community

Alright Al! Great article- I'm all over it- intentional community- YES!

I saw an article in the New York Times yesterday that captures a lot of the feelings that we had at the beginning of Farm Yonder, namely the desire and hope to find people to live with who shared the same liberal values. Here is the article.

A Modern Answer to the Commune

By Penelope Green

September 30, 2009

Johanna Bronk wants to make communal vegetarian meals and keep chickens. Mariel Berger hopes for social, artistic and political collaborations. Harmony Hazard is into hula hooping, book groups and anarchism.

Oh, to be a young city-dweller in search of a house share. Finding a roommate has never been easy, but for some, the endeavor has lately assumed all the urgency, emotion and extreme specificity of shopping for a life partner.

Last month, just in time for leases to turn over, the housing portion of Craigslist, the uber-community bulletin board and road map to the 20-something’s psyche, featured dozens of impassioned tone poems, vivid personal biographies and ideological wish lists.

Unfettered by space restrictions — since Craigslist is free and space on the Internet is boundless, the word count of housing posts can stretch into the thousands, and some do — and schooled in a culture of idealism that’s uniquely 21st century, those in search of shared housing and compatible mates are crafting come-ons that are as far removed from, say, “female nonsmoker wanted” as a business card is from a doctoral thesis.

Consider the efforts of Ms. Berger, 28, and Ms. Hazard, 24, who advertised eloquently for roommates before even settling on a house: “Some of the things we like are: permaculture, living sustainably, gardening, dancing, hula hooping, yoga, herbalism, making music, active listening, non-violent communication ...” they wrote, in part.

The idea, they said last week, was that the relationships would be more important than the real estate. What they hoped to put together was a kind of family, but without sibling rivalry or parents, of course; the thought was that everyone would do the dishes without grumbling.

“It’s hard to feel supported in a place like New York City, especially without a partner, or consistent person or group that you are able to connect with daily,” said Ms. Berger, a musician and piano teacher who has been renting a room from another young woman in an apartment in Park Slope. “And I’d rather have a lot of people to share my day with.”

The impetus for the group home or collective they hope to form is less about finances — though it is true that pooling resources yields better real estate — and more about community building. Indeed, Ms. Berger and others seem to share the ideals of the old-fashioned communes of yore, except that their groups are tiny, urban-centric and linked to outside interests like fixing bikes or, here in New York City, membership in the Park Slope food co-op. And like communes, many collectives give themselves names: The House of Tiny Egos (a name that’s decidedly more evocative than, say, Findhorn, that of the hoary Scottish commune) is a five-person collective in a century-old brick bungalow in Bed-Stuy. Not only do they aim to remain of the world, they hope for a convenient location, one that’s near all the major subway stops.

Are their numbers surging? Hard to tell, though people who study more traditional “intentional communities” — that is, any group of individuals living together with shared values, as in a commune or collective — say that they are demonstrably on the rise. Laird Schaub, executive secretary of the Fellowship for Intentional Community, said his nonprofit’s database has swelled from 614 communities in 2005 to more than 1,300 this year.

Traffic to the site is up 25 percent in the last year, Mr. Schaub continued, to an average of 2,000 visits a day. As to why that should be so, Mr. Schaub pointed to what he called “an ever-increasing level of dissatisfaction with traditional lifestyle choices, because there’s too much alienation and lack of connectedness. Humans are inherently social animals, yet we don’t particularly know how to get along with one another.”

The urge to create a group house or join an intentional community, he said, “is an attempt to address that.”

Ms. Berger met Ms. Hazard, who had been living in the East Village in her mother’s town house and looking for work in “social justice,” she said, at a permaculture conference in Vermont last summer. Permaculture is big with the collective-living crowd; it’s a model for sustainable living that extrapolates principles from natural ecologies — like how different plants grow together for their mutual benefit — and applies them to other systems like, well, group housing. Ms. Berger and Ms. Hazard had had collective living experiences before, in upstate New York and Oregon, and they connected over what they had learned there, as well as over the creeping dread both were feeling about returning home to New York City.

“If we could envision it,” Ms. Berger said, “we thought we could build it.”

Energetic, cheerful and outgoing, they seemed very nicely matched, in this reporter’s opinion anyway, and a pretty terrific catch for just about anyone. But early last week, they still had no firm prospects and, more important, no house. The two were barely sleeping, they said; the reporter fretted over them.

Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, a similar scenario was being enacted. There, three roommates already had their house, a funky Victorian in the Cedar Park neighborhood, but needed five more.

Their advertisement on Craigslist ran to two pages when printed out and contained all sorts of buzz words that had been chosen, said its authors, reached by phone last week, to winnow out those looking for a mere room — or “dudes looking for cheap housing,” as Emili Feigelson, 19, put it. But many had to be explained to this reporter, who was puzzled by certain phrases.

“You will probably not feel at home here unless anti-ableism, anti-ageism, anti-classism, anti-racism, consent, trans-positivity and queer-positivity, etc., are very important to you,” the ad read.

Anti-ableism?

Ms. Feigelson, who works as a political organizer and volunteer, explained: “It means against the oppression of those who are physically or mentally disabled, and extends to language. Like you wouldn’t use the word ‘lame.’ ”

O.K., then. Ms. Feigelson was at home with some of her housemates, including Robin Markle, 23, who works at a community college teaching seniors computer skills, and Gauge, 30, who is transitioning from he to she and works in an S&M store, and also declined to give a last name. (“My family has no idea where I am — or if I’m even alive — and I’d like to keep it that way,” she said.) They were passing the phone around the afternoon before the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh, where a few of them were planning a trip, intending to protest, Ms. Markle said.

Ms. Feigelson explained that they were being “super-selective,” because an activist house, which is what she hopes theirs will be, she said, “can create tension.”

But were their hopes too high? Their criteria too stringent?

Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist at Rutgers University and a relationship expert (she is the scientific adviser to Chemistry.com, a spinoff of the dating site Match.com), took a gander at a few of the ads, including the ones written by Ms. Berger and Ms. Hazard and the gang in Philadelphia.

The idealized, small-scale communities they described reminded her of the hunting and gathering bands of pre-history. So she was a bit concerned that their creators didn’t seem to be searching for individuals with different skill sets. Dr. Fisher, whose new book, “Why Him? Why Her?” explores the neurochemistry of gender differences, concluded that the ad writers were by and large “estrogen-expressives, or what I call Negotiators,” which she defined as “compassionate, verbal and emotive,” as well as “Explorers, meaning those expressive of the dopamine system, or people who are energetic, creative, politically liberal.”

She also noted that they all seemed to crave roommates who shared their values, which, she pointed out, “is how many relationships are built — it’s probably the right the thing to do. You don’t want to come home and spend your evening fighting with someone over health care. You want someone who agrees with you.”

Yet she worried that other personality types, the sort who know how to fix the toaster or program the VCR, weren’t being invited into these houses.

A call to an established collective seemed in order. What is the secret to success? Is it a big compost pile? A brightly colored chore wheel? Is it possible to find domestic harmony, even domestic bliss, with four, five or ten strangers?

Suzi Teo, a former fashion designer who started the House of Tiny Egos two years ago, avers that hers is a happy home. While Ms. Teo, 44, touts the “diversity and individual skill sets” of her housemates in a way that would make Dr. Fisher proud, it all seems to circle around the dishes, just as it does in more conventional households.

“It took a whole year,” she said. “But we figured it out. There’s always one non-dishwasher, you can count on it.”

Ms. Teo’s solution? “She” — the non-washer — “pays for all the housecleaning supplies, and there is world peace,” Ms. Teo said. “Also, she has lots of connections and she gets us into clubs where we get drinks for free.”

A week and a half ago, Ms. Hazard and Ms. Berger were still searching for roommates, and also for a house. They had put a deposit on one, but it was quickly returned, as their incomes didn’t qualify them for the rent (a relief, since they hadn’t been truly keen on the house). Then they considered another, which was big and beautiful and came with the all-important garden, but they eventually retreated from it because it was in a dodgy neighborhood. (Monday of last week, Ms. Berger woke up at 4 a.m. and began researching murder rates in the area. “There were 16 in the last year,” she said glumly.)

But a happy ending was in the offing. A few weeks earlier, she and Ms. Hazard had met Johanna Bronk, 23, a recent Oberlin graduate and classical singer, and Sara Teitelbaum, who is also 23 and studying to be a lactation consultant. The two had written their own evocative ad but, like Ms. Berger and Ms. Hazard, had not found the real estate.

