When was the last time you expressed gratitude for gravity?
— Ethan Hughes
In early September, before I went to Dancing Rabbit, I spent two weeks at Possibility Alliance, or as they are now calling the farm itself, the Still Waters Sanctuary. Possibility Alliance is more of a name for the entire project which includes the farm, the Superheroes Rides, the new permaculture school next door, and a support network of similar communities elsewhere.
The farm is located in north-central Missouri, about 3 miles from the nearest small town with a train station (and 40 minutes’ ride from Dancing Rabbit). The college town of Kirksville is only 13 miles north. The land itself is slightly rolling, mostly deciduous woods and old exhausted pastures, a couple of ponds. This is an agricultural area and many of the neighbors are Amish. It all began with an 80 acre farm and a rundown Amish house which has been partially renovated.
There is an outdoor kitchen made of cob, a large barn, and a nearly finished tiny cob house for the founders, Sarah and Ethan Hughes, and their two small daughters. Another house, a straw-bale duplex built on durable osage orange stilts, is about midway in development. More land has been added since. Friends of Possibility Alliance have also been buying land and building in the neighborhood.
Along with me, three other visitors came: soft-spoken Nathan from Chicago, a musician and shaman in training, irrepressible Danny from Florida on a train tour of communities, and Corey, a raconteur and jack of all trades from St. Louis who showed up unannounced in his 1951 truck. Six adult residents were living on the farm: Sarah and Ethan, Ariel, Mark, Dan and Phoenix; many day visitors dropped in all the time. There is a large flock of chickens and several ducks and geese. A small herd of goats provides milk for the delectable goat cheese we were lucky to nibble on almost every day. A cow with a calf was being milked as well, and two draft horses helped with the big chores. A couple of barn cats and a working dog complete the picture.
Gardens are fenced and the chickens run free. First impression is a farming idyll: happy scratching hens, ducks in the pond, many fruit trees and grapevines surrounding the house, and a friendly bustle as everyone goes about their farm chores. The day begins at 6 am with the ringing of the bell (luckily, I slept the sleep of the exhausted and I never heard it except once). The first bell calls people to sit in silence; yoga follows. Breakfast bell rings at 7:45, a quick check-in after breakfast divvies up the chores, then work until another bell rings. Lunch, a bit of a siesta (or a consensus meeting, or a discussion) and more work until the dinner bell. Some chores don’t go by the clock, and those who care for the animals are often out till dark. Several times during the day, the ‘bell of mindfulness’ peals slowly, calling everyone to stop work, become aware of the surroundings, and bring one’s consciousness into the now. ‘Noble silence’ reigns in the house on Thursday nights. Mayhap this is a version of the new monasticism?
The farm runs on the gift economy. Only about $9,000 per year covers all expenses. A 20% portion of incoming donations are passed on to other communities. They only have three monthly bills to pay (phone, water and bulk food), and minimal yearly property taxes. No visitor is charged for the stay. All workshops — even permaculture classes — are offered on donation basis; no one is turned away. Each person who joins the community is expected to give all their assets away. One builds social capital instead of financial capital, while “looking for a way to live so that all life can thrive.” The detailed vision (more here) is inspired by Gandhi and Lanza del Vasto.
There is no electricity; I kept groping for light switches the first week I was there. Home-made beeswax tapers light the inside of the house. Running water, provided by the county, is supplemented by stored roof run-off. No cell phones or fossil fuels are allowed on the farm, and people who wish to smoke or drink can take it out on the road. Computer use is discouraged even off-farm. The otherwise peaceful and dark nights are marred by trains passing less than half a mile away at all hours, shaking the earth and honking like mad; as one train disappears over the sonic horizon, another one rumbles in. Bicycles are the main conveyance; no one owns a car.
My day started with fowl liberation. I got up before 7 to open the door of the chicken coop, and stood there transfixed with astonishment and delight as the feathery avalanche poured out, running, flying, and squawking. A new day, woo-hoo! Enough infectious joy to turn this night owl into a morning person. And for a few days I also went with Phoenix to assist with evening milking, tucking the goats in with some night fodder. The days are intense, and everyone works very hard. When chores are done, there are meetings and workshops to attend, or events to host. That Friday, we had visitors from a nearby old folks home and put on a show for them. The following day was Harvest Festival. It started as a country-craft show — candle dipping, bread baking, cider pressing, bicycle-powered flour grinding, bow making — and evolved into a pleasant neighborly hangout. Kids having fun, helping with crafts or running off to explore. Grown-ups standing around, chatting, making leisurely connections, reluctant to leave. Over a hundred people attended. The other Saturday was filled with workshops: morning and evening devoted to the study of coherence counseling, and that afternoon Ethan gave a spirited presentation on beekeeping to about 10 people who had signed up. On Sunday mornings, the farm hosts a Quaker meeting.
