The summer and its heat pass, and soon we celebrate the Autumn Equinox, in a candlelit room. We gather for a potluck-style dinner with a wide variety of dishes made with vegetables and fruits harvestedfrom our garden: pumpkin pie, stuffed marrow with chestnuts, elderberry juice, apple pie, roasted garlic, salad and much more. Such abundance!
In the meantime, the bonfire is lit. We gathered around the fire to share a moment of reflection and gratefulness; to make space for the transition that is happening in nature, to also happen inside ourselves. To shift from blossoming, ripening and being directed outwards, to allowing parts of ourselves to die and turn inwards.
What arises in that moment is a co-creation of singing songs, sharing poems, staring into the fire, writing down on small papers what we want to let go of, burning these papers with intention, and sharing these intentions with one another.
“I asked the leaf whether it was frightened because it was autumn and the other leaves were falling. The leaf told me, 'No. During the whole spring and summer I was completely alive, I worked hard to help nourish the tree, and now much of me is in the tree. I am not limited by this form. I am also the whole tree, and when I go back to the soil, I will continue to nourish the tree. So I don’t worry at all. As I leave this branch and float to the ground, I will wave to the tree and tell her, 'I will see you again very soon.''"
 
Celebration of Autumn Equinox in Suderbyn – memorised with food treaures from our garden – is very much the celebration of the harvest and abundance of nature in this period, its fruits and colours, its warm light and calm days. With the first sacrifice of pumpkins, with bounty of local apples – even small and sweet-sour they are a big gift to our northern land – we honour this short momentum of the equilibrium in nature. From now on, the daylight will get slowly submersed into the darkness of the winter... with shorter days and longer cozy nights, candles and hugs, talks and games, when we, as every element of nature, get a chance to recuperate after long summer. 
 
Honouring the seasons, embodied in nature and resonating within our own organisms, is probably one of the most regenerative things you can learn in an ecovillage. Intensity of the summer, followed by harvest and abundance of the autumn with its chill vibe, replaced by the winter hybernation to restore and reset... Living in cities we lose the sense of this simple cycle, functioning over millennia for everything in nature with no exception for humans. We are artificially stimulated when it is time to rest, getting exhausted when it is time to restore. Here in the countryside, in a small yet intense community, you feel into the seasons – both in weather and in your inner feelings  – and, overtime, you learn to respect its wisdom. What at first might seem as inconvenient disruptions due to the weather, soon becomes a clear reflection of your own needs. Be it to work when the land is awaking, or to rest when the work is over, to open up in the spring and turn inward in the autumn. ​

We live together with people from very different cultures and backgrounds and don’t have a fixed shared culture or spiritual belief system. What we celebrate and in what way, is completely up to the people that currently live here. Despite our differences, the cycles of nature is something we all seem to feel very connected to. In this, it is easy for us to find common ground for celebration and reflection. And the cycle of seasons guides us through different aspects of the community – with more calm and cozy introverted time following the arrival of the cold and winter winds, and with more open, outdoor and high vibes celebrations of life when the first sprouts and buds come again.

These fundamental and simple tools provide not only the conditions for physical needs, but can be even a deeply valuable source of mental and spiritual peace, reminding that everything gets born and dies at its time, with its pace, in a cycle. 
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The (new) story of Uddebo, started some 15 years ago when the owner decided to tear down the old factory in the village. 
A group of five people of different backgrounds, including Caroline Bergman, with a long family background in the village, decided to act and buy the house. The yellow house then became a village meeting and cultural house.
This laid the background for a unique development with Uddebo becoming a driving force for de urbanization and the search for a new way to live.
Caroline moved back to Uddebo 2005, renovating a farm and also starting several different projects,
-2008 we invited some 60 people, asking how we could  beautify Uddebo?   
A NGO was established making plans for the future but also leading to activities like,courses, dance parties, a common sauna and food and building projects.
Caroline also became local politician, started other NGO organizations and helped apply for EU and other founding possibilities.  
The latest project she is involved in is the development of a small house settlement with 8 new self-made houses.

