So I was seventeen and living in New Orleans and a road crew of Zendiks needed a place to crash and I loved visitors. They got a floor to sleep on, I got interesting company, we collaborated on some organic apple pie. (Check out their website: www.zendik.org. Sounds great, doesn't it?) Descendents of original visionaries, they have a farm where they make their art and live their lives in a healthy organic way. I guess there's about 40 of them up there in the North Carolina mountains. Often, they take to the streets with their magazines, CDs, and books, trying to spread the word to disenchanted youth within our dying culture. If you've wandered Harvard Square, the Village, Dupont Circle, or other hip neighborhoods in major cities, perhaps you've run into a Zendik or two.

It's a beautiful, promising vision, and I admit I'm not really qualified to comment on the reality of it, only having spent one night at the place when I passed through one year on one of my crosscountry jaunts, but here's my impression. Work is really hard. I helped them dig a septic system, and my back was burning by the end of the day (I was in pretty decent shape then, too, since I had been working on an organic farm in Maryland). But you take city kids, disaffected suburban kids, kids who are fed up with American life, you lure them with your vision of Real People & Good Earth-- and then how do you teach them to work, really work, without them becoming disenchanted with your vision & slipping into a morose space? Finding people who are committed and hardworking enough to really build something might be a challenge for any community, but the way the Zendiks dealt with it was kind of weird, I felt.

I was sitting in the common room, quietly observing the day sliding into night, and listening in on an interaction between a few community members. One boy had been "delinquent" on his exercise program, and so his penalty was to run an extra mile. He was rather upset about this. Apparently, he was a new addition to the farm, and they weren't too pleased with his enthusiasm level. They believe in open confrontation and communication at the farm, so they were having an honest discussion about it-- but the whole business, from my subjective point of view, was completely tinged with a weird vibe. So they have an exercise program, and a crew of people to discipline it: Rationale: everybody has to be fit to do their share of the work if it's going to work. Still, there was something, well, communist about the whole thing. When you start keeping records, and marking people with language like "delinquent"... There just wasn't the spirit of genuine joy pervading the place that I had hoped-granted, it might have been a bad day, there might have been all kinds of stuff going on I didn't know about. (Another observation: Dinner came, quinoa and lettuce and goat's milk, but they had also done some shopping for goods Walmart. In my idealistic youthfulness, I was dismayed about this-the revolutionaries are buying anything from Walmart? As I got older, I came to understand that when times are rough, you do what you gotta do to survive.) Anyway, Lesson #1 about communes: Farming is hard. You've got to really want to do it. It's easy to get beat down. You also might have to eat rice and lettuce a lot.

Four Quarters Farm

A few years later, I was pursuing my interest in magick and the occult, which led me to Four Quarters Farm in Pennsylvania. It's not so much a farm or a residential commune-type place as it is a gathering place for the larger Pagan community. While the Zendiks survive through donations and art, Four Quarters supports itself with the gatherings, workshops, and festivals it plays host to. A circle of standing stones, little forest altars and shrines to various gods, glitter and ribbons in the trees, and a clear, piney stream: this place was gorgeous. It raised the possibility in my mind of running a campground, or throwing crazy art-parties and electronic jams, etc., as a way to support a piece of property. Much less attractive were the people that lived there: the chief male had a few wives, or lovers, that smoked like a factory and didn't seem to get along so nicely with each other. Then he introduced me to his pets, including his rooster (Isn't he cute?)-mentioning, next, that "this is a Santeria household, and if you don't know what that means, then you'll find out." (wink, wink). Now, I'm not one to judge whether animal sacrifice is right or wrong, but it's pretty fucked up to talk about how cute & cuddly your rooster is before you kill it as some kind of shock-rock way to elicit a reaction from some person. Lesson #2: Pretty landscapes don't make pretty people. Choose your companions carefully. And, one can project, if you're going to open up your land to the public, you might have to deal with a whole variety of people...

Lower Shaw Farm

Nestled into a suburban neighborhood in Swindon, Wiltshire, lies a piece of land known as Lower Shaw Farm. This "three-acre oasis in an area of 1980s development" has kept a character and atmosphere of its own, with vegetable, herb, and flower gardens, many native shrubs and trees, living willow structures, ponds, poultry, black mountain sheep, and unspoilt play areas both for children and adults." Forgive me for quoting their website and sounding like an advertisement, but this is one place I wouldn't mind advertising. I remember a big white bunny in the yard, children dancing around a Maypole; the mother on the farm taught me how to bake bread, her daughter taught me some poi, and the husband ran the Swindon Festival of Literature, which drew authors from around the country. Lower Shaw Farm used to be a commune, but now it's a family farm that hosts juggling weekends, basket-weaving classes, African drumming sessions, et cetera. The gardens aren't too expansive, but they offer some fresh produce, and there's duck and chicken eggs. I wondered, though, why the community didn't still exist as a residential commune-what had led them to break up? But like the Sufis in Carbondale, this family farm managed to use their land to benefit Swindon as a whole, bringing culture, vegetables, and hope to their neighbors. Lesson #3: Family is a natural place to explore community. It's probably where community begins-you don't choose your family, but you learn to live with them as best you can.

