We die a slow death

So the community walkabout project is over; Alex is wandering around the country, I think Mirra might still be living in New York, and I’ve decided to divide my time between working for FEMA and writing in Massachusetts. I’m considering starting a new blog, thingsinflight.wordpress.com on which, hopefully, I’ll be posting things about what I make, what I eat, what I do and what I write.

Ionia

I’ve been back for almost a week (hard to believe) and life is amazing. Ionia has gone through a lot of changes since I left; the place is amok with wwoofers, visitors, and, of course, old friends. When I was last in Ionia it was the very end of the winter; winter here is a time of reflection and contemplation while summer is a time of activity. The garden is over flowing, the woods are full of wild berries and everyone would be enjoying the summer weather if it hadn’t been raining most of the time.

Really amazing is the fact that I’ve met a number of other people who are interested in intentional communities. Irene, for example, is a girl from Belgium who is on a quest very much like mine, Hannah has lived in a number of intentional communities including one of the ones I’m planning on visiting, and other people are thinking of starting their own. I never expected to find the people I wanted to meet in the place I went back to– I wonder if I could have started my trip better by just staying in the same place.

My relationship to Ionia will necessarily be different to all the other communities I will visit. I will be able to see the flaws of this place better, but I will also be able to see the benefits. Above all, Ionia is full of people who I love, things I love and ideas I love. I don’t know if it is livable for me, though. It seems a hard thing to figure out. I was very content living hee, but contentment can be a trap. Motion is important, passion is important and striving is important and I don’t know how well I can achive those things living here.

But then all of my interlocutions remind me that I have to remember how recently my life has changed, and how dramatically, and these things, no matter how you think they’re not affecting you, do. I am not in a place to make choices; I am in a place to reflect, to observe and to learn. Irene says ‘relax and let the universe provide for you’. I thik she is a lot braver than I will ever be, but I will try. Three more weeks in Ionia and they will go by so quickly.

And then there was one

After a great deal of deliberation, and though it breaks my heart, Alex and I have decided to go our separate ways. He’s going north to participate in the Beehive Summer Work Party and I’m going back to Ionia for a month.

I wrote a whole post about this before (it got deleted) and find my words have already been used up. I’m very sad about this; Alex has been my friend and roommate for the last six months, excepting the month he spent in Hawaii, and there has hardly been a day in that time when I haven’t spent all or part of the day with him. I have come to depend on him in so many ways, that I feel like his loss will be an amputation. But a part of me feels like this is right, and I’m very happy to be going back to Ionia.

Community Walkabout isn’t dead; it’s just divided. Alex is still planning on pursuing it as he tries to figure out his dreams and I am planning on going to Dancing Rabbit after my month in Ionia, and hopefully from there to Sandhill, Twin Oaks and Koinonia. How I am going to travel without Alex I don’t know. I’ll probably just break down and take the bus.

Change is a good thing. Relationships change and plans change and people change and all these things change to give us room and motivation to grow. There have been so many things in my life I have wanted so badly that I am glad now I didn’t get because if I did I wouldn’t be who I am now, where I am now, and this is just another of those things.

So I’m going to keep up posting, and I’ve invited Alex to post, but judging by his response (‘I guess… maybe’) I doubt he will.

Gwendolyn

Family

 The idea of family is one that’s coming up for me a lot lately. Last weekend we had a birthday party for my grandmother; she turned eighty on April Fools day, so the fact that we had a birthday party for her in July confused her no end.

Most of the members of my mother’s side of the family descended upon us, and I got to see cousins I haven’t seen for a long time, relatives I couldn’t recognize by sight, and little babies I was just meeting for the first time. It was really cool hanging out with my cousins, although most of them are older than me and have families so it was a little bit of me feeling like a little child. It’s funny how we don’t really have that much in common– they’re not really in the same culture I’m in, they don’t eat the food I eat and they probably can’t relate to a lot of the things I’m doing– but we have this intricately tied history, kind of like war buddies, that means we connect on a level I can’t connect with anyone else. No one who isn’t in my family understands what it’s like in our family. It’s wonderful being able to have that connection again.

