Startled by quivering creature contact I shifted and sat up; the rodent scampered up the tree a ways, but just a little ways. Realizing I had been visited by a Northern Flying Squirrel, I smiled and bade it good night and again nestled down feeling safer and more comfortable in my treetop bed knowing the natives felt comfortable approaching me. Then it ran up my body and welcomed me face to furry face. I think I'm going to stay a while! Then, briefly and tentatively, the flying squirrel sat on my face.
The next morning I watched a pair of these wing-flapped rodents as they sat on our porch checking out me, my human neighbors, and our food. Our food secured in buckets, they settled on gnawing on newsprint. They looked at us bravely with black eyes that said, "Okay, you can stay." There is no question who is a guest in whose home here.
Have you ever seen a flying squirrel "fly"? A flying squirrel can leap from a tree branch and glide up to 200 feet downward through the canopy to another tree. These creatures glide on flaps of skin that unfold between their forearms and their sides. They can steer themselves left and right as they glide, and their flaps come all the way out like parachutes as they land gently and stealthily on a branch. They can also dive-bomb.
I'm sitting 150 feet up between the massive trunks of two magnificent old growth Douglas Fir trees and one old Hemlock. This 96 total acres of publicly owned, rare, low-elevation, old growth forest, above the North Fork of Fall Creek in the Willamette National Forest, is slated to be clear-cut. Known as the Clark timber sale, this popular recreation area has been temporarily spared from logging due to ongoing attention which began last April when a village of treesitters moved into treehouses that reach heights of 210 feet into the upper canopy. They called their camp Red Cloud Thunder. To this day these forest defenders continue to speak out in favor of a bill introduced in Congress to end corrupt logging on public lands.
These trees were supposed to be cut down last spring by Zip-O-Sawmills of Eugene, Oregon, Zip-O is now taking a wait and see approach. This area was once set aside and protected as critical habitat for the Northern Spotted Owl. The Spotted Owl is an indicator species, which means its decline is a reflection of the decline of many other rare, old growth forest dependent species. Even though the Forest Service is breaking the law by logging US Fish and Wildlife Service designated "critical habitat," and also breaking the law by not surveying for rare and sensitive species, the Forest Service continues to maintain that Congress has given it the authority to break the laws. Congress says this is necessary in order to put out the annual yield in board feet that it promises to industry.
Since the Northern Flying Squirrel, prime Spotted Owl food, is not considered "threatened," their habitat is considered expendable by Congress, though the truth is that the unprotected old growth patches of this forest are one last sanctuary for these beautiful native aeronauts. And since a squirrel rarely ranges beyond a 30-acre area, these Fall Creek flying squirrels certainly will die. We, their human relations, can help them by living with them in the trees. You can help us by sending a message to your federal representatives, to the Forest Service and to Zip-O-Sawmills. STOP LOGGING OUR PUBLIC-OWNED FOREST LANDS!
I am not uncomfortable or unhappy here on this dark winter night, on a hanging cushioned platform with a tarp roof, listening to the radio and writing by candlelight. I am not cold or hungry, there is nothing I need that I don't have. I don't have any money, but what would I do with that up here? When I go to bed and blow out the candles, a flying squirrel might approach me and run across my face. It might even bust into the flour bag by my head again. I don't mind, I like the little critters. And as comfortable and happy as I am in their home, I know there are plenty of other places I could go on this earth and survive. Not so for the flying squirrels. If we leave their treetop homes, their homes are coming down. Our departure would leave the squirrels at the mercy of the US Forest Service and Zip-O-Sawmill trying to make a quick buck.
And the trees would fall. And the squirrels would fly from tree to tree, and tree after tree would fall and still they would flee, until nothing was left but the few sparsely separated trees marked orange in spray paint around their trunks, the diseased trees, the dead snags, the "not suitable for timber harvest" rejects. But these would be few and far between, further than a flying squirrel can fly. And there's nowhere to go, nothing to eat in the air or on the ground and there are giant industrial machines turning and churning all around. The flying squirrels have nowhere to fly, and so they die. How could we possibly leave these trees, knowing the flying squirrels and their plight?
People tell me I'm wasting my time, to get a "real job," to live in the "real world." But what could be more real than the wind and the rain, the sway of a big ancient tree, the mountains in the distance, the red clouded sunset, the hoot of an owl or a growl in the night, the fluttery, fidgety feeling of furry little feet on my face and in the flour?
Take Action:
1) Please call, write, or e-mail your Government representatives and ask them to stop the corrupt logging program that "manages" our public lands and to support the National Forest Protection Act.
2) Call Zip-O-Sawmills: (541) 343-7758, and tell them: Don't cut the Clark Timber Sale!
3) Call, write, or e-mail the Forest Service and tell them to shut down the Clark Timber Sale! Willamette National Forest: 211 E. 7th Ave., Eugene, OR 97440, (541) 465-6521, solson/[email protected]; Chief of the Forest Service Mike Dombeck: wo/[email protected].
4) Come live in the trees with us! or send us financial support: Cascadia Forest Defenders! PO Box 11122, Eugene, OR 97440, www.ecoecho.org, (541) 484-2997.
©1999 Talking Leaves
Spring/Summer 1999
Volume 9, Number 1
Cultivating Community
I think of community as a circle. When we draw the circle too small, excluding others on the basis of race, nationality, or religious preference, our attempts to build community suffer. Our efforts also fall short when we exclude others on the basis of species or divide the Earth community into good and bad species and include only those we deem as good. Those divisions violate the fundamental unity of life and create artificial barriers that can only impede community-making.
Including the entire Earth community in our circle of care and concern presents other problems, particularly when we fear or despise certain species. If we are to be nurtured by our community, we have to feel at home in it. Fear and mistrust prevent us from feeling at ease. So does animosity. Anxiety levels elevated, we risk becoming increasingly isolated, pitted against the imagined ill-will of the Earth community. Unless we work to examine and dispel those kinds of negative feelings, we are destined to keep the circle small, and inadvertently limit our own potential and capacity to experience and respond to the grand diversity of life.
Few would argue that in Western society the most limited and distorted relationship we have is with the insect kingdom. Our beliefs about insects and our readiness to think the worst of them color our experiences with real insects and transform the natural world into an alien landscape populated by robotic and malevolent specks of life. And although many believe that it is natural to dislike insects, there is a great deal of evidence that demonstrates that our feelings are learned, not innate--a subject I have written about elsewhere. So how do we include and re-connect with these unjustly neglected, feared, and largely despised creatures? Thinking about them as our relations is a good first step. Another approach is to see them as part of ourselves.
Deep ecologists tell us that our individual identities do not stop at our skin but encompass the natural world. This means that each of us has an "ecological self," rooted and grounded in the natural world. It is this self that recognizes all other species as being aspects of itself and members of its true community--not just the small number that we have embraced as a culture.
I have long suspected that our ecological selves must have a deep and abiding affinity for insects. Judging from the vast number of insect species in the world and their importance to the functioning of all life on Earth, how could our deepened and extended identities not reflect that fact? I like the idea of having multi-legged roots and multi-legged relations. It means we don't have to work at connection. We are already connected. It also means we have places inside ourselves the right shape for insects and affinities for specific species that, if we were more open, would push us to seek their counterparts in the natural world. Given our ties to insects, it is easier to see (although no less disturbing considering our continued pesticide use and biological warfare) that the current alienation from these creatures in the culture is merely a false overlay on a deep and life-serving connection.
Much of my current work centers on reminding people that insects and related creatures are part of our community and that we can cultivate a positive relationship with them if our intentions are clear. I don't buy the popular notion that says we can't identify with insects or feel empathy for them or their situation because they are structurally different from us. As those of us who have embraced the natural world and view other species as part of our community already know, seeing the world through another creature's eyes does not require structural similarity. It requires only a willingness to blur the boundaries that separate and distinguish one from another and participate in another's worldview. From that place natural empathy and compassion flow forth.