Brithdir Mawr

Why was it so silent? I wandered around in the May rain, weeding onions, climbing the Welsh hills, settling into the attic and cooking lentils, reading Robert Graves and listlessly gazing out into the rain, rain, rain. Brithdir was strange. There had been some kind of split in the community where half the people went to live on the other half of the 165 acre-farm, and I never really saw these mysterious other half, or understood why they had split. But the ten or so people I was with seemed kind of subdued. Was it just the Welsh character to be sullen and rugged? I took a few meals with them, quiet meals, and then was left to wander in the rain. This was a real, working farm, but I don't think they had enough committed souls to maintain the gardens and everything else. One woman spent hours spinning wool; I'd hoped she would show me, but was too shy to really talk to her, with the strange quietude that shrouded the place. They had a wind generator and a water mill; for heat, they burned wood that they chopped from the copse down the hill, which was carted up by horses. I worked on the wood-chopping one day, learning to handle an axe, getting plastered by the endless mud...

the sun shines on Brithdir / above, a storage hut with living roof

Two days later, I was walking down the street again. One of the boys popped out of another pub, dressed in a dapper black suit. "Did you just get off work?" I asked, struck by the change in appearance. "Naw, we're having a wake," he answered. "Will's mum just died. Come on in." Will was one of the boys I'd been drinking with the earlier afternoon; while we were in the pub, his mother passed away. It seemed the entire town was crowded into this pub, all wearing their best mourning garb... and here I was, a strange American girl, but they all welcomed me into their wake as if I'd always lived in the town. Lesson #4: Community grows organically / not always intentionally. It's not always where you expect to find it. Perhaps intentional community isn't the best; perhaps people who live sequestered together lose something; perhaps people who have no intention to have community with each other have the strongest community of all.

Crestone

Do you ever look at the mess of your life and say, wow, this really isn't working out for me, so you throw your sleeping bag into your car along with some quinoa, two carrots, a grapefruit, AND a grapefruit spoon, and drive out into the mountains? I found Crestone kind of by accident one January day. It's a town that's tucked into the Sangre de Cristo mountains in Colorado, all sagebrush and deserty. The town, official population about 75, pretty much consists of an artist's co-op, a gas station / general store, and the Shambhala coffee shop, where I got tasty curry made by a Cambodian woman. It was there that I learned more about the strangeness of the whole place.

Apparently Crestone was practically a ghost town until the 1970s, when this Canadian businessman (an oil-lord from Alberta, I understand) and his Danish wife, Maurice and Hanne Strong, bought a huge tract of land that lay alongside it. Maurice was one of the people who helped create the Earth Summit in Rio back in 1992, and also apparently wrote the foreword to a Trilateral Commission book on environmental problems (?) (if none of this means anything to you, just skip over it...) anyway, Hanne had a spiritual vision about the place, and they have granted parcels of land to all kinds of spiritual and ecological foundations, according to her vision. Crestone itself is tiny, but at least a thousand people live scattered upon the neighboring Baca Grants.

This explains the map I received of the place. You know how different cities put out free maps, with advertisements on them from local businesses? Well this one features a crazy labyrinth of roads, and dots with labels alongside them: Yeshe Khorlo. Haidakhandi Universal Ashram. Atalanta. Village Witch. I Am Harmony. Stone Huts. Shinji Shumeiki. Ziggurat. Sanctuary House. (Photo: alongside one of the stupas, or Buddhist shrines).

These places live up to their names. As I carefully drove along the tangle of dirt roads, in search of ziggurats and adventure, every so often there would be these ramshackle palaces: straw bale rammed earth adobe-plastered geodesic domes boasting brilliant solar panels and the like... I've never seen so many creative, strange self-built houses in my life. And Crestone's the perfect place for it: though most of the buildings are self-sustainable, there seems to be underground power infrastructure even out there in the desert, and sewer too I'd guess; also, no building codes at all.

Most interestingly, the whole thing sits on a massive aquifer.

I was just staggered by that. If America falls, those people are going to survive. They never say that's their stated intent, maybe it isn't so stated, but they will, & it'll be beautiful... I mean there's nothing else around there for miles, nothing. the whole valley has a strangeness to it; no wonder there's so many UFO sightings; strange and desolate but filled with life, nevertheless... Lesson #5: It's possible to build a whole town of sustainable, living places. It helps to find really rich people to hook you up with this.

ponderings...

So what do you do-- if you're not incredibly wealthy, but you want to live in a community of interesting people, where you can feel some connection to the planet, eat good food, raise your family, make your art? a community which is not just serving itself, but helping this mess of a planet too: either by existing as a model and a point of hope, or contributing art, cultural opportunities, and veggies to a larger group? (If America disintegrates into economic and political chaos, or becomes a police state, or continues along a path of hyper-consumerism and super-high-tech-marketing that's nothing but strip malls and parking lots, or becomes an environmental disaster... then you want to be living in a self-sufficient place that's got some wilderness and some greenery, right? But if America doesn't completely become a mess-if green technology takes off, and we wean ourselves off oil, and get some real leadership-then we still want to be living in a self-sufficient place that's got some wilderness, but one that's linked to a larger whole... so that leaves us where, exactly?)

secret message beneath a crestone bench

 

...we might be finally getting somewhere...