First of all to set the stage, we were a bunch of young people who migrated to San Francisco mid-sixties, me personally, Summer of Love, 1967 so called. Had been in New York City. Tried to break into off Broadway theatre. Sort of being a beatnik, being, thinking myself to be a rebel type. When all these interesting looking papers started to appear on the newsstands in the Village, such as the San Francisco Oracle. And I am reading in the San Francisco Oracle that people like Alan Ginsberg, who i had read as beatniks, talking about "God", and all this incredible art work and all this energy coming out of this newspaper where all these people are really excited, they're obviously having a really good time, they're obviously having interesting psychic and spiritual adventures; that was just very compelling.
We heard of this gathering that came to be known as the Human Be-In, when thousands and thousand of hippies showed up in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and had this tremendous celebration; music, speakers and the characters of the day like Alan Ginsberg, Tim Leary showed up and I am sure the Grateful Dead played and so forth. We are in New York City, we hear about this and think we gotta have one of these in New York. So we put together a thing that does not amount to much in Central Park in New York and we start to feel drawn to San Francisco like thousands of other young people in America that time.
So we put it together, my brother and my wife and I, get some kind of a drive away, get a car of some kind and drive to San Francisco and we don't stop driving till we get to the Pacific Ocean; we get out the car and walk to the Pacific Ocean. The next day we are on Haight Street, and caught up in this incredible time that was happening of young people streaming in, people living on the streets, piled up in community housing. It seemed like in that time you could live off nothing almost, didn't really need, and you didn't even think about where the next meal was coming from. I mean ultimately, we went out and got jobs in the post office or in one thing or another, but we were doing what hippies do out there, experimenting, having all these amazing experiences that were really changing our perspective about who we were as human beings.
I would say that previous to that, a lot of us in my generation, certainly myself, were kind of semi-depressed, not too interested in stuff, cynical, not sure where we fit in; we're young, we're in our twenties, but still we were already kind of down about things. And, we went from that overnight into excited to be alive, realizing that everything was possible, in that, infinite possibilities and love love love and peace and love and the world is kinda crazy out there, but hey, we are waking up here, as a generation. We're waking up to the fact that we are actually each other, it is all in the mind; George Harrison, we're dancing to the Beatles, we are alive, we have come alive. We gave up alcohol, we gave up cigarettes, we gave up meat, we are gradually purifying ourselves and feeling better about who we are, a big change.
And then, we hear about this gathering that's happening initially it happened at Glad Memorial Church on Thursday night, and then it moved to a theatre on Haight Street and then the Family Dog Ballroom where this fellow from San Francisco State, a guy about ten years older than us, but one of us, one of the hippies, Steven Gaskin, was having these gatherings and these meetings where we could get together to talk about these experiences that we were having. What does this stuff mean and should we be putting something together here other than party, party, party and dance on the streets, and ride the buses, and go to the beach and stuff. So we started seriously planning, and he described it, I thought really well when he said, it is kind of like the Second Continental Congress for Second American Revolution. And that is what we felt like, revolutionaries, we felt like we were on the cusp of creating a new society. I mean, we were not shy about our ambitions for what we felt we could accomplish.
So, these classes went on for a couple of years from '68, '69, '70. There was actually a group of Methodist ministers having a meeting in San Francisco. Some of them came to the Monday night class and they were intrigued by what we were talking about. They realized that there was a lot of crazy stuff going on in their communities all over the US, of young people tripping, people being freaked out by it, what does it all mean? And thought that they heard some sense being made here and thought that the Monday night class message would be valuable if it went out into the rest of the country, if it was heard elsewhere. Which brought on the idea -- Hey, let's have a caravan, let's put together a tour, and let's move out of our