We live in separate households on the land, occasionally sharing meals, regularly meeting for plenum, group building, community workdays, workgroup meetings and a weekly café space. We occasionally share sweats in the sauna, cook soup over the fire and hold rituals. We share organic food, delivered weekly in bulk. 

It’s an ongoing learning process to balance the different areas of our lives and the roles within them: as individuals, partners, parents, professionals, community members, and as humans within the web of life.

Much of our collective energy is dedicated to the essential rhythm of maintenance: nurturing our internal bonds and systems that keep us together, sustaining our physical structures, and stewarding the land we live on. By grounding ourselves in this daily care, we preserve what we have built, while we continue to move forward step by step, growing gradually and intentionally as we keep developing our foundations, and future projects. Currently this includes spending enough time on bringing money in from the outside, as we can’t make an income yet within the community.

On a practical level, we are establishing more and more a regular rhythm, and strategic focus, while remaining attentive to what is most alive in the community at any given moment. This is how we keep prioritizing our energy across our various fields of action:

• Maintaining and developing our essential infrastructure to meet our basic needs, such as secure and cozy shelters, heating, electricity, fresh and waste water, internet…
• Maintaining and developing our shared food ordering and distribution system, where we receive fresh organic food in bulk every week.
• Maintaining and developing our shared spaces (including community rooms, storage, kitchen, and bathrooms) to ensure they remain in clear and cozy condition for our collective life.
• Stewarding our forest environment, maintaining the land offering a pleasant living space and a regenerative habitat for humans and other living organisms at the same time. This involves the constant care of our infrastructure—cleaning roads, stairways, roofs, gutters, walls—alongside seasonal tasks like mowing meadows, pruning trees and bushes, and managing invasive species, while promoting native species by feeding, sheltering, and nurturing them. We promote organic cycles through composting and the creation of habitat wood piles, micro-swales, micro-earthworks, and log barriers, while managing the enormous volume of leaves. Our work also includes regular collaboration with tree surgeons and the ongoing processing of wood.
  We are maintaining a mosaic of no-disturbance, low-disturbance, and highly maintained areas within the property to promote a healthy balance with all the living beings we share our land with.
• Caring for our individual and relational well-being, acknowledging that constant maintenance is required for ourselves and our personal connections, both within and beyond our immediate families. In this environment, we are continuously growing in connection—an unavoidable and enriching part of community life. We have dipped our toes or full bodies in a pool of different methods and tools and are applying our own unique mix, wich is constantly developing. Some examples are Non-Violent Communication (Mashall B. Rosenberg), Forum (ZEGG and Tamera), Grief Ritual (Joanna Macy), Community Building (Scott Peck), Dragon Dreaming (John Croft and Vivienne Elanta, inspired by Aborigine culture), Embodied Intimacy (Rachel Rickards and Buster Radvik), Primal Play (Darryl Edwards), Radical Honesty (Dr. Brad Blanton), Haka (Maori Culture) and many more..
• Connecting to the land, the natural cycles and the higher intelligence, through rituals, mostly held in our dedicated ritual space in the woods, where our sweatlodge is located. This is happening occasionally, yet it’s a vital part of our community life.
• Prioritizing the care and wellbeing of our children, with many of us dedicating a substantial amount of our time and energy to their upbringing, ensuring they thrive within our nurturing communal environment.
• Sustaining our organizational foundations, which includes the ongoing maintenance of our finances, governance, agreements, and communication. We develop these structures bit by bit, moving forward gradually within—and occasionally stretching the edges of—our collective capacities.
• Staying synchronized through collaborative processes, meeting regularly in formal and informal working groups and project teams. We balance these meetings with focused tasks in between, maintaining alignment through frequent digital communication (Slack), in-person decision-making in our Plenums, co-working days, open weekends, and shared community rituals.
• Envisioning the evolution of our fundamental structures, where we continue to dream about new possibilities for our shared vision, our legal and financial systems, and our culture of conflict transformation.
• Engaging with broader networks and alliances, such as the Global Ecovillage Network, Les Pas-Sages, and Mietshäuser Syndikat. We are actively exploring partnerships with like-minded organizations to achieve our goals together and strengthen our impact within these wider movements.
• Last, but not least, we also share spaces of just being together and it’s one of the ongoing challenges to make enough space for this vital part of community. We experience it around the fire, cooking soup with wild herbs, in the sauna, at weekly Café Margarita (hosted by our oldest member),on Potluck Picnic Sundays, Singing Circles, Lazy Lake Afternoons, board game evenings and such. Every now and then we very much enjoy to leave the land together and get to know each other even deeper in foreign environments. 

By creating space for these different dimensions of our lives, we aim to cultivate a community as resilient and richly layered as a mature oak ecosystem, shaped by the rhythms of growth, decay, and renewal.