The second thing that happened that makes me think about family is my grandfather, pictured above, just died.

I don’t really know what to say about that, because I don’t know what to think about it. My grandfather was pretty important in my young childhood, but I didn’t see him much after my parents divorced, so it kind of feels like loosing something I already lost. But death does this thing to your mind; it changes the world. Literally; there is a part of your brain whose whole purpose is to keep track of what the world is like and every time you encounter new evidence that the world is different a different part of your brain is responsible for correcting it. I don’t how, but death just doesn’t make sense. It just doesn’t make sense, and so this one part of your brain is holding onto ‘this person is alive’ and this other part is trying to correct it and it sends you off in a whirl. When my father died I spent months with my mind like a broken record, all of it’s energy trying to reconcile the world. And then you come out of it, finally convinced and the world hasn’t changed. The earth still goes about its orbit and your neighbors and the people in the coffeeshop you go to and your co-workers– almost no one but you has noticed that things are different.

My grandfather was a pretty amazing man. He fought in WWII as the radio operator on a submarine, then stayed with the Navy for a while, stationed on Key West, where my father was born, then France. When he got out of the Navy he went and lived in the Mid-West for a bit because he thought he was sick of the sea, but then he gave in and moved out here where he became the pilot for a Alvin, a deep sea submersible belonging to the Wood Hole Oceanographic Institute, that explores the deep places of the world. On one expedition to the mid-Atlantic ridge the scientists he was piloting found a worm they named after him.

 Family and community are deeply related. Your family is part of your community and communities are often made up of families. I like to think that a community is the family you choose, but the truth is that all your family is important, even when you don’t see eye to eye.

Alex’s community, Ionia, is mostly his family, but I have to face the fact that whatever community I end up in won’t have my family in it, and even when I start a new family, not having the rest of my family around will still feel like a loss.

Me write pretty one day

So I haven’t been able to write for shit lately and it is really frustrating me, especially because most of what we need to do right now, is write. I am told practice makes perfect, so my plan is to do that.

We are trying to put together a indiegogo campaign (which is what I’m having trouble writing),  but we are having trouble getting it together. And even once we do, I have no idea how to promote it? What the hell do people do to promote these things? seriously, if you have any advice send it our way (communitywalkabout@gmail.com).

Anyway, besides my writing woes things are going pretty good, the only thing is there isnt a whole lot of people that I know or hang out with in this town, I get kinda lonely. But that being said, a bunch of my fam is in and coming to town! My sis Jane got into town yesterday, my uncle David and friend Mirra got in the day before that, and my mom and my bro lauden are coming on friday, so it is going to be a really good weekend.

Well this weak, lame little post will have to do for now, because I gotta go and try and write.

Peace, love, and other good things.

Alex

Health is one step at a time

There are three things I want to talk about– funny how it comes in spurts, nothing, nothing, nothing and suddenly ideas I could write whole essays on pour in. Writing– there’s another topic.

 

The other three, so I’ll remember when the next time comes, are family, obligation and health. And harvest. Four. Five.

 

But right now, health.

 

I don’t know how well you know me. I’m gonna guess you do, so forgive me for telling you things you might already know. Two things: one, that I was rather ill for a long time a couple of years ago. I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and IBS, and TMJ and some other things that are sets of initials that don’t have a treatable cause. Stress, maybe, depression, or something unknown. There’s a whole host of things like that, things that can be crippling, real things that you can feel– that you can’t stop feeling– but of which there isn’t much sign– no elevated white cells, no strange things in your blood, and of which there is no cure. Some people think of them as twentieth century diseases and why not when there are so many things in the twentieth century that were never about before.

 

The second thing: I lived in a Macrobiotic Community for a year. We haven’t talked a whole bunch about macrobiotics on this blog, mostly because it’s a big thing, a very big thing and this blog isn’t about it. But at the same time it’s huge in our lives. Alex was raised macro and I have become (mostly) macro, and that’s like becoming Buddhist; you can’t just go to church every sunday and read the bible. It’s more of a philosophy than a religion or a diet.

