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transcript by Anne Ennis
I am Ofek and I'm right now in Amirim. Amirim is a 50 year old village in the mountains of the Galilee. I live here on a property, we're 4 generations; my grandmother lives here and my brother and other members. 4 generations live in here in cohabitation.
I think what's assisting me in choosing alternative paths in terms of how I was raised is a combination of being born to young parents that were fairly liberal for their time; that have both artist qualities in them, and uncompromising qualities, and stubborn qualities. Being the first born and being young, those qualities were most alive during that time. And, a lot of traveling, my parents moved with me many places and moved me from different schools so I was used to being an outsider, at least for a part of time, and also being the different one. If I was in America, I was the only one that didn't speak English at first, and if I was back here, I was the only one who was more Star Wars-oriented while the kids my age were still watching Westerns, Western movies. I was doing euw euw and they were peuw peuw. And, I was raised vegetarian. My daughter is fifth-generation vegetarian, so today it's not so unique, but when I was a kid, I was used to just eat differently, and food by its nature has a very bonding quality. People, even in the most loose communities gather around food in their weekly planningor something, so I was used to being an odd bit, and the way that society has programmed to respond to the odd ones -- feelings of threat, of rejection, of humiliation and later on, learning that these same qualities can be used to lead for change and actually get positiveattention.
I noticed that my way of living is constantly evolving. and it's not one choice I make overnight. but as I travel and exposed to different ideas, I notice I have a level of openness in me and actually, like, eagerness to learn about different ways to solve different problems. I feel like I'm growing when I'm learning of another way to handle relationships, or diet, or make decisions together. So I would say that even though there is some kick from doing something odd and something different, that's not the natural drive; the natural drive is curiosity, and some kind of identification of, That sounds right; somehow, it fits with the way I see other things with the things, or doesn't sound right.
So when we got pregnant, I have one daughter, when we got pregnant, and it was unplanned, and we had to make some decisions, it was pretty obvious to both of us the model of: father, mother, children. Father, mother go to work, children go to school; see each other at dinner and weekends. Living in your own house with your own vacuum cleaner -- something there seems very wasteful and lonely, and isolated, so it didn't sound appealing to us, it wasn't something we felt like a sense of identifying, this is something that fits me. So, we set out on a tour and this was both of our drive, I don't want to take credit -- on a tour to see what other people have found or created a way to grow and raise, grow themselves and raise their children in something that feels more suitable for us.
So, we read, when we set out into the world to see how people are living differently. I remember we were inspired by the permaculture movement and we decided we wanted to go to Australia, that was our first idea. However, we had some awareness already about the use of air travel and its high cost both ecologically and mentally; what happens when the journey is unnatural in the way that you hop from one place to the other. It's like taking an elevator, the journey is more important than the destination, so the air travel is something crossed off to justemergency cases only. We didn't want to rely on it at all as a means of transport, so it forced us to be more linear in how we planned the trip. And, when we went to the port of Eilat to find a ship in the direction of Australia, the Second Intifada just started a month before; it was the 11th of December,the Second Intifada started November 2000, so there was basically no traffic here and, the last boats to Greece left. We changed our plans and we visited a few of the southern communities. We visited Samar, we visited Naot Smadar, we visited Lotan.
This is what's nice about not traveling with air travel, in Hebrew there's something called Ba-Li, it's like a very impulsive way of asking for something, it's called Ba-Li (I feel like it) and our culture, the Western culture is used to this Ba-Li mentality, so if I feel like I want a piece of candy, I just go and get a candy, if I feel like going to India, I go fly to India. I noticed that when we decide to free ourselves from a certain kind of technology or any habitual thing; especially the habitual things that are tied down to freedom. For a lot of people, flying to India equates in their head as something very free, and when I re-inspect that and put it aside for a second and say, What if I do something else different, I notice that many times I discover the greatest sense of freedom. It's like these technological solutions come to the Ba-Li need, come to the impulse in the true need for freedom and travel, and they succumb, they give it some relief, but don't really address it in a deep and meaningful way.
So suddenly when we can't fly to Australia and that's not an option, first of all, we check the boat and then when we look at the boat, it depends on the political situation in the region and that's affecting what we can and cannot do, or at least the availability of it. It requires a lot more difficulty to go that far in that direction, and then suddenly we are forced, or encouraged, to actually look at the communities that are under our nose. We were in the south of the country, and we did go to see Samar, or Naot Smadar, or Lotan and after visiting dozens of communities in the world, these were exciting communities, and we learned a lot of important things in all three of them. This is something in which you can get the reward very quickly; you decide not to fly and then suddenly there's things under your nose that you haven't noticed before. I live here in this village and I still discover places I haven't been to before that's only walking distance, an hour walking distance from here, so my life today is a lot more local.