The food was very good, and plentiful. Though one of the gardens died this year because of the drought, the remaining four gardens provided much of our food, and sadly, we also ate one of the ducks, and a rooster. Diet’s omnivorous, though heavy on the side of fresh produce. Some of the meals were extra yummy and downright creative. Ariel’s eggplant zakuski (a garlicky chutney) was out of this world, and so were Mark’s fresh breads and Dan’s fluffy eggy frittata! One notable dinner included a sumptuous lasagna, goat cheese with lime liqueur, and old fashioned apple pie. Our hosts took turns cooking in the outdoor kitchen equipped with three rocket stoves, 3 solar ovens, and an earth oven. A summer kitchen is essential in this climate. It was — with the exception of one day — hellaciously hot, and frequent leaps into the nearby pond let me live another day. (My little LED alarm clock melted in the heat.)
As you can see, there is much to admire here, and much to love. Being part of a subsistence farm again after a lifetime away was, for me, a dream come true. I learned so much! Cheese and candle making, cooking on rocket stoves, solar apple drying, chicken care… and last not least restorative circles, wellbeing meetings and gratitude rituals. The parting ceremony, where each person leaving stands inside the circle while the others take turns showering them with appreciation, truly touched my heart. Internal organization runs smoothly, and unlike in most intentional communities, there is an emphasis on external politics: protests attended, bike coops and school gardens started. Service to the larger community — such as their give-away plant nursery in the spring — is an ongoing practice. You want radical? This place is radical.
Hygiene was atrocious. Thick, maddening swarms of flies were everywhere, on the food as it was being made, as it was being served. And this with the stinky composting privy a stone’s throw away. Dirty rags are used to wipe kitchen surfaces with vinegar water, people don’t necessarily wash hands, er, when they should, I saw food served after getting dropped on the ground, water for washing dishes came off the roof, and at Friday night shabbat dinners people drink from the same wine cup and feed each other bits of bread, regardless of their own state of health. During the first week, several people came down with vomity queazies. My bad turn came the following week when I caught a nasty intestinal bug — or should I say, an E. coli caught me? — that refused to leave even after I went home, would not respond to any home remedies, and finally necessitated a course of two antibiotics. And I brought Corey’s cold home with me as well.
But it wouldn’t be accurate just to say I came down with the runs. What happened? Well, ten days into my stay I collapsed. My sickness was one part of it, and so was exhaustion from unaccustomed work and the heat. What bore down the heaviest, though, was the relentlessness of the life. Relentless physical work. Relentless commitments. Relentless socialization. Relentless overscheduling (even music nights were scheduled!). Relentless gregariousness, relentless ‘people everywhere,’ all the time. The life of the PA farm is one long self-imposed crisis — a crisis caused by too few people, with too few resources, running a working farm, hosting hordes of visitors (some 1,500 a year) and trying to fulfill a vastly ambitious and demanding vision that never quits. It was like being on a treadmill, albeit different from the one we know in Babylon. One of the younger residents was suffering from severe fatigue and debilitating body pains, after two years of this onslaught. The misery of no solitude, no privacy. The stress of always running according to the bell. Never a chance to reflect. All bread labor, no head labor; ouch!
And there was another increasing burden weighing me down: cognitive dissonance. The vision, and the reality on the ground were, in some instances, pretty far apart. Feedback, so prominently stressed in our welcoming tour, was actually not welcome. People were exhausted and overwhelmed and last thing they wanted was us visitors speaking up and adding to their heavy load. Our initiative was not appreciated, and was sometimes flat-out shot down. As far as I could ascertain, there was no financial transparency and overall accountability. The place is in private ownership, not a land trust; the other members are not vested and in effect work for room and board. And permaculture is about working smart, not hard, right? Yet with so few people and such a hectic pace, living beings inevitably suffer, and not just humans. Many of the farm’s young trees and bushes were distressed or dying from neglect, lacking mulch and extra care in a dry year.
