Dean Fleming’s geodesic art studio at Libre

My particular dream neighborhood would be a rural community of actively producing artists, writers and musicians. I’ve lived in a couple of them. My eccentricities become social assets in these places. Brainstorming with peers inspires me. Gatherings created by artists usually tickle my spirit. As the famous hostess Pearl Mesta once advised, “Never go to a party where you are the most interesting person there.”

Packer Corner Farm neighbor and artist/bookbinder Susan Bonthron shows me her foldout book theatre

I admire in particular one beautiful and intellectually stimulating artist community southern Vermont. In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, writers from the Liberation News Service, fleeing persecution by FBI at their office in Washington DC, established four communes in northern Massachusetts and southern Vermont.

Ray Mungo, photo from the late ‘60’s, co-founder of the Liberation News Service and Packer Corners Farm, and author of books about each: Famous Long Ago (currently being made into a feature film), and Total Loss Farm.

I spent the winter of ‘71-’72 at Packer Corner Farm, and joined with the entire four-commune community of writers and artists there to create Home Comfort: The Day Books of Total Loss Farm (New American Library 1973).

Painting (circa 1970) of poet Verandah Porche, a co-founder of the Liberation News Service and of Packer Corners Farm and still a resident.

From the outside,Verandah’s house looks much like the house the commune members bought in the ‘60’s from a farmer’s widow who was about to retire, but she and her husband essentially rebuilt it from the ground up.

In later decades, most of the Packer Corner commune members moved away, but two of the original members built new homes (one on the site of the original house) and remained on the land. The new art community is not communal, but includes nearly every home on their forested country road.

Myron and Lana Golden’s home near Packer Corner Farm

I also spent 1967 to 1968 in a houseboat at Gate 5 Sausalito, another unaffiliated community of intensely creative people. The Gate 5 Industrial Center Building, where I had an art studio in those days, is now exclusively art studios. Here’s my online diary entry from 2000, when I last visited Gate 5.

In October, 2000, I visited Libre, a community established by a group of artists in the Huerfano Valley in Southern Colorado in the ‘60’s, and still thriving.

Dean Fleming’s paintings in his home gallery in the dome above.

Dean Fleming, a painter who shows in New York City galleries, works in a geodesic dome studio across the road from his wife, Sibylla’s, elegant circular house, built around a tree.

Interior of Sibella’s house

Solarium at Dean Fleming’s studio

Jim Fowler, a sculptor, has been creating his house for decades, a room here, a wing there. His wife Sesame works as a massage therapist; the kids have already grown and gone.

Jim Fowler’s fantastic house in progress

Staircase and sculpture in Jim Fowler’s house

Jim’s sculptural house wood heater

A natural mosaic bathroom at the Fowlers’

One of Jim Fowler’s carved marble sculptures

Living in a dome tent while building a straw bale home.

Yes, there are communes, ecovillages and intentional communities still thriving in the USA and abroad. Fellowship for Intentional Community publishes a directory of them, which is now available online.

On my cross-country music/storytelling tour in 2000, I spent July 16th at the amazing Lost Valley Educational Center in Dexter, Oregon (just south of Eugene) and made a blog post on my old web site.

I did not get around to posting about Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage and Sandhill Ecovillage, both just outside Rutledge, Missouri, which I visited the following October. Sandhill’s roots are in The Farm, originally founded by Stephen Gaskin and his followers in the early 70’s, and now the world headquarters of the Global Ecovillage Network, forty-five minutes drive from Nashville, Tennessee.

Sorghum extractor at Sandhill Eco Village

Sandhill’s economy sustainably rests on bottled honey and sorghum; they grow their own produce, and they house the office of the Intentional Community Directory.

Kurt at the Intentional Community Directory office at Sand Hill

Dancing Rabbit’s Gen Y founders came from a housing co-op near Stanford University, and visited Sandhill to learn more about sustainable land based intentional community. Sandhill’s folks wasted no time in finding them a suitable piece of land in the neighborhood and helped them start a land trust.