Back then, I still had that bug of traveling far and we went to... we decided to take one of those last boats to Greece, and we ended up touring Europe because of that.Another "liberating limit" we put on ourselves was a budget.It was important to us that just because we are coming from a background that's pretty privileged -- I mean, just the color of our skin and the ability to speak English gives us some privilege -- it was important to us to not experience the world just through that privilege, and we wanted to see how we could enjoy the world despite the privilege. We put a budget limit of $400 per month maximum expenses on all things that we spent back then, and most of the time we spent a lot less than that most of the months, and it wasn't hard. It went together with the flying, we couldn't just make impulsive decisions just because we have access to money, or can ask a relative for money, and so that meant that we traveled slowly and we stayed for awhile in different places, we hitchhiked, we did a lot of gleaning and a lot of work-trade.
Another thing, once we traveled from community, to community, to community, we are living a plant-based lifestyle, meaning that our food and clothes, we prefer, we strongly prefer that they come first-hand from plants, and not second-hand from plants through animals; they're moral, environmental and just taste reasons for it. There are a lot of back-to-the-land communities that are more husbandry-, animal husbandry-based, and if our diet is based on a lot of greens, and they have goats, that means that there will be very little greens for us, because it is all being converted into diary. Communities that were very animal-based, we kind of crossed off from the list, that were very interesting otherwise.
I remember we very curious about communities that have, that encourage different styles of relationships and not just monogamous, heterosexual, default contract you can download from the internet. And what else? Anything that had to do with low impact living and political activism. I guess that we were really inspired by the communities that seem to have not a narrow, 'okay, we are now back to the land and we take care of ourselves, but how we can go back to the land and live high quality life, and still be involved in political action, and also not just be head-solution permaculture/design/agriculture-machines or bicycles -- but also heart, emotional and spiritual growth.
So, we were happy not to plan too far ahead because we noticed with this style of traveling, there's a lot of unknown parameters, and its much more enjoyable and essential to be able to adapt to ever changing realities and new discoveries of things we thought exist and don't exist anymore; it's just very dynamic, the scenery.
I remember that the first community we visited was in Italy after the ones over here.It was really like losing your virginity in an alley; it was a very interesting community, but the way we approached it -- we were completely inexperienced, and there was the language. We were barely able to communicate with German-Italian community, and we have no German or Italian. The way that we called them ahead, what we wanted, and the way to say what we want, it was a positive experience, very educational in that sense, but,we learned very quickly how to approach it. Because we learned that many communities do prefer if you call ahead and just tell them that you are about to come. Some communities are very open and flexible, but just this interaction before. I think that, also living in communities later; it's for the sense of intimacy in the community.If people keep coming and going unannounced, I feel liked I barged or like the door is always wide open. Open in a way that invites too many insensitivities.
And then we visited some WOOFing farms, and it was a lot of couples, or small families. We realized that we really wanted to focus on communities. We saw some communities that are initiated by a couple, or just one person, and they could be 20 years down the road, and I could see how difficult it was for them to transition from the group collective process. I can completely understand how it happens. It wasa message for us, that if we ever wanted to start something, that we should be careful if we're going to say, 'okay, let's just start it now, before we find some seed community and not just a single person, or a couple'.
Some of the difficulties I have seen when a single or couple start a community, it's similar to an old lady who lives for a long time by herself; just that they prefer a set of preferences, that's very logical, because of their experience on the land, and a new person who comes and tries to join in suddenly has to fit into these preferences overnight, or be very accepting to them, because it's already back in the path of the other people that are there already. So, they already went through the process, and they don't want to go back there each time a new person comes. And I have been thinking about it, that there are other difficulties in other communities that are wider, that there's this: it's not a generation gap, it's like where you have the more veteran members and they're tired, and they just want to live their lives. And then you have these new people, because they doneed new people, because many of those communities are small, and these new people come with their ideas and changes, they think.They see things from a very fresh mind, but sometimes immature, and it creates this friction, and the friction always exhausts at the end.It was just more obvious when there was just one person starting it, because I think there is a lot of that energy, of grumpy, grumpy energy that concentrates in this one person who has seen people come with exciting ideas, butmost of them are young ,and their ability to follow through on those ideas, to really take it on to manifest something, is usually pretty slim.
Anyways, I remember actually,one of the communities... We also, just from reading of it, did prefer to stay at the secular communities which are smaller, by their nature, and younger. This is something that the religious, more family-oriented communities do enjoy a greater sense of stability, for the most part. And we did end up, just because we were along the way, we got a very warm welcome to visit one of the 12 tribes communities in Germany. We became closed off and worried, because they are religious and follow through on their faith with a lot of detail. It's like an all-encompassing lifestyle, that you join the community and your whole life is becoming this way of life. But, the level of joy and love and care for each other was touching, compared to secular communities that have, like, an acceptance process, where you have to come for a year, stay for a year, go through all these different stages in order to be accepted. In the religious community that we visited, on the day that we arrived, one of people cleared their house and said, "Welcome. Stay here for ever, you can stay here for as long as you want," there's no acceptance process. It's pretty much, because their life is so clear to them, because they have this confidence in a way that also tribes had -- I'm assuming tribes had -- you either joined the path, or you would just feel that it doesn't fit, you leave by yourself. There is no need for this artificial process.