Identifying with insects isn't much different from identifying with any other species--including our fellow human beings. When we are open to them, the identification is simply there, and we readily see ourselves in them and their situation. In his essay "Self Realization," philosopher Arne Naess, who coined the term "deep ecology," tells of the time he was looking under a microscope at two chemicals interacting when a flea jumped off a nearby animal and landed in the acid pool. Unable to save it, Naess watched it die. "Its movements were dreadfully expressive. What I felt was, naturally, a painful compassion and empathy."[1] Later he realized that if he was alienated from the flea and not seeing anything in the flea that was like himself, the flea's plight would have left him indifferent. Compassion and empathy always arise from identifying with the other.
Contrast his experience with those of a modern "flea circus master" who has drawn her circle of community too small and is deeply alienated from the creatures she uses in her show. The woman, a former artist, recently brought her fleas to "perform" at the prestigious San Francisco Exploratorium, a museum of science, art, and human perception. As did the flea circus master of three hundred years ago, she glues costumes to the bodies of every flea in her sideshow. Once they are attired, she gets the insects to perform feats of strength, such as pulling a toy train thousands of times their own weight by gluing ropes to their bodies and then to the train and then subjecting the insects to light, something she learned that they greatly dislike. The shackled fleas pull the vehicle in their desperate effort to get out of the light.
In the flea orchestra, the fleas are not only glued into chairs, they have tiny instruments glued to their legs. As they struggle in vain to escape, the movement of their legs gives the impression that they are playing the instruments. In another act, two fleas with formal attire glued to their bodies are then glued together--back to back. Their panic and frantic attempts to escape make them whirl in a circle like two dancers.
The show, which was featured in a prominent alternative magazine, played to an appreciative audience and was considered a great success--which means that those watching were as disconnected from fleas as the circus master. Fleas were simply outside their circle of concern, not part of their community, and so they did not feel their plight. A learned dislike for these creatures and a vague anxiety about their disease-carrying potential (for the record, the flea that likes to feed on people rarely carries the plague bacteria) suppressed what might under other circumstances have invoked a response of distress and outrage to such acts of cruelty.
The disconnect is also evident in the magazine interviewer who presented the show as artistic. She said that the artist has "brilliantly melded science, ecology, aesthetics, and humor into her current body of work" and that "there's something refreshingly honest in her act--something primal, raw, and unedited."[2] But if there is humor in such a show, it is the dark ridicule that emerges when we are disconnected from the other and have excluded them from the circle of our concern. And what is primal is not abuse of other life-forms, but our genuine connection to all other species, an affinity characterized in native societies by wonder and respect.
Including fleas in our circle of community may mean finding our voices and protesting this kind of exploitation that passes for entertainment. It may also mean setting boundaries without hating fleas for living as they were created to do, and seeking balance instead of total eradication.
I like to think that by understanding the ways in which we are taught not to like or identify with insects, most of us would, in time, reorient ourselves and be able to view all insects heartfully and as part of our community. Doing so puts us on a direct pathway toward the maturity necessary to reach our own potential, for we must entertain all kinds of "otherness" to discover our essential selves. Howard Thurman would agree. This philosopher, poet, and mystic believed that when there is deliberate acceptance between people and other species, "the potential of each life undergoes a radical expansion."[3]
I suspect that we may already have guides and helpers to help us in this redemption process. Consider those insect species zealous in their efforts to remain close to us. When we moved away from the natural world into artificial living environments, they are the ones who followed us, moving into the cracks and crevices we couldn't plug. Perhaps it is these insect species, the ones that insist on sharing our living space and carry the heaviest burden of our ill-will, that are the messengers of our ecological self telling us that they will not be excluded from our community. How many then are we in conflict with? How many parts of ourselves have we condemned, and at what point do we see their appearance not as something unpleasant to deal with, but as a remarkable opportunity to stop the war and make peace?
Community-building will always suffer when in arrogance, ignorance, and fear we draw our circle too small. Redrawing it now to include the natural world will not only free us from countless battles with others we have insisted are "not us" and "not kin," but it will enlarge our sense of self and well-being. Forsaking our fugitive status and returning to the embrace of our true community promises to enrich our lives beyond measure, firmly connecting us to the larger pattern and purpose that informs all life.
What heartens me is that I believe that the idea of including insects and other previously excluded species in our circle of concern is one that our modern culture is finally ready to receive. I note how insects still come to us in our homes and gardens, and in our dreams. Indigenous people regarded them as messengers of the creative and numinous forces operating in the universe. We would do well to adopt their view, for it has been my observation that insects do seem to be devoted in their attempts to get our attention and stay with us. We might pray that our job is as straightforward as relinquishing any misgivings we have about them and letting the lens through which we see them clear. When we do, all possibilities for identification, and the gifts of community, are once again present in the moment, and we will be reunited with our ecological selves and infused with its vital energies to work, as the insects work, on behalf of the Earth.
Notes:
[1] Arne Naess, "Self Realization: An Ecological Approach to Being in the World," in Thinking Like a Mountain: Toward a Council of All Beings, John Seed, Joanna Macy, Pat Fleming, Arne Naess. Philadelphia, PA: New Society Publishers, 1988, p. 22.
[2] Marilyn Berlin Snell, "Little Big Top: Maria Fernanda Cardosa Reinvents the Flea Circus." Utne Reader, May-June 1996, p. 68.
[3] Howard Thurman, The Search for Common Ground: An Inquiry into the Basis of Man's Experience of Community. Richmond, IN: Friends United Press, 1986, p. 63.
Joanne Lauck is an environmental educator and the author of a new book called The Voice of the Infinite in the Small: Revisioning the Insect-Human Connection (SwanRaven & Co., August 1998). To order call 1-800-366-0264. To contact the author write her at 1724 Alberta Ave., San Jose, CA 95125 or e-mail her at [email protected]. She is looking for stories of positive interactions between people and creeping creatures for possible inclusion in a second book.
©1999 Talking Leaves
Spring/Summer 1999
Volume 9, Number 1
Cultivating Community
I grew up with some vague ideas about "community," and a cursory familiarity with beans. I had some early experience of a "faith community" in my family's church. Later, having enrolled in an alternative junior high school in the post- Watergate '70s, I was intrigued by the previous decade's communal impulses, listened to some of its music, and started to learn about its ideas and social- political movements. Still later, in between high school classes, I occasionally read about current communal experiments in the pages of Communities magazine.
As for beans, I ate mostly the canned variety, with some fresh (albeit chemically-raised) local beans standing out in my memory. Vegetarianism introduced me to more ways of eating and thinking about beans in my late teens, during the heyday of protein combining.
The larger context of my life, however, did little to encourage in me a real understanding of community, or of beans. "If it can't grow corn [beans], I don't want any part of your religion," Sun Bear once said, and though I didn't articulate or understand my movement away from my family's church in these terms, this may have been one of the reasons church did not feel right to me. But the competitive, individualistic educational and economic systems I eventually entered, having left behind organized religion, had even less to teach me about true community.
Unbeknownst to me, the extended family of just a century ago--and before that, the tribe of just a few thousand years ago--had been replaced by the nuclear family, which was (despite the merits of my own particular family, which I suspect was among the picks of the crop) an inherently limited domestic reality. Human beings, who for eons had lived in intimate contact and connection with one another and with the sources of their sustenance, were now living in relative isolation from their larger human family, and from the earth and the food it produces. So, despite my intellectual interest in both "community" and "beans," all of my actual experience of these, within the confines of the society I was raised in, was (so to speak) small potatoes.
The turning point came at the age of twenty, when I was forced to recognize the harsh reality: I didn't know beans about community--nor, for that matter, about beans.
Through a series of vignettes, this story will attempt to share some of what I learned about community, and about beans, over the course of the ensuing years. Consider this a rough sketch of one individual's journey toward a deeper, more experiential understanding of community, and of beans.
Scene One: The Eco-Bus
The Eco-Bus was my first immersion in twenty-four-hour-a-day communal living, a full school year program through which I completed my final two years of college. Diametrically opposed to much of conventional education, it ran by consensus and emphasized "feelings" over "facts," "process" over "product," ecological sustainability over economic opportunism. My Eco-Bus "bean" memories illustrate both some upsides and some potential downsides of communal living:
Hands in the soil: The Eco-Bus visited a Mennonite farm for a week every year, helping with such projects as bean harvesting. This was probably the first time I ever made a conscious connection between the bean plant and the beans it produced. I still remember the wonder of first digging my fingers through the soil, to where a peanut plant had plunged its flower stalk after pollination, and discovering peanuts there. Through this communal educational experience, I got my first inklings of the connections between culture and agriculture. Mennonites and Amish lived in an entirely different world from the one to which I was accustomed, one revolving around community and connection to the land. I wasn't ready to hop off the bus yet, but the idea of a collective land-based culture had, for the first time, become real to me.
