Our friend Albert  Bates peripatetic world curious Johnny Appleseed of communities write:
I celebrated my 70th trip round the seasons in January, but this year
seems even more active than the last. Last year I was in
Mexico-Belize-Dominican
Republic-US-Mexico-US-China-US-England-US-Morocco-US-Mexico. This year its
Mexico-Belize-Mexico-US-Mexico-US-England-Italy-US-Mexico-US-Ireland-Brazil(SER7)-US-Mexico-Germany(COP23)-India(IPC13)-Mexico.

I am an emergency planetary technician and the solutions I offer are way
cool. Whether there is a habitable planet after I leave it is not up to
me, but not for want of trying. Having the best years of my life,

Please check out the mailing from this site by  clicking on 'subscribe' if you have not done so.  I just posted a piece there about the Los Angeles EcoVillage.  What my friend Albert Bates writes is so much exactly what I am trying to promote to our world that I have posted his own words.  How do you feel about ecovillages?  Have you experience of any of them?  Would you like to?  Do you think you would ever like to be part of one?  Also see my book 'Have You Lost Your Tribe?'  which is all about ecovillages, a history from the utopian communities of he 19th century through the hippie communes to today's ecovillages, including a section on our experience of creating a conscious sustainable community where my sons grew up in New Hampshire from 1978 to 1998.

RELIGION AND PURPOSE

We all seem to need purpose and meaning.  Without them we often flounder discontentedly. Ill at ease in our preoccupations.  Traditionally religions supplied these for us, but purpose and meaning handed to us by any external source discomforts us.  We sense not divine will but human manipulation through both institutions and traditions narrated by others.  Among religions that is easier for Buddhists with no deity to contend with.  We want to trust ourselves, focus on our enlightenment and a good life free from other constraints.

I have avoided the entanglements of lineage.  I am not even a deist.  I am a theologian with no god, if that does not seem contradiction.  Yet I impune.  I look for intention.  I find intention in myself and therefore I seek it in the universe.  Anthropomorphic thinking?   Possibly.  But I wonder why I am so constructed.  Born of an agnostic mother into a family that avoided any mention of what they did not feel equipped to understand – leave that to the professionals who claim knowledge – with a faintly superior cynicism about the self-serving claims of the followers and uncritical believers.

Is it only that I want there to be a purpose – to the creation, to life, to my life?  It feels right that there be and that I should seek it.  And the responses that seem acceptable truly do satisfy some need in me.  What about you?  Does the concept of God resonate with you.  What is your sense of what you maybe here for, or what you ought to be doing with the gifts life has given you?