At that first meeting, all had taken to each other, but Ms. Hazard and Ms. Berger assumed that the four could never be a good match. Ms. Bronk, you see, envisioned a substance-free, vegetarian home, while Ms. Hazard likes a glass of wine when she hula hoops, and Ms. Berger prefers a bit of meat in her diet.

But late last week, the four joined forces, along with Rupert Poole, 30, a horticulturalist Ms. Berger met last summer. As it turned out, Ms. Berger said, “everyone was willing to compromise on their original intention because we shared a vision for a house.”

Yesterday, the five plus one more, an artist’s assistant and friend of a friend of Ms. Berger’s, signed a lease on a spic-and-span house with a stupendous backyard in the Prospect-Lefferts Gardens section of Brooklyn.

“The core of what we wanted was the same,” Ms. Berger said happily. “The fact that we wanted to live together kind of trumped all the other stuff.”

The house, however, comes with a basement apartment that still needs to be rented. Any takers?

Julie's song for Tony

When I met up with Julie in July, she told me the sad story of Tony's death which was something like this:

Tony became a successful master cabinet-maker and traveled across the country doing the storefronts for Ralph Lauren and other top commercial retailers. He lived in Norman, OK and was married to Cleo. They had two children- Carver and Laura.

Tony worked a team of top notch cabinet makers as employees. Some would stay behind working in his shop and others who would travel with him doing installations on the road. Some things never change though- Tony or Wander Yonder as he was once known- loved traveling and being on the road. It was however both rewarding and stressful. As a result---Tony struggled with an alcohol addiction. Alcohol affected him strongly and he battled the addiction his whole life.

When Julie moved back to Texas to take care of ailing parents in late 1999- they renewed their relationship. She tried to help him with his alcoholism, but with little success. In 2003, Julie moved her parents to FL and she and Tony continued a long distance relationship.

In September of 2007 Tony was clearing out his woodshop so he could sell his shop building. Late one night during the move he blacked out while driving and ran into a curb - the truck flew through the air - he was severely injured. Tony was rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery with 3 crushed vertebrae. They put rods in his back. While in surgery he got a hospital induced staph infection.

Julie could tell something was wrong because after the surgery on the phone Tony was talking out of his head for a few days. She flew to Oklahoma. The hospital had over medicated Tony to the point that he didn't know what was going on. She decided to stay in Norman and be his advocate in the hospital. Because of the staph, Tony was on heavy intravenous antibiotics and heavy pain pills and couldn't leave the hospital. They both lived in his hospital room for 2 1/2 months.

Once he was released he had to continue intravenous antibiotics and continued on heavy pain pills. Julie ended up staying in Norman until April before going back to Florida. Tony never seemed to really get better. He was in extreme pain and never could get to where he was comfortable sitting. Since he didn't have health insurance, his surgeon didn't want to continue seeing him after his release and kept saying that because of the severity of his injury that healing would be slow.

Fast forward to September 2008, almost one year to the date of the initial accident: Tony called Julie and asked her to come back to Norman because he was terribly ill. She flew there immediately and got him back into the hospital. After many tests--- they decided the Mrvsa (staph) had migrated into his bones. Their solution was surgery to take the metal rods out of his back. After a week- Julie, who works with the Sierra Club, had to testify in a lawsuit against the County where she lives so she had to leave and fly to Florida before Tony's surgery.

Two days later Tony went into surgery. It was a Friday - on the next day he called and said that he felt better (Saturday), and on Sunday Julie got a call from the hospital saying that he had gone into cardiac arrest and couldn't be revived. Needless to say, Julie was devastated.

Julie wrote a song for Tony and a friend of hers, Raymond Harrell Odom, put music to it. He's now put it up on Youtube. Remember how Tony was called Wander Yonder? That's the name of the song....... (actually on Youtube, the title is Wonder Yonder)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EkQBrKnxQA

Julie and the tomatoes

It is tomato time in Ohio as I write this post. Our 6 plants are putting out more tomatoes than we can eat right now.

This is a great picture of Julie cutting tomatoes. She was probably getting ready to make some tomato sauce. Julie's gentle free spirit was always the glue that kept the wild pieces of Farm Yonder from ripping apart. Julie 's down-to-earth personality kept all of us from looking too far ahead or behind, so we could focus on living today in a beautiful place with great friends.