 

So here’s a third thing: I no longer have fibromyalgia or IBS or TMJ and for that matter I don’t think I really show many symptoms of having ADD either (another of my initial issues). Maybe I’m not depressed any more (I don’t think I was to begin with, though) maybe I’m no longer stressed out (I’m totally stressed out.) Basically, I blame the diet (that’s not exactly a diet).

 

I’m not a macro teacher so I’m not going to tell you what macrobiotics is, but it does have some guidelines, things you should probably generally avoid, things which I try to generally avoid because when I don’t they make me feel kind of shitty. The thing is, I haven’t been doing very good of a job lately.

 

I can blame that on a lot of things; my proximity to all sorts of snacks at my work, the fact that my mother stockpiled everything I try not to eat in preparation for our ginormous family reunion (it wasn’t that big, but my family is very good at taking up more space than we really need to), and of which a great deal remains (especially cupcakes), the fact that every social situation I ever get into involves alcohol.

 

But the truth is, I’m the one who puts it in my mouth. It’s hard, not eating things you know you shouldn’t when you want to, even when you start examining ‘you know you shouldn’t’ and ‘you want to’. I know I shouldn’t eat sugar, or drink coffee, or eat too many baked flour products because they make me feel crappy. I want to because I want to be normal. I want to eat what people around me are eating. It sounds like a pathetic reason, but humans are herd animals. Doing what other people do is part of our learning experience, and mostly other people are making good choices. So every time I see a customer buying something, or a friend eating something or are reminded that every other person my age goes to bars more often than I do I want to do those things because I want to fit in– I want to be like them. I don’t think it’s pathetic at all, actually. I think it’s a pretty reasonable thing to want.

 

But it makes it hard. I know I need to eat differently. I know that because I know how I feel when I eat things. I haven’t been hungry for weeks. I should be hungry for my meals. I should be hungry so I can appreciate the meals that Alex and I spent so much effort cooking, and so I can make sure my digestive track stays healthy.

 

Intention is the biggest part of valor, I think. What I mean is that I can look at every wrong move I make as a failure or I can think of it as practice. No one plays perfectly whenever they practice; that’s why it’s called practice. So maybe if I set the intention every day to eat the way I want to eat that day, eventually the practice will pay off.

 

Now I have to go finish eating this cupcake.

A little bit and dinner

So I got my new glasses, which was awesome because suddenly the world is light again (although it will take a little while to adjust to the new lenses), and to celebrate (or actually just coincidentally) we went down to Provincetown to see a drag show with Mirra. It was great doing something with her again– we get along so well– and we had a lovely (though long) drive to P-Town, walked around for a while, ate our picnic lunch, walked around for another while, waited at the door for an hour so we could get good seats, waited in the performance hall for an hour and you’ll know it was a good show when I say it was worth it. Although there was a little too much penis for my likin’. Some of the acts were awesome some were weird and some were somehow awesome and weird. We got back home a little after two and up at ten (which is five hours after we usually get up) so today was a little slow.

Today we started really digging into thinking about our IndieGoGo campaign, cooked, of course, and then took a bike ride. We’re just about to watch Firefly and eat popcorn (olive oil and salt… mmmm) but before I go I thought maybe I’d tell you about one of the meals we made today. We’re incredibly food-focused people (you have to be to spend an hour cooking every meal), and since it’s such a big deal to us, maybe it’d be interesting to you. So here goes;

Dinner:

Squash sauteed with olive oil and soyu

Refried turtle beans with leftover chili and mezuna

and

Reheated brown rice.