“Truth window” inside a straw bale house at Dancing Rabbit

The rules at Dancing Rabbit: no new lumber, only scavenged, recycled lumber and renewable building materials, including strawbale and cob.

Exterior of straw bale house, naturally insulated for snowy winters and hot summers, like the prairie sod houses of a century ago

No gasoline or individually owned cars; everybody shares the bio-diesel powered vans. Guests who are interested in becoming residents may stay on a trial basis and then are voted in as residents by the whole community. Members can be on the governing board after five years residency.

Susan, Rachel and Allette at Dancing Rabbit

I saw a cool little business going within the commune. Allette Brooks, a singer/songwriter, lives at Dancing Rabbit when she’s not on the road. Susan and Rachel, who live at the community, do her booking and publicity, and the three split the income from Allette’s concerts three ways. The women get a cash income they wouldn’t get living so far from town, and Allette gets a staff that works on spec, since they aren’t burdened with the overhead common to city living.

I noticed that the Rabbits worked hard, enjoyed each other’s company, had fun, and ate well. They invited me to come back and live, and who knows, maybe someday I will.

So Benida and I went to see Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth the night before last at the Laemmle Theatre in Santa Monica. It was a leftist’s Rocky Horror Show, that is, the audience reaction was as compelling as the film itself. The film’s violence comes off more like a college lecture than a Hollywood thriller, but, unlike most horror flicks, this one depicts an apocalypse that most likely WILL occur in real life, to US.

Critics on the right say it’s one long political ad for Gore. If so, it works. Eat your heart out, Hillary. When Gore tells an audience in the film, “There are higher priorities than terrorism,” our live audience cheered, stomped and whistled.

My friends and I have been talking and living green since the ‘sixties. It looks like An Inconvenient Truth is winning over some of the squares who’ve been pooh-poohing us up until now. And not a moment too soon.

Left politics is about using the nation’s pooled wealth and technology to do what is beneficial for the largest part of the population, including the poor, the disabled, the working people, and the middle class.  Left politics is about seeing human beings as one family, and as a part of nature, rather than as the dominators and exploiters of nature.  Left politics are egalitarian rather than hierarchical.

The left wants to see free, excellent education (through college) available to everyone (as it is in many other countries), to see publicly funded health care available to all (as it is in most industrialized nations), to build and maintain public infrastructure that supports a healthy and safe population, including excellent libraries, hospitals, roads, schools, highways, bridges, sewage facilities, deep draft harbors, and so forth. The left knows that the public funds for these projects could be more than amply covered by reducing corporate welfare, military spending, tax cuts for the wealthiest people, government corruption, and other blatant misuses of taxpayer dollars.

The left wants news media with a variety of viewpoints and a requirement of truth and completeness in reporting. The left wants separation of church and state and of corporations and state. The left wants transparency and accountability at all levels of government. The left wants to protect the planet from devastation by industry and war, and to protect the people from environmental pollution and unsafe foods. The left wants elections with hand countable audits and publicly funded candidates (who, once elected, don’t owe favors to wealthy donors).  The left wants to see workers controlling their workplaces as worker-owned cooperatives, and/or unions. 

The left wants to reign in corporations that perpetrate harm upon the public domesticly and abroad. The left wants to create trade agreements that are win-win with other nations. The left wants to promote peace between nations, and prosperity where there is poverty. The left believes in diplomacy and mediation, and in sustainable, aesthetically appealing solutions to the needs of people and planet. The left believes that a well-nourished, well-paid, well-cared for population will seldom resort to crime. Similarly, the left believes that well-maintained international relations seldom, if ever, require the use of military. True leftists are non-violent. Violent people are not leftists.  Violence is the hallmark of totalitarianism.

The left encourages preventative health care and a variety of treatment modalities. The left is not interested in controlling people unless they are hurting others. The left is interested in fostering the wellbeing of all people and appreciating their wide range of expression, so long as it harms no one. The left supports the arts, creativity, celebration, cultural achievements and heritage.

