Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Unstuck

I have a problem I wrestle with everyday. My vision is complete and clear. I know how every one of us might be able to live the lives we all long for instead of making the best of a badly formed society. And I can see the steps we could be taking right now to get started quickly in that direction. All I have been doing for the past forty years has led the way. But now I am stuck. I can’t take the next needed steps alone.

What we need is the kind of organization that the gurus were able to build in the last century. Remember? The organizing power of Meher Baba, Sai Baba, Yogi Bhajan, Maharishi, even Sri Aurobindo, and especially Osho. The trouble is, I am an anti-guru! The only one who spoke to my heart and mind was that other anti-guru, Krishna Murti, who refused the role of spiritual leader that was offered him. No one has offered that to me, well, a few do try now and then, but I refuse anyway.

Krishnamurti was a teacher, of course, as was Gurdjieff?, as is Thich Nhat Hanh, and they all managed to inspire organizations to continue teaching. I guess we have achieved that in a small way, due to the many of you have been organizing workshops and camps for Ellika and me every summer for 25 years. I am so appreciative of all that each one of you have done. I love you and I love our life of learning circles with you. But, I want more. I want to change the way we live. I want to live together and show the world, to lead the world to a better life for our children and enhance human evolution in the direction of all our hearts.

There are a few who are ready right now, have been for a long time, ready to go anywhere as long as we are together to build community the way we build our camps. There are communities that have invited Ellika and me to join, and I love them, but I want to start from scratch, as we do at camp, and have us in clans, listening and dreaming and planning and working and playing together in the Circle Way.

I have been thinking I need more time, need to write a few more books to explain how and why it works, and to promote them widely. Everywhere I am asked to speak now, all the people are excited and enthused to hear what we are thinking and doing. If we had a place we would start gathering people.

But it’s hard for me to write and to take care of all the business here. I don’t have a secretary or assistant anymore. We need an organization. People to organize the travels, the publicity, the promotion, the office work: accounting, paying bills, filing. We have a lot of potential here: a beautiful big old house that has ten living spaces, a large great hall for events, and an attic space that was a dormitory or could be small rooms, a big kitchen and another large room – all in need of work. We have ten acres of woods, a big backfield, camping area, garden, and a sweat lodge.

I have dreams for the land. In the past, we had many conferences, workshops, and camps here. We could again. I want to build an old Indian village for the Nature School and as an attraction to tourists. I want a gift shop, bookshop, art gallery. A restaurant. I want to make a nature trail with plaques describing the flora and fauna of the area. A small community could live here again. Down the road the Nature School has nine plots of land for building ecological homes and places for the homeowners families to come together and be a circle way ecovillage.

How could we get unstuck? Hmmmm. Well, in Europe if we had land somewhere suitable for camps where a small group could begin to live and work together and there was room for others to come and build, a few could start living and working on this together organizing camps and expanding with people who decide to stay and help build. ZEGG was fortunate to find a place ready to accommodate many people at once, when East Germany opened to the West. Tamera was fortunate to find a large piece of land in Portugal where they have been energetically building for over a decade. The stories go on for all the grand ecovillages, The Farm, Auroville Damanhur, Sieben Linden and so on – but all of those had a committed group of people ready.

Another start could be if one person came here to live with us and take some of the burden that Ellika, Donna and I now struggle with alone, we could make room for more people to come and build organization and community from here.

No comments:

Post a Comment