 

I love cooking with leftovers; it makes the question ‘what am I going to make’ so much more simple. My mom made a vegetarian chili a few days ago which was just too hot for me (I don’t like my food being too hot because I think it ruins the taste of it). So, to use the chili but to tame it a little I cooked a pot of beans, smooshed them, fried them a little bit and then mixed in the chili, cooked it a little to merge the flavors and then added the mezuna until it was wilted. It would have been really good except I was a little impatient and didn’t cook the beans long enough. Maybe tomorrow I’ll make a stew out of it. Leftovers of leftovers. Mmmmm…

 

Stamps and stencils

I know, I know; it’s been too long. I’ve been meaning to write for more than a week, but there’s just so much going on. Last week I made these awesome communitywalkabout shirts, which we’re planning on using for rewards when we launch our IndieGoGo campaign. Aren’t they sweet? All hand stenciled and stamped.

Indie GoGo is a fundraiser tool, which we’re going to try to use to get some money together for our trip. We’ve hired consulatants, Mindy and Ryan from WithinReach, partially because they’ve successfully run fundraising campaigns before and partially because we think they’re super awesome. They did a community tour a few years ago, on bicycles, with the intent on visiting over a hundred different sustainable communities. They went into debt to make their sustainable community documentary and we’re excited about the idea that we can help them out and help us out at the same time. They’re starting a consulting firm connecting people with communities and helping them out with fundraising.

For the fundraiser we’re going to make a video, hopefully after I get new glasses. I lost mine two weeks ago and have been wearing my sunglasses ever since, which has been really annoying. I ordered new ones from Zenni Optical because it was two hundred seventy dollars cheaper than getting them made here (there’s totally a glasses prescription monopoly thing going on in this country) but it does take them a little bit longer to come in. (My glasses usually cost three hundred dollars because my eyes are so bad they tell me it costs an extra two hundred dollars to get the special plastic the lenses are made out of. And yet it only costs Zenni an extra ten dollars. Suspicious?). Everything’s been a little dark. It’s been surprising, though, how few people have asked me why I’m wearing sunglasses inside. No one has, actually. At night, in the dark, inside on a dull, rainy day, no one has addressed the fact that my eyes are covered with half an inch of brown plastic.

 

Thinking about the video we’re going to make has led me to thinking a lot about intentional communities. Why people live in them- what they are. I picture the average American dream- which really works for the average American person. Your own house, your children, your pets, your husband or wife. Having lived in a community, with thirty other people, it seems so empty now. No- it always seemed empty, to me. It’s harder and emptier. Harder cooking good meals with only two people, harder cleaning up with only three. Emptier living without children running about underfoot, without good friends you can find when you’re lonely. Harder to live with two other people being always in each other’s faces. I’m not complaining- I love my life as it is, right now. But the future I imagine is more populated.

Intentional communities are an alternative to conventional life. They allow more people to live with less resources; three people cooking for fifty is more conservative than fifty people cooking for fifty. At Ionia there were two cars for thirty people. And Intentional communities support the residents; parenting is shared, taking the burden out of a twenty-four/seven job. Household tasks are made easier and more fun when everyone takes part. When you live in a community you don’t have to be alone, or to face anything alone when you don’t want to. If you can’t handle something, you find someone to help you.

Individualism is the American Ideal, and it really works for some people. But it really doesn’t work for others. Some people get lost in a world they have to face all by themselves. Some people live in neighborhoods or towns where everyone knows each other and helps each other, and some people live in apartment complexes or suburbs where they’ve never spoken to any of their neighbors. Some people want their own house, their own yard, their own car, their own life, and to some people it just seems like a waste. When I found out that intentional communities were a real thing- not just something that failed in the sixties because everyone smoked pot and slept around – I felt as if I’d finally figured out the answer to a question. And when I lived in Ionia, a community that really worked, I couldn’t believe my luck. Since then I’ve talked to other people about intentional communities and I’ve seen a similar thing happen inside them; suddenly the realization that they can live differently. That’s one of the things I hope will come from this; that people will see that there is a different way to live and that people are out there living it. That we can reach people, with this blog, or the book we plan to write, or maybe if we pull off giving presentations. We can reach them and tell them that they don’t have to live in same way other people do. That they can be different. You can be different too.

belonging

The gang minus David

       For the last week I have had so much fun! A whole bunch of my family and friends were in town. My aunt Ann and Catherine just got back to the US, after an adventure in Europe, and stopped here so Cat could get familiar with David’s yacht. My uncles Michael, John, and friend Zara came into town from some yacht town in RI; Michael is on a yacht that is stationed there for the summer; we will see him again. My sister Jane and Mirra came up from NYC, because they both are working for David.