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This one was actually sown as a green manure that we were planning to turn in to improve the soil... And well, when you forget to turn in a green manure, it just continues its life and grows to its full potential and eventually gives seeds! (This is probably the only existing case of productive procrastination.)
Food wise, rye is often ignored or limited to crackers and dark bread, which is a shame since it is a very nutritious cereal and healthier than wheat in many regards.

Actually, the grain is not the only yield here. The straw - the dried stem of the plant - is also an excellent source of food...for the soil! Straw contains proportionally more carbon than hay, which is dried grass or legumes. Straw is therefore a perfect ingredient for soil building as a mulch or in compost, especially when combined with more nitrogen rich elements such as urine, grass clippings, certain manures, food waste etc.

Returning homegrown straw to the soil is an essential part of the the simple and balanced cycle created by the farmer-philosopher Masanobu Fukuoka. He understood more than everyone that growing food implies giving back to the Earth after taking from her. Indeed, even though the grain took some nutrients from the soil, most of its food came from the sun and the air, unlimited and renewable sources. At the end, it's a net gain for the soil, especially when all the nutrients are kept in the loop, with compost toilets and straw back to the land.

Recent cultivars of grain are very often shorter which results in faster harvests and easier processing, but also less straw, which is not regarded as an essential biproduct anymore. (Our rye on this picture reaches up to 175 cm!).
This perspective illustrates the contemporary misunderstanding of the needs of our soils. Synthetic fertilizers, mineral powders, diluted juices and far-imported fertility, intended to feed the plants directly, cannot replace local whole foods such as straw, hay, compost or manure when it comes to feeding the soil on the long term. The narrowly scientific, productivity oriented approach cannot match the holistic perspective that encourages a constant flow of nutrients and energy from soil to plants, from plants to humans and animals, and back to the soil.

After threshing the grain out of the huls and off the straw, we will take back this small sheaf to our soil, and "the cycle won't be broken!"

These are the stories which change the world and show us what is possible...
We have a magician in our ecovilage. His name is Théo. With his long tale of dreadlocks, humble and kind heart, and magic hands Théo is a unique producer of chocolate of a special kind. Shipped by friends on an original sailing boat "Tres Hombres" from across the ocean, the cacao beans come straight from a small farm of a local ecosystem restoration project in Dominican Republic. They come with the wind of salty sea, without fossil fuels and international cargo companies. Théo picks the beans in Amsterdam and brings them home – to our ecovillage Suderbyn on the island of Gotland. Here Théo recently moved his little chocolate factory, where he makes the chocolate by hand from bean to bar without any preservatives, all vegan and organic as it only can be. He wraps the precious bars in paper made of cacao-shells. The chocolate is then sent to small organic shops and personally to people who subscribe online (the link below). Every time we look at a bar of Théo's chocolate, be it one with cacao nibs or hazelnut, or raw dark chocolate, I think of the wind in Tres Hombres sales, of a long way which a real fair chocolate needs to make, and all the goodness this small bar contains.

The first wild greens are poking through! These last weeks, ramson, ground elder, nettles and many others have been busy covering the land with her spring jacket.

Walking around and picking these fresh and healthy goodies is a great source of seasonal joy for Suderbynians. A bit before our own garden starts to give its first real harvests, Nature's supermarket opened its doors and provided for us. (When you have to work to get your own food growing, it is easy to appreciate something tasty that grows on its own and that you just need to pick!)

But it's not only that we appreciate the amazing healthiness, the colors and flavors of the wild greens in our soups, spreads and teas.. They are also a reminder of our need to connect with the wild, to be in it, to be it.
Picking wild plants forces you to know and understand them, their landscape, their ecosystem (mistakes can be deadly!) and eventually reintegrate ourselves in the Natural world. Foraging is an amazing platform to reconnect with the nature in ourselves and realize how much we need to become natural beings again.

