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Fellowship for Intentional Community: Our mission is to support and promote the development of intentional communities and the evolution of cooperative culture.

Housebus Helios and Lolin Farm Cohabitation

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  • Fellowship for Intentional Community
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Mission: We look toward building a better life for ourselves and the world by going back to simple living. We want to produce our own food or buy it locally, and we want to produce our own power as much as possible. We also look forward to helping found a sustainable community that positively impacts neighboring communities.

From www.ic.org/directory/housebus-helios/:

Hi there, I'm Alys. I'm one of two members of Housebus Helios. We're parked with a budding intentional community (pop. 6 besides us) on a large organic ranch in Arlington, WA. Currently we're helping the owner of Lolin Farm and their community members build cabins with a central kitchen/shower/bath building. We're also clearing out a few spots for short-term camping areas and rebuilding walking forest trails.

We rent a spot in the woods on the far side of forty acres, away from the central hub. While the two of us can do what we like on Helios and our small plot of land, the landower has the ultimate say with the rest of the community.

Helios is a 2001 New Flier transit bus. We're renovating the inside and plan on having solar panels and a battery bank (right now we run a genny.) We've built a composting toilet in an outhouse and installed a woodburning stove for the nights when insulation isn't quite enough. We have plans for a drill well for fresh water so we won't have to haul it; luckily we're parked on a small creek and won't have to dig deep. The inside of the bus will be furnished with recycled wood, flooring, and other materials-- we spend a lot of time finding second-hand furniture and tools.

Our family also includes two dogs, Mac and Trigger. They've adapted well to living on the bus; both have always loved riding in cars so there wasn't much adjustment to go through. They get as much time as possible running around the woods with us, hiking, and swimming. The landowner has several working dogs, including a rottweiler that herds her beefalo cattle. There's also a flock of chickens for eggs and meat.

The land itself has glacial creeks running through it, an apple orchard, tons of wild mint, a plot of raspberries and natural blackberries and salmon berries. Whatever food we don't get from the land is available locally and often just down the street.

We spent the summer living on various campgrounds but none of them had offered what we'd been looking for-- a diverse community that we can be a part of long-term and that has the same goal that we do towards a living sustainable lifestyle within nature. By lucky chance Lolin Farm found us and it is more awesome than we imagined. It's not huge, but forty acres of paradise is enough.

Address
Physical Address
Arlington, Washington
United States