I often talk about making our own place into a model. At this year’s Earth Day, for instance, we’re doing Open Houses all over town, and ours is one of them. We’ll show the PV and solar hot water system (which they’re putting in as I write this), the compost, veg and perennial garden, bees, chickens and rain water catchment. We’ll also show plans and hopefully the foundations of the Hugelswale system, the fish pond and the orchard, which won’t be established yet. Most of all, we’ll show how it all fits together, how they’re all elements in a wholesome and open system, along with the line-drying, the solar cookers, the eclectic library, the cabinet full of homemade medicine…
But this talk of models and modeling doesn’t seem right. Not because of arrogance – I’m a firm believer now in Jenkinson’s observation, that you have to risk arrogance because, you know, we have a huge amount of hard work to do. No, it’s more about what it would mean for us to live in a “model house”. It would stop being the refuge that we want it to be (for us, our family and friends, the community), thus also stop being a model of what we really want people to see: a refuge. Long argument short: you can’t model a refuge.
I’d still want people to come, but not to come and see, not to find a demonstration for them to observe, pen and paper in hand.  They’d come to participate – which means, of course, to work. Not looking in at “life” behind a glass partition, but immersion.