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to me, the extended family of just a century ago--and before that, the tribe of just a few thousand years ago--had been replaced by the nuclear family, which was (despite the merits of my own particular family, which I suspect was among the picks of the crop) an inherently limited domestic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
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