I came to find out, specifically, how an IC farm might be successfully run while each person chooses freely, out of affinity and love, their own daily occupations. I had so resonated with that part of the vision which stresses self-chosen activities that bring joy! Much is made of this in Ethan’s talk; he tells of some young people on a day visit who chose to fish instead of working. When they later gloated over getting off so easy, they were praised for feeding the community. Alas, reality tells another story. When my work diverged even a tiny bit from the assigned tasks, I was reprimanded in no uncertain terms.
Watching Ethan go about his business took me back in my mind’s eye to the days of tribal Big Men, those high-energy, gregarious, expansive, driven, attention-seeking, talented, hard-working, visionary movers and shakers. Ethan is all that and more; an amazing person to know. He could talk an auctioneer under the table, loves to perform for an audience, gives highly articulate and inspiring speeches and presentations, and wields the knack of persuading people to make radical life changes. A consummate alliance builder, his presence is felt everywhere on the farm and among those drawn to closer affiliation with the Experiment.
But Big Men are also dangerous people whose larger-than-life downsides can threaten the long-term well being of the community they serve. Their overweening ambition, domineering and intimidating presence, power-hogging, stealing other people’s limelight, hype-mongering exaggerations, and relentless people-driving will alienate people and damage the very values they profess to uphold. They too easily slip into letting their ambition override their caring for the mundane needs of the community. Their quest for tight control and their compulsion to dominate every group event dampens spontaneity and blocks felicitous emergence.
The people at the farm live in far harsher conditions than are necessitated by their chosen subsistence lifestyle. I believe this is because pursuing PR-worthy outside goals has been more important than paying attention to everyday human needs. For example, the wash is done in a tub of water with a bar of soap and a washboard. Please. You might as well dig a posthole with a spoon. There are well designed and effective Amish washers available; one of them would have made a nice addition when the second baby was born last spring. It seems to me that sending money to the poor of St. Louis while ignoring the needs of the Poor Clares and Francises on the farm is a misallocation of resources, and something Diana Leafe Christian once called ‘visionary abuse’: “when dynamic, energetic, visionary founders, burning with a spiritual, environmental, or social-justice mission, work grueling hours in primitive, cramped, uncomfortable, or health-risking conditions, and happily expect all members, interns, and apprentices to do the same.”
The Possibility Alliance farm is exploring the edges of the ‘known world’ not only while bravely and cheerfully inventing an experimental, low-impact neo-Amish lifestyle, but also regarding power. Will the other members rise into greater power themselves to counterbalance the excesses of their leading man? Can they find a good mix of checks and balances regarding someone so clearly gifted and valuable, yet so equally clearly out of control? Next year, the farm community is finally taking a sabbatical from the extreme busyness and visitor overwhelm of the past five seasons. Whether they succeed in slowing down and reorienting will be of much interest beyond the boundaries of the farm. I am certain that the issue of the right balance of leeway/restraint of dominant individuals is something highly applicable to other intentional communities as well as to mainstream society. And so Possibility Alliance may yet pioneer a reconnection with an ancient path our ancestors lost in the far reaches of the Neolithic.
December 22, 2012 at 7:56 pm
Thank you, Vera, for a delightful, yet cautionary description of Possibility Alliance.
Göthe wrote, “A confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.” He was writing about marriage at the time but so also does it seem that getting deeply involved with an intentional community is a marriage of sorts.
Why is it that, over and over again ideals get in the way of real life? It seems in the case of Possibility Alliance, the perfect has become the enemy of the possible.
December 22, 2012 at 9:07 pm
What a fascinating post. I’ve long been curious about the Possibility Alliance and appreciate your thorough, you-are-there way of describing your experience.
Here are some things I’ve found that help communities feel healthy and sustainable to their members. And sustainable in the long run, in that their population is stable and turnover relatively low. This comes from my research, including visits to now 120 different communities in North America and aborad, and many dozens of conversations and outright interviews with community founders and members. The list:
* The community has service to others as one its values and practices.
* Service to others is balanced with service to the community itself.
