Coming Home to White Hawk
When my wife Holly and I met 21 years ago in San Francisco, she told me that she was ready to move back east. I had grown up in Maryland near D.C., and she had grown up in the woods of northwest New Jersey.
Every year we spent thousands of dollars and two weeks of time traveling with our family doing the family tour, which included Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and here. Holly’s sister and her husband live in Brooktondale just outside of Ithaca.
For years we had dreamed, schemed and looked for ways and places to come back to. We told ourselves, “When we see the opportunity, when the door opens, we’ll go”. Which is probably why the folks at White Hawk were surprised to see us jump so quickly. We told them “This is a decision that has been years in the making.” What drew us here? We had a list of things we were looking for, and White Hawk just magically seemed to line up with all of them.
– The people. We felt both completely comfortable and truly inspired by the folks at White Hawk. What has impressed us most is that there are high ideals and dreams of community living, sustainability, and homesteading, coupled with practicalities of making it work with family and jobs. No extremists here. Just friendly, helpful folks who are willing to dig in and make it work.
– Home school! We aspire to unschool our twins in a supportive community. The happy group of White Hawk kids engage in a variety of schooling/unschooling options, and we saw that our choices around education would be welcomed and nurtured here. For us, to have supportive community who understands and engages in home schooling/unschooling is such a relief.
Plus LOTS of homeschoolers/unschoolers, groups, coops, and programs in the area. It’s not “home-schooling” it’s “community-schooling”. Which is what we were looking for, and we love it.
– Village with land. I have a friend who lives on an ecovillage in Australia, and they have several hundred acres, and each family has a 2 acre plot. As it turns out, that brings challenges to function as a community, because each family is distant from their neighbor and so taken up caring for their own land.
With the village-style design of White Hawk you *see* each other, you’re in each other’s daily lives. And yet surrounded by 120 acres of beautiful land for all kinds of projects, like 200 blueberry plants, a food forest, apple trees, maple sugar trees, and who knows what other projects we’ll take on? – Rural living- but not isolated. I have to admit, if I had to live just me and my family on acreage an hour from a sizable town, it would give me the heebie-jeebies. I love walking on wild land. And I love sitting in a cafe with a good coffee and a friend. I love doing live-fermentation preserving. And I love going out to community festivals, events and restaurants.
Dude! Ithaca! 10 minutes from White Hawk. A progressive, alive, small city, fed by the culture of both Cornell and Ithaca College, with so much. Add to it the plus for us personally that we’re only a day’s travel from most of our family (except my sister in St. Louis.. hey sis!). The kids have seen their grandparents more in the last few months than they have in the last 4 years! So nourishing.
I know I’m sounding a bit like a White Hawk infomercial, but truthfully, so many of our dreams have come together here. We can’t wait to move in this spring.
If this intrigues you at all, please come visit our ecovillage. We love to meet new people, and we’re curious to see who is going to make up the rest of our community, and fill in the other 20 lots that are still open.
– Mark Silver, Holly Glaser, Sam and David
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