Ayala and Alicia at Ayala’s Eugene Saturday Market booth in July 2000. Ayala made the dress she wears. Quilter and fellow Wheeler Ranch alumna Charlotte Lyons made Alicia’s dress in the 1970’s.

Ayala Talpai, my dear friend since commune days and my seventh nominee for the Living on the Earth Award, writes, illustrates, calligraphs and speaks stylishly, so I prefer to let her describe herself.
Herewith:

“Ayala is a post-menopausal woman with five grown sons whom she raised in various degrees of wilderness settings. She is currently living happily ever after with the man of her dreams, at the end of a dirt road just far enough out of town.

“She was born and raised in New England by slightly crazed parents over whom hung the influence of her grandmother, a famous artist. Ayala’s solution to the dilemmas posed by these details was to play alone in the woods and her room, creating by age 15 over 100 dolls and related paraphernalia, and then as an adult, to merge her artistry into her household and its surroundings, a habit of folk artists the world over.

Ayala and Richard Talpai’s artist paradise in the woods, back in 2000.

“Daughter of an engineer and an artisan, she delights in coming up with new and unusual solutions to perceived and manufactured problems—a trait useful in her greatest joy, teaching. Ayala has eliminated the word ‘mistake’ from her vocabulary, having found that ‘opportunity’ and ‘discovery’ are far more accurate and workable concepts. She lives in delighted anticipation of what her students will come up with next!

“Ayala has spent her entire life making stuff, making do, and doing well. This happy obsession with creativity has led to the first innovaiton in fiber arts since the Stone Age—NOW! felting needles turn wool into a sculptural material! Having taught all ages and abilities all over the place, Ayala has also written two authoritative needlefelting workbooks.

A felt mermaid created by Ayala

“Ayala is a folk artist who has intentionally avoided the often political world of art galleries. She has supported herself with her art—at a booth in Eugene, Oregon Saturday Market these 14 years past: as creator of wedding garments for ceremonies both on and off the beaten path; as Artist-in-Residence for the county public schools, teaching woolwork to people of all ages and abilities.

“Ayala brought felting needles to the attention of the fiber arts world. She’s keeping this simple, affordable, and applicable anywhere fiber is found.”

[She wrote in one of her brochures:]

“Prepare for a lively, productive workshop (and quite likely, a lifetime’s absorption in needlefelting!)

One of Ayala’s felt placemats

“I want to talk with you about wool… the delectable compliant medium of WOOL, a sustainable and renewable resource produced by fashionably vegetarian animals. And it’s true—science recently discovered that wool is in electromagnetic harmony with the energy fields of the human body. We humble peasants have known that for centuries! (I cannot resist adding the fact that petroleum-based fibers like PolarFleece© are dulling to our auras, as well as to politics in the U.S. of A….)

“It’s become my (not-so) secret mission to get wool into studios, ateliers, art rooms all over America, even all over the planet-and not just for all the applications where it has performed so magnificently since the early dawn of mankind’s association with sheep, like making felt, spinning yarn, weaving fabric, but also… also as a medium for SCULPTURE.

“Yes yes, wool HAS been used for 3D sculpture already… but by traditional wet-felting techniques (cumbersome), and only with certain fleeces, since most wools will not accept more fiber after a certain point in the wet-felting process. Such inhibiting limitations! But we have now a recent event to mitigate all that: the introduction of INDUSTRIAL FELTING NEEDLES into the world of the folk artist, cottage industrialist, and fine-arts artist.

“In the early 80’s a girlfriend in New England gave me a handful of various styles felting needles. She had acquired a sample-sized needlepunch machine from an abandoned woolen mill there. Over the intervening years, as I delightedly needlfelted away alone in my kitchen, a question kept coming up: WHERE have these tiny versatile things BEEN for so long???

