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"In the shelter of each other, the people live."
Proverb-Gaelic
Trying to start a self-sufficient intentional community can be an interesting game sometimes. Really, it’s interesting all the time, but angles of interest change as the process evolves - there are always new surprises.
We are a bunch of artists and dreamers, planning on creating a sustainable community using permaculture principles (permaculture means permanent culture or permanent agriculture, and is a systems design science that allows one to create sustainable human systems that don’t deplete resources of other human systems or ecosystems).
Artists and dreamers vs the hard realities of self sufficiency - growing our own food, creating our own energy, building our own shelters – hm, sound like a recipe for disaster? Well, maybe. It’s hard to imagine a bunch of citified poets getting their fingernails dirty by using a backhoe to reverse stream bed erosion. But one might be amazed at the poetry that can be composed while doing such tasks, while our happy and productive chickens and alpaca roam free in our sylvan food forest and our straw bale homes await, warm and inviting at the end of the day.
Alas, we are not yet there, and our poetry is written while sitting at our desks, in our city apartments, our wasteful refrigerators filled with food that too often arrived there via the use of a truly and obscenely amazing amount of fossil fuel, our forced air heat purring, we flail away on our high speed computers, with our gas guzzling cars sitting patiently in the garage.
Many of my acquaintences, except for the most dedicatedly serious dreamers, have at least hinted that they couldn’t see how I was going to get from here to there, and why would I even want to try? I was going to end up working sixteen hour days just to eat! (Though with permaculture techniques, we plan on ending up spending less time producing our own food than we do paying for and shopping for it now, and it will be fresh and organic.) We were going to have weird crawly things in the straw bale and wouldn’t it burn down if a spark hit it? (Well, I guess the imagery brings back 15th century thatch with lice and puppies leaking from it, even though straw bale housing is not only incredibly energy efficient, inexpensive and comfortable, but is also extremely fire resistant, earthquake proof and aesthetic, clean and bug free, once you finish it with adobe or like material.)
Of course, there is work involved in setting up a community like this. You have to research where you want to move, figure out your resources, and work out the financing and the logistics of arriving and setting everything up. Additionally, because we are doing this as a group, not just a single family or individual, we have to create an appropriate legal and social structure for the community, so people can come and go if they want, but we have some control over what type of person we end up living with so intimately. We have had to research the best ways of providing all of our own food and energy, truly sustainable shelters (which means checking out building codes first and exploring non-traditional building methods), and controlling our water use so as to maintain the level of water available on our property, rather than cavalierly depleting the aquifer supply like there is no tomorrow, literally, as is happening all over this country and many others.
Not only do we plan to live light and ethically on the land, but we want to do so in a way that provides aesthetics, camaraderie, community support and other quality of life factors to our members far beyond what most neighborhoods have ever even thought about. Our community structure will allow people to get off the economic hamster wheel of mortgage and debt, permanently, while experiencing abundance in many ways, freeing themselves for the truly important pursuits in life – things like self-fulfillment, healthy and fulfilling relationships, aesthetics, and pursuit of their deepest dreams and goals. Oh, yes, and a bit of fun and games as well :-)
The vision we’ve created of this community is so exciting and viscerally attractive that most people, once we thoroughly explain it to them, want to live in such a place. Many of them prefer that we create it for them, so they can arrive, put their feet up on the couch and sip their freshly blended mango coolers while writing poetry. Hey, we want to do that too! But there are a couple of things that need to be done first….
One barrier is this: most people are too busy running madly around the hamster wheel, buying stuff and then paying off the debt, to spend any time or energy figuring out how to get off of it, regardless of how miserable it might make them feel (well, that’s the idea, right?). If someone offers them a nice, dainty little stepstool to walk off and try something different, maybe they will consider it. What they may not understand is that the reason they feel stressed, and “too busy” to do anything about it is because of the nature of the hamster wheel. It is, at its core, debilitating to the spirit. It makes you want a vacation, to go out on the weekend and “relax”, and try to forget where you are – on a hamster wheel. It is one step up from having a chain around your neck, but then again, maybe not. A slave at least knows that he is a slave.
Ay, and there’s the rub. That is why we find ourselves in a hamster wheel culture in the first place – because we became too stressed out to notice why we were stressed out or do anything about it, and we were waiting for someone else to hand us the stepstool to escape, and oops, they never did….
There is a possibility that they never will. Which is why we’re willing to do the work of building our own. And you know, you are always more likely to get exactly what you want if you do it yourself rather than leaving it up to governments, multinational corporations, authorities and other relatively disinterested parties.
It helps when one is a visionary dreamer – envisioning assists the acquiring process. But if one is also willing and able to take steps to reach one’s dream, then you have a powerhouse! The good news is, anybody has the capacity to become a powerhouse. And it has to do with creating that stepstool gradiently. Find one thing you can change to improve your life, that will give you more freedom to pursue what is truly important to you. And then find the next thing, and the next. If you just put one step in front of the other and keep doing that, you actually do arrive, eventually.
One of the major goals of our community is to create an environment that is conducive to bringing out the best in people, that offers them what they most need spiritually, emotionally, physically, to achieve their deepest and truest goals – on all of life’s dynamics. Philosopher L Ron Hubbard breaks these down into eight expanding circles - the urge to survive and goals for self, for family, for groups, for all of mankind, for all living things, the universe itself, spirit, and one's relationship with infinity or the Supreme Being (however the individual wishes to define that for themselves - we are a non-denominational, inclusive community). One can compare the activities of any community to a very high quality of survival on each of these dynamics - what if a community based the majority of its actions and resources towards increasing that quality for the individuals within it?
Ay, but the second hero’s task, once one frees oneself from the hamster wheel long enough to look around and notice what one's options really are:
To create such a community in the first place, one must already be in a position, to some degree, of being able to manifest those goals within an environment that is not at all conducive to assisting one to do so. An environment, in fact, that is downright hostile to the idea in many, many ways.
And that is where the process gets very, very interesting.
This is what our current culture is and does in so many ways – it creates barriers, some of them extremely formidable, to reaching our deepest and most heartfelt goals. Future blogs will go into much more detail about exactly how it does that - though there is already plenty of info about that on the ‘net, the way we put it together is relatively rare. Some of it is so insidious it is very difficult to see, unless one happens to spot the curtain flapping and the little man inside, manipulating the controls. But the good news is that thoroughly understanding the mechanics of the manipulation alone can help free one from its influence.
One could ask how we allowed ourselves to get into such a position in the first place, and you know what? Each individual's personal spiritual path best provides those answers, but we are having to confront these truths about ourselves and how we got here, and rise above the situation, some way or other - as a group as well as individuals - in order to make this ideal community happen. We must create that community within ourselves, in disagreement with everything around us that is against it, first. And that experience alone, even if we were never to arrive at our land, is worth the journey.
We will share that journey with you in this blog. Welcome, and enjoy!
myspace.com/theedgebetweenuniverses
Our artist's cooperative
myspace.com/earth_food_solutions
Our food forest web site
http://www.permacultureactivist.net/articles/articles.htm
Articles on permaculture
http://www.permaculture.org/nm/index.php/site/classroom/
Basic info on permaculture
http://www.ic.org/
Intentional communities web site - lots of resources!
http://www.strawbale.com/
Great resource for straw bale building
http://www.volunteerministers.info/en_IN/solutions/pg003.html
Explanation of eight dynamics
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