I noticed that in many communities, the whole process of accepting people, kicking out people, is very touchy and it can create big rifts on just this one person they want to... even that question can come of asking someone to leave. Being part of that whole... I notice also what that does to us, and how the support we received just by being there, made us get along better in a more traditional sense. I mean, the wife has to be more submitting, and there is a division of labour between the man and the woman, but it's a way of life, and they found a way to balance it. There's much more to say but I will stop about that community.
I learned on this journey the importance of vision, and how when you have a clear vision it's... A lot of the work is there, just having that clear vision, the drive just comes, and it's focussed, so communities that have a clear vision of what they want. I noticed a level of seriousness and success in how they can attract people that are precisely in tune with what they want, and this is something I have adopted for myself; just adopting visions of how I want to live, how I want my house to be, and then just letting it manifest.
We were already very open, but visiting Spain in a raw food, permaculture community, being there for a month, was like the final thing we needed to go through, to chose to live a life that is supported by a living lifestyle; a live lifestyle that includes living foods.And another thing that was interesting in the secular was the fluidity of relationships, how rare it is a couple, a traditional couple, will join a community and actually stay a couple once they join, even if a community doesn't especially encourage it. I just noticed that, I know from the stories, is that people share, they don't live in their own separate houses, they share things, they share meals, they share property, they work together, they have more opportunities to meet, and then people fall in love if their heart is open, and a lot of the communities want the heart to be open, because when the heart is open, they do favors for each other, and support each other. So, they came with the heart open, and they do things together, and then you fall in love like that with three people or four people. If you hold on to the one particular vision of serial monogamy, it invites a lot of trouble, because there's all this thing: cheating or not cheating, and you have to chose, this one or this one. It seems more compatible with this more sharing lifestyle; it comes to this core ownership, a core principal of ownership and then the ownership of other people.
So, several communities that we visited were friendly or encouraging to more open styles of relationships, and this was something I could never come upwith by myself unless I experienced it being in these communities, and seeing how it happens, how it feels to be attracted to someone that is attracted to you, what do you do about it: do you lie to yourself, lie to your partner, or do you want to talk about it, and actually talk about it. And the communities that have the process and the space to talk about these things, and encourage this kind of honesty. There's something very exciting about these communities because a lot of the material is very fresh.
At the one hand you have access, most of these communities are not in Africa, they're in the richer part of the world, I would say richer in terms of resources that are very available, that can come easily there, and are available also because of the level of income you have. So the richer places, you have a combination of, you have all these seeds, of these variety of plants that never existed here. You have machines like laptops and solar panels that have a different agenda. Like, solar panel is a technology that has a different agenda than the electric company that wants to plug you in; there's a sense of freedom when you have a solar panel, it works only for 20, 30 years, but for those 20, 30 years you have electricity wherever you go, so long as the sun shines. So you have this combination of abundance, artificial abundance, but abundance of the Western culture, and you suddenly want to go back to the land and want to live more simple.
This combination creates a lot of new possibilities, so being able to be on the internet and read articles that would never get to you through the public library, or through a newspaper, because of all the filters and the technical difficulties, and it can be opened to ideas that can radically change your life.
When you put a group of people in a prison environment and divide them randomly to prisoners and wardens and guards, you divide to prisoners and guards, the Lombardi Experiment, you can see what happens when people are in that framework.What happens when people live in a city? You take 20 people, put them in a city, in a small crammed apartment. What kind of content does that create? What happens when you put in the wild, or in agriculture area? What happens when they have children, if the children go to school, don't go to school? There's so many parameters here, and each one of them could create a whole new set of possibilities, and then you have to decide that again.
So, this is that sense of freshness, that you're creating your reality as you go. There's something exciting about it, but later you need to get past that exciting period, and kind of settle down and say, "Enough". This is maybe also what creates the friction between the older generation in the community and the newcomers, that are still in the excited mode, they want to create, and the others want to sit and enjoy what has been created until now, this is good enough, let's just enjoy what is.
When I was 16 or 15, I had some out-of-the-box ideas, the uncles and aunts would come and say, "Oh, when you get to 18, 19, 20's, it will pass". Once I got to that age, they would say that when Ihave children, it will pass, and then I had a daughter. I know it didn't pass, but I did notice that there's more and more pressure on you to go back into a box, the more you grow. It's artificial pressure, it's not real, people create it. But when you have a child, whatever you choose is more of everybody's business, and you're more on the radar, in terms of what's acceptable and what's not acceptable, because people perceive that what you do can harm another being, not just yourself. So, when we chose to hitchhike, and hitchhiking has a lot of fear associated with it for some people, some people can make a face at that, a disapproving face, so I noticed I have to be prepared sometimes to answer, and to answer with joy, and explain that we're happy and healthy with our choices.
