note: The Farm is a hippie turned yuppie community in Summertown, Tennessee. for more information about it please see: http://www.gaia.org I know this is more than 3 screens long, but I think if you read the essay you will understand my ecofeminist point of view. Please feel free to pass these words along. NEUTOPIA AT THE FARM ============================================================================ Assessment of my visit to the Ecovillage Training Center at The Farm Oct. 10th - 16th 1997 Open Letter to Mr. Albert K. Bates, Global Ecovillage Network (GEN) Secretariat The Americas ============================================================================ Introduction: Albert, back in Amherst for a few days now, has left me with mixed emotions about my visit to your domain--The Farm--your ecovillage. I thought that maybe it would be best if I stopped sending you email as a way of trying to clease my mind of the love I have for you. I was thinking I should work at trying to forget you since you made it fairly clear to me that you are too busy to have dealings with me either on the personal and/or the professional level and that you don't want me to play a significant role in your life or the ecovillage movement. In one of your emails to me I believe you wrote that you were mostly interested in me on a cerebral level, but I seriously question if you even care about my emotional health. I have this feeling that if I was to drop off the face of the Earth, you wouldn't even bother to find out what had happened to me. In other words, if I stopped writing you email, you wouldn't be curious enough about me to even find out why my email stopped. Our relationship seems very unbalanced, with me caring much more deeply about your well-being than you are able to care about mine. Even sending me an occasional postcard along your travels seemed too much to ask of you. And I will certainly not hold my breath waiting for a digital postcard from you to arrive in my mbox! One of your workers at the Ecovillage said that you only wanted to have "low-maintenance friendships." With that I really question if you want a friendship with me at all since there are times in my life when I need emotional support and tender-loving-care from my friends. Most of the time I am a "low-maintenance" person, but sometimes I need more than a five minute chat in the morning. Perhaps what you really want from me is a distant acquaintanceship, an email exchange once in a blue moon. So from my above comments you can tell that I am feeling ambivalent towards you. I want to love you, but I feel that I can't since I feel you have put a force-field around yourself so that my loving energy can't penetrate into your heart and mind. Of course, your force-field stopped all possible telepathic powers from flowing between us. I am not quite clear yet if this is an artificial barrier constructed by you out of fear, or if it is a natural barrier because you simply have no desire for intimacy with me either because you are not attracted to my psychic energy or my physical body. The soul-bonding phenomenon is very subtle. So I can't possibly know all the reasons for your neglect. What I do know is that every time I try to become part of your life, either professionally or personally, you reject me. During my visit to the Ecovillage, after I accepted that they you are incapable of loving me physically I tried discussing with you how I might fit into the Ecovillage movement. You said that I would not be a good propagandist for ENA (Ecovillage Network of the Americas) slide shows since I had an "artistic temperament". How funny this really is since I have probably been an advocate of the ecovillage/ecocity movement longer than most of your staff. You even admitted that I had a greater theoretical understanding of the issues and ideas being addressed, at this moment in time than anyone else in ENA, even though they might have more practical experience than I do with living in intentional communities. But still you could not find a place for me in your heart or in the ecovillage movement. Consequently, I can only wonder just what kind of "chief" you are if you are not devoted to creating a meritocracy within your organization. I have to question if your organization is simply the beginning of another global tyranny started by another fat-bellied egomaniac. Do you know what your adversaries at The Farm call the Ecovillage? Its nickname is Albert's Egovillage. So I must wonder, is this derogatory name justified? For the sake of our collective future I hope it is not! What happened between us during my visit to The Farm is a classic illustration of what I have been writing about in terms of the evolutionary nature of the love experience and the need to build a partnership society. So let me now go over the points I made to you while we were driving to the bus stop in Columbia. These refer to points you requested that I type up and send to you. How To Improve the Ecovillage Training Center: 1. I began by pointing out to you that you can learn to enjoy putting on a condom in order to give and get the spiritual and physical ecstasy of sexual union. Your argument to this was that one of the reasons why you got a vasectomy was so that you could enjoy unprotected sex without the fear of getting someone pregnant. You seemed to not like sex if you had to wear a condom. And since I am inflicted with genital warts, I suggested that we use condoms during a trial period should we decide to move in that direction. Then if an eternal love reality grew between us, we could stop using the condoms since we would be