Excerpts from RAMBLINGS FROM THE EDGE:
Creating Family and Community

     The following seven short pieces are excerpts from Eugene's inspiring book, Ramblings from the Edge. They offer spiritual and social alternatives to the loneliness and the lack of family and community in today's modern world.
     The first three pieces focus upon family, those smaller social groups that are based upon love. The first describes the dearth of both the large, extended families that many of us grow up within as well as the outdated spiritual values upon which they were based. The second tells of the new families that many of us, still hungry for family, have found and made such a large part of our lives. The third piece shares a vision of the telepathic group head that can develop within these new families.
     The next four pieces all focus upon community and the spiritual revolution. The first laments that we have collectively lost our self-reliance and have given away control of our lives to the government. It also suggests ways in which we may reclaim our sovereignty. The second tells of various communities, describing, in particular, an actual self-governing community that was created in the late seventies. The third recounts the community organizing process that helped this community to come together. This process, based upon the principles of no permanent leadership and consensual decision making, is a model that will allow other communities to come together too, communities in which everybody is equally involved in all the decisions affecting the community. The last piece speaks of spiritual revolution, one based upon family and community, and declares that the one that began in the early sixties is about to come to fruition.

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WHERE HAVE OUR FAMILIES GONE?

     Aspen and I have been reminiscing about our childhoods. We have been missing the large family gatherings that always happened around the various birthdays and the major holidays. This used to be true for most of us. But nowadays, for many of us anyway, our families have become scattered out all over the country.
     For both Aspen and me, our families have been heavily visited by death. Both of my grandmothers, my two great aunts, my uncle and my parents are already dead. I never knew my grandfathers. Aspen's grandmothers and grandfathers, her aunt and uncle are all dead. My brother still lives, although he and his family live halfway across the country, on the West Coast. Two of my children also live on the West Coast. Only my daughter Ariana and, of course, our young sons, Callahan and Jake, live nearby. Aspen's three cousins are still alive, together with their families, but they live in Wyoming and Utah. Only her parents and her brother live near us.
     It isn't just us either. It's a general social phenomenon. Large family gatherings aren't what they used to be. This is a concern for many of us, and 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 unity is failing. (See the I Ching, Hexagram 37, The Family.)
     It is failing because that older generation was the last of its kind. A new day is coming and with it a new way. The failure of the old families to hold together and to provide moral guidance for each family member merely reflects a shift, a break really, in both consciousness and worldview. It reflects the generation gap that we began to notice in the sixties. Our new consciousness and way of life differs radically from our parents and their generation. In particular, our consciousness is both more whole, being centered between the feminine and the masculine, and more holy too, with a new reverence for both life and meaning.

THE NEW FAMILIES

     For many of us, our old families, the ones we grew up within, no longer provide nourishment. And without family, we are alone and adrift in today's unfriendly and impersonal world. At best, we might have a mate, maybe a child or two. But the large families of our past are gone, decimated both by death and indifference.
     However, in my long life I have always found new family. When I left Southern California and moved to Berkeley, I found family. I was part of an acid hippie family there. 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. There were no parents. We were all brothers and sisters. No one told anyone what to do. We all figured it out together. For the first time in my life, I felt I really belonged to a family.
     I also found family in Eugene, Oregon. We didn't all live in the same house, but we ate together every Friday, partied together often, and loved each other lots. I remember once all of us going to a movie and filling three 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 both 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 little boys, but I am still part of a larger family, and we do celebrate our various birthdays and other holidays together. 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.

EMPATHY AND COMMUNITY

     In his book, Callahan's Secret, Spider Robinson has one of his characters say that "to approach telepathy, you start with empathy and crank that up as high as you can. You care about each other. You feel each other's joy and pain. You make each other laugh, and help each other cry. You work hard at trusting each other, so that it's safe to dismantle the fortress around your ego. You forgive each other anything that stands between you, and try to bring out each other's best, you work very hard at hosing all the bullshit out of your head so that it's clean enough for guests, silencing all the demons in you subconscious so that it's quiet enough to hear somebody thinking at you, and most of all you find ways to make that work so much fun that you keep on working. You stick together and love each other and keep growing."
     Spider shows us this process happening in Callahan's magical Crosstime Saloon. Jake, the bartender, realizes the potential behind all that is happening in the saloon, what with all the good feelings engendered by friendship and the shared adventures. He suggests to the regulars that they be more conscious of this process and lend it their energy. His suggestion is met with unanimous approval, and choosing this goal takes the book's characters on a long and illuminating path, the way of the "wonderful conspiracy."
     I've been often on this road myself, helping to create telepathy and oneness with family and friends, working together always to be telepathic and kind, to be one in our hearts and our heads. Sometimes we've gotten there too.
     This has always been my goal. Ever since I was a young boy, I've always been very aware that by our very nature all of us are always in each other's heads. It takes a lot of energy to keep ourselves separate. Because of this, I've always wanted to be part of a large and conscious group head, one in which I could continue to be myself yet no longer be separate from everyone else. It's happening.

