and design workshop
Dancing
Livelihood and business ideas workshop
House design and natural building methods workshop
Ecovillage founding simulation board game
We started with a beautiful full moon ceremony in the tipi, with lots of signing, lovely guitar from Amelie, tarot cards and a ritual to manifest what we want to call in from the energy of the full moon - drawing our visions on card and leaving them to bathe in the moon light before burning them a few days later.
We bought a great selection of fruit and veg from the local market and cooked amazing meals every day, with lots of help from Kali, the youngest of the group who always reminded us to include playfulness and curiosity.
The vegetables in the garden were starting to develop, giving inspiration for the growing ecovillage project.
Our visioning and ecovillage-design workshops, under the shade of the trees by the river, explored many ideas and were a chance to share about our skills, experiences and inspirations from other projects.
We later grounded these dreams into simple business plans and ideas for how we would create a livelihood in the first year of joining an ecovillage - to provide us with the resources and facilities we need for our basic needs and desires.
This group was motivated to work on the clay plastering of the common house, to have a balance of some physical work in between the theoretical content and the dreaming of the workshops.
Margarida, who was a participant of the first founding gathering and had returned for some weeks to help with the building work and this gathering, did a great job of guiding the work.
Everyone quickly learned the technique and enjoyed mixing the clay, soil and straw with their feet.
The workshops at the end of the week focused on how the ecovillage will develop, with information about the licensing for multiple homes and the requirements of facilities and equipment for this. We also shared our personal ideas for what we would want to build first, then chose together which of these are the priorities for the first few years of development.
We then had a workshop to discuss the options for natural building methods and shared our visions for our dream houses that we would like to build if we were part of the ecovillage.
Overall, the gathering was positive, with a strong feeling of togetherness and the balance leaning more towards creativity, fun and visioning compared to the mental, technical and legal aspects that were more the focus of the previous two gatherings.
The vibe of the gathering is summed up by the footage edited by Polly.
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