* Service to the community is balanced with “down time” for members. Productive work balanced with doing nothing. The “inbreath and outbreath of existence” to quote ancient Indian texts for a moment. In Robert & Diane Gilman’s famously quoted definition of an ecovillage is the phrase “with healthy human development.” Community’s members are considered valuable resources of energy, intelligence, and consciousness, and their development is important too. They get to rest.
* Transparency is highly valued and consistently practiced. Everyone knows and anyone who asks is told who owns the land, what kind of legal entity(s) are used in ownership, who has what decision-making rights, what rights and responsibilities members have, and if there are different kinds of members (i.e., owners and those who trade work for food and shelter) the rights and responsibilities of each are crystal clear to everyone and anyone who asks. Open books: however much money the community has, owes, has loaned or donated, requires from members, etc. is all available to be known. (Why not?) And if everything is free and people are just asked to give donations, how the money goes is tracked and freely available. (Why not?)
* One of the _first_ things communities learn is how quickly disease can spread with multiple people sharing things like toilets, kitchens, utensils, plates, food, couches, chairs, beds, sheets, etc. Long-time communities from The Farm to Findhorn, from Dancing Rabbit to Damanhur, _absolutely_ have learned the hard lessons from not agreeing to and doing good hygiene practices. This usually means consistent handwashing with hot water and soap, dunking all shared things into a wter & bleach rinse, and a place to wash hands (with said hot water & soap) by each flush or composting toilet. If you ever visit a community where all the kids and many adults have shaved heads, it’s not because they’re skinheads, Hare Krishnas, or Japanese Buddhists. They’ve just had (another) outbreak of head lice in the kids.
Two practical tips.
(1) It’s easy not to have flies on food being prepared in an outdoor kitchen with a combination of mosquito netting or window screening on all the walls and a screen door (and no holes in the screen), and one or more strips of flypaper hanging from the ceiling (changed frequently. Problem solved.
(2) There’s absolutely no reason a composting toilet should smell bad. When you know how to make them, they don’t smell like anything at all, except perhaps a woodworking shop. The secret is the specific and direct application of sawdust. When you cover everything with a light dusting of sawdust, you cut off air so smells don’t travel, plus the carbon of the sawdust neutralizes the nitrogen of the human waste. Also, compost toilets with 55-gallon barrels or 5-gallon buckets — with the use of sawdust — work _orders_ of magnitude better than the hole-in-the-ground or underground cement vault kind, because you can aim the sawdust directly onto the poop or pee (which soaks it up) and voila! no smell. If you visit a community where the toilets smell, they must not know they can do _so_ much better! (Have ’em call me.)
* Feedback is welcome. Really. Painful and difficult to hear though it may be, some of the best advice a community could ever get is from visitors and work exchangers. Because they often have what Zen folks call “Beginner’s Mind.” (Though not always. Once a visitor to Earthaven wrote in her blog wrote that we have no rules and so everyone here throws their trash in the woods. Oops! The blogger didn’t know what a carbon dump was or how it works, and didn’t observe that the “trash” was branches, leaves, paper, cardboard, and it was building soil (in this humid climate it will be soil soon!) in the ox-bow bend of a stream that was otherwise eroding to undercut our main road. A Permaculture designer she was not. So beginners’ mind folks sometimes don’t have all the information either.)
* Founders and community members tell the (whole) truth. Rather than saying, for example, “We don’t use money here, and we demonstrate how to live without money, and if we can do it, you can do it too” they’d say, “We don’t use money to the extent we can barter and get donations, though we did buy our land with more than a hundred-thousand of the ittle green rectangles known as Federal Reserve Notes, so we used money _then_. And you can live without money too if you first secure more than a hundred thousand (or in some cases, several hundred thousand) of these little notes too.”
Thanks again for this really straightforward post, leavegirl.
December 23, 2012 at 10:32 am
Thanks so much for writing this. I’ve been hearing about the Possibility Alliance for a long time but this is the most in depth analysis that I’ve read. Thank you for writing about all of the stuff there, good and not so great.
I think that part of real, living communities is that they are messy, complex, and way less than perfect places. That seems to be the nature of real human interactions.
One of the things I’ve noticed about a bunch of other wonderful places is that they are started by either one person (usually a man) or by a couple. The issue is whether the founder(s) can let go and let the place evolve as people work together. How much do the founders need to stay in control? It’s not easy letting your dream change but it’s not really a communal effort until there is really group decision making.
