Hello dearest Earthdancers. Christos here, editor of The Score, which I do remotely from my current home of Santa Fe, New Mexico. It’s been over two years since I took over the responsibility of putting these monthly dispatches together while living at Earthdance in the summer of 2022, and they seem to grow in scope and complexity with each passing month! This is a reflection, I believe, of the thriving and ever evolving trajectory that Earthdance has been on since our tentative post-pandemic reopening two summers ago. Our calendar has been mostly full this year, and next year it’s looking even more so. Our larger jams now regularly sell out again, several of our longtime rental clients have now successfully returned (ie. HAI, Nomadic College), and our staffing continues to grow and return to pre-pandemic norms. This past month, our beloved Liv Frank moved on, and we hired a brilliant new Marketing Coordinator, Jennifer Rahner, while expanding the role and scope of that position. Also this past month, both our bookkeeper of the past seven years, Emily Cavin, and our head chef, Faith Rathbun, announced plans to move on at the end of the year. We’re beginning the process of finding replacements for those roles if you or someone you know could be interested. 

Over my 18 years and counting of being enmeshed with Earthdance, I know there always come periods where it’s easy to lose sight of why I and so many others keep returning to this wild place - a place I have come to relate and refer to as ‘Jedi School’ over the years. Those are the days when the never-ending battles against mold and the weather-beings feel hopeless; when our buildings feel beyond redemption, and all our efforts in the face of entropy and time are sure to end in defeat. Those days when all the staff go above and beyond in their attempts to perpetually care for everyone who walks through our doors, and to steward beautiful encounters and events, only to be told later that someone left feeling triggered and hurt, excluded, or disappointed. Burnout is a real thing at a place like Earthdance, and it’s no secret that we’re often understaffed, under-resourced, and unprepared for all that might potentially unfold at each event. And yet…And then…there are evenings like I had this past week here in Santa Fe, where myself and about 20 CI friends new and old snuggled together to screen longtime community member Sanford Lewis’ documentary ‘An Intimate Dance’, which he generously made available for free through his Vimeo channel last month. None of us had seen the hour long film before, and most of us smiled and whispered a stream of names in recognition of friends who danced across the screen. We laughed together at the funny parts, cried together at the sad parts, and were moved by the dance. Always the dance at the center. Most poignant for me were the scenes where beloved and now deceased members of our community stared back at us with their eyes still bursting with mischief  – Eugene Williams, Walter Jonas, Nancy Stark Smith, and now most recently, Steve Paxton himself. So many of us long for deep community and belonging. But to belong also means to feel everything, and to be affected by what affects the others that we’re bound to. I’m writing these lines on the morning of October 7th, and the anniversary of a conflagration that seems to be only intensifying and spreading. I write these lines during a week of waiting to hear if my people in the Asheville area survived the hurricane, and wondering what life will look like there for the foreseeable future. There’s an election happening in less than a month. All these things weigh heavy, and so many people in so many places need material and spiritual support. And, in the face of all this, I know that for myself and so many others, having a place like Earthdance can mean the difference between feeling like giving up hope for something better, vs knowing I can walk through the doors of that front porch, stroll into the kitchen, and be met by smiling familiar faces and arms reaching out to draw me in for a long, warm, familiar hug. And then, a dance. At the center of this Earthdance community is a movement practice based on one deceptively simple agreement - to stay in contact with one another despite the chaos and uncertainty that is ever present, in every moment. May we continue to do so.

• Christos Galanis

GARDEN UPDATE AUTUMN 2024

Abundance is the nourishing essence in our autumn garden, not only of food but also of the supportive appreciation Tamara and I have received from the Earthdance community as the present gardeners. We continue to be inspired by the words and logic of social critic and author Micheal Pollan, “we cannot have healthy communities without healthy diets, and we can not have healthy diets without healthy agriculture;” we feel it in alignment with Earthdance’s renewed effort to create and secure a nourishing onsite food production culture. 

After just two seasons of reinvigorating the beauty and productivity of the Earthdance garden, it has become clear to us that the historic garden site sits on the farmhouse’s aging septic leach field. Subsequently, we are in the process of ‘retiring’ a portion this site, leaving it to its intended underground purpose. Nevertheless, our efforts and vision continue to evolve and include shifting parts of the food production to a new area on the property where there is the longest sun exposure. Specifically, we will be ‘cultivating’ an area on the other side of the farmhouse, east of the way to 9 Mountain, opposite the fire circle and toward the backside of the orchard. Be not dismayed; although it will take a couple years of sustainable horticultural practices to match the current productivity of the historic garden site, we are working toward a longer-term goal of establishing a more productive model, site and system to efficiently supply the kitchen with dependable, seasonal fresh and storage produce. Along with the recently created Earth Integration Stewards Committee and efforts to develop a network of new trails in the forest, this vision seeks to ally with a conscientious effort to “put more Earth” in the greater Earthdance mission.  

• Neal & Tamara

This month's collection of sweet moments at Earthdance from the past month!

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