Sharing Meals and Gas: Students on the Eco-Bus cooked and ate communally, taking turns learning what it's like to prepare food for a large group. We saved time by cooking together, and also shared the experience of giving and accepting physical nourishment within the group. This was a far cry from eating canned beans at the supper table in a suburban household, or, even worse, very questionable bean dishes served in a college dining hall. For many students, cooking for the group was an awakening.
The downside of this equation was the most common complaint and source of amusement on the bus: flatulence, sometimes but not always associated with undercooked beans and other culinary errors. This problem also drew attention to the cramped quarters and participants' lack of personal space. Unfortunately, the general response to the physical closeness on the Eco-Bus was interpersonal distancing, which was exacerbated by confrontive, often nasty, communication patterns, and a code against physical affection. In their zeal to be part of the group, I and all other newcomers eventually fell into step with these tendencies.
Loss of individuality: To be admitted into the Eco-Bus program, students had to agree to eat whatever was served, whatever everyone else was eating. My unsuccessful campaign to get everyone to adopt vegetarianism (so that I could be vegetarian) highlighted to me the frustrating lack of choice that went along with this bargain everyone had made. Ironically, while valuing diversity in the natural world, Eco-Busers had fallen into the trap of excessive conformity in the human world, even as they tried not to conform to the norms of the dominant society. While attempting to establish an alternative, more ecologically sensitive culture, Eco-Busers let their own individual insecurities lead them to behaviors every bit as cult-like as that of the "mindless consumers" they were trying so hard not to be. Group-think, group-act, group-talk, and scapegoating of dissidents were distressingly common. After two years, I had learned a little about community, but not much about living happily and peacefully within it. Yet some seeds had been planted.
Scene Two: Pueblo
I spent nearly a year-and-a-half at a Pueblo in the American Southwest. Drawn to the vibrant culture there (which I'd visited on the Eco-Bus), especially the ritual dances associated with crop tending and harvest, I eventually saw how inseparable culture and agriculture were for these Pueblo people. Raising, storing, processing, and preparing food were all communal acts, carried out and celebrated in the traditional ways, and surrounded by art, stories, ritual, and prayer.
The Value of Diversity: I worked with a population normally marginalized in Western culture: the mentally alter-abled. The Pueblo parents had formed their own nonprofit care center as an alternative for their "different" children, who were thereby spared spending their lives in the off-Reservation "warehouses" to which many developmentally disabled Native people were consigned. They had a chance to grow up near their families, nurtured by the Pueblo culture that bound their people together. And, eternal children, they never lost their wonder for the world, and were a constant reminder to those around them of how miraculous even the most familiar details of our lives are.
The Challenges of Gardening: My first personal foray into the world of gardening occurred at Pueblo: I obtained some free seeds from a Native Seed nonprofit, and gave them to some other staff to plant and tend (since I knew nothing about gardening). Unfortunately, this garden did not do as well as the traditional Puebloans' gardens and fields, which had sustained them for centuries despite harsh climatic conditions and very little water. Dogs dug up and destroyed all of the plants in this new garden. I was starting to discover that beans, like community, need careful tending and protection in order to grow safely to maturity.
The Call of the Soil: Recognizing that I would never understand Pueblo culture until I understood agriculture, I also saw that my opportunities for learning about that were limited by my circumstances at Pueblo, where, as an outsider to most of the traditional culture, I worked nearly every waking hour at the care center. Shucking corn one day with one of the more verbal of the center's residents, I received a clear message that I needed to move on, if I wanted ever to truly understand corn, or beans, or the community that grows around them.
Scene Three: The School of Soil
Beans' functions in the garden are enough to inspire gratitude in even the firmest anti-mystic. They increase soil fertility, their roots hosting rhizobial bacteria that fix nitrogen from the air and make it available to succeeding generations of plants. They are perfect "companion plants" to many crops, thriving in and contributing to the rich community of a diverse garden. Nutritionally, they complement those same crops with which they grow well. Some varieties grow as bushes, some as vines; some in the summer, a few over winter; some are black, some white, some purple, some green, some yellow, some red--and nearly every color of the rainbow in between.
Land and People: My first experience of truly supportive, sustaining twenty-four-hour-a-day community came among the beans and students at the School of Soil. Together, I and a few dozen fellow gardeners (some, like me, neophytes; others more experienced) grew together as a community even as we grew vegetables, flowers, herbs, and fruit on the land. This was very different from most schools, where the primary activity seemed to be talking and engaging in mental gyrations. There was no point in putting on clean clothes at the School of Soil; a few minutes after the day started, they wouldn't be that way any longer. "Facts," "ideas," and "academic achievement" in the conventional sense were not the centers of attention, nor was abstract conversation-though conversation was always a pleasant accompaniment to the physical activity. The center of attention, the greatest teacher, was the garden itself, before whom all students were equal.
Being physically engaged with others out-of-doors in joyful and/or useful tasks--whether simply in play, in sports, or, most usefully of all, in gardening--seemed to me like an inherently grounding, essential ingredient in any whole human life, neglected at our own peril. I made lifelong friends, discovering that my own Indo-European heritage did not necessarily doom me to distance from nature and from other people.
Old Habits Die Hard: My old habits didn't die easily, however. Predisposed still to seeing beans as "dry beans," which needed to be soaked and cooked, I had become fascinated and obsessed by solar cooking over the previous couple years. I fanatically stuck a pot of beans in the solar cooker nearly every sunny day at the School of Soil, even when it should have been obvious that fellow students were tired of eating cooked beans. Fresh beans and other vegetables sat unharvested in the garden on my cookdays, my thinking clouded by my less-than-thoroughly-examined conviction that solar cooking was an ecologically honorable and correct choice, which should always be used to its full potential (even if it means eating stored instead of fresh food).
Seeing myself as offering "salvation through solar cooking" to my fellow students, I felt hurt when my gift to the world did not meet with unqualified appreciation. Only when I started to learn beans about vegetables--the virtues of eating fresh out of a garden rather than cooking stored food for hours in a solar cooker--did my culturally-ingrained tendency to look for "salvation through technology" give way to appreciation of the more subtly offered gifts of the earth.
Scene Four: The Sustainable Living Institute
White Wonder Beans: who had ever heard of them? And yet here I was, listening to Oliver, the founder and self-proclaimed director of the Sustainable Living Institute, expound on just how White Wonder Beans were going to save the world.
Pledging Allegiance: My tenure at the Sustainable Living Institute (SLI), coming on the heels of my School of Soil experience, was a strange mixture of accelerated, hands-in-the-soil learning, opportunities for "below-the-radar" cooperation, and dysfunctional community dynamics. Oliver seemed to demand absolute loyalty to his opinions, not only about White Wonder Beans but also about everything else, and it was relatively easy for me to adopt these opinions, since they usually made a lot of sense. Oliver's charisma and obvious intelligence made him SLI's "guru" and undisputed leader--especially since individuals or groups who started to mobilize against his influence in the organization were quickly moved out by Oliver and a few of his most loyal followers. Oliver's petty tyranny kept SLI firmly on the track he had set for it at the beginning: a no-compromise experiment in ecological living. Run by a residential "community" which also formed its staff, SLI was as divorced from the fossil fuel and money economies as a public nonprofit institute which welcomed visitors to its rural acreage could be, at least in the United States. Unfortunately, Oliver's domination of the group prevented true long-term community from emerging--except, at a distance, among ex-SLI staffers.