So a child adds a whole new set of choices at every junction - how to conceive, who are the parents, and what setting is the family, but also, simple things like, how long to breast feed, or to immunize with artificial immunization, or how to sleep, to sleep together, separate rooms, to put it in a sling, to put it in a crib, put it in a stroller. There's so many choices here, and they're very condensed into a very few years, especially at the beginning. What to feed it, when to feed it. We were very much inspired by a book called The Continuum Concept, a book from the 70's my mother actually read when she was pregnant with me. Erika read that, the same copy that my mother read. Continuum Concept talks about not separating the children from the flow of life. And, not putting them in concentration, under the justification of learning ,because what is discovered in both animals and children is that the best learning and the most meaningful learning is happening when we participate in meaningful activities. So, as soon as it's learning in the schools,it's not really doing the real thing, just talking about it or, doing an experiment in physics without applying it to something really going to be used later, is really a demo environment. And yeah, you can pass a test, but your creative thinking is nil, close to nil, and you forget it as quickly as you have passed the test.
Keeping our daughter close to us and involved, not putting her away all the time, I would say that traveling made it easier. Actually, if you're stationary and a part of a village, all the dynamics of the village, and the habits and the norms, there's a lot more pressure. When you're traveling, things are constantly changing, people perceive you as an outsider. I remember meeting an architect in Egypt that finds it easier to build in Egypt than in England because in Egypt she is an outsider, and they just ignore her, just as long as she is not going to do anything political. She's just contributing to the economy. So I drifted and now I go back to...
So when we traveled, I noticed there was a sense of openness to us because we were new people to the scene, and we're about to leave in a few weeks or a few days, so a lot of the things we learned in communities we then passed on to the next community. We kind of brought them with us. This we actually did before the trip, we didn't know how to do the whole diapering thing with our daughter, and our plan was, we didn't want to use disposable diapers, or disposable anything of plastic and chemicals. So we thought of using cloth diapers, but then how do we wash them while traveling? We had this idea of having a sealed bucket in our backpack, as we walk, it washes it and have a rope that we hang in the train or wherever we are, and dry it like that, but then we...
One time I had this idea: It's impossible, do we need this?You look at all of the animals in nature, and they somehow do without diapers. And how accustomed we are to seeing babies with diapers, and this is the norm and one time I have a feeling that if I just hold her above the toilet, she'll just go and pee. Now, this is the time, I took her, andshe peed, and I said, Hey wow! I thought this is just a coincidence, but then we got a link to the whole method that was named by a friend of mine; later we met her and then she became a friend of ours, Ingrid Bauer, called Elimination Communication. Suddenly, within a matter of weeks after reading the principles, our daughter was diaper-free.We could see a signal that she gives us before she needs to go, and for the most part, catch it, for the most part, and if not, it would be the urine ones.You just rinse it in water and hang it on our backpacks.This really made it easy, the trip. And then when we traveled from community to community, we had emails, because we had a blog on the internet, we had emails from people following our footsteps, and saying that in every community they visited, there's parents holding their babies over the toilet and giving the signal.
Traveling with a kid, for the most part, when you're hitchhiking people will have a more open heart to children. I did notice, because I did travel by myself in the past,like, living in a van in America and all the suspiciousness of a single guy alone, and then travelingas a family, I notice how society is more positive towards us. Many times people think that children are limiting, they make life more difficult, in many senses, I noticed that she made our life more easy.
Other than that, because we were traveling and walking, hiking and hitchhiking, it was easy to integrate her into that life. I think that if I would be working on a computer all day, and tying to hold her day, it would be difficult; but to be busy and on the road with simple tasks like that, it was easy to integrate her. I noticed that many families with children are very afraid to do what we're doing, and a lot of what made us stand out was that we were doing it with a kid. So, the fact that our baby was unplanned and our desire made us more open. When you plan things and you say, "Now we're going to buy a house, then we're going to have this, then we're going to have that, now we're going to have the baby; the fact that it was unplanned made us open to doing something, at least according to the Continuum Concept book, is healthier for the development of our daughter.
I did notice that when we are traveling more, and we have very little possessions, our daughter is much more generous with the very little things she has in her backpack. She could just have a small bag of toys or, cards, or something, and she'll just, the first kid she sees, she'll say, "Here take it", and I'm like, "Wait!" But once we're stationary, or we're around here, and we have extended family, there's a lot of junk at my parent's house, she suddenly becomes more hoarding, like the excess creates cautiousness. There's something that's more limiting when you're on the move, without a car, that you can only carry what you can carry, and that was wonderful, another liberating liberation. I do enjoy playing with these ideas.
