"Longbow Village: A Permaculture Story"
In the years after the silence — when the roads cracked and the stores stood empty, when the land had forgotten the sound of laughter — people began to wander, looking not for riches, but for each other.
Among them walked Marty the Builder and Joan the Baker. They carried no gold, only small tools and a pouch of saved seeds. Where others saw ruin, they saw the patient bones of the earth, waiting for new songs.
One evening, they came upon a dry valley. The moon hung low, shaped like a longbow drawn across the horizon. Marty pressed his hands into the tired soil and said, “This place remembers water.” Joan knelt beside him, whispering, “Then we will teach it to flow again.”
So the people gathered — ten, then twenty, then fifty — calling themselves the Longbow Village, for they wished to bend together in strength, not break apart. They built cisterns to catch the rain and swales to slow its journey. They planted guilds of trees — apples embracing clover, berries feeding bees. They pressed seeds into the dust and sang to them under the new sun.
Work became their prayer. Some shaped bricks from earth, some brewed soap from ash. Marty raised walls with hands that had known both war and harvest. Joan baked bread that smelled of courage. Together they wove a pattern of care across the land — orchards, gardens, forges, mills, bees, cows, oxen, and children.
Yet the true trial did not come from drought or frost. It came when abundance arrived. The storerooms filled, and old fears whispered, “Take more, guard your own.” For a time, the people forgot the promise of the Longbow.
One dawn, Marty climbed the hill above the village and strung a great bow from the bending limbs of a willow. He called the people together. “A bow’s power,” he said, “is not in how hard it is pulled, but in how true it bends. So too are we.”
The people listened. Old greed softened into gratitude. They feasted that night beside the pond, where the frogs sang of rain and return.
And since then, it’s said, when the moon rises full over the reeds, you can hear the hum of the Longbow — the sound of a village that remembered how to live.
And in that sound are all of us — builders, bakers, planters, keepers — bending together toward tomorrow.
Resilient Communities Network
https://resilientcommunities.network/
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