Digging In: And yet, I found that digging in at one location for a couple years, even in the midst of a very-far-from-perfect human community, helped me learn lessons about the soil, about gardening, about beans, that no shorter period could have. At the School of Soil, I had shuttled back and forth between the multiple gardens and rarely been able to follow a crop I planted or tended from start to finish. At SLI, however, I became intimately involved with the entire cycle, from soil preparation through planting, tending, harvest, and preparing for the next crop. I watched the seasons of the year come and go, and started to understand something that cannot be learned in an instant: timing. There are times to plant summer beans, and times to plant White Wonder Beans, and these vary with each year's particular conditions. Failure to respect the natural cycles of the earth, the weather, and the plants--neglecting to observe the conditions which will greet our newly sown crops--results more often than not in crop failure. In gardens, as in communities of people, continuity of care and attention allows for learning and growth. Even when the going gets rough, the act of digging in brings unique rewards.
Appropriate Technology: SLI offered one other benefit not as easily found in mainstream society: an opportunity to engage with appropriate technology on a daily basis. My eco-technology repertoire expanded far beyond solar cookers to encompass hayboxes (retained heat cookers), solar water heaters, composting toilets, efficient woodstoves, and a host of other devices. Nearly everything that mainstream American society accomplishes in certain taken-for-granted ways (cooking, refrigeration, heating, building, etc.) can be done in quite different, ingenious, and often more ecologically benign ways. SLI's eclectic community setting provided a fertile environment for me and others to discover and experiment with some of these ways of supporting basic life needs. SLI's guiding precept of spending as little money as possible--and therefore needing to earn as little money as possible--meant that staff members had time to experiment with this level of creative subsistence living. Failure could mean being temporarily cold, hungry, and wet--but rarely was there any danger of monetary debt.
Scene Five: Mapleleaf Community
Eventually the level of dysfunctionality at SLI, which emphasized "ecological vision" at the expense of "human values," became paralyzing. I set out to find something better in the community sphere. Mapleleaf Community represented a radical, egalitarian alternative to Oliver's ecologically pure (but far from egalitarian) petty dictatorship.
The Benefits and Perils of Size and Egalitarianism: Mapleleaf's main attractions included its large size and diversity, and its lack of a dominating authority figure/boss. Socially, Mapleleaf offered me a breath of fresh air. But these same traits meant that ascertaining a guiding vision for the community could be difficult, and change, especially attitudinal and lifestyle change, sometimes happened at a snail's pace. Members spent large amounts of time working in cottage industries that did not wholly resonate with my sense of purpose in the world, earning money to build buildings that (more than its gardens or any advances in "sustainable living") were seen as measures of the community's progress toward its goal of "a middle-class lifestyle on a poverty-level income."
Half a year after joining, I recognized that, despite its indisputable merits, Mapleleaf was not sufficiently ecologically oriented for me. My community quest needed to continue.
Scene Six: Good Life Farm
I moved on to Good Life Farm, a family-sized rural intentional community where members were committed both to ecological values and to nurturing relationships.
The Joy of Self-Sufficiency: Good Life Farm raised upwards of 95% of its own food--not only vegetables but also grains, beans, fruit, and animal products. Farm-raised value-added products provided the income, which could be modest because expenses were also modest. Many building materials were also grown on site, and Good Life had the good fortune to be located in a county without building codes. Like Mapleleaf, Good Life was committed to, and practiced, income-sharing and egalitarian decision-making, but unlike Mapleleaf, Good Life had a spiritual, land-based focus, directly tied to its way of life.
Time, Cycles, Timelessness: The lessons of this rural life were many. With less focus on "education" and "research" than SLI, greater emphasis on the worthy work of day-to-day life on the land, greater physical isolation, and no petty tyrant or heavily-entrenched dysfunction, Good Life had many fewer distractions from the good life its members were leading. The beautiful, bountiful land, and all its diverse forms of life, were just as obviously members of the Good Life community as the human members and their domesticated animals. The cycles of the seasons swept up the members in their rhythms. Even more obviously than at SLI, there was a time, I learned, for everything--including, in the middle of the winter, skating on the pond, and in the summer, diving into it after a hot day in the fields. Sweat lodge ceremonies and seasonal rituals helped ground the members in an eclectic brand of paganism, their shared spirituality. Life at Good Life was cyclical, and almost timeless. If I hadn't known anything about the outside world, the concept of linear time might well have become a happily-forgotten, distant memory.
Splitting Hairs Over Beans: In such an Eden, I was hard-pressed to find fault; but perhaps not every Adam belongs in every Eden. Just when I thought I'd learned beans about community, other beans started rearing their ugly heads.
First, coffee beans: Good Life members had a morning ritual of sitting on the couch drinking coffee and waiting for breakfast to be ready. I liked to go for a walk first thing in the morning, and not eat a heavy breakfast. Also, still a relative purist, I had doubts about the politics of coffee, even organically raised coffee: it wasn't a bioregional crop. Neither I nor the rest of Good Life were necessarily wrong in their preferences, just different.
Next, dry beans: Good Life's beans, like many of its crops, were planted and harvested by machine and grown in tractor-tilled fields. This was not a big deal, since I had been eating machine-processed dry beans all my life (except the hand-harvested White Wonder Beans at SLI, still a relatively small part of the diet there). But beans were not alone in this. All of the fields, and even the vegetable garden plots, were plowed by tractor, and virtually no beds were dug by hand, or prepared with sheet-mulching or other Permacultural techniques of which I had grown fond. I liked gardening without fossil fuels, even if it meant being less self-sufficient. I liked my body to be involved in all parts of the cycle. If farmers in the Peruvian Andes didn't need tractors, I didn't think I should either. Again, nobody was wrong--but personal preferences were different.
I also spent lots of time milking the cows and taking care of the chickens, but still couldn't bring myself to give up veganism. Influenced by my prejudice against cows, which had degraded many ecosystems and replaced many native animals on this continent, my ideals warred with the practical considerations of the well-established Good Life ways of doing things. How could an "environmentalist" live with cows? How much was I compromising myself?
Isolation: Ultimately, I left Good Life Farm because of social isolation, and because my purpose in the world didn't quite seem to fit there--not because of beans. My coastal sensibilities didn't quite match Good Life's midwestern flavor; I was one of just a few single people in a community of couples; and aside from the six to ten people living at Good Life at any one time, I probably could have counted on one hand the "alternative" people (or "unrepentant latter-day flower children") living within a fifty-mile radius. Forced to recognize that not every Adam belongs in every Eden, I migrated back to the neighborhood of my former stomping grounds.
Scene Seven: Common Share Farm and Cornucopia Farm
After a brief return to the Sustainable Living Institute, which was experiencing major internal political turmoil, I decided to give the idea of "community" a rest, and attempted to live in a nearby small city. By imagining the traffic to be the sound of the ocean, I was able to coax myself to sleep at night. But I felt far from the land, and equally distant from the apparently well-adjusted city dwellers who surrounded me.
Farming Forms Community: After two months, springtime pulled me out of the city onto a Community Supported Agriculture farm. Common Share Farm supplied its subscribers with a weekly box full of vegetables, in exchange for a once-a-year fee. At Common Share, and at Cornucopia Farm, where I worked next, my most significant lesson was a reinforcement of what I had been learning for years: that human-scale farming creates community. I and my co-workers on both of these small organic farms shared our work, our living spaces, our meals, our lives. These "communities" only lasted a growing season, but they were communities just as real as and sometimes more genuine than those "intentional" communities that lacked a common vision or shared work. These farmhands' communities could also be prey to communication breakdowns, especially with no formal agreements or commonly-held expectations about the nature of the "community" that formed there. But bridging the gap between the world of "community" and the everyday work of farming, they gave me hope that "unintentional community" will form wherever relationship to the land brings people together.
Scene Eight: Sustainable Living Institute, revisited, and beyond
An education junkie, I finally returned once again to the Sustainable Living Institute, which had finally rid itself of Oliver through a collective coup d'etat several years before, and now needed a gardening instructor. Unfortunately, the White Wonder Beans had been allowed to all but die out too. I grew a big patch of them by saving seeds from the few remaining plants. It was less easy to maintain the kind of unifying vision that Oliver had held, and SLI often strayed from its former "ecological purity." But what it reaped in exchange was a newfound tolerance for diversity. We SLI-ers now had to think, speak, and act on our own behalf, stand up for what we believed in if we wanted it represented in the collective discussion and decision making. "Oliver says" no longer cut it. Staff gradually--and not without mistakes and difficult lessons--learned to use our empowerment within the organization to bring it much closer to the collective spirit that had been suppressed for so many years.