engaged in life-long monogamy as a way to achieving enlightenment. Look, Albert, you should always have protected sex with women because there are a lot of STD's out there. You can't trust women whom you just meet because they have short memories about their sexual partners. So my advice to you is to carry condoms around with you in case you meet someone with whom might you want to make love. I'm sorry, but the reality is we are living in the age of condoms. Michael Traugot writes in "Re-sacralizing Marriage and Fertility at The Farm" in Communities Magazine Summer 1995 that sex was seen as a holy sacrament. It wasn't just seem with the purpose of reproduction, but one of openness and grace. He writes: "If anything was in the way of achieving this feeling together--which often included orgasm, but could occur simply through cuddling and rubbing each other--the couple would have to deal with it before they would be in enough agreement to relax and let the fire catch on. Thus sexual union was a time for cleaning oneself of psychic debris making the subconscious conscious, and dealing with any disagreement the couple might have had during the day. This made for a more solid marriage. And thus, making love was at the core of the community." This is one of the most beautiful visions of the purpose of erotic love which I have read. Dear Albert, I think your life would be much more peaceful if you practiced this beautiful core Farm principle. You kept telling me that it was unfair of you to get involved with me because you had so many responsibilities that you had no time for yourself much less time for a lover. At first I was taking your actions as a personal rejection until I talked with your staff about it and they said to not take it personally because you treat everyone that way. One of your staff members even confessed that the Training Center runs better when you are away because of your anti-love, anti-social behavior. Well, perhaps the force-field was breaking down the final hours of our visit when you allowed me to give you a back rub. I was really surprised when you unbuckled my belt and tried to place your hand over my clitoris. But, of course, there was no time for you to feel relaxed enough to proceed in learning about where to touch. My point is that if you cannot feel relaxed and in harmony with someone whom you say you love and allow yourself time for self-reflection, then what is the point of all your work? Do you really think that you are going to "save the world" when you have such an empty personal life? Your frantically-paced life-style at The Farm is no different than that of a Wall Street man living in New York City as far as I can see. You are rushing to work in your car, rushing home at 5:00 from work to turn on the TV to catch the latest news and sports report, and then rushing back to be alone in the chief's yurt away from the main building to sleep. No time to nourish your inner life or anyone else's close to you. Addicted to candy and Coke, how different is your life from any other middle-age over-weight white male American living in suburbia? Even when you finally took time off to see a Hollywood film, "Seven Years in Tibet", you still had this nervous energy jarring you as you automatically stuck your hand into the super large popcorn box and devoured it by the handful. I was quite disgusted after you finished the giant box and you went back for a refill! After witnessing your gluttony, it certainly made me think twice about wanting to hold your hand during the romantic part of the movie! It reminded me of the Bread and Puppet saying on my refrigerator, "The hunger of the hungry and the hunger of the overfed." Written in "The Earth is Our Habitat: Proposal for Support Progamme for Eco-Habitats as Living Examples of Agenda 21 planning" it reads: Three key criteria have emerged in assessing appropriate technologies for eco-villages, over and above commercial viability: 1. ecological sustainability 2. human scale, decentralised production 3. allowance for a non-stressful, meditative life style. If your life-style is an example of what the 21st Century ecovillage man is all about, then I can't see a real change from 20th Century industrial man. The same neurosis prevails. The same using technology as a way of escaping our inner connections and spiritual life continues to bankrupt us all as the ecological and social crisis worsens. People on The Farm say that you don't live on The Farm, but in Cyberspace. I am not saying that your work is not important because you know I think it is, but I am saying that you are sacrificing the meaning of life for it which in essence can only lead you nowhere: will not save the world the way it needs to be saved, and it will never allow you to allow yourself to enjoy any of the fruits of your labor. You need to understand the role love plays in the ecovillage story. That it is the spirit of love, the core of an ecovillage, that is the catalyst that makes labor possible. But you told me the week of my visit that you had written an email to the GEN, Gaia Trust director Ross Jackson and particularly to his wife Hildur, that it would be best if the movement dropped the eco-spirituality part of the agenda since you felt her New Age spirituality and belief in such things as reincarnation was getting in the way of real progress. I realized that you were particularly busy during my visit to The Farm since you were getting ready for your trip to South Africa. But there could have been time made for tender talk and back rubs with me had you wanted it. Maybe I am not the woman of your dreams (if