Something that happened when we arrived in America, before we decided... wait, we decided to set the budget to $400 per month, what would happen if we set the budget to $300 per month? And we just decided, that's what we did,was just decided to do $300 this month, let's decide this month to do $300.The month ended and we spent only spent $300, and we could make what we had done differently besides deciding. If we could do $300, why not $200? It's just here in our head.
We ended up...so in the beginning we ended up visiting more rural communities. Then we noticed that a lot of the rural communities were dependent on the cities, and a little more isolated, so we were excited about more urban communities. We visited a bunch of them, and got very excited about the energy in the urban communities. It's just an urban environment so there's a lot of things accessible. And later on, we actually focussed more on urban communities that don't live together; people that gather around different ideas and attraction to each other that live in the same city, and meet constantly, and definitely feels like a community. They don't necessarily share ownership or livelihood.
One thing that was difficult was, we have a set of preferences, we actually let go of our idea of finding the ideal community. We didn't want to have that pressure, we're just going to visit as visitors, and as researchers, researching communal life, co-habitation. We're still officially on this trip, researching this co-habitation here with extended family, living here for the last four years. But, we had a pretty specific way that we wanted to live, and we have our set of preferences, and we never exactly found that set of preferences in any of the communities we visited. So, when we live more isolated in each house, we can live our way, they can live their way, but when you live communally, the idea is to share things. For somebody, that comes with a blank set of preferences, they come to community and say, "Oh, I'll adopt to all theseÉ" and just join in. But the people that have a more specific vision of how they want to liveÉ For us, it was very easy to see all the communities that we visited are not suitable for us, for how we want to live. And it's more comfortable for us to live the way we want, either create our own community by our own standards, and live on our own, and get support from a variety of places, so we can relate to this family, or these people around how we raise our daughter, and with these people around how we eat, and kind of have some diversity, because it puts a lot of pressure on one community; it's like marriage in that sense, to have all these things from the community, especially if it's an isolated community, that's your main interaction.
At one point, my parents had visited us, and my siblings. And I was already living for a year in a community in Oregon, and it was a community with a lot of emphasis on education; educating people from the outside who come and visit, and a lot of the energy was towards the outside. As the education was outwards, it was inwards, but there was a lot of heart work. I noticed many of the communities we visited had accounting hours of how much you had worked, how many hours you worked this week, or did you come to the weekly meeting or not come to the weekly meeting, and different agreements that were hard to keep. And also, many of the communities had a high turn around, the secular communities, four years on average, I think. People come and leave on average every four years. So, I remember at one point my parents visiting, and these are my parents, they are always going to be my parents.My parents are vegan, they buy organic food, they are very far from how we live, but they're very close also, especially when I look at other parents.
I remember reading about Gaza, that back in 1967, [first prime minister of Israel] Ben-Gurion said that 300,000 people is too much, living in this small strip of land, and that was 300,000, today it's 1.5 million! And, the reason they are able to survive there, cope there, is because the extended family structure makes it possible. One person has to work, and that's enough to put food on the table for the whole extended family, and there's something very efficient about it. Efficiency is not a group, but the fact that because it's family and there's no out from the family, there's less friction that has to do with if you don't do what I want, I'm going to get out of here. A lot of friction in the community has to do with, if you don't do what I want here, I can always leave. When you come with that mindset, you can't really meet at any point, be in dialogue, because it's pretty clear cut.
How do I choose to be with something I have no out from?Even if I create a community with people, how can I chose that to be the thing with no out, if that's one of the agreements, that we are here to stay? How do we do that without feeling limited, feeling liberated by this support and stability? I don't have clear answers to this, it is more questions than answers, but I did notice that extended families have a much higher success rates in supporting each other, especially in crucial moments. Who do you come for when you really hit the ground? Who is going to come there when you get in a car accident?
Even the thought that you can hate your parents, they are the ones who are going to come there and be with you. So, it seems like there's a potential there for transformation in ourselves and how we look at it, and in the nature of the relationships where, maybe, before we come and recreate the wheel with strangers, or people who just connect around similar ideas that are ever-changing, especially if they're young, it seems like a very weak link; just common ideas. If you have family members -- it doesn't have to be your parents, it could be uncle, aunts, family members, you have that bond with them AND you have some ideas in common. What I'm been doing these days, and I've been doing these last 4 years, seeing how we can not investigate potential here to develop in our own path, and together, so in that sense, I am very pleased we're here, because you know, there is a lot of compromise, like these bars over here.There's a lot I'm getting from being here, and I'm independent.
One of the books that I read there on this journey is, In the Absence of the Sacred, by Jerry Mander. He has one chapter there, called "Form Equals Content", how we tend to see forms, in this case, technology, different technological solutions, as neutral. It's similar to what they do with meat-based dishes, they call it schnitzel, and I remember being a kid, some of my years as a kid, studying on a kibbutz, and eating communally and the kids don' t know that it's meat. They think that it's schnitzel; it has this cute kind of name.It's not called carcasses or...