There’s so much to think about here. Again, I really appreciate your detailed, thoughtful post.
December 23, 2012 at 12:21 pm
MoonRaven222, it’s so true what you write, that there is even a name for it: “Founder’s Syndrome.”
In particular, it’s really, really hard to move from sole-owner to shared-ownership. This is the main reason we went with co-op ownership from the start. But that has its own cost; as a “corporate entity,” we don’t qualify for the property tax grant that ordinary people enjoy when they live in their own home, for example.
I don’t think society is ready for alternatives to highly-individualistic living. People aren’t hungry enough… yet. So we’re stuck with the visionaries in control, because of the 0.00001% of people who choose this life-style, there isn’t a lot of diversity — lots of visionaries, and a relatively few followers.
It’s the old cliché: there’s two types of people in the world: those who lead, and those who bitch about the leaders.
December 23, 2012 at 8:06 pm
Thanks, Jan, for that follow up–they’re helpful thoughts.
Among other things, it validates what I’ve been coming to realize. I’m not a leader (I’ve tried and believe me I’m not) but I’m coming to think that my mission in life may be to be an intelligent, supportive follower. As you point out–there are lots of leaders in the communities movement. I think we need to have more followers. At least I can be one of those…
December 23, 2012 at 8:13 pm
MoonRaven222, c’mon over! We could really use some help here, and I like to think I’m the sort of leader who leaves a lot of room for initiative.
December 24, 2012 at 4:57 am
(hey Vera
good time to say thanks for your blog ->
Taa!
:0
Won’t say Merry.Humbug…… but I do hope some good moments happen for you all the same.
And can i just add….
Be Strong you Americans with Minds and Hearts;
the whole world needs you.
So cheers to your readership too!
xx
December 24, 2012 at 11:25 am
Diana, many good suggestions. Starting with open books would be wonderful.
The flies are a tough one, their outdoor kitchen was built in such a way that placing screens or netting would be really challenging. I kept trying to figure it out in my mind and could not, short of building a whole screened pavilion like the Floridians use for their pools nowadays (which, really, would not be the right kind of ambiance… ).
Their composting privy is a hole in the ground, they move the wooden structure every so many months. But I thought it would not have been so bad if they had used damp sawdust. Their saw dust was protected from the weather and bone dry. But by the time it dawned on me, I had incurred certain costs for taking initiative, and was not inclined to incur more. So I let sleeping dogs lie. Sigh.
I did apply “beginners’ mind” to the chicken coop (actually, with the help of Gene Logsdon’s Holy Shit lodged in my beginners mind) and threw a portion of the feed into the bedding every morning. Like magic — instead of a dusty poopy floor, the chooks enthusiastically turned it all in and ended up with clean straw everywhere, and no more dust.
Thank you for all the great input. I will try to pass it all on.
Jan and MoonRaven and Angie :-), thank you for pitching in too. Questions of control are foundational indeed. And difficult.
xoxo everyone
December 24, 2012 at 1:31 pm
To Jan,
Thanks for the invite. Unfortunately, I’m committed to a beginning community in Pennsylvania, not to mention other communities in Virginia, and a strong love of New England. At this point I’m pretty attached to the East Coast.
But I’m just one guy and the point stands–we need more people willing to be smart, helpful followers. How to find them is the big, big question. One piece is that I think others also need to let go of trying to be leaders, and be willing to help others who want to get communities going.
Of course that brings us back to the original point–if founders and leaders want real community, they need to be able to step back and let others lead. I appreciate that you’re trying to do that.
MoonRaven
January 15, 2013 at 5:10 am
Hi Vera
This is good stuff!
Click to access TheSufficiencyEconomy3.pdf
Cheers
January 15, 2013 at 5:42 am
Though maybe you need not read every word, as it covers familiar territory.
January 18, 2013 at 1:34 pm
Read it, and wrote to him. He says he will focus more on the problem of power in the future. Other than that, nothing to disagree with, ey?
January 19, 2013 at 4:56 pm
Hi Vera, thanks for an honest and deep post. Can I talk to you about this offline somehow? I love the PA and don’t want to hurt anyone there, but I need to talk more about my latest visit there (I was denied an internship) with someone who would understand. I wonder if we could communicate via phone or email. If my email doesn’t come through, I can send it to you.
One thing I do want to say publicly is that supposedly winter is more restful.