there is one) and that the less cruel way to reject me was by treating me the way you did -- coldly, without fervor. You told me that your work gives you ecstasy. Well, I certainly understand that because my work also gives me ecstasy to some degree. But there are nights after my work is done that I get this great feeling of loneliness. At these dark moments, I realize that I need to be touched and talk with someone in intimate ways about my work. I need someone with whom I can dialogue about the future. The problem for me in sexual relationships is that I have to concentrate so hard my work that if the fellow is not a part of it, then we can't share much of life together. So the way I have sought to solve this problem is to try to find a partner with whom I could share the same work/vision. The ideal situation is when work and love unite. When I met you at Sirius Community and went into that three day or so ecstatic state was because I thought I had finally met a man with whom I not only wanted to make love, but with whom I could work together for the same cause! This to me is what the Neutopian state of consciousness is all about and the way the Lovolution will emerge. 2. What I see you are in desperate need of is a manager of the ecovillage inn and construction site. This person should be someone who has a long- term commitment to the place, who will be there when you are away and who has the authority to make decisions. As you have stated, this person needs to be mature, financially responsible, work well with staff, friendly to newcomers, likes meeting strangers and, most important, there needs to be chemistry between the two of you so that there is open communication about everything which you have yet to achieve. This person also needs to be able to look at what jobs need to be done around the construction site, integrate volunteers into these jobs, and be sure these jobs get done. In the ideal sense, this would be the role of your soul mate. The very thing you say you do not want, are not ready for, incapable of dealing with, is the very thing you most need to help your life become more sane, mature, healthy and holy. Speaking to one of your staff members I deduced that he was unclear what the ecovillage is about and that newcomers have no idea what the place is about. You need to make the ecovillage mission statement clear to all. You wrote in _Communities Magazine_ Summer 1996, "In our Ecovillage Training Center concept, we hope to create a "total immersion school" that will co-evolve designs to move us all toward a more sustainable-- maybe more human--way (again). We try to bring together First, Second, Third, and Fourth Worlds to harmonize their visions. We want to create a holistic, "comprehensivist", hand on curricula that makes learning fun and inspires as well as teaches." The best way to do this is to practice the daily art of ecovillage principles. These principles should also be written in a feminista manner so that new people can read them and know what the ideal daily practices of the Training Center could be. Staff and volunteers should be made to realize that this is a social experiment which is opened to public scrutiny. People who don't like living in the public eye should be warned that this might not be the place for them since the ecovillage is a pilot program which could develop into something which could be sustainable, a prototype commune. In Ross Jackson essay, �Villages with Vision,� he writes, �We arrived at the conclusion that the world needed good examples of what it means to live in harmony with nature. Disgruntled mainstreamers needed places where they could go to see and partake in a more spiritual lifestyle. Architects and developers needed to see model settlements that could inspire replication.� It seems apparent that to discover the ideal ecovillage model, we have to discover the social architecture which would make an evolutionary sustainable architecture possible. For me, one of the fundamental principles of the Neutopian ecovillage is a commitment to women's liberation as an element for social liberation. Of course, this starts with work in the home by doing collective house work. I have found that having a certain time to do this work where we would all be doing it together works the best. You told me that one of your former Inn Keepers exempted you from doing such work since you are working on other projects for the ecovillage at the Mushroompeople building, but I feel that this is not a good example to follow. Being exempt from the dirty work of cleaning toilets or putting away dishes, etc. is making it appear that such work is not the work done by the chief. This is how it has worked in the old paradigm that we were trying to evolve away from: that is, men's work is the mental work of the outside world and women's work is the dirty inside work of taking care of men and babies. Perhaps you could spend the household work time doing something like taking the time to do the secretarial work like filing your papers on your desk or the household work cleaning up the yurt. But it would have to deal with doing essential daily work. In the Neutopian ecovillage, the ideal balance would be for people to spend half the day working together on construction work and daily tasks around the Training Center and the other half the day doing the independent work of developing their intellectual and spiritual lives through Net learning and/or in culture-making activities. Some of your staff members were unclear as to whether the Training Center should be seen as a community or as an individual living space. This