1. UPDATES: It is still happening! You all have been responding to this great opportunity
- some with whatever donation you
could scrape together and some for the chance to earn 6% interest on a loan to realize a beautiful dream. I want to thank everyone of you from my
heart for all your prayers as well as your loans and gifts. So many are responding it is keeping us
up late. But more is still needed
– we have an new extension now until March 31st April 14th, so we still can
make it but time is short.
We need to spread the word further now. Ask everyone you know to ask everyone
they know to ask everyone they know;
put it on Facebook and Twitter. Make circles and brainstorm; make flier as post them in public places;
write letters to newspapers. Stir
the excitement that people can actually make money and do real good in this
world right now. A loan of 1,000
will earn 60 more in a year, of 10,000 will earn 600, of 100,000 will earn
6,000.
2. HISTORY: For any of you who may be interested in knowing
more, here is the history of this project and our dreams and plans for its future.
In May of 1978 fifty people came together on this land
responding to a poster that read “Have You Lost Your Tribe?” In the Great Hall we had hung a banner
that read
ON US WE TRUST. They came from all over New England and shared their dreams of a better
life and fell in love with each other.
That night I had a dream in my sleep that we really did all
live together, that we were a small tribe and the name of the tribe was
Mettanokit – “Our Mother Earth.” A
group of us did at last come together to live on this land, calling ourselves
the Mettanokit Community and became part of the Federation of Egalitarian
Communities nationally and the New England Network of Light locally. Mettanokit continued th ework of
Another Place, presenting alternative education and healing seminars such as
the annual New England Healing Arts Fair and the annual Northeastern
Communities Conference, and also created programs in many New England Prisons.
Thirty acres of Another Place land had been sold before we
moved in to help pay down the huge debt previously accrued by Another
Place. Within a decade our new
community was able to pay off the mortgage and the rest of that debt. Later, in the 90s, a great fire,
probably from sparks landing from a chimney on the roof, made the Main
House uninhabitable. We had not examined the fire
insurance we had continued from the prior management, and now found it too
small to fund rebuilding.The last
of the community was disbanded, but Ellika and I continued living in our small
house in the woods, continued the prison programs and to hold circles and
gatherings. The Nature School of
Massachuetts bought the property and agreed to allow Ellika and me to live out
our lives in our little house while we continued to expand our Circle Way
teachings in Europe for half of every year.
Then the adjacent property which had been sold became for
sale again, now with a fine ecological house and garage a pond, several gardens
and fruit trees and natural woodlands that we want to preserve. There we could immediately begin again
the work of an educational-healing retreat center. Our plans also include rehabilitation of the Nature School
property nearby in Mason, and the growth of an ecovillage to support and carry on
the educational and healing activities on both properties.
For thirty-three years I have lived in my little Birch
Cottage in the woods, hand build b y our old Mettanokit Community. There our only neighbors are the wild
creatures – the raccoons that one year moved into our attic, the porcupines
that mad love under our bedroom and made babies that grew and return to have
more babies every year, the red squirrels that invade our cabinets, the flying
squirrels that lived in our closet, the mice that brought toilet paper to make
nests behind the books at the top of our shelves, the wild turkeys that
sometimes troupe by our sundeck traversing our hill, the partridge that used to
chase my car up the drive away from her babies, the deer we sometimes glimpse at
twilight, the moose, the foxes in their hole, the pair of otters that swam
through our pond on their way to the beaver pond below our hill, the bobcats we
sometimes hear at night, the rabbits only known by their footprints in the new
snow, the chorus of the frogs when the streams overflow in spring, and the many
birds that visit our feeders on their migrations.
If the woods around us are cut down for commercial
development, where will they go, all these friends of ours?
Our plans for this property if we are able to secure it,
besides creating the educational-healing retreat center there, are to make a
nature trail through the woods for the school, a trail that will be ope to
everyone and an attraction to the area.
We have dreamed of a museum that will include a collection of native
artifacts I inherited from my Wampanoag grandfather, a model native village
displaying various types of constructions from diverse tribal areas, and a shop
for native and local crafts and artwork.
At the Nature School we plan courses on how to teach about
nature and good environmental practices, and to teach the Circle Way of
inclusion and mutual support in creating the kind of lives, relationships,
communities and society that we want – ones not based on money and financial gain
but on love, and joy in each other and in our children, in the wonders of life
an the world, in fun and play, in creativity and interesting work and study, a
world in which every human being can travel anywhere in freedom and peace and
be welcomed with hospitality and pleasure. In ecovillages everywhere we can model the way human beings can
live together in harmony, supporting each other and creating a more huma world
for and with our children.
