Driving up the gravel road, I had no idea if I was at Dayempur Farm: no sign, no name on the mailbox, just rolling pastures with thickets of green. But I heard a "Hello!" ringing out from the distance, so I approached. "We're just about to eat lunch, would you like to join us?" was the first thing the fortysomethingish man asked, both heartily & cordially. So I smiled and nodded (sincere-ly-there was something very sincere about the whole interaction). Lunch was a picnic table under some shady trees. The plates were laden with greens and eggs, and a woman in a straw hat began taking a portion of eggs off each plate to make a plate for me; the men seated around the table helped, scraping forkfuls off. I was really touched: something about the simple sharing of it-- it wasn't abundance in the way that we can just get more from the fridge. It was a type of abundance, though: this is what we have, and we will make it enough. There were beets, preserved from last year's crop (the best beets I ever had-and I normally detest beets, imagining them dying my intestines red) and also sweet homemade tomato preserves. Everything on my plate, from the scrambled eggs to the unidentifiable greens, was grown on the farm.

Admittedly, that story wasn't the most exciting story: it was just lunch. But I wanted to mention that lunch, because for me, it caught the spirit of the place-it was my entrance to their world: simple, sincere, true abundance-not the artificial, mass-produced illusion of abundance most of us in America know.

The world was that of a Sufi-run organic farm, and I caught the world as it was being made-one of the most exciting times to catch a world, if you ask me. (How cryptic is that?) I caught a glimpse of something really dynamic, something rare, and so I want to show you. We'll have to go to Southern Illinois, though. Even if we have to go through endless Kansas or boring Indiana to get there, it'll be worth it, so gather up all the fun little car games you know, & let's go.

Most people don't know about Southern Illinois. It's not the metropolitian northern Illinois of Chicago; nor is it the flat plains of Kankakee or Champaign-Urbana. Southern Illinois is the heartland of the heartland: quiet, tucked into Missouri and Kentucky and Indiana, land of barbecues and Bibles. Straight roads dotted by little towns, edged by the Mississippi: there's southern Illinois. It's pretty chill: not much happening.

"I drove past this area so many times without ever giving it a second thought," Wayne confessed. Wayne, the director of Dayempur farm, is the man who so warmly invited me to lunch. A self-taught man, he spent years in the woods and working with the earth. Now he teaches wilderness survival and permaculture workshops, when the busy projects at Dayempur can spare him for a moment.

I asked him why the Sufi community chose to make Southern Illinois its home, and Wayne said he had wondered that too, when they settled down here. The community's spiritual teacher, Sheikh Din Mohammed al Dayemi, decided to move the community to the area about a decade ago. "Now I understand," Wayne says, sweeping his arm across the panorama of green and pointing out that five ecosystems meet in this region. Aside from the beautiful, fertile land, there's no industry to speak of in southern Illinois, and a lot of forest land left. Plus, the people are friendly, Wayne claims, mentioning that there's a lot of old hippies around in the country here, ones who didn't sell out.

I had wondered about the friendliness of the people. I admit an aversion-a prejudice, okay, I'm working with it-to the Christian culture that shrouds the middle of our country. Would a Midwestern town really take to dozens of Sufis moving in, especially with the anti-Arab political climate? Wayne states that the neighbors are very receptive to Dayemi. "We don't want to be seen as a cult," he comments, and says that all their books are in the open-the community welcomes them, because they have nothing to hide and nothing to be suspicious of.

a rural / urban relationship

Curious, I went to town and tried to feel out the residents. The town I'm speaking of is Carbondale, Illinois, population about 27,000. It's a college town, home to Southern Illinois University, but it's not exactly a thriving college town: many of the businesses on the Strip are empty, the Varsity theater lies silent, and the place has the ragged feel that so many of the outlying smaller towns do. At first glance, the most hopping place is the Dairy Queen on the main drag. The students who didn't make it out of town for the summer can congregate in the parking lot, eating Blizzards and watching the trains go by.

At second glance, the most vibrant place in town is the Long Branch coffee shop. Open late, the back room of the building offers space for poetry nights, music, salsa lessons, et cetera. The main cafe is lamplit and cozy, where you can get organic sandwiches, herbal teas, and fair trade coffee. It's pretty much the hub of local culture / subculture (they go together, in a small town like this).

(the porch at the long branch)

I met a man named Kale up at the Long Branch and asked him what he knew about the Sufis. "Oh, the Sufis... the sheikh's our local prophet." He guessed they were pretty cool, but he didn't know much about them. In fact, nobody seemed to know much about them. "I heard he's got a whole harem of women," somebody whispered, but that was the only semi-negative comment I got out of the bunch: most people were either indifferent, or recognized that the Sufis do a lot for the community.

I speak of the Sufi community (Dayemi Tariqat)-but then there's the Carbondale community, which the Sufis are immersed in. Actually, when you look closer, they seem to be involved in every interesting endeavor that goes on in Carbondale. Dayemi members own the Long Branch-Dayempur Farm provides it with its organic produce. They own Dar Salaam, the only Middle Eastern restaurant in the region, which is also graced with organic homegrown produce. "Dar Salaam" means "House of Peace", and the restaurant's mission, besides feeding people good food, is to forge peaceful cultural understanding between the middle East and middle America. The grease produced in the restaurant will go to power the biodiesel on the farm.

