The Communities Directory

I began reading The Communities Directory aloud to Heron on our drive to Seattle one afternoon. I think this is the best way for this interactive guide to be shared. The Directory begins with a series of thirty three articles related to the intentional communities movement as well as listing seven hundred communities and what they offer. Sense we are not planning on visiting these communities for quiet some time we mainly focused on reading the articles which described many different scenarios that you come across in this movement . I was drawn to the articles on cults, being an elder looking for community, raising children in community and resistance activist community. As well as the essays on income sharing, working with consensus and setting up a structure so you get you personal needs met.

In the article "My other car isn't mine either" Bumper sticker for an income-sharing community
Valerie Renwick-Porter Outlines the basics of sharing income as a community. "One of the most attractive features of this type of living is the interdependence and the level of engagement we share with each other." I like this philosophy. I like how radically different this is from our mainstream one unit family culture. She goes on to describe having home business, sharing resources and making sure each persons need are met. I imagine this to be a challenging set up, deciding what "needs" are and what your fair share is. In my communal house we have a "Kitty" that we each put in $40 a month for collective grocery money. It took us awhile to decide what should be communal and what was your own personal wants. This food list has changed greatly from the beginning and is an ongoing dialogue in our house meetings. In this way we share money to help the collective get there basic needs met. It feels good to practicing this now to get a sense of what it might be like to do this on a larger scale.

In Life in a Resitance Community I was inspired by hearing about the radical acts people do in community. Sue Frankel-Streit points out that "Living with others who share a vision strengthens the activist resolve; when you are discouraged, you can draw strength from others. When you cannot be as active, you can support the activism of other community members." this was a good point to realize and a push for the importance of having a strong vision that you all follow. Frankel-Streit lives in a Catholic Workers community and does non-violent direct action. She is also a mother in this community and helps to raise the other children on their farm. I liked the idea that community can enhance your activism resolve and help you see your blind spots. It is always inspiring for me to see radical mothers and people who have made a commitment to social justice working with each other for the long term. I think a sense of spiritual connectedness is a part of keeping this energy going as well. The essay ends with a great quote by Dostoyevski and Sue Frankel-Streit "Love in dreams is easy, love in reality is a harsh and dreadful thing." It is only that harsh and dreadful love, in fact, that will sustain both community and activism, and it is perhaps this common root that keeps the two intertwined. When we bind together community and activism with love, the universe bends a little closer to justice."


I found the essay's in The Communities Directory to be great starting off points for thinking of the many ways people decide to share their lives. I hope to use this book in the future to set up a tour and get some hands on experience to ultimately create the kind of community Heron and I would like to share.

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.

Notes on "The Earth Path" by Starhawk

One of the key concepts I got out of reading Starhawk’s book The Earth Path relates to the mechanistic approach verses the animate approach to how life is viewed in western contemporary culture. “The mechanistic model assumes that the world is knowable and controllable. Unintended consequences of an action are seen as anomalies, not “real” consequences, and therefore often go unseen, unacknowledged, and unaccounted for.”(16) This model of thinking shows up most readily in agriculture and the way western contemporary society relates to nature. Starhawk exemplifies this by showing how a corporation can clear-cut a field, spray pesticide to kill off weeds and say the salmon that die from the herbicide run off are “externalities” unintended consequences. After reading this it made me clearly see how one action is connected to a web of relations. “West Africans believed in an animated universe, in the process I call ‘continuous creation.’ Continuous creation means that the generation and recycling of energy is always in effect.”(21) “While indigenous cultures are all different, one thing they share in common is a perception of the world as alive and themselves as embedded in a matrix of complex relationships.”(22)

This book has greatly affected the way I look at the history of my culture in North America and re-examine the way I choose to be in the world. I started this book before attending the earth activist training. Using these tools and way of thinking on a daily basis during the training really enriched the text and made me more ready to dive into Starhawk’s approach to observing the natural world. The Earth Path is full of examples and exercises of ways to connect with the earth and see all beings as sacred. I want to use this book and its exercises as a physical tool in connecting to my home and the land I live on. I have chosen to keep it as a resource throughout this quarter, to take some of her observation with me when I go to my secret spot, when I have social interactions in groups and when I am moving around in my day to day life grounded and aware.
“To be a witch is to be someone who has concisely accepted the challenge of serving the powers of life and balance.” (134)