One day, I will… #3 Create an intentional community. This is how I envision it: after spending two or three years travelling around the country in an RV, I’ll stop in an amazing place one day, look around me and have an overwhelming feeling “this is home”. Then I’ll know that my wondering around days are over. I’ll make that place home – and invite people who “get me” to join me there. Our community will be a close-knit group of people who value and support each other through thick and thin. We will spend a lot of time together – yet respect each other’s space, for we’ll understand that individuals need alone time, too. Our children will play together while Moms or Dads sit and relax and talk and laugh, or share chores and talk and laugh. We’ll trade childcare. We’ll be there for the new mommas among us, and we’ll help and support them through pregnancy, birth and the period of adjustment to motherhood. When one of us becomes sick, we’ll all show up at her door with chicken soup and all sorts of help. And we’ll make sure that not one mom or dad among us will have to say “I’d love to homeschool, but I have to work and I have absolutely nobody to help” (this is especially important for me, for I remember my own years of struggle as a single, working, homeschooling mom). At least partially, my inspiration came from watching videos about The Farm in Tennessee. I could not help but notice how happy the “Farmies” were. Smiling, laughing, really enjoying the company of one another… I don’t think it can be faked. I think it must have something to do with the fact that people at The Farm share the basic values. But I can’t just join The Farm, though I really want to visit (visiting The Farm, in fact, is item #2 on my List of Things I’ll Do One Day…) While the values I hold dear and the values of The Farm overlap in some areas, they are different. I believe in homebirth and I’m grateful to Ina May for being one of pioneer women who paved the way for women like me to birth at home. But I do not believe in government-paid medicine, or in government-paid homebirth. In fact, I am convinced that “publicly funded homebirth” will mean the death knell of authentic midwifery and the woman’s freedom to choice how to give birth. I’m for the opposite for the publicly- funded healthcare and birth: I’m for the complete separation of healthcare and the State and birth and the State. And I hope to surround myself with people who share this conviction with me. I don’t expect people in my intentional community to think alike on everything – it is neither possible nor even desirable. I don’t think I’ll ever find one, let alone several, people who agree with me on everything. But if people in our community agree on the basics, and respect the differences of opinion beyond the basics, that will be good enough for me. I hope to attract people to whom I will not have to explain why the State is not the solution for the problems humans face, and that the State funding poisons everything it touches. I hope I will not have to justify to them my unconventional choices: my decision not to vaccinate or not to have annual physical exams and generally to avoid doctors save a traumatic injury (one area where even the Great Medical Heretic Dr. Mendelsohn respected Modern Medicine). And even though, given that I’m 51 myself, and my youngest being almost 17, I have outgrown homebirthing and homeschooling (until and unless I have grandchildren), I hope to create a community where homeschoolers and homebirthers will feel right at home. Other details are not yet clear. Not only the location is to be decided later, but I don’t know whether we’ll be able to buy land, even in an area where land is (relatively) inexpensive. When The Farm was started in 1971, Stephen Gaskin and his tribe were able to buy land at $70 per acre – and Stephen joked that $70 was more or less the price of a kilo of pot in San Francisco. Gone are the days of $70 per acre land – or $70 buck per kilo of pot, for that matter... Which means: we might have to rent, with all the drawbacks of renting. I also don’t know how big the community will be (probably not very big), and how close to one another we’ll be (if buying land together proves to be too complicated, we might just rent different homes in the same town as close to one another as possible). If enough people want it to happen, they’ll find a way, and work all the details out. For now, it’s just a dream… and if somebody says “it’s a crazy woman’s dream”, I shall bear it… P.S. I showed My Love what I wrote, and he said: “It’s definitely not crazy. It’s actually very humane. But it’s utopian. It’s just too human to be accomplished on the ground.” To which I replied: “If this is a Utopia, we’ll make the most of it.”
Posted on: Tue, 20 Jan 2015 22:21:08 +0000
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