My "bean stalk" and quest for community didn't end with my return to SLI. Many more challenges lay ahead. To make a long story slightly shorter, I eventually recognized that I was ready to make a commitment to "intentional" rather than "unintentional" community again: ready to put significant energy with other people into loving one another, rather than agreeing, too often, merely to tolerate one another.
But this is another story, one we don't have room for here. The essential nugget of wisdom to be extracted from all of this is that it is possible, with persistence, to learn beans about community, or about beans, even if you start out in nearly total ignorance. Other people have set out on this path even later in life than I did, and found that they, too, were rarely tempted to look back.
Since that fateful day when I realized I didn't know beans, I've learned more than I ever could have conceived of from within my limited worldview at the time, and made choices I'd only vaguely dreamed about before. Perhaps most significant, I've discovered that growing "beans" and growing "community" are not two separate choices. It's very difficult, if not impossible, to grow one without the other.
Chris Roth is editor of Talking Leaves, author of The Beetless' Gardening Book: An Organic Gardening Songbook/Guidebook (see http://members.aol.com/growseed), and custodian of the White Wonder Beans at Lost Valley Educational Center. He can be reached at [email protected].
©1999 Talking Leaves
Spring/Summer 1999
Volume 9, Number 1
Cultivating Community
I was told the man to seek was a priest who lived in the Hilltop neighborhood, a notorious part of town, most recognized on the five o'clock news for its drive-by shootings. The idea of going there was very scary for me. I went to his little house, which was connected to a much larger house. Later I would learn this larger house served the homeless. He wasn't there, but on the side of the house I noticed a huge, freshly rototilled garden area. I entered a little greenhouse in the corner. The small, plastic paneled room was filled with life--tomato plants, peppers, squash starts--all kinds of things! Marvelous! I looked around, then suddenly a black man with a very stern face bolted in and asked what I was doing in there. I explained to him that I was looking for Father Bix. His face broke into a generous smile and he told me to wait in the garden. (We later named a garden after this man.)
This was such a welcoming place to me, for my family and I had just recently moved to the Northwest from a small town in northern Illinois. Back there, I had a huge garden, much larger than any small family should have, but gardening is my passion/obsession. Back in Illinois I'd pile the kids in the truck and we'd drive some 30 miles toward Chicago to find a food bank to take my produce. So, needless to say, it was delightful to find this place. When the priest finally arrived, I told him of my mission regarding the rally, and he wanted to jump in with all fours! I asked him about his garden and if he needed any help. He spread out his arms and said, "Take a piece and it's yours!"
That first year we divided the garden into small plots, community garden style. Folks from a nearby mental health facility brought clients out, and other people living in the vicinity tended their "spots." What was interesting is that people loved to come out and plant seeds, but usually did not return. Their gardens turned weedy. Bix, a couple of other volunteers, and I ended up tending the abandoned plots. It became obvious that the "community gardening" style wasn't working here.
As the season continued, vegetables grew like crazy and we ended up with a ton of food. There's a farmer's market in Tacoma that operates on Thursdays and we thought we'd see how well we would do there. As it turned out, we made over $1000 the first year for just laughs and giggles! Basically, this was produce grown from rejected plots, which gave us a clue, perhaps, of where we were heading.
While at the market, we distributed a little flyer that talked about where we were growing this food and who was involved. The house next to the garden, Guadalupe House, is a Catholic Worker house which provides hospitality to homeless. Their main thrust is to provide transitional housing for folks as well as a place to use a rest room, make phone calls, get mail, etc. The garden next to it also serves people on the streets. It has become an oasis of sorts--a place of beauty amongst the desolation of street life.
The rally we planned was a success, but it did not spark the unity we were hoping for. However, the connection we made with this little piece of earth and its inhabitants, did.
The next season, we continued growing food for our families, Guadalupe House, and the market. We used the proceeds to buy seed for the following year, and gave the balance to the house to help defray costs of water. These were delightful times, bringing people who had heard about what we were doing to join us as volunteers. We had "weeding bees" on Wednesday nights which truly strengthened our bonds to each other and to the earth. In growing, we used only organic methods and focused on feeding the soil. Our little piece of earth responded with amazingly beautiful flowers, strawberries on Thanksgiving, and butterflies like we'd never seen before.
The third year we began to think outside of our perimeter. Although we had accomplished our goal of developing a beautiful garden at the house, we were in a neighborhood surrounded by vacant, abandoned lots where illegal dumping and drug abuse took place. We began clearing two sites, one across the alley and the other next door. The lands were difficult to work for they were full of thorny blackberries, garbage, and used needles.
We named the site across the alley after the friend I mentioned earlier, Kevin Putney, who literally lived on this site out of his car. He cleared an area next to his vehicle and laid out an inviting living room scene complete with chairs, tables, and a couch. He called it the "colored peoples' park." I asked him once if a white sassy gal like myself would be welcome into his "park." He gave me one of his famous grins and asked me if I were a color. "Sure I am--a little pink, red, dirt brown..." was my response and he said, "Well come in then, this is for 'color'ed people only!"
Kevin died not long after that, and this really kicked the wind out of our sails. A short time later, we convinced the owner of the land on which the Colored Peoples' Park was situated that his property would be enhanced if he allowed us to clean up the rest of the site and grow a garden. It took some talking, but eventually he agreed. The garden flourishes today with perennial herbs and vegetables like angelica, cardoon, and Jerusalem artichokes, and lots of strawberries, which Kevin loved. It's also a gateway to our newly built produce stand facing Tacoma Avenue.
Autumn of the same year gave us another jolt. A man died of a drug overdose in a vacant lot in the next block. This was just a little too close to home and was a painful reminder that we weren't out of the woods yet. Not long after, there was an announcement that our area was chosen to receive grant funding for environmental projects in urban settings. We decided that if we could get some funding to help us, we would take on the lot where the man died as well as two other sites nearby. During the period of writing the grant, Jerry Garcia passed away. Being a Grateful Dead fan, I found it extremely difficult to put the words to paper, but somehow it flowed. I was determined that if this worked, we'd name one of the biggest sites "St. Stephen's" after one of my favorite gardening Dead tunes.
Shortly afterwards, we received the maximum allowed for the grant and in spring of '96 we added St. Stephen's garden, the Miller garden (where the man died), and the garden of Eva--the ultimate flower garden built atop a toxic waste site! These three sites were our biggest challenges yet. From the Miller site, we hauled twenty truck loads of beer bottles alone to the recycle center. When we finally macheted up to the top edge of the garden, we discovered an abandoned station wagon that hadn't been seen in years. Unbelievable! The efforts of many helping hands pushed that old beater out to the alley and the city finally hauled it away!
These, too, were amazing times, with neighbors and volunteers from all over working side by side. When all the debris was hauled out, we discovered that the actual place where the man had died was really very beautiful. Surrounded by cherry and Doug fir, we were compelled to preserve the trees for all to enjoy. The city of Tacoma and their multitude of departments worked with us in building an incredibly unique park. We took foundation chunks (three separate foundations were discovered when we were clearing the lands), granite blocks (from the old union station), and gravel, and embedded them all into the ground. The design formed two lizards that sprawled under the trees with their tails meeting in the center of the site--one tail cradling a gravel area for children to play in and the other a semicircle seating area.
In one blur of a day, we built this park, bringing together employees of the city (including the city manager), residents and guests of Guadalupe House, and neighbors--some forty in all. This marked our first official work party. The tradition continues today, for our greatest strength is in gathering and working together to accomplish our goals.
The flower garden site was toxic because many people living out of cars would come to change their oil and dump radiator flushes there. After digging some forty tires out of the brush we decided to use the tires as planters filled with dahlias to surround and protect the garden. Maybe it's the toxins but the flowers that grow in this spot radiate!
All this gardening going on, and the potential to raise some money by selling at the market, gave us more ideas. We decided to do a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) program where we would sell shares of what we would grow in the upcoming season. Instead of worrying about marketing, our energy could then go toward education for the gardeners, working with volunteers, and teaching the community about their impact on the food system and the environment.