And so technology, and then we learn how to use technology right -- if we only learn to put the right programming on television, and take out the commercials, and limit the time on television, then they say everything will be fine. The conclusions that that author has is that it's not neutral, it never was neutral; sometimes things are discovered about it later, but many times it's predicted.Many times things are marketed to us, touching out most basic needs -- security, love-- and then we go run and get these things, and never achieved those things it promised. What it does get is further control on our lives.
A cellphone is a great example. But in that book, before there were cellphones, he actually talks about regular phones, and how pretty much after the regular phone appeared, the skyscraper appeared. Before that, it didn't make sense to go up and down so many storeys in a building. And, it allowed transnational corporations to have much further reach, because of this ability to reach further areas with telephones, all you need to control your puppet over there. So, these are things not talked about. When the first phone was marketed, it was marketed to lonely wives in their farmhouses staying alone with the children, and what happens if there's an emergency? Who can you call? You can call the doctor, that's how it was marketed. And cellphones were also marketed the same way, even though they are mostly used for business, for making people work harder.
It also has to do with diet. My diet has evolved over the years, and it is still evolving, and I noticed that most of the diet changes are difficult in the same way that addiction is difficult.It was actually proven with rats that junk food, what ever that means, but food that is not nutritious, let's say, creates in the brain the same processes as heroin or cocaine. It's the dopamine that's being released in the brain, and you need more and more in order to feel that effect. The rat actually starved itself for three weeks before it started to eat the nutritious food.
So, it's knowing our weaknesses as a culture, as a human being. Knowing, this is one of the first steps an alcoholic has to do, actually, the first step in a 12-step program, is acknowledge that there's something bigger than me here, and I need help. It goes together with the 'form equals content', is knowing that when we have these forms or variables -- when we have cellphones, there's no just using it for emergencies, we can't, we have no limit.When we have these things available, it's like for an alcoholic having the alcohol right in the cupboard. I notice sometimes I can let myself, from the place of doing the right thing, or of course from negativity -- I don't want this, it's not good for me. When I do it from that place, very soon I feel a sense of contraction, and basically a sense of being less alive.
So, when you put a group of people into a prison environment, you can expect only so much from the people -- even if they practice the highest level of self discipline and meditate every morning. What happens, within days, instead of weeks, the experiment was supposed to be two weeks, but they had to cut it after a few days, because the wardens became so sadistic and the prisoners were so obedient, it was just a really violent environment. I don't own a car, but on the rare occasion I borrow one or use one, I can just see how my brain operates differently, it's subtle, it's subtle, but it's responding to these signals. I can see that I am in a more aggressive state. If I'm in the city, walking on the street and everybody marching, there's noises and there's smells, it puts me in a different state of being.I'm under a tree, it puts me in a different state of being. If I have bars or don't have bars so, I notice that there are some limits that I put on myself. They don't really look at limits because there's not really a process. I identify it as something that sounds right, and I just apply it to myself, and then very quickly I have this sense of liberation and freedom, more than I had before. So, this is a lot of what I am after is, to myself, how do I apply these to myself? What other things can I chose that are equal to the form, not to the content?
So what would happen if the form I apply to a relationship is a form of, you are mine, I am yours, we are here forever? What content is that more likely to create in the same way as the prison environment?What happens when my diet is based on seeds, seeds and grains, and legumes, and food? What happens when my food is based on fruit and leaves, not just what it does for me, but what does my garden look like?And how much water does my garden need? How easy is it for me to be self sufficient?
Some of the communities we visited aspire to self sufficiency, it's one of their ideals, they're very attached to 20%, that would be a very good place, and that's mostly because their diet is based on grains, and grains in the form of meat, it's because of the animals that ate grain, and it's very intensive to grow grains. But an eco forest that we visited in Spain, the diet is based on fruits and leaves. Fruit is, you plant a tree and you have oranges every year and they're not much work. And leaves is something that grows very easily, and you don't actually pull out the whole plant, you just take the leaves, and actually, it goes to seed, and you let the seeds go on the ground, grow again to leaves. So for me, I tell people I eat 70% things I pick myself, and people say, wow, that's a lot. But I'm not a permaculture expert, I do know a lot of the permaculture principals, that's not something that I spend a lot of energy on, I'm a "lazy gardener", but because my diet is adjusted to more easy things to grow, then it's very easy for me. It's not out of self discipline I have to eat 70% of my diet, it's a form, and then the content is 70% of the diet, at least,is something I pick myself.
There's a great sense of liberation because of how people are worried that they won't have what they need, and to know that I can subsist on what grows freely, all around, even the excess things that fall on the ground. And not just survive, but thrive and be happy and enjoy it -- the best food ever. I appreciate that.
