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A living laboratory for a sustainable human future.

Author: NikiAnne Feinberg

NikiAnne (she/her) was born and raised on a horse and cattle ranch on the ancestral lands of the Salinan people in the Central Coast of California. She currently lives at Earthaven Ecovillage on unceded lands of the Catawba and Cherokee (Tsalagi) people. Her ancestors come from Eastern and Western Europe — France, Germany, and English Isles as well as Belarus, Lithuania, and Russia, from Ashkenazi Jewish heritage. Throughout the last two decades, NikiAnne has been immersed in community and in service to a wide range of educational endeavors focused on nature connection, personal empowerment, and community resilience. NikiAnne considers herself the grease and glue – that which helps things run smoothly or holds things together. Before co-founding SOIL in 2012, she worked and traveled through much of Asia, the Americas, and Europe, which made her formal education at George Washington University in International Affairs come alive in ways that can only happen through personal experience and relationships. Collectively, these experiences have undeniably shaped her cooperative cultural values and commitment to supporting leaders to think, feel, act and design from a foundation rooted in interrelationship. No matter what she’s teaching, NikiAnne is always on the same mission: to raise awareness of our whole selves – gifts, passions, blind spots, shadows – and help those whole selves find and fill niches in their communities. This is how the web of life is woven, and the fabric of culture repaired. She’s especially eager to support those in transition – between vocations, stages of life, and stories of world and self. Within this context, she is particularly passionate about community grief tending and death care midwifery.

What Can We Let Go Of?

This time of year in Southern Appalachia the waning heat and waxing cold converge to produce sights, sounds, and smells unlike any other season. This weekend’s convergence was resplendent here in our village, with the red leaves of the sourwood trees and the yellow leaves of the oaks and hickories...

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Is Place Important? – Virtual Tour

Back in the winter, I attended my friend Lee Warren’s workshop on “Place-Based Living at Earthaven Ecovillage.” She talked at length about place. Specifically, she suggested that “we are cosmological orphans” in part because we aren’t connected to place. I’ve been sitting with that concept....

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Autumn Equinox And End-Of-Life Workshop

As we pass through the autumn equinox, we can see the seasonal change in our Appalachian forest home. Bees are feasting on the goldenrod flowers, sumac leaves are turning red, and acorns are falling. At autumn equinox, we celebrate our harvests of squash and corn, and also the ways we have...

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What is Earthaven? Here are some perspectives…

Transcript of What is Earthaven? Hi. I’m Dimitri. Hi. I’m NikkiAnne. I’m Paul. I’m Courtney Brooke. And we’re at Earthaven EcoVillage. Where we are trying to answer the question, What is Earthaven? And the simple answer is we’re this ecovillage that’s in Southern...

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Healthy Relationships

I believe many of us desire healthy, engaged, dynamic, alive, and supportive relationships. I know that I do. I’ve noticed that when I have a strong sense of self and can name what I want and need, things tend to go better in my relationships. And yet, I still do those all too human things,...

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My House Got Plastered!

It’s a long-time Earthaven Ecovillage tradition. When a house is ready for its exterior plaster coating, we have a big party and invite all our friends. Dozens of Earthaven houses have gotten their pretty exterior face that way. It makes the work much more fun and the project goes way faster. My...

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We Learned So Much From Death

It’s hard to convey just how much we have learned from the deaths of a few of our beloved community members. Over a two-year period from spring 2016 to spring 2018 we had six deaths in our community. These beloveds all had home funerals and home burials. And several of them died at home after...

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Meet My Friend Steve

Have you ever met one of those people that lives for the good of the whole? Someone that does everything with the collective in mind? It’s actually very rare. And I can only think of a couple of people in my life that fit this description. And for sure, that’s my friend Steve Torma.For his...

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