In addition to Dayemi's ventures in food, the community publishes a guide to sustainable living in Southern Illinois; runs a community garden for the town, which has playgrounds and events for children; organizes a child-care co-op; and offers a lending library of spiritual materials.

left / entrance to Sufi gardens // right / surprising statue in Sufi park

Dayemi members also run schools for their children, and a holistic health practice with rolfing and massage. "It's about getting local," as Wayne says. "This is about as local as you get." This emphasis on being local, Wayne says, is both a political statement and a social statement.

It just makes sense. A lot of intentional communities are insular, you know, living together on the farm, on their commune. But this setup is different: the people are dispersed throughout the town, engaged with the town, improving the town. I can't imagine what the town of Carbondale would have going for it without the influence the members of Dayemi Tariqat. While I can't say much about their practice or what they do within their community, I know they get together on Thursdays and Sundays for community gatherings, and share meals together. All the community members receive a portion of farm-fresh eggs and veggies. They can work jobs in the town, and live in town, but by being linked into the Dayemi community, they get the fresh taste of rural life.

a transitional lifestyle

People want the connection of community, they want good healthy food to eat and real people to eat it with, they want land and forests to enjoy-but not everybody's cut out for the hard farming life, at least not to begin with. Having a dispersed community, rather than a cloistered commune, avoids the whole problem of dropping unprepared people (say, middle-class people with no agricultural background) into a rural life. It's a "gradual orientation towards rural life," as Wayne puts it, and I can see how it might work-you come out to the farm on weekends, you learn your way around, maybe you start to think about moving out there... or maybe you're content for others to do the farming, maybe your work is in the city. There's something for everyone. "People are really afraid, afraid of chiggers, afraid of ticks..." Afraid of the woods, I'd imagine, of the wilderness... I think a lot of the 1960s communes languished because the middle-class revolutionaries didn't really understand the harshness of living with the natural world. But by building your farm in a way that's interlinked with a town, you can transition people.

There's a crew building a new community building out on Dayempur right now that will help get members onto the land and used to alternative buildings. The community space is being built with both traditional and green building methods-all pegs, no nails. Wayne envisions constructing a cob house out on the land for himself and his family, and there are 6 or 7 more houses being planned right now. In addition, they are also building a house for their spiritual teacher, as well as straw-bale retreat cabins.

barn with solar panels, Dayempur farm

At the moment, though, Dayempur is mostly fields and forests. It's amazing what they've done with it already: with 60 acres available, Wayne's cultivated portions of land-at first by himself; now, they're up to 6 full-time employees. The first garden he showed me looked kind of crazy, a tangle of green; but he explained that in this section, ecological succession was taking place all at once. There were no rows, but he could tell me exactly what in the growing chaos was where: hawthorn trees (for the medicinal berries), passionflower (both fruit and medicinal), comfrey, green and concord grapes, apricot, nanking cherries (they got cherry pie last year), pecans, asian pears, ginkgo, Jerusalem artichokes...

forests full of food

"I think our main goal here is to build food forests," he explains. This was a new concept to me, but it's amazingly simple: you have a forest you can walk through and gather food from, because the plants and trees are rich with food, and you know what each plant is. It's good for the soil, as opposed to constant plowing and planting, and good for the ecosystem in general. (I'm no permaculture expert, but this seems like what permacutlure really is: permanent agriculture. Here's one site with a copious amount of permaculture info).

Not every space on Dayempur embraces this creative disorder of plants: there are plenty of organized gardens, yielding chard, beets, potatoes, you name it.

Fragrant herbs flourish; Wayne is about to become certified in his herbal knowledge, and he's created a medicine chest with over 50 tinctures for the community. There are beehives, a chicken shed with fifty chickens (yielding 2-3 dozen eggs a day); there are orchards, a greenhouse, a 70-foot wind generator with a diesel backup, an area for canning and preserving, a wood and metal shop, a hundred-year-old farmhouse. Wayne envisions six connected ponds for aquaculture, and a wheat crop that the community could grind themselves. They've done a lot in six years; they have a lot more to do in the future.

"Are you optimistic about the future?" I have to ask. It's a question I tend to ask everyone. "I wouldn't say optimistic," he answers. "I'm optimistic about our future here. I'm optimistic about the future of humanity." But the governmental stuff... I think everyone's pretty bleak about that. I wonder if I should ask about Bush; my question is anticipated. "He's going to fall to pieces, this guy. He can't do it." I tend to agree; but Bush falls to pieces, and then what fills the vacuum? From here, it's a mystery. Sitting on the clean half-built poplar porch of the building-in-progress, though, I am taken by Wayne's sense of optimism. I believe that this Sufi community is onto something, that they have a beautiful future: and if they do, then humanity probably does, too.

above the door in the under-construction community space: remember

Being suffused with hope... it isn't a feeling that washes over me often; and I want to describe some of the other places I've been-communities that I feel inspired by, and communities that are missing something-- so that you can see why Dayempur struck me as so rare and beautiful. I won't go into too much painful detail, because this is rather long already, but I want to give some background for why I found the Sufi place so amazing. Organic farming is hard; especially for small farmers in this kind of economy. Organic farming and sustainable living mixed with community is even harder to pull off. Granted, the Sufis had the bonding of their spirituality (and somehow, funding because of it, I imagine). But they were the closest to a happy, wholesome, planet-caring lifestyle I've seen so far. Let's leave Southern Illinois and visit a few places in America, and beyond, that are also trying to create a liveable life.

continue on to explore some communities...

or, if you're tired of wandering, check out one recipe for a more liveable life