I noticed that many communities are... they came up with the best form they could come up and then they don't want to change that form. They just hope that the content would change, and they try all kind of meetings and rules, and it never works out in the long run, because the form is so... it is a form and it's... you can only create one shape out of that form. So, I was really excited about, when we visited communities that experimented with form. I know, like for example,Naot Smadar, they have a habit of switching houses, not staying too long at the same house. What does that do? They do it as an experimental thing, and then they talk about it, and they see that it does well for them, and so theykeepthat habit, and they try different things. I know that when I visited Naot Smadar, I had to run out of the dining room right after the meal, because there was a free box of cigarettes and everybody would go and smoke, but it stopped, some change had happened.It was a good sign because, any of the communities we visited, the older ones,seemed like when I looked at the picture books, and I heard the stories, the progress only happened for so far, and then it kind of stalls there. And, it's not necessarily sustainable, the way it stalls there. It may be comfortable for the veterans of the community, they may be tired, but it doesn't work for the younger people, the children, but they have these rules there that are not liberating rules.
I visited a community that has a rule that you had to keep a ratio of one child to five adults, which means that there's a waiting list of adults that want to have children in the community, and families from outside, like us, that could never join -- which is fine, and I understand the importance of knowing what is the carrying capacity of the land, or the community, and not just have children out of tune to the limit. But, it seems like the tribal people which are the most egalitarian way that ever existed, no matter how many communities like this there are, they found a way to live this way without imposing these limits in that contracting way. It seems like they found a way of life that maintains its number of the population.
I can see how, I have one daughter and we hitchhike together, we don't have a car, she is unschooled so she is integrated into the daily life, she takes her amount of attention. and gives attention when she's here. Having another kid, in my head, I don't... now I am verbally processing it, but having another kid means, having another kid to hitchhike with, or another kid to have here, and it seems like if I would have my excessive high-tech job, and a big house with rooms, and the kid would go to school, and I would see the kid at noon or on the weekends then I would be less in tune with what the limits are, because the system is so complex. My salary comes from this company, corporation in California, my food comes from here, the kids to go school, where they learn these things that are not necessarily useful to them -- it's a very complex system. It creates a detachment from nature, and what the carrying capacity is, so I would really like to find these forms that work, and this is something that is very interesting to me, whether it is in a community or not.
How do people forgive each other? What is the form that really helps people forgive each other? Or, what is the form that creates the least conflicts? For example, they discovered that most couples fight after dark, okay, after dark. Now, they can go to all kinds of workshops on how to communicate better, and take responsibility for their feelings, and it's all important. But they can just go to sleep when the sun goes down, and bypass that. So again, we leave the lights on, the same way we do with the chicken coops. In the chicken coops, they leave the lights on, so that the chicken will lay more eggs; that makes us more active. So, we make artificial time to see each other, we skip... I noticed on our trips, we spent time together awake in the dark, especially in the winter when the days are short and at five o' clock it's dark.We don't go to sleep at five, but we get into a horizontal position at five, and we look at the stars, and lying down and looking at the stars creates a very different feeling and content than being in florescent light. Even though the compact florescent is more ecological, being in the florescent light seeing each other and using the eyes as the main sensorial organ. Just sitting around a fire and looking at fire, I am not judging it right now, but it creates different content than looking at the stars, and looking at sky, or snuggling against each other because it's cold and there's no fire -- it creates something else.
I noticed that many groups of people that want to create community together are very focussed on the logistics of it, so, how to get land, how to get the money to buy the land, and I find that is the easiest part. You can gather 10 people together, in this part of the world, and they can all get a sum of money together and get a nice piece of land; that's all it takes. It could take a year, but it's just a year. After that, once you live together, you need to learn how to communicate, you need to know what to do when a couple breaks up, if there's couples, what happens if someone falls in love, or you get jealous, how do you create income, the expenses, how do you own things together, how do you change if you decide one thing and then how do you make changes -- radical changes, if they are needed.
So in the last 3 years, I have been doing something called the Wander Gatherers. It is a dream of mine that manifested years before, that going out with people and living on what is; living on what there is. When I was in the States, I guess I wasn't charismatic enough or mature enough to do it, but I tried to do it with friends, tell them, let's go out for a few days and see how it is. I was confronted with, they didn't take me seriously, or resistance, and it didn't manifest, it always ended up that we brought food with us.
Personally, and with my family, I discovered that I really appreciate most, especially when I am eating live food, the food that I pick, and know where I picked, and it's tree-ripened and local, and in season, is the most orgasmic, is the best tasting, the best experience, not just in the mouth, but is a stronger sense of connection with life. So naturally, I felt more and more drawn to food that I pick myself, and wild food, or food that is is more natural. I became more confident in it. Once we returned here, I actually did meet a couple of friends who were excited enough to do this with me, and we did a few experimental trips; first one for a week, and then another one for three days, and another one for three weeks to see how it is to live off of what is. The first time I did it, I discovered, doing it for several days, I felt I had discovered Eden; I discovered paradise, and it is right under our nose. It is the way of being that is most healthy, and liberating, and in tune, and easy, joyful.