Being in a nurturing setting for homeless, it only made sense to employ these folks in the project and provide job training opportunities. When shareholders came to pick up their weekly box, they saw what was going on, and got to know who was growing their food. Friendships developed out of these connections and the first organic CSA in Pierce County was born. We just completed our third year and are looking forward to many more. It is a wonderful way of growing community.
The following year, we added two more gardens, La Grande (named for its size, over an acre) and our orchard. La Grande, three blocks from the original garden, is in a delightfully sunny location nestled in a Vietnamese community. Because of language barriers, we have difficulty connecting with these folks on other neighborhood issues, but when it comes to working in the soil, we all speak the same language. There have been incredible relationships made through gardening with our good neighbors there. The orchard, a block further south, is also very special for we rehabilitated some old fruit trees and then planted twenty more. In addition, we grow lots of berries, kiwi, and grapes there!
Magical things have begun to happen. Although we aren't solving all problems, people do respond positively when they see gardens instead of eyesores. Neighbors feel more comfortable getting back out in the neighborhood again. Two of our most precious neighbors, Eva and Jean, both in their eighties, now feel they can go visit each other again while not long ago they didn't feel safe leaving their houses. Children are allowed to play freely once more on the sidewalks and in the park.
There's been a shift in the wildlife as well. In a place where crows and stray cats were the only "wild" critters around, we now have resident possum, raccoon, and hummingbirds! In addition, since we utilize only organic methods, there's a noticeable difference in the ladybug and dragonfly populations. Recently we have taken up bee keeping and sport two colonies in St. Stephen's garden. What a huge difference 80,000 bees make in the amount of fruit that develops in the orchard and in the abundance of food and flowers throughout the gardens!
There's no longer hunger anywhere in this neighborhood. Nutrition abounds! There are still those who are homeless who come through on their way to the nearby soup kitchen or food bank. Sometimes they miss the boat by showing up too late--so it is the gardens that feed them and water from the hose that quenches their thirst. As the saying goes, "inch by inch and row by row" you can make a difference by helping a garden grow. My advice is to get out there and "Grow For It" and build a garden with your neighbors! You'll be amazed by watching both flowers and people bloom!
Carrie Little writes that she is mother of two teenagers (God save her soul), wife of a union organizer (doubly), and former office worker of fifteen years who couldn't handle the four walls anymore. She is addicted to gardening thanks to her "pusher" teacher of 7th grade biology (blame Mr. Anderson!), and volunteers with schools, labor education forums, environmental groups, and the United Farm Workers. Her hobbies include seed saving (endangered plants), sewing with hemp material, and traveling on a shoe string. You can reach her at [email protected].
©1999 Talking Leaves
Spring/Summer 1999
Volume 9, Number 1
Cultivating Community
Are we looking in the right places?
Perhaps our received ideas of "community" are unnecessarily limited. A community that includes only people may not, in fact, be a community at all. In section one of this issue, Community with All Beings, our authors explore what expanding our concepts of community could mean. Joanne Lauck asserts that insects are just as vital parts of our extended "ecological self" as any other creature, and that re-connecting with them can help us heal our relationship with the earth. While perched in an old-growth Douglas Fir, Khaos discovers a similar bond with a Northern Flying Squirrel. Fellow tree-sitter Monkey advocates the kind of natural anarchism practiced by this Fall Creek tree village. Jesse Wolf Hardin reminds us that the natural world is inherently part of our community whether we recognize this or not, forming the context for every collective human endeavor, and that balanced, vital societies take their cues from their natural surroundings.
In section two, Community Between the Rows, three gardeners detail their personal journeys toward community--with people and with the earth itself. Cathrine Sneed describes the horticultural training program she started for convicts in the San Francisco County Jail, and its remarkable success in restoring people as well as land. Carrie Little tells the story of a Community Supported Agriculture project that has converted vacant lots into gardens, replaced hunger with nutrition, and employed and served the homeless in a Spokane neighborhood. Chris Roth traces his quest to learn about both beans and community, in educational settings, on farms, in intentional communities, and on his own--discovering, in the end, that it's difficult to grow one without the other.
Section three, Rediscovering Human Community, shares the insights of a prominent futurist on how we can bond more effectively in our human groupings. In an excerpt from his book and lecture series Reworking Success, Robert Theobald asserts that local community activities are vitally important "building blocks toward the truly fundamental change we need"--and gives inspiring examples of communities working together on a small scale to create this change.
Community with Intention, section four, takes us further in this same direction, into the world of intentional communities. Geoph Kozeny, the famed "peripatetic communitarian," offers an introduction and overview based on his quarter-century in the communal trenches, and offers some hard-won lessons. Albert Bates, Marilyn Friedlander, Rupert Fike, and Rachel Sythe share perspectives and stories of The Farm in Summertown, TN, including a memorable encounter between CBS news reporter Dan Rather and "the Wolfman." Finally, two Talking Leaves editors flip coins to determine which side of the Lost Valley Educational Center story each one will tell, and Larry Kaplowitz ends up with the privilege of shedding light on the "Dark Side" we usually don't mention.
Section five, Y2K: Getting Prepared, features ideas and practical techniques for preparing for possible disruptions caused by the Millennium Computer bug/bomb. Debbie Hubsmith sees Y2K as an opportunity to promote bioregionalism as a strategy for sustainability, crisis or not. Tom Atlee describes steps we can take in the areas of energy, food, waste, water, toxics, and economics to bring us together as communities, "rediscovering neighbors and nature" through Y2K. The section concludes with instructions on making and using hayboxes, solar box cookers, and rocket stoves--sustainable cooking technologies guaranteed to be unaffected by date changes.
We round out the issue with book reviews, music reviews, and announcements, many of them dealing with these same subjects. This issue is also enriched by poetry, artwork, and letters sent by readers.
Thanks again for joining us in this issue of Talking Leaves.
©1999 Talking Leaves
Spring/Summer 1999
Volume 9, Number 1
Cultivating Community
Most of the people that are in our jails and prisons throughout the country are there because they're poor. They're there because they've sold and used drugs. Unfortunately, they're there because they're people of color.
What really is for me the most important part of our project is that we have people who are in need of restoration. The people in need of restoration are the ones who are working very hard to restore themselves, but also to restore their neighborhoods, their communities, and their families.
Since I started the program in 1982, more than 10,000 prisoners have been in it. We've grown a lot of food that we've given to soup kitchens and senior centers and community centers. Growing food and giving the food to these places is what has helped to restore the prisoners and the participants in the program because they're able to give something. They're able to give of themselves.
Over the years, people have asked me, "Well, why don't we sell the food instead of giving it to the community centers?" That's probably one of the most important things we do, because you do have to give to live. In giving the food that the people work very hard to grow, they begin to care about themselves, they begin to care about other people.
In growing the food, they begin to learn about their bodies and about health. I've over the years always asked people, "When you got arrested, what kind of food were you eating?" Generally they say the same thing. The poor, when they get money now, go to McDonald's. I'm seeing more and more people who aren't eating food at home. I have concluded over the years that this is why they are using drugs. This is why they're craving crack. It's because of their diets. Having talked to thousands of prisoners over the years, I'm positive that that's the case. They were not eating vegetables. Many of them have never eaten vegetables that didn't come out of a can or weren't frozen. In San Francisco, in the neighborhood where most of the people in our jail live, the one store that is there doesn't have fresh vegetables for the most part.
We're really trying to change that with the Garden Project, growing food and trying to get the food to the community that needs it and where it's grown. Our garden is about a half acre here in San Francisco in Bayview Hunter's Point, a community of mostly African-Americans where there are at least two Superfund sites. We invite people from the community to come to the garden. We invite seniors to come, and they come and they bring other people, and we're very glad to be able to say, "We'll pick those vegetables for you."
We're trying to teach people about nutrition and health not just by lecturing to them, but by showing them. So we make food and eat it in the garden. We have lunches in the garden using the food that we grow. The prisoners and the former prisoners tease me quite a bit because they say it's always vegetarian. "Don't you ever eat meat?" But what they're doing is learning to eat vegetables, and it's something that really offers to them a way to feed their families in addition to whatever they can come up with just on their own.