          It was so awesome having so many people I know and love together! We were all having dinner together one night, and I just looked around the room for a few minutes, and felt a deep sense of happiness. It was so nice. I really feel at my best when I am around people I know and who know me. I suppose that this is typical. It really made me happy to see all those guys.

I feel strange sometimes about this journey because community is so important to me- that is one of the main reasons I am doing it, but I am leaving my community in order to do it. I know it is just temporary, but it feels like I am going in a different direction than the community is. I am not really sure what I mean by that. I guess what I am trying to say is, that I felt, and feel, a deep sense of belonging with the people I grew up with, and have lived with all my life, and I feel a little bit like I am moving away from that. It’s been my life so far, all twenty-two years, the people, the place, the ideas. It is hard to move away from that. But I needn’t worry; that belonging I feel won’t go away. Twenty-two years of life doesn’t go away in two years of travel.

Alex

 

Garden growing

Everything’s coming up roses here… I mean turnips. Our garden is looking fabulous. We bought heirloom organic seeds from Southern Exposure Seed exchange, http://www.southernexposure.com/, a seed catalogue which sells heirloom and organic seeds, and which is partially run by Twin Oaks, a community in Virginia that we’re going to visit in October. Heirloom seeds are important because they represent a greater variety of plants than are normally commercially available, varieties that people long ago cultivated for their different qualities. You might be familiar with heirloom tomatoes, which are a completely different tomato experience from the perfectly round, red, balls you buy at the supermarket. Heirloom plants have character and taste, and more importantly, nutrients. In his book In Defense of Food Michael Pollen suggests that heirloom plants might have twice the number of antioxidants and other important nutrients that regular, mass-produced, picture-perfect, genetically bred plants have. That’s because while those plants were being babied and sprayed with pesticides, the heirlooms had to survive generations of insect attacks and disease exposure. It’s the same protections the plants make against insects and disease exposure that helps our bodies fight off attacks.

Anyways, we planted our garden a little late- two weeks into May- and with the exception of the cabbage, which didn’t come up at all, and the basil, which wants a warmer climate and so is still uber-tiny, our garden is bursting. We have already thinned all of the beds and another thinning is coming up soon. (I used to feel bad about thinnings until I realized you could eat them. Most of our plants are greens and baby greens are super delicious.) And we mulched the gardens with cut grass, to keep the weeds under control and to retain moisture in the soil. It hasn’t rained once in two weeks! I know because I water the gardens every day and I keep hoping for a rainy day so I’ll have some time off.

I love gardening- it’s such an awesome way to get a connection to your food. You see it as a seed, as a baby plant, you care for it, then you dig it up and wash the dirt off and cook it and eat it. One of the rewards of working with whole foods is that you really get a feel for where your food comes from. I know what tofu is because I made the tofu from soybeans. I know what whole wheat looks like because I ground the wheat to make the flour. And this is just taking it one step back. Someday I’d love to have a hand in growing all the crops I eat. I want to know what’s it’s like to work in a rice paddy, an apple orchard, a field of beans. What is more human than eating? And what is more animal than knowing what your food looks like?

In other news, Alex is excited about trying to get personal chef work. We’ve already got one lead, and a wine tasting set up where he’s going to showcase his food. I hope it works for him because he’s an awesome chef and it’s amazing to have food which is so healthy and so delicious. And, when he’s got a big gig I’ll get to come along and be a sous-chef and dessert-chef. I designed posters for him, and business cards, and we hung them up around the upper cape, so I’m also his graphics designer and his chauffeur. With a support staff like that, how can he fail?