WISDOM'S CORNER

Family

     Lately, I've been missing the large family gatherings that always used to happen around my birth family's various birthdays as well as the major holidays. Nowadays, for many of us anyway, these gatherings no longer happen. Our families have become scattered out all over the country.

     This is a general social phenomenon. Large and cohesive extended families no longer even exist for many of us. Many explanations have been offered. The right-wing Christians say that it is due to the breakdown of values, but they have it backwards. Morality is breaking down because the extended family, as the primary socializing unit, has disappeared. And without real family, we are alone and adrift in today's unfriendly and impersonal world. At best, we may have a mate, perhaps a child or two. But the large extended families of our past are gone.


     However, in my long life, I have always found family. When I lived in Berkeley, I found family. Although only five of us lived in our small, two-bedroom house that was the center for the family, many more folks hung out with us every day. For the first time in my life, I felt I belonged to a family.

     I also found family in Eugene, Oregon. We didn't all live in the same house, but we all ate together every Friday night, partied together often, and loved each other lots. I remember once all of us going to a movie and filling two whole rows of seats. I liked that.

     Eventually, I became part of the Rainbow Family, a large group of folks who have put on a family gathering in a different national forest every year since 1972. I met my old friends Mexican and Mitro there, and later we became the not your usual acid family and had many adventures and good times together. We also raised four wonderful kids. We did well by them too.

     Nowadays, my family energy is focused mostly upon Aspen and our two boys, but I'm still part of a larger family. We don't all live together. We don't even get together regularly, and we certainly wouldn't all fit inside a movie theater. But we are family, joined by love if not by blood, and our intention is always the same - to create conscious and loving family, one that includes and furthers everyone and fulfills our shared primal need for love and belonging.

Community

     Back in the seventies, when my daughter Ariana was born, her mother and I moved from Berkeley to the country in Oregon. Besides gardening, cooking, crawling around on the floor all day with Ariana, and fishing for salmon in the nearby Siuslaw River, we got to know the area and the folks living around us. We saw that it was a community just waiting to happen. Most of the community energy was centered in the nearby long valley that followed Deadwood Creek down to the Siuslaw River. We moved there as soon as we could.

     There already were several smaller communities in the valley. West Fork was loose and outlaw, sort of like our house in Berkeley. Alpha Farm was very tight and organized, a commune with everyone working together to keep the various financial projects going. These included a rural mail route, an extensive herb garden and business, and a store and restaurant in the nearby town of Mapleton, located on the way to the coast from Eugene. Ariana's mother and I, together with a woman named Chris, whom we had met there, organized the first community meeting for all the folks living in and around Deadwood Valley. Over forty folks came. We had a tentative agenda set up that included childcare and a food buying cooperative. We also wanted the members of the community to continue to meet monthly.

     Before I left Deadwood the following year, it had become a strong community of communities. There was the monthly community meeting, with no permanent officers and run by consensus. There was a weekly women's meeting, a weekly men's meeting, a permanent food buying cooperative, organized childcare, and even a school. There was also a flourishing trade between the various households, with one doing the baking, another the milk and cheese, and yet another doing the butchering.

     There were several community outreach jobs that members of the community applied for and got. A community center was built. A doctor was attracted by the energy and opened his office in the old mill building down the road. A dentist, who has become one of my best friends, liked the energy in Deadwood and bought a farm at the upper end of the valley. He had lived in Southern Oregon, traveling around to the smaller communities in his school bus that he had outfitted as a traveling dental lab (complete with dental chair, x-ray machine, all the tools of the trade, and, of course, a cozy wood stove for those damp Oregon winters.)

Creating Community

     I'm never been interested in communes. I have never organized one. I have never lived in one. A commune is an artificial structure imposed upon relationship. However, I am interested in family and in community.

     I am interested in family, in that natural feeling that comes to us when we can feel loving and close with one another, as we hopefully did in our childhood families. I've had this several times in my life. We were a family in our house in Berkeley, a medicine family, focused upon growing in consciousness and love. We were all brothers and sisters, and no one told anyone what to do. There were no rules, laws, or trips. We trusted our love.


     I'm also interested in community, in that age old and natural way of organizing folks from the bottom up, allowing everybody his or her say, allowing everybody to be useful and fulfilled. Deadwood Creek was a community, comprised of neighborhoods, families, and one commune. Cougar Creek was a neighborhood. West Fork was a family. Alpha Farm was the commune.

     With community the focus is different than with either a family or commune. In a community, everyone lives their private and separate lives. People usually don't share all their meals together, certainly don't earn and share all their money together, hardly ever live together. Community is basically a way for folks to come to agreements, using consensus, concerning how they will relate to one another and how the community may serve them.


     We all live in some sort of community. I'm living in a large apartment complex now, consisting of four buildings, with close to a hundred folks living in each one. It's not organized, except for the structure that has been imposed upon it by the apartment management and the city of Boulder. There's certainly no conscious organization by the folks living in these four buildings.

     However, seeing as how most of us, all except for the most reclusive hermit, do live in community, we might as well make them intentional and more conscious so that we might better fulfill our true needs as social beings. We can begin with the community in which we already find ourselves, whether it be an apartment complex in the city, a college dorm, a residential neighborhood, an organic fruit farm, or a long and fertile valley along a meandering creek like the Deadwood.

     Once we determine our community, we can begin organizing it. We can get out the word, calling for a first meeting. We can announce a tentative agenda, staying open to what the folks who will come may want to add to it. We can volunteer to be the first focalizer, the person who will keep the meeting focused on the agenda and make sure that everyone gets a chance to speak. We can have the goal of making this meeting the first of a regular and ongoing series of weekly or monthly meetings.

     However, we have to make sure everyone knows we have no intention of focalizing the following meeting. We can suggest that someone else volunteer for it and that this procedure continue, with someone new volunteering for each and every meeting. The same for the secretary, the person who keeps the notes. We can explain the virtue of no permanent government, the virtue of everyone being responsible for their own community, rather than just a select few. With all this in mind, we can begin the first meeting and let it flow from there.

     The experience of meeting together and actually governing ourselves as a community always brings us folks together in a powerful and healing way. We see that we are actually doing something constructive and empowering with our lives. It is good work.


     A worldwide spiritual and social revolution began in the early 60's. Its energy is still alive today, although the forces of conservatism and regression have so far prevailed. Since then, the dominant world culture has been one of stability, stagnation and discontent. Today, however, this prevailing culture is much weaker than it was in the 60's, and the worldwide spiritual revolution will soon begin anew. It will be much stronger this time and it will be easier to overturn the prevailing paradigm and the dying culture it supports. The revolution will succeed, and it will be peaceful.

     By Eugene Marks