But there was one, after the three weeks that only me and my daughter did, one disadvantage was that my daughter said that at the end of three weeks it was very fun but there was no other kids. It's like that conclusion that, they made that movie Into the Wild, what's the worth of freedom, joy or happiness, if you can't share it with anyone. So we did invite some people to come, but I noticed it was difficult for the people. From the side, what I've seen is that the difficulty was, their heart was not open, especially with friends; people that are close to me, that already go into certain roles with me, and I go into certain roles with them, and it's something that happens in our culture when we think we know someone. We have our limiting ideas about them, and they have their own self imposed limiting ideas about themselves when they are around us. It's very limiting, and their heart is not completely open, and then the weather is either too hot or too cold, or there's too many mosquitoes, or there is not this food or that food, and all these things suddenly matter a lot.
So, I basically combined deep ecology work, transformational workshops I've been through. Doing it while some background is not some class in Tel Aviv, but it's being outdoors, and living together off of what is, creates a common and very egalitarian livelihood for us during the journey. I announced the first trip and it was just three days long, which allows one full day from waking up till going to sleep. It was excellent feedback, and I could just get it immediately as we did it. The people were not hungry when you get enough hugs. I joke about that, that B12, doesn't matter if you're vegetarian or not, because 40% of the population has low B12 levels, and I say that B12 means that you have to have 12 hugs a day in order to thrive. So, when you have enough hugs and you have enough true encounters with the people around you, not just hi, bye, or like wedding-style encounters, some can actually go deep and look into another's eyes and breathe, and say honestly what you feel, everything, especially the things you put aside.
And, the combination of living very close to the land, I noticed I had a connecting result, not result, sensation; a feeling of connection. I would say that many of the transformational workshops are in the feeling; they are doing it indoors, where you don't hear the birds, and then you can go very high and lose connection with the earth, and here, you can't lose connection with the earth. When people come, they see some apples on the floor and suddenly start asking, wait a minute, isn't there pesticides here on the apples and it's not like they eat all organic at home, but when they see where the food is grown and they feel more connected to it, they start asking more questions out of care for themselves and the food.
The trips are basically a collection of things I learned that are creating a greater sense of connection, and encouraging true encounters, so people leave their cellphones at home, that's a big distraction, the screens, all the screens are distractions, big distractions that takes us away from who we are, where we're from. That's so rare, just to be able to experience with a group of people for three days without a cellphone, or without even checking or thinking about checking the messages. Also, you come to the meeting point without a vehicle and a few people go around it, instead of parking the vehicle, and confess later the fact that they parked their vehicle at some starting point of the trip, and the possession of this expensive machine, and thinking about it being in the dark over there, or thinking about we need to go back to it, is also a distraction. We carry minimal sleeping equipment, and we don't bring tents, so we co-sleep, and make one big bed from all the mattresses (sleeping bags), and all sleeping close without even a small gap, just sleeping in one bed together, looking at the stars and being in the dark together; all these have a simple yet profound connecting qualities.
People come on the trip with different intentions. It could be someone who works in Tel Aviv in an office, but has difficulties with his employee or his mother. Or, they have difficulties changing their lifestyle, and they can come back to a more meaningful experience. They learn, they get empowered to manifest their vision, whatever it is, it's their own. People come again and again to the trips with different visions, different intentions, and in the last three years, we just celebrated 300 people who came on the trips; many came many times. All my friends, also, the people who are in the circle, most of their friends are from this group. I don't keep in touch with all of them, but I know several who their best friends are from these trips.This is not a tribe yet of people marching the earth together, but in the summer, we are doing two-week-long trips where we subsist solely on what we find.
But, it's really only really short, you realize it's minor, the subsisting on what you find. You learn the plants, you eat what there is, if it tastes good -- that's the background. The foreground is the human-animal experience of encountering ourselves, each other, nature, and it's so simple, and sometimes it is also so sad that it's kind of rare to have this thing. I can travel the world, visit Rainbow Gatherings but the fire is always on, they always turn on the fire. On the trips, we let go of fire, control of fire is one of the suspects of humanity's fall from grace, and as I said, we discovered the quality of watching the stars. And just now, there was a Rainbow Gathering that just ended in the Golan, and it ended up with 13,000 dunams of forest burnt, just because of the use of fire. It is also knowing the limit, when we use fire, and we're in this number of population, there's a very good chance that it could be by accident; we're not perfect and we've never used technology in a perfect way, so you go, and some people burn their toilet paper after they use it, or they make a small fire and think that they turn it off, and it is a mistake of an instant that creates so much damage, to the little nature that is left in this area.
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