“A nonwoven-fabrics factory worker clued me in: the first felting needle patents were dated 1859. Needlepunch machines were originally designed to make batting and insulation from shoddy (shredded woolen garments), from slaughterhouse fibers, even from soldiers’ haircuts. AND… all this was occurring at the height of the Victorian era! Aha!! There’s the hitch: Victorians were total prudes and prissies. Junky old second-hand stuff is too disgusting for words!! We could just swoon away at the thought…. A century later, however, social mores shifted and recycling is now so politically correct. Also, automobiles have proliferated, and everything that’s not metal, plastic or fiberglas on a car is needlefelted. That machinery has moved into the Group Consciousness! Nowadays artists even rent afterhours time on needlepunch machines, the better to create rugs and large wall hangings.

A wedding “fairy coat” designed and sewn by Ayala

“Untold thousands of felting needle styles have been developed for industry, and with good reason-those huge machines use say 150-200,000 needles at once, a situation where a tiny difference is multiplied a thousand times over, for different fibers and different applications.

“Returning to my personal journey with needlefelting: Well, one thing led to another and eventually I was drawn out of my foothills retreat in the interest of spreading the word and the techniques I’d developed for fiber artists and their lone felting needle. Wrote a couple workbooks with the hope of getting others to make some of the myriad items that needlefelting engendered in my imagination, and then maybe taking off into their own heavily populated fantasies.

“Anybody with a flexible wrist who can be trusted with sharp things could be handed some wool and a felting needle, and it is such a delight to see what folks come up with! Even boys can be inveigled into the fiber arts by a felting needle! Moreover, all sorts of ghastly damage to fiber items can be repaired with a felting needle and an agile mind.

“The most appealing aspect of this technique is that you CAN’T go wrong, you just keep adding wool until you get what you like. No mistakes! Only opportunities, or discoveries… a perfect way to get wool back in the public eye, don’t you think? In the ‘70’s when I first met up with sheep, wool was 11 cents a pound on the open market. Really, it hasn’t gotten any better. High time to remedy that… Whatever type of wool one has at hand is the perfect kind for needlefelting. Fiber differences lend their own special characteristics to what is made from them-like dancing with different partners.”

Alicia at a peace march in Los Angeles, March 19, 2005

“It’s true that any talk of hope is dismissed as naïve, but that’s because we tend to look at the surface of things at any given time. And the surface almost always looks grim. The charge of naïvete also comes from a loss of historical perspective. History shows that what is considered naïve in one decade becomes reality in another.

“How much hope was there for black people in the South in the fifties? At the start of the Vietnam War, anyone who thought the monster war machine could be stopped seemed naïve. When I was in South Africa in 1982, and apartheid was fully entrenched, it seemed naïve to think that it would be dissolved and even more naïve to think that Mandela would become president. But in all those cases, anyone looking under the surface would have seen currents of potential change bubbling and growing.”

Howard Zinn, in an interview in Tikkun Magazine, 2006

When my book Living on the Earth was first published in 1970, I was twenty years old, living on an open land commune in northern California in a shack built of recycled materials, dividing my time between weeding the community garden, hiking, doing yoga, practicing guitar and singing, celebrating whatever day it was with my friends, and making beautiful things out of clothes from the free box. My book conveys those free and easy days, and became a window through which people trapped in stressful urban lives could fly and dream.

Now I’m the person looking through the window and dreaming. I just turned fifty-seven, and I have a strong spiritual commitment to doing what is right by my own estimation, which, in this case, is caring for my aged mother in her home in Los Angeles. Here I am in the town I thought I had left forever at seventeen, with the woman who made my life hell until I stuck out my thumb and boogied on up Highway 1 to San Francisco in 1966.

I am cool, though. I walk a lot, practice music, write my blog, do spiritual practices, learn everything I can about elder care, work on my communication skills, work on my creative projects, work at my business as art entrepreneur. I have some wonderful friends and family in LA, some I’ve known since I could know someone. They love me and make this work.

I dream about how I will live after this is over: In a sustainably built off-grid home, in a permaculture gardening and natural farming, with pollution-free transportation, in an intentional community with other artists, musicians, writers, healers, earth stewards, and visionaries whose visions resonate with mine.

Meanwhile, I hunt for cheap gasoline, and wring my hands at the wastefulness of modern society. Happily, my mom’s a leftie, too, and she wrings her hands along with me.