Creating a Life Together :Practical Tools to grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities

Heron and I used Creating a Life Together as a tool and reference to start making plans for our future community. This contract began with our idea, building on a 10-year plan to establish an intentional community and education center in the Pacific Northwest. My vision for the community incorporates artistic exploration with deep connection to the natural environment. I believe that nature awareness can be greatly enhanced by artistic expression. Our community will incorporate a “freeskool” (for grassroots information and skill-share), long-term permaculture farm to produce a subsistence level of food for community members and guests, long-term internships in building a sustainable society, use of local resources (wild food and medicine, water, timber, etc.), and a documentary media collective. It will be financially sustained by our work as educators, foresters, artists, and farmers, and other diverse small industries. Through reading Diana Leafe Christian's work I started to see what the practical steps were to making a truly successful community. Christian breaks down the skills you will need to start this business and a time-line for the first steps in finding members and land. Heron and I began this process by brainstorming the skills we already have for creating the community we want. After this we brainstormed the skills we will need and the kinds of people we want to live with.

In the top 10% of successful communities Christian outlines, is the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, the community Heron and I visited in California. It was great to see that we chose the right place to investigate. I remembered talking to one of the members on the day that we visited and volunteered in their garden. Michelle's advice for creating community was 1) Begin with prior relationships with the people you wish to live with. At the very least, have an extended trial period before accepting new people into the community.
2) Have an established structure for emotional process that the community has agreed upon and has employed regularly. This foundation is invaluable for avoiding emotional build-ups of resentment and miscommunication. Michelle prefers Naka Ima as a model.
3) Create a land-based culture that is a built-in bonding system for people to feel connected to the place where they live and the natural rhythms of the ecosystem. Many community-seekers were raised in the city, or in the mindset of the city, and living with natural rhythms is not ingrained; it must be harbored and developed through regular activities that connect our life cycles with the land, i.e. growing food and eating it. We must re-create the need for local knowledge by linking our needs to those of the land.

This advice seemed like a good way to think about the foundation of our community. Another tool that Christian shares is creating a vision document to state clearly why we want this community and what we will achieve in creating it. This has lead to Heron and I crafting many small vision documents to align our values so we can be sharing the same ideas when courting others to join us in community. We feel that we cannot create a true vision document till we have a good strong group of people ready to commit.
Overall I found this book to be helpful in making this process much less overwhelming. I see that I have tools and mentors in the process of making a community and that we could be a success. I will be posting some of the vision documents and brain storms Heron and I come up with in the next two weeks.