I wish I had more pictures of Julie, Tony, Keith, John/Otis, Al and Maren, Joe, Gary and everyone. I'm hoping others have pictures to post on this site to share with everyone. It really is easy. You can call or email me with questions.

Goin Up Yonder

Where did the name Farm Yonder come from? I faintly remember a few weeks after we decided to form a community that we had a discussion about a name. Someone (who?) suggest Farm Yonder and we all agreed fairly quickly. Not vote or anything like that.

Our name always brought to mind the famous gospel song, Goin' Up Yonder. Of course, "yonder" meant "heaven" for the gospel singers and I suppose there was a lot of heaven" at Farm Yonder. At least for me. Below is a video from Youtube of a young gospel singer performing it. The lyrics are below that.


If anybody asks you where I'm going
Where I'm going
Where I'm going soon

I can take the pain,
The heartaches that it brings,
The comforts in knowing I'll soon be gone.

I'm going up yonder (going up yonder)
I'm going up yonder (going up yonder)
I'm going up yonder to be with my Lord.

If God gives me grace
To run this race,
'Til I see my Savior,
I see him face to face.

I'm going up yonder (going up yonder)
I'm going up yonder (going up yonder)
I'm going up yonder to be with my Lord.

Making molasses

This picture shows Gary and Julie using a sorghum press, also called a grinder, to press the liquid out of sorghum cane to boil down to molasses. I think it is Pete in the background who was providing the power that moved the press. I was gone from Farm Yonder when this picture was taken (due to my bad case of histoplasmosis). I viewed this scene as a culmination of self-sufficiency efforts in which I had a hand. While we had prior success in growing a bountiful garden, a goal was to also use as much of the 40 acres of land we had in an agricultural way. Sorghum looks a lot like corn in early summer and many farmers in the area grow it. I think it was widely used in the midwest as a source of sugar until the sugar beet industry in Idaho and the west monopolized sugar production.

One thing hidden in this picture is the story of dealing with insects. I remember that when I first moved to Farm Yonder, mosquitos and chiggers were a terrible problem. They cost me some sleepless nights and a lot of irritation. I forgot exactly how I learned to deal with them, but I do remember one time I dipped a rag in gasoline and wiped my shoes with it, as I thought gasoline was an insect repellent. Maybe we bought repellants. Maybe we got smarter about keeping the place cleaner. Maybe we wore heavier clothes (like Gary in his overalls in the picture). But somehow we learned to cope with the insects and rarely thought about them after we lived there a while.

Building a solar greenhouse

Thanks to Gary, especially, we were aware of alternative energy sources. We couldn't afford gas or oil, but sunlight was free. The plan here was to build a solar powered greenhouse. We began with the back wall (in the picture) facing south. When the whole building was finished, large oil cans filled with water were placed up against the wall. The sun heated the water and the metal cans kept the heat radiating slowly. I see Gary (left), Tony (blond hair in the middle), John/Otis and Al Op (I think, on top.

As I look at the picture I also see two themes of Farm Yonder at play. First is working with wood. Just about everyone but me was good at it, had done a lot of it growing up. Not me, I just read books and played football with my friends. Still, everyone was very happy to teach me and I reached my peak of woodworking skill and fantasy in our loom shop one winter in Eureka Springs.

The other theme was ambitious projects. We felt and often talked about the power of lots of people working together. A feeling that we could do anything and wouldn't it be fun. I think the greenhouse came out of that feeling more than the need to grow food more efficiently.

Kim and Julie in Richmond

A few weeks ago Julie flew into Dayton to visit her daughter, Kim, who now lives in Richmond, Indiana. The three of us got together for the first time since 1973 or about 36 years. Kim was about five years old at that time - beautiful then and beautiful now. Same as Julie. It has been the highlight of my summer to see them both. I had been living within 30 miles of Kim for about 24 years, but I didn't know it since I lost track of both Julie and Kim when I left Farm Yonder and went back to St. Louis. Kim, her husband Jim, and her 3 year old daughter Marin, live in a beautiful house surrounded by trees. Jim is skilled in every aspect of home construction and has remodeled their home and Kim has pursued knowledge of architecture, art, and home decorating for years and years. Together they have created a very graceful environment, an archetype American country home. I can't help thinking that growing up in rural areas of Missouri (Farm Yonder), New York state, and England contributed a lot of Kim's very developed aesthetic values. Its something I share with Kim, love of a beautiful country home on the outskirts of small town in midwestern America.