But what also happens at the Garden Project, while the seniors are picking the vegetables, is the seniors see the same people that maybe were on the corner trying to take their purses or knock them out and rob them. They see the same people now giving back and trying to help. That changes something for them. I know the prisoners begin to feel badly about what they have done in order to support their habit in preying on other people. The garden does that. Growing this food does that.
What really disturbs me is that as citizens we are allowing our government to spend an amazing amount of money to keep people, mostly people of color, in jail for really the crime of being poor. I think there has to be a time where we say as a community, where we say, "No, in order to heal our communities we need to involve the people who have hurt the community." I'm not a mathematician, but it seems like the money that we put into sending a person back and forth to state prison for ten years is a lot of money. We're talking $25,000 a year, or more when you calculate what the person being in jail does to the family that's involved.
My son just got a job working at a center here in San Francisco in Visitacion Valley in a community that used to be really, really badly plagued by drugs and gangs. But something's happening in Visitacion Valley. The people seem to be coming together. When my son got this job working in this center, he said, "You know, Mom, the thing that really bothers me about it, is not that the kids are bad, because they're not bad. They're no different than any other kids I've seen, but everybody treats them like they're bad. They're just kids." What I know is that what happened to these kids could very well have happened to me and my children. But the difference was that I got a job. The difference was I was able to stay in school because I had a job. I was able to support my children.
My daughter graduated from Barnard last year with high honors, and when she walked across that aisle, I cried the whole time. I was hysterical. Everybody was, like, "Cathrine, why are you crying? This is good." But I was so happy because I remember when I stood in a line to get bread for her at a soup kitchen. But now I know that she and my son are able to help others because they had the benefit of me having a job. So when people ask me what am I trying to do, I guess what I'm trying to do is give people work so that they have worth. It's been said before, but when you do something, you feel good about yourself. Imagine if you had nothing to do and nowhere to go all day. If the only place you had to go was some corner, how would you feel about yourself, and how would you feel about the people around you? Not very good.
So my son organized a big party for Halloween for the kids. This year, I'm proud to say that at the jail we've been able to grow over 1,000 pumpkins which we will hand out to schools. We delivered the pumpkins to my son's center in the giant sheriff's flatbed truck. The ex-prisoners were unloading these giant pumpkins and the kids were jumping up and just screaming. A lot of them had never even had a pumpkin before.
The people in our program and the deputies said that delivering the pumpkins to the center was the thing that meant the most to them in their whole career. The people in our program were so proud and so happy that we got out the pumpkins and weeded them and watered them and cared for them, and then we were able to deliver them. When people ask, "How do you break the cycle of crime?" I think you break it with pumpkins.
Thousands of people come to me--and they do, every day--and say, "Cathrine, can you hire us?" I can't tell you how hard it is for me to say, "I don't have the money to hire you." Because I know that when I do that, they go to the street and they go back and they end up in jail or they end up dead. And that's a crime. I hope and pray that as a country we begin to look at the fact that people in jail need education, and we could put that money there and they can be taught to work. They can be given an opportunity to contribute to their community. They can learn that, and we can do that.
©1999 Talking Leaves
Spring/Summer 1999
Volume 9, Number 1
Cultivating Community
What does a bad day look like for me?
It's been raining non-stop for a week in a month that has seen only three dry days. My family are all irritable and edgy from having spent the whole weekend cooped up in our one-room house. I am frustrated because my "variety in work" has left me with uncompleted projects wherever I look, and my backlog of phone messages and correspondence waiting to be answered has grown to an absurd level, causing me a continual, low-grade sense of guilt. The food orderer has been on vacation and we're out of fruit, vegetables, and bread. Our recent deep freeze, in addition to bursting many pipes, killed most of our overwintering crops in the gardens. Several community members are sick, in the throes of yet another microbial onslaught, delivered by one of our continual stream of visitors, apprentices, and conference guests who have partaken in our touchy feely lifestyle. Consequently, every pre-meal circle now ends with a frenzied flight to the washrooms, where we queue up for the anti-bacterial soap to disinfect ourselves from our hygienically corrupt handholding. The phones are malfunctioning, causing every other incoming call to get cut off, and our computers all have viruses.
At our morning circle in the kitchen, everyone is soggy and puffy eyed and the energy is grim. Someone is heating up week-old rice, which is burning in the pan, and another is looking forlornly at the barren toaster. During Lost Valley winters, our primary diversion and comfort is toast, and the empty breadbox is a cruel insult. We circle, and after a long silence during which everyone looks at the floor, someone finally begins a song. Several of us join in despondently, with dirgelike effect, until the song raggedly peters out. It is Monday morning and on the plate for today are the cheery tasks of trying to figure out why our sewage system, water system, and phone system are all malfunctioning. We also have to work on our 1999 budget to find a way to recover from our deficit from 1998, and to once more redesign our organizational structure so we don't end yet another conference season burned out, frustrated, and broke. Several of us are beginning to feel desperate because it seems like it will never get done, should have been completed a month ago, and probably won't work anyway. Add to this mix occasional Y2K panic attacks, relationship blowouts, existential crises, automobile breakdowns, lice, pinworms, mysterious rashes, and seemingly irreconcilable philosophical differences, and I begin counting the hours to bedtime.
I sometimes think of Lost Valley as a whirling centrifuge, where all our impurities, both individual and cultural, are pushed to the surface at an accelerated pace, continually erupting to the surface like boils. While this affords tremendous opportunities for growth, self-discovery, and healing, it also makes for an unrelenting intensity, particularly in the summer, when dozens of new people are thrown into the hopper every week. Depending on my mood and frame of mind, this can make for abject agony or blissful ecstasy. And I can switch from one to the other without warning. This way of life is not for the faint of heart nor the weak of spirit. It is a warrior's path, for those whose vision (or bullheaded stubbornness) is stronger than their desire for comfort. Comfort, however, can be a good thing, and in my weaker moments I have succumbed to thoughts of returning to the good life, from which I bid a hasty retreat five years ago. Then I remember. Wherever I go, there I am. This is as good as it gets.
Yet we have succeeded, as Chris says, in holding love as our center. Something is working. Perhaps all this is what it takes to create the space in which our love and compassion can grow. Welcome to community. And don't forget to wash your hands before dinner.
Larry Kaplowitz is associate editor and art director of Talking Leaves. He has recently been enjoying a string of good days, due, in part, to a bumper crop from the bakery.
©1999 Talking Leaves
Spring/Summer 1999
Volume 9, Number 1
Cultivating Community
You're likely familiar with those wooden Russian dolls that nest one inside the other. Take the top off one, and you reveal yet another doll inside, again and again until uncovering the final, tiny seed doll. We can think of the smallest doll as the self: the community of one's cooperative parts: organs, skills, experiences, needs, and desires. Each part interacts with the rest according to its evolved purpose. This self-doll is nested in the larger human community, which resides in and is linked to the fate of greater Nature. Nature exists within a community of planets and stars, all of which are contained by the forms and intentions of inclusive Spirit.
The process of remaking human society will require attention to the diverse interests of our authentic inner selves. Both self and culture depend on the sustenance and example provided by the natural world, and this natural world requires our active protection. None of this is possible without the inspiration and spark of life that is the gift of the sacred.
We have only to turn to our natural surroundings, our watershed and the wild animals that inhabit it, in order to come up with examples of balance and right living. We have only to turn outward, away from our preoccupation with emotional and material baggage, to tap the energy for an inspired reformation of our community soul.
At their best, our various social constructs both reflect and respond to the needs and patterns of the watersheds where they're situated. Traditionally, terrain, weather, and available natural materials dictate the type of structures characterizing a given community--such as the peaked roofs of Alaskan log cabins, and the flat roofs and thick insulating walls of Southwestern adobe casas. For a glaring example of community indifference to the land it exists on and with/in, consider the bluegrass lawns and constantly evaporating swimming pools of desert suburbia. Little could be more obvious than the simple fact that arid regions require dry-land gardening strategies, and call for conscientious cactus and gravel landscaping.
Terrestrial and climatological influences also affect our activities, our schedules, and even our very characters. There's more at play than an easy stereotype when we speak about the "stoic" qualities of Midwestern farmers--their determination tempered by storm and crisis, their perspective shaped by flat lands and distant horizons, their patience a product of the empty miles between.
