I find that recently, I have been arriving places exactly at sundown—allowing each new location to present itself in the dimming embers of dusk. The beauty of all this was the most dramatic this evening when I slowly made my way along Tennessee's Highway 20 into “The Farm” one of America's most famous and longest lasting intentional communities. Just as I had turned onto Highway 20 and the sun was beginning its decent, I made eye contact with a man on horseback before I realized that I was in Amish country. The land was covered with farms as a few women with bonnets stepped outside of their houses to get errands done. After a while, I came back to a little more mainstream looking part of the highway and stopped at a small one-pump gas station to ask a the man filling up his car for directions. He was definitely not a “hippie” but knew exactly what I meant by “The farm” and happily gave me extremely thorough and well explained directions to the community. When I made my way to the welcome center, the pink of the sunset had completely filled the sky.
For those who, like me a week ago, know nothing about The Farm, I can offer a little bit of information. The farm is a fascinating social experiment that has now lasted over forty years. In 1971, a man named Steve Gaskin developed a spiritual following in San Francisco, and decided to move to Tennessee with a caravan of about 50 other buses. From what I have read about him, he wasn't a religious fanatic, but rather a man who was extremely curious about all forms of spirituality and was trying to do what he could to put what he learned into practice. “The Farm” was a way he could do this.
The couple I stayed with here, Deb and Will, have lived here for over 30 years, bringing up three children. It has been fascinating to hear them talk about their lives and the transitions that the community has gone through. For example, when it was first set up, every thing was completely communal and they had been living in tents. However, now they have changed and adapted to the times so that they are now a “cooperative with a hybrid economy” meaning that people now have private incomes, but that still most elements of living there are community-based. Their stories have been fascinating, showing how surprisingly insightful and sober these “hippies” have been over the years. Because the community lives almost exclusively off their own farming, they had stories of the “soybean winter,” the “wheat-berry winter,” and other times when food had been scarce. They also talked about their frustration with the structurally ingrained issues with our corpratized world and the sanitized nature of political correctness. Both issues I have been thinking about a lot. They mentioned how, in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, the Farm's development arm, Plenty, was one of the first NGOs able to bring in aid. With the help of their lawyers, and other people experienced with similar projects, they were able get all their paperwork right to get around the government's red tape and directly to the people.
Currently the community has a population of around 200. Earlier it had housed almost 1500. Back in those days, Deb remembers, the very house I am staying in housed over 50 people. There were two showers that people would wait in line for, and two outdoor toilets people could use. Thinking back about all these times, and especially flipping through Steve Gaskin's book “Hey Beatnik!” makes me kind of wish I could have lived here during the early days to see what it was like. The fact that the farm is still running and has spawned now three generations is really impressive, but it also makes me think about the future of intentional communities in America. Or even more importantly, the nature of concepts such as community, or democracy, or capital in general. How close do we ever let ourselves get to living our ideals? And then when we are, when do we have to adapt to the realities of a world wired to think so differently? The Farm was the perfect place to visit after the Occupy movement because in a way it houses similarly discontented people who are willing to change their very livelihood to discover what it means to stand up for and live what they believe in. The future of both communities will have a lot to tell us.
20 seconds at the farm:
1) A picture of Deb and Will's family in the
Spiritual Midwifery book 2) Deb and Will now 3) Some home made whole-wheat bisquits for breakfast 4) Their moss gardens in the foreground, their guinea hen in the background 5) Around The Farm 6) Some horses by The Farm's solar panels.