When you think about it, it is actually a pretty clever design trick from Mother Nature to include a bait in the landscape. To encourage humans to wander in the woods and in the plains, just to get them to wonder in awe at the perfection of such a creation.

Thanks JingwenYao Art for capturing this beautiful moment! ❤️

#SuderbynEcovillage
#Permaculture

Literally.

In Suderbyn, we only use compost toilets. Three weeks ago, our middle latrine compost box finished its decomposition process of roughly 12 months. During this period, various microorganisms and bugs actively ate, pooped, reproduced and died, turning human feaeces, leaves, sawdust and toilet paper into a well balanced rich compost!
The pile heated up to 55-60 degrees, at which dangerous bacteria such as Ecoli and Salmonella get killed.
After taking out the compost from its box, we will spread it on the fields where "heavy feeders" (plants that need a loooot of nutrients) will grow.
Even though we are 99% sure that all the nasty bacteria that we don't want in our food died, we are still careful: the plants that will grow in this compost, like corn and pumpkins, will produce their edible part away from the soil and since these bacteria cannot travel through the plant body, the only way to get contaminated by a potential survivor would be to eat something that got splashed with compost still containing harmful bacteria and that didn't get washed properly. Very unlikely, especially if one considers that such bacteria are in a hostile environment as soon as they get out of our bellies and that if they don't die in the compost, the other beings in our lively soil will surely take care of them mercilessly.

By now, you should probably be convinced that compost toilets are an hygienic, simple and efficient way to process humanure on site and turn it into a resource.
Sounds a tiny bit better than mixing poo with 10 liters of drinking water (especially on an island like Gotland suffering from water scarcity in the summer), disinfecting with chemicals and releasing it into rivers, knowing that many heavy metals and hormones will poison the wildlife...and maintain a costly sewage system for this.

But composting humanure is much more than this. It's our connection to the land, the way we close the loop and remind ourselves that we are animals.
It's a sacred cycle that allows us to make atoms travel from plants to humans to microorganisms and back to plants in a never-ending magical loop.
From this unique perspective, humans of Suderbyn acquire a new function: processing units turning plants into food for bacteria! It might sound a bit reductionist but it is actually a way to reintegrate ourselves in the complex web of life, as one humble step in a perfect system.
And from this humble soil we sprout as happy stewards of the land.

 nspiration and connection! In these unprecedented times communities appear as an alternative – stronger than ever and more connected than before. While growing our local resilience, we in Suderbyn and thousands other communities also strengthen our large systemic actions. Though ECOLISE (European umbrella-organisation for community-led initiatives) could not meet physically for the General Assembly, it gathered for a great online assembly with over 50 delegates from national and regional networks of Transition, Ecovillages and Permacutlure movements, urban and rural community-led initiatives, research activists and policy changers. Folk from Suderbyn is typically there as besides being an ecovillage we are also an active hub for international and regional networks! 3-4 April 2020 will be remembered by as the celebration of our resilience and adaptation, strong connection and mutual support.

“Perhaps we cannot raise the winds. But each of us can put up the sail, so that when the wind comes we can catch it” — the quote of E.F. Schumacher was shared by the keynote speaker Daniel Christian Wahl and echoed in the group. These weeks we feel how the experience of community-led initiatives can serve the times of COVID-19 and the following crisis: how our tools and solutions for food and energy sovereignty, strong local communities and international solidarity, ecosystem restoration and climate change adaptation can also serve fundamental needs and happiness of the society.

When the world and its old socio-economic paradigm are facing an upcoming crisis, we see how resilience, practical solutions and social support cultivated by communities offer a strong alternative. When "business as usual" does not provide illusionary safety anymore, we turn towards our families and neighbours, friends and like-minded companions, towards land and local resources, towards homes and gardens, and ask What we can do differently.
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ECOLISE represents a strong trust in communities and local actions, as well as the multi-local connection between networks all over Europe. We have so much to offer! Let the time of the crisis be the time of mainstreaming the solutions already developed and practiced by the communities!

Warm greetings and deep inspiration from #EcoliseGA2020! #ecolise