Even a modern city, filled with generic high-rises whose windows look out on nothing but other duplicate high-rises, demonstrates a palpable sense of character that's partially an effect of the rivers coursing through it, the ocean lapping at its beaches, or the mountains rising just out of sight. To some degree even the most insular and self-absorbed of societies must still feel it, and reel from it: the power of a blazing sun, the effect of long months of Northwest cloud cover, the muffled imploring of the earth beneath the pavement. Tactile rock, beating wing, and exploring, subterranean roots all touch its populace at the subconscious level. The angst and hope and inspiration that result surface in yearning arts, musical laments, and the primarily unanswered desire for us to feel at home.
On the other hand, a balanced, vibrant society consciously takes its cues from the natural world around it, responds to the needs of that world as it provides for its own. It takes on the elements of local Nature as co-members of an intentional community, as pledged allies, and as lovers...contributing to the well being of the whole, sensitive to matters that threaten its integrity or dilute its intensity of being. Such a society can be said to be ritually and fundamentally bedded in the adjoining natural world, as much as plants are bedded in the living soil. It is this essential, comprehensible grounding that affords us the wisdom of stewardship, and the grace for redemption.
The root of the word "community" is the Latin communis, meaning "common." Other words growing out of the same root include: "commune," the most deliberately sharing of contemporary social experiments; "communique," which can include interspecies messages; and "communicate," which means literally: "to make common." A healthy society is bound together by what its residents and participants share in common: shared intentions, shared needs, a body of ideas affecting the ways that we live and the quality of that life.
Certainly this is no longer the case for most American urban centers. Financial opportunity has become the primary and often sole reason for people picking a particular place to live. The second most important criterion is usually a comfortable home, followed by a "comfortable" neighborhood and available recreational opportunities. All too seldom is the reason a desire to live near relatives or to die in the habitat of our personal family history. Or to be in the company of like minded folks, engaged in that hard day-to-day work called "utopia." Or to answer a soul deep call from the lap of the redwoods, the bosom of the Rockies, the heart of the Midwestern grasslands.
I speak not as a successful communard, but as one who has slipped through the fine cracks of the social screen, proposing a harmonic social body from which I myself have opted out. Even if I stumbled upon the functioning, Earth-centered tribe I've always dreamed of, I'd likely find myself making camp at the farthest edge. Like a Seeker, or a shaman, or a leper--taking advantage of the stillness and the silence in order to apprehend the movement of power and the voices of the land!
I've been disgorged from the impersonal maw of one this country's largest metropolises. I've even found it difficult to function happily in the cooperative folds of alternative community. I understand the essential value of consensus, while finding it outside my nature. I appreciate the highest expressions of culture, but was born looking at them as if from afar. I've been too easily wounded by the back-fence gossip that helps sustain the fabric of even the most radical of alternative social experiments. In later years I prayed for, and did everything I could to orchestrate the forming of clan and tribe around the protection and celebration of this bioregion, only to find that the land spit out all but the most die-hard, and that the folks we enlisted didn't always have the best effect on the land they came to live on.
While we need natural places for our survival, as well as for our deepest fulfillment and realization, if everyone spread out from the towns and villages there wouldn't be any undeveloped places left. No room for the plants and animals, nor space for quiet, no arena for evolving wildness. No matter what my personal inclinations or failures, I know that the answer for our kind (in our times) is to cluster with like minded folks in places we love, near those places we need. And to enter into communication with the non-human world as well as with one another, using what we learn in this cycle of touching and sharing to create a society we can be glad to belong to.
Whether a small clan gathering around issues of social activism or an entire neighborhood or town, meaningful success will hinge on the cultivated ability to make common: recognizing the commonalities linking us to one another, linking our alliances and our fates to the cooperative association of the more than human realm.
Jesse Wolf Hardin is an author and presenter on matters of mindfulness and spiritual, deep ecology. This article was written especially for Talking Leaves, and will be included in his upcoming book Homeland: ReBecoming Native, Recovering Sense of Place. For information on wilderness retreats and workshops contact The Earthen Spirituality Project, PO Box 516, Reserve, NM 87830. You can find the ESP web site at www.concentric.net/~earthway.
©1999 Talking Leaves
Spring/Summer 1999
Volume 9, Number 1
Cultivating Community
Are we all talking the same language here?
Yes and no. Yes, in that each term conjures up an image of togetherness and cooperation--having a sense of belonging and mutual support and looking after each other. No, in that rarely do the same images and cultural assumptions come to mind when people start talking about what "community" looks like in its physical form.
In general, a common set of attitudes and skills is needed to create and maintain a community in any of these forms, and the issues and challenges that arise are also similar. It's especially interesting to look at what folks are doing these days in "intentional communities,"* because that's where folks are consciously trying to design and live(!) in nurturing, human-scale, sustainable settlements--and must face all these issues head on.
Several decades ago, when I started seriously networking among intentional communities, I thought I pretty much knew which structures and systems worked the best, and which ones were ineffective and/or oppressive. Having visited over 330 communities, I've had to change my opinion. I've found workable examples of almost every imaginable kind of government, decision-making process, and economic system--what seems to really matter is whether or not the members believe in the system they're using.
I did learn that, regardless of the vision or the leadership or the lifestyle chosen, every attempt to live intentionally in community has its challenges and frustrations. Living in community is hard work. Period. And worth it!
Why? Because it makes us squarely face our growing edges--those areas in which we need to transform ourselves in order to become more fully ourselves: creative, curious, inspired, loving, friendly, thoughtful, helpful, humble, ecological, social, playful, spiritual...the list is nearly infinite. Mostly this is a matter of unlearning our conditioning and tapping into our potential.
If you hear someone talking about a community in only glowing terms, put on your detective hat--you're obviously not being given the whole picture. It's not that the shadow side should overwhelm the positive aspects, but it does need to be acknowledged and worked with rather than denied and hidden. Unfortunately, we're more likely to judge and alienate those we perceive as acting out the shadow roles--rather than finding ways to celebrate them as our teachers so that we might peacefully and joyfully coexist.
It's a sad truth that, at least in this century, most of our conditioned attitudes and aspirations have emphasized competition and rugged individualism at the expense of cooperation and community. Most of us have fantasies of living harmoniously with loved ones and peers and neighbors, but we don't have many of the skills required to pull it off. In that context, living consciously in a community environment is like being in a social pressure cooker where you can earn your Ph.D. in personal growth and cooperation--a double major! And the homework at times seems overwhelming.
If and when you're ready to join or start a community, there are plenty of resources available to help you along the path [see footnote to get started]. The current Communities Directory lists 440 diverse communities in North America--and that's just the tip of the iceberg. There are also many networks and publications available, so that we may all benefit from the collective experience and find referrals to others aligned with our values and visions.
But your major first step is a huge one: to figure out exactly what you value and what you want, and to understand clearly both where your vision is flexible and where no compromise is possible. And guess what? For most people, those understandings change over time--so try to err in the direction of being flexible.
Happy hunting!
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*According to Communities magazine, "An intentional community is a group of people who have chosen to live or work together in pursuit of a common ideal or vision. Most, though not all, share land or housing. Intentional communities come in all shapes and sizes, and display an amazing diversity in their common values, which may be social, economic, spiritual, political, and/or ecological. Some are rural; some urban. Some live all in a single residence; some in separate households. Some raise children; some don't. Some are secular, some are spiritually based, and others are both. For all their variety though, the communities featured in our magazine hold a common commitment to living cooperatively, to solving problems nonviolently, and to sharing their experience with others."
Communities magazine (quarterly, $18/yr.); Communities Directory (440 pages, $28 postpaid). 138 Twin Oaks Rd., Louisa, VA 23093; [email protected]; www.ic.org; (660) 883-5545.
Geoph Kozeny has lived in various kinds of communities for 26 years, and has been on the road for 11 years visiting communities--asking about their visions and realities, taking photos, and giving slide shows about the diversity and vitality of the communities movement. He helped create the Communities Directory, and is a regular columnist for Communities magazine. Presently, he is producing a full-length video documentary on intentional communities.
©1999 Talking Leaves
Spring/Summer 1999
Volume 9, Number 1
Cultivating Community