this season's people

"I used to say that if you took all religions like on IBM punch cards...some of the holes would go clear through the stack...and that's what we're interested in. We agreed that if you actually felt like we were all one, it seemed like you would live somehow collectively so that everybody could have some of what was happening..."

This was Stephen Gaskin's response to Erin's question, "What were the founding principles of The Farm?" It was late afternoon a week ago and we were sitting in Stephen Gaskin's bedroom; he was lounging with his cat on the bed and we were sitting nearby trying to absorb every word of this legendary figure in the hippie subculture movement. Gaskin describes himself as a "non-superstitious psychedelic freethinker" and at 70 years old, he is still an articulate visionary, inciting people to wake up and speak out. In 1980, he was the first recipient of the Right Livelihood Award, the alternative to the Nobel Prize, which has since been awarded to leaders such as Vandana Shiva, Helen Mack and Mordechai Vanunu. He received the award for founding The Farm, an intentional community in Tennessee, an hour south of Nashville and the 4th stop on our community tour.

So what did religion and IBM punch cards have to do with the genesis of this 1700-acre, 175-member community deep in the Bible Belt?

In 1967, as the United States got more embroiled in the Vietnam War, Gaskin started teaching what came to be known as the Monday Night Class at San Francisco State College. Of the class, Gaskin remarked to us, "doing Monday Night Class was a tremendous privilege because everybody was tracking so well together on ideas and other things, you could see an idea go across like wind on a wheatfield." As Farm Historian Albert Bates describes, "Stephen would say, 'Let's talk about how we're gonna be.' Not 'how we're gonna stop the war' or 'how we're gonna make it fair,' but 'how we're gonna be.'" The energy and ability for people to generate ideas and understand these concepts was often a result of experimentation with LSD. At the time, "tripping" seemed like the most effective way to access a higher spiritual plane and understand that "we are all one".

As the class grew to six hundred people, there was a feeling among participants that some kind of planetary change was afoot. Like any movement, you could take a few different approaches to this impending change. Sectors of society like the Weathermen adopted a revolutionary , violent anti-government approach; others participated on a political level. Those who were part of Gaskin's Monday Night class took a spiritual approach.

In 1971, the class morphed into a caravan of 70 buses and 250 people that travelled around the United States with Gaskin giving lectures at universities and churches and others speaking out about the war. The caravan eventually made it to Tennessee where they bought their first 1,000 acres of land for $70/acre. Then, as Gaskin describes, "our kids got to see us be doers". Working together and pooling their resources, they began clearing and cultivating the land, building houses, installing a water system, constructing their own roads and establishing their own midwifery clinic. The Farm's numbers continued to grow throughout the seventies with 50-70 people living in one house at a time. In the early eighties, the community reached 1500 people. The sheer size of this "experiment" created a statistic that was noticed around the country.

In The Farm's brochure, under their guiding principles, it states "we believe that we, individually and collectively, create our own life experience." Peter Schweitzer, an original farmie (as they call themselves) and Executive Director of Plenty International, the Farm's international aid and development NGO, explained it to us another way, "We are the writers and directors of our movie. We are not the victims of whatever the government wants to do. No, we are the authors...and that's liberating." To grow food, erect buildings, get married, deliver the babies and ultimately create a community, no one from The Farm ever asked for any permission. No church, corporation or state was consulted; those that founded the community believed in a vision and authored their own way of living. They did not wait around to see whether or not they were "allowed" to create another reality; they went ahead and made their own revolutionary movie.

In reference to the current world situation, one community member shared that, for him, President Bush represents the worst of us - our worst fears and our violent, reactive side. As Gaskin reminded us in quoting the Second Coming, "The best lack all convictions, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." We need to counterbalance this anti-life atmosphere with a way of living that is compassionate and nonviolent. More than that, however, we need to stop waiting for things to happen to us and instead, change the course of what is happening.

I'm humbled and fascinated by what was created on The Farm...and in those moments of reflection, when my dreams override my fears of what I can or can not do, I'm incredibly excited about the next movie that I, we, all of us who believe in human rights, nonviolence and respect for the earth will come to create.

You are the people.
You are this season's people -
There are no other people this season.
If you blow it, it's blown.
- Stephen Gaskin in ...this season's people


Kareen

Off the grid...

We just came from spending a few days at Earthaven (www.earthaven.org), a developing ecovillage near Asheville, NC, at the foot of the Appalachian Mountains. This community of approximately 65 members is entirely off the grid - all of their electricity is generated through solar, hydro or human power (see photo at right- you rock, Tony!!!). They obtain their water from a nearby spring and almost all their toilets are composting.

Earthaven is a great demonstration center for natural buildings; members' homes are either strawbale, earthship, cob, clay slip or made mostly of recycled materials. More than that, the community is "art in process", as one member described. Aesthetically, it is an incredibly beautiful community with painstaking thought put into the design and sculpture of the houses. In fact, there are times when you feel like you've landed in some fantasyland with names for neighborhoods and houses like Hut Hamlet, White Owl Lodge, Hobbit House, Village Terraces and Council Hall. There's even a labyrinth with a crystal...It conjures up that "other world" experience where you feel stuck in some surreal human experiment at the edge of the planet...

I'm exaggerating of course but being at Earthaven certainly tested the limits of our comfort zone, especially with regards to human waste. As far as I understand, although I would like to read the Humanure Handbook to be certain, composting toilets are legally required to be outside of a building. At Earthaven, they are usually located near buildings/houses and look like a standard outhouse. However, the compost toilet itself has a separate place where the urine goes and a barrel where the feces are deposited. Since this whole operation is outside, Erin and I were presented on our first night with a typical plastic yogurt container with lid to pee in at night, should the need arise. This, of course, is a smart idea, far superior to stumbling outside in the dark at two in the morning at 28 degrees Fahrenheit, trying to find an appropriate place to pee.

Yet, I'm not sure if I'm up for doing it all the time. Each morning, I ceremoniously tromped outside with a full yogurt container of my own urine and attempted to find a discreet place in the garden to dump it. Don't get me wrong, we are resilient, adaptable creatures but these practices of pooping in a barrel and peeing in a yogurt container are not going to fly very well in the mainstream. We are used to flushing away our waste, not having it stare us in the face every time we flip up the toilet seat. I'm all for composting toilets, though. It's unconscionable that we contaminate potable water with feces and urine and flush it away. However, if we are going to sell sustainability to the masses, we can't ask Mrs. Jones to pee in a yogurt container on a regular basis, even if it's of the Horizon, organic low-fat French vanilla variety.

To deal with this issue, a couple of members are putting flush toilets in their houses so that they are "up to code". More than anything, it's to prove that sustainable, eco-friendly houses are possible and that techniques illustrated at Earthaven can be replicated in the mainstream. A part of me thinks this is selling out, another part of me thinks it's simply being realistic.

I'm afraid that there are no juicy stories from this commmunity. Although I did meet a person named Kimchee, our evenings were filled with conversation around the wood stove about peak oil and sustainability, a few games of dominoes and a revival of the 1995 game, Jenga, in an altered form. The possibilities are simply endless in an ecovillage...

Kareen