SELF-RELIANCE

     After WWII, the government gave the veterans of that war land and money to set up hospitals and centers for themselves. At first, the veterans took over the offered land, built hospitals and living quarters, and took care of themselves. But then they began to hire administrators to take care of things for them, and soon a huge and very untogether government agency was formed, the Veteran's Administration. Before long the veteran no longer had any say in "his" or "her" hospitals and centers.
     We did the same thing with this country of ours. At first, we were the army, the militia, with our constitutional right to bear arms. Then we hired a professional army with officers and all that (like that of the English army we had just defeated). That was the beginning of the end. Nowadays, this hired army is the backbone of a gigantic and unwieldy organization called "our" government.
     We came here from Europe to get away from government and being told what to do. We came here to be free. Within several generations, however, we had given away our freedom to men who said that they would take care of things for us. Invariably these men have stolen our money and our land and have taken away our freedom. They have it almost all now.
     We let them do all this "for us" because we can no longer take care of ourselves. We no longer know the basic skills of life. We have turned everything over to the specialists. Everything is done for us just as long as we are willing to become a ripped off, enslaved player in their obscene and insane "I want it all" game.
     In the early seventies, I began to learn everything I could. I learned how to hunt and fish, what plants were edible and useful, how to grow food and herbs and take care of animals, how to cook healthy meals, how to build my own house and work on my own car, and how to take care of my own health. I know how to do all this now. I don't need government. I wish none of us did.

COMMUNITY

     In my earlier days, back when I was a graduate student at UCLA, I started a dream-sharing group. There were six of us at the first meeting, but, within months, we had grown into a community of more than fifty folks. Because we were sharing our dreams, we came to really know and trust one another. We became very close. The best part of it was that it happened all by itself, out of its own energy, with none of us trying to make it happen or run it.
     In Berkeley several years late, I was living with some folks in a house in the flatlands, west of campus. I had just moved there from L. A. with Ariana's mother Karen. We began sharing the house with these Zen Buddhist students; but we were too wild for them, so, after they moved out, we asked Bobby and then Abby to live with us. We all became best friends, family, although we weren't a commune. We all earned our own money and kept separate food stashes. We shared a lot though. We did a lot of LSD together too. Soon, there were lots of folks hanging around the house all day, every day, attracted by our energy. Soon, we were all family, maybe twenty or thirty or us.
     When Ariana was born, the house became too intense for Karen and me trying to be another sort of family, so we moved 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, much 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. They were all good folks at Alpha Farm, but they reminded me of my days in the Air Force.
     Karen and I, together with a woman named Chris, whom we had just met there, organized the first community meeting for all the folks living in and around Deadwood Valley. Over 40 folks came. We had an agenda that included childcare and a food buying cooperative. We also wanted 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 was 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.)

COMMUNITY ORGANIZING

     I'm never been interested in communes. I've never organized one. I've never lived in one. A commune is an artificial structure imposed upon relationship. However, I am interested in family and in community.
     I am most 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 to organize 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. West Fork was a family. Cougar Creek was a neighborhood. 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 of us 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 in Paonia, a food cooperative in the city, or a long and fertile valley along a meandering creek like the Deadwood.
     Once we determine our community, we can begin to organize it. We can put up flyers, call folks, use e-mail, and somehow 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 next one. 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 brings us together in a powerful and healing way. We see that we are actually doing something constructive and empowering with our lives. It's good work.

CYCLES OF CHANGE

     Studying the Russian Revolution, I noticed a regular ebb and flow to the progress that led finally to its flowering in 1917. The impulse towards revolution first appeared in strength in the 1840's. At this time, the Czarist government was easily able to put it down, and there then ensued a period of stability and stagnation until the 1860's, when again the impulse to revolution made itself felt. Again, the Czarist government was able to put down the revolution, although not as easily this time, and again stability and stagnation apparently reigned. The revolution was attempted again and again now, in the 1880's, in the early 1890's, in 1905, and in 1911. Each time the Czarist government was able to turn back the revolutionary tide, but each time the government was weakened, while the revolution grew stronger and stronger, until 1917 when it was strong enough to finally topple the embattled Czarist regime.
     It's the same in psychotherapy. The client will begin to make major (revolutionary) changes in his or her life and consciousness, inspired by the healing energy generated by taking oneself seriously. But soon there will invariably be a time of pulling back from the changes begun, of finding fault with therapy and the therapist, of regressing to the previous state. Change is scary, and we all resist it. However, if this time of darkness is endured, the client will again begin to change and to make progress.
     A worldwide spiritual 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 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 this worldwide spiritual revolution will soon begin anew. It will be much stronger this time and will easily overturn the prevailing paradigm and the dying culture it supports. The revolution will be peaceful, and it will happen.

Eugene Marks