confusion could be seen around food. It took me a while to feel comfortable enough in the kitchen to cook a collective meal because each one was cooking various things at different times. Perhaps this is the only way since people get in from work at different times. But this individual cooking arrangement creates an element of unsustainability. I would like it so that at least a core group tries to eat and clean up together and share food whenever possible. Also, there needs to be a sense of thanksgiving towards nature for the food. I did not find this at The Farm. In order to create a communal spirit, it might prove to be truly evolutionary for you to seriously look into creating Gaia rituals. I have not fully explored the appropriate rituals yet into order to help us to create Neutopia. But it will finalize once I find the group to work with on making this Lovolution happen. Albert, your ecovillage needs magic, and the only kind of magic I want to practice is based on the love-between-the-sexes principle which brings about planetary union and a new life-style pattern of human and urban/rural development. What I would like to experiment with at the Ecovillage Training Center is the union of ecofeminism and ecovillages and how they must work together if we are to uncover an alternative culture based on the Gaia Religion. To learn more about the Gaia Religion please see: http://genesis.tiac.net/neutopia/ 3. You are proud of your Web page awards and your four million hits on your Web page each year. But as one of your staff members pointed out to me, the virtual space doesn't match up with the real ecovillage space. She said that most of the calls coming in about the Training Center were generated from seeing the Web pages. But what was she to tell them about the place? To come on in, come help create the new world at The Farm when The Farm members don't accept outsiders? This brings me to the next point. It doesn't take a lot of sense to see some of the dysfunctional family patterns within The Farm. Perhaps it is difficult for you to see them since you are making money go around the world giving slide shows about the history of The Farm and you don't want to admit some of the failures of the once grand project of building a "telepathic community." Stephen Gaskin writes in _This Season's People_ about how important it is to communicate on the spiritual plane. He writes, "If people never get above the purely signal level of communication, and don't become telepathic, they haven't explored their full human birthright. Telepathy is a high and Holy thing. When a bunch of people experience it together- when they really feel each other�s the presence and the presence of the Holy Spirit, they call it Holy Communion." So what happened to this Holy Communion at The Farm? I asked this of Martin Holsinger the day I was digging ditches at the Ecovillage Training Center beside him. He said that he felt it was because Stephen's vision was not all the way where it should be. He felt Stephen made a mistake by saying that the purpose of The Farm was to "make the square people respect you by hard work and good neighborliness," when the call of the times was to change the basic structures of society, not to conform to it! You also took pride in informing me that each year you save The Farm thousands of dollars in federal taxes by working as The Farm lawyer to find the loop holes in the tax system. But did you ever think of making The Farm a place of war tax resisters who are protesting our insane military budget of billions of dollars going into weapons of mass destruction? How can you call The Farm a place of non-violence if your community is paying into the United States war machine? The day I was reading Stephen's book, I asked your son, Will, if he thought The Farm was a telepathic community. He said that it wasn't because there was too much junk getting in the way like junk food, junk TV, fossil fuels, and greed stopping people from connecting with their cosmic selves. He said that what was required for telepathy was clear thinking. But he thought such thinking didn't exist at the Ecovillage Training Center. After reading _This Season's People_, I can see that Stephen had a messianic calling to try to pull together Eastern and Western religious thinking. He writes, "Every one of those spiritual teacher who ever made that crossing--Saint Francis, Mohammed, Jesus, Buddha, Krishna--came back and said, "Hey! We're all One! We all know that now. We've been knowing that for a while. What do you do if you know that we're all One? How do you live?" This, of course, is a utopian question. He continues to ask, "Do we, of our own free will, bring about the Kingdom of God on earth as it is in Heaven?" As it is in Heaven? God's plan to build nuclear power battle platforms so that laser weapons can be used to terrorize people who want to make change? Is this the way? The problem with these questions is that feminist religious thought is not present. Is it really true that all our great religious thinkers have been only men as Stephen's list indicates? Have there been no spiritual female thinkers throughout the ages? Or have they been ignored, eliminated from the pages of history? Any enlightened utopian scholar will tell you that men have not had the insight to create paradise on earth. In fact, male visions of their gated-suburban paradise, the Kingdom of God, is what is in the process of destroying the Earth! I wonder if I had come to The Farm in 1976 as my mother suggested when I has having severe emotional problems over the nuclear arms race, if I could have changed the outcome of The Farm by visualizing the governance structure of the Queendom of the God/dess. Would you have ignored me then as you are doing now? Albert, I wonder in how many lifetimes you have ignored my message? You said that if I had come to The Farm in 1976, it would have been unlikely that I would have been given the liberty to develop my scholarship and my feminist vision, since women on The Farm were cast in more traditional female roles. I realized the failure of The Farm when we were at the community meal to raise money for The Farm school. Will, who attends The Farm High School was sitting beside us. When I asked him what he wanted to do with his life and he said that he really didn't know, but that he would do anything for money, I realized that he had been indoctrinated with the same value system as mainstream Americans even though he was born and raised on The Farm. Will did express interest and talent in writing poetry, but on The Farm--like in mainstream society--there is no financial support for people to develop their creative gifts which are given to them from the higher power to serve humanity. What was important was being able to pay The Farm rent, not living a spiritual life. If a young man was to write a book of poems, where would he publish them? I was informed that The Farm Book Publishing Company is only interested in publishing books which will make money such as cookbooks or books on Native American traditions: not new, unknown writers. So it became apparent to me that The Farm School and The Farm parents couldn't even produce noble-mind, lovolutionary young men and women who would have the skills and backing to be able to challenge the massive injustices our species faces! On another occasion, you said that you wouldn't want me around the Ecovillage because I might try to organize the youth to rebel against their status quo parents in order to try to re-establish the positive founding principles of The Farm such as Gaskin�s idea that �if we really are all One and we really are telepathic, then we are our brother�s [sic] keepers, and it really does matter what we do. How we be makes a difference for how it is for everyone in the world.� I said that it would be a good idea to hold a Gandhian type non-violent hunger fast at the Gate until it was re-opened so that the ecovillage could grow. You said that if I did, you would be siding with the parents and the Gate- keepers who have been known to call the police and have outsiders arrested. Albert, after talking with you about our environmental crisis while were in the booth at the fair, and you stated that we had generations and generations left, that the ocean was not dying and the biosphere was not in serious danger of collapse, I realized that your denial was so deep that you were unable to feel the extreme danger we are in. The nuclear waste problem alone is enough to kill us, not to even mention the problem of nuclear weapons in Outer Space, on earth and in the sea. You even stated that anti-nuclear lawyers like yourself had been successful in shutting down the nuclear-power industry in the United States. Are you really totally crazy, man? Do you really think that anti-nuclear lawyers like yourself have stopped the nuclear industry? There is more uranium mining going on now in the four corner states in Western United States than ever before! The US government is still genociding the Native Americas by making them the slaves who are forced to dig the poison out of the ground! I applaud you for sticking it out with those people who control The Farm Gate and The Farm membership after people like Martin Holsinger and Stephen Gaskin had moved their projects off the land to avoid getting trapped in corrupt Farm politics which they helped create. I was appalled to hear the way the Gatekeepers have kept so many good people out of The Farm who could have been helpful like Jacob, the young man who had worked for the Food not Bombs organization in California who asked to volunteer at the ecovillage for a few days. But what was most disturbing to me was your story about sending members of The Farm your Christmas card with your drawing of your vision of the Ecovillage. It was a beautiful blueprint of what the future could be. For them to have then made you conform to their building rules in order to control what you can do is to suppress your artistic freedom for the public good. So what kind of utopian community do you live in? To me, you live in dystopia! Your rich Farm neighbors like the family who has made millions on producing Geiger-counters and the wealthy group who attends the Friday Night Happy Hour don't even financially contribute to your ecovillage efforts. At The Farm, you are not free to express love. You are not free to build an ecovillage movement. You are not free to take time for self-reflection. Albert, you are not a free man and if you refuse to be evolutionary in the face of injustice, then you are really not a man at all! I just received the _Newsweek_ photo I gave you of me looking like a GEN Goddess with the Earth and the butterfly beside me in the mail and your good-bye, dear Neutopia letter which reads, "Thank you for the photo. It crystallized my thinking. I wrote and rewrote this in my head a dozen times. It was much longer. And even shorter. In the end, this should do. Its over. It was lovely. It was energetic. It was unsustainable. To ask for more is to beg for unhappiness. Goodbye and God Bless You. Albert." I say, may GAIA help You! After seeing my slide show on the Gaia Religion at The Farm on what God's reign has done to desecrate the ecology of the world and the need for a feminist thealogy [theo=God, thea=Goddess) to arise to save us, what a slap in the face it was for you to end our relationship with those words, just the way Clinton/Gore end their meaningless speeches filled with sweet lies to the American public. I can see now that you simply are one of the infantile good-old-boys dressed as a long-hair hippy. Are you sure you are not an undercover agent working for the CIA assigned to The Farm? :-) It isn't that my infinite love and kindness is unsustainable. It is that YOUR "love" is non-existent. Since I have spent four days of my valuable life composing this email to you about my Farm visit, I will see through my tears and continue to finish my thoughts. Before we parted ways, I thought you were starting to comprehend my message to you when you said that you realized that what I said was true, but that the truth was painful even though you knew it was healing you. You admitted that you were mean to me and that you were a misogynist, but that I should be hopeful that you would change your misogynist ways. By that comment, I thought that you would arrange it so that we would met and spend time together as formally planned at the International Communal Studies Associations conference on "Utopian Communities and Sustainabilities." After I criticized GEN for not proposing any panels composed of women and women's issues, and you ignored my idea for the Ecovillage Love and Sex panel, you said that you were no longer interested in meeting me at the conference and that the GEN guys would all be sharing a room together in order for male bonding to take place. You said that you would be so busy with the GEN guys that there would be no time for socializing with me. Well, I really don't know what else I can do to liberate you for the homoerotic culture. If you prefer the company of men, what can I do to make you see the basic role women play in birthing an alternative world view which the Ecovillage movement demands if it is to be a revolutionary force against the global corporations? So this email means farewell once-and-for-all. I only ask you to please send back my manuscript, _CyberQueen at the White House_ when you get back into the United States. I also request that you send me a copy of Richard Register's book which you had for sell for 15 dollars on that ecovillage/ecocity conference. I don't think it is too much to ask you for my 150 dollar donation to the ecovillage movement to send me the book for my research. I forgot to talk with you about giving me the book before I left The Farm. So please send me a copy with my manuscript. And if you believe in the value of my writing at all, please send me the name of your literary agent like you said you would. I would also like to request that you send me a copy or a slide of your Ecovillage blueprints so that I can add them to my slide collection on utopian images. My most profound regret is that you could not even see me as a utopian scholar whom you could admire and respect and would want to engage in dialogue with about the important problems of our times. But I know that the disease of misogyny runs deep in our sick culture. Asking men to change after thousands of years of treating women inhumanely is too much to ask for any man except perhaps a genuine genius who understands the vital role love plays in the global transformation process. It will take me a while to forget some of the ideas and visions of the future that happened between us-- especially the idea you had of us writing a utopian novel together. I doubt whether you can find someone who is better suited than I am to make that vision come true. Let's hope someday soon you will find a woman who holds a special place in your heart, whose hands you will reach for to help you and someone who you will want to kiss passionately on a the moonlit night so that the organic garden at the Ecovillage Training Center becomes a world peace garden of true love. Maybe then the gate of The Farm will re-open and great-hearted volunteers from around the world will be let in. As you write, "The real bedrock of the project are the volunteers who come to us from a variety of different backgrounds but share a common vision." The Farm will become a nucleus for the people's struggle to create the better world, a community of anti-nuclear resistance and a model of love, peace, joy, women's rights, and solar energy. And may GAIA Bless You! Doctress Neutopia PS. This weekend I went to a conference at Boston College on "Abolition 2000: Organizing for a Nuclear Free Century of Peace." I got a chance to talk with Karl Grossman. I told him that I watched "Nukes in Space" with you while I was at The Farm. He asked how you were doing. What was I to tell him? The image which came to my mind while I was talking with him was of the painting you showed me that you had painted of the woman and man holding hands confronting a nuclear power plant with a monster coming out of it. You said that it was a bad painting and you wanted to cover it up. I tried to convince you that it was an important image and not to cover it up. But you kept on saying that it was a bad painting. The night you told me you loved me, you said that what you loved most about me was that I brought out the artist in you. I replied by saying that I wished I could make you remember the Goddess of Love within you, since it it is She who inspires the greatest art of all, the philosophic art of building a world without war starting at home base with constructing an ecovillage of true love, a safe place to cure the monster within.