Kim also has Julie's sense of quiet and strong love. Does anyone ever remember Julie raising her voice? I don't. I recall only Julie intervening in arguments (between Gary, Keith and me usually) by reminding us that peace is a better way. Kim seems like she is the same way. I can't imagine her raising her voice to anyone for any reason.

Mose and Rowdy

Here is a picture of Al (Mose) Oppenheimer and a dog we had. The dog's name was Rowdy. I don't care much for dogs (just ask my wife, Donna), but I liked Rowdy, even when he got the mange. I have always been grateful to Al Op for inviting me to stay with him when I went down to Golden, Missouri looking for my friend, Warren Pake. By the time I came down to Golden, Warren was gone to Brooklyn to work for the Watchtower Society and the Jehovah's Witnesses. Last week I was at my 40th year high school reunion and I ran into Liz Hasler, who was also a friend of Warren's. She recalled that she and I drove down together in an old car I had -- on a whim. I recall feeling that Al Op enjoyed the spontaneity of my arrival and spontaneity in general. He validated a notion that I was forming that life is meant to be lived in the present, not as a part in a script that has already been written. Also from the picture, was there ever a more pristine and beautiful winter than the first year at Farm Yonder. It was enough to make this Jewish raised boy fall in love with Christmas. I remember that we all wanted to make hand crafted presents for each other to capture the spirit of the holiday, of the country setting, of the friendships we had formed.

May Long letter page 1

This is a letter that May wrote to me when I was in the hospital with histoplasmosis. I probably caught it when I was tearing down an old chimney with the intention of rebuilding it on the farm. Birds had pooped for years in the old chimney leaving a lot of the fungus which causes histoplasmosis. May wrote that I was like "a giant pine that has fallen but with the help of my mother and father I would rise again." I love the imagery and recall that May's letter made me feel good in a very difficult time in my life. She continued by writing a lot of news from people on the farm. That reminds me of the way we used to talk: Tony is doing this, Otis is planning that, Keith just finished something else and so on. We were busy putting our community together.

May Long

This is a remembrance of May Long, who lived down the road from Farm Yonder with her husband Tom. She was what I call "a sweet thing." To my knowledge May never had a harsh word for anybody. She welcomed all the kids from Farm Yonder just like a grandmother and shared her simple and loving life with everyone. When I left the farm, May was the only one who corresponded regularly with me and I will share some of her writing in future posts. I think people were what made May tick and her letters to me were full of new and stories about people on the farm and in the neighborhood. May never led a comfortable life or had anything that was fancy or a luxury but it never seemed to bother her. I think she understood that happiness isn't found in possessions or travels, but in loving the people you live with.

Pete

This picture shows me with Pete, the mule, who (I believe) belonged to old Tom down the road. This must have been in the spring. Leaves are on the trees and it was time to plow the garden. Growing veggies in the garden, which was at least 1/2 of an acre, was a highlight of my time at Farm Yonder. Thanks especially to Gary, I learned a lot about how to grow plants. We gave the garden a lot of thought, from ordering seeds from catalogs in the winter to learning how Pete could help us plow the garden, to keeping the garden weeded, to canning food, and much more. I recall that Pete was kind of reluctant to pull the plow but that once he got going, he did well. Especially if he was given time to rest between every row. Before Farm Yonder I had knew nothing about either plowing or disking, but through experience I learned about both and a lot more.

Alan and Julie

Last week Julie came to Richmond, Indiana, to visit with her daughter, Kim, who lives there with her husband, Jim Tanner. Kim works in the development office at Earlham College, where she attended college more than 20 years ago. Kim has been living in Richmond almost as long as I have been living 30 miles down the road in Oxford, Ohio. Julie has been coming to visit her all these years, but I never knew it until Julie located me on Google and called me about a month ago. We had a wonderful reunion and talked for hours abou Farm Yonder. We thought it would be a good idea to have a wider conversation about Farm Yonder to reconnect with old friends and enrich our memories with each other's help. I have a lot of pictures I will post here and use them to job my memory and reflect on Farm Yonder. Hopefully Julie and I can connect with Gary, John (Otis) and Colleen, Al (Mose) and Maren, Keith, Joe and many others who shared the experience of Farm Yonder. I think this will be fun. More later.