May the Light of this season bring blessings to you and yours, wherever you may be.

We wanted to take this opportunity to send a warm and full thank you to all of you, our family, friends and supporters as 2023 draws to a close.

This year began with high hopes for the first full year of “bouncing back” from the pandemic and all of the challenges it brought to us both as a community and as individuals. Reservations were coming in, our community grew as Mirco and Marisa joined us early in the year, and our fields and gardens flourished. We hosted a permaculture design workshop in late winter that helped us plan and reimagine spaces, energy flows, and even envision bigger infrastructure projects. We mapped out wheelchair accessible terraces, new approaches to grazing the animals, and new water catchment systems to greatly increase the ease and efficiency of our farm. As people began to “emerge” from the pandemic, there was more interest than ever in coursework, and we also explored classes and travel in our personal lives that had been restricted for years before.

We had just begun to put some of these new plans into action, starting with the terraces in one of our main fields, when disaster struck in May. As many of you know already, we received massive rainfall in just a few short days that completely overwhelmed the land still recovering from lingering and erratic drought. Our whole region was devastated, and our farm in particular was badly hit. We lost the road that leads to our farm, our animal stall and a large part of our growing field, including the newly built terraces which slid down our steep grade. Damage to fences and even paths in the woods was everywhere.

In those first few days of the crisis, we rallied as a community, including our newly arrived intern Alexandra, to rise to the occasion. We patched together what we could to secure the animals and build a path through the woods to get out. As helicopters buzzed overhead, we cut away debris, stored goods and helped ferry stranded guests off the land. We had to cancel a community skills class set to arrive in the days immediately after the slides, and the painful sense that things would not be the same again kicked in.

And then we launched a campaign to rebuild our road. Informed that public support would be a long time in coming, if ever, we rolled up our sleeves and many of you supported us to rebuild the road through crowdfunding. Our neighbors brought skilled expertise in roadbuilding, setting to work with the help of local engineers and contractors to design and rebuild a road that would not only be provisional but hopefully a lasting testament to community pitching in. And it worked. You all rallied around us, and hundreds or people all over the world contributed to our campaign or offered other kinds of support in our time of greatest need. Friends organized fundraisers or simply handed us resources we needed.  In just a month, we had rebuilt our road and for this we are so grateful to you all! We could not have done this without you, and it is just the kind of solidarity you showed that tells us our vision and mission touched people. We are deeply grateful.

And so the rest of this year has focused on what comes next. There is still tremendous work to be done and great deal of uncertainty, but whatever happens we carry this support you have shown us. At this solstice season, the darkest time of the year in the northern hemisphere, we await the new light, a light that hopefully will reveal new possibilities, and know that we are not alone.

Blessings to each of you in this season, and may 2024 bring just a little more peace and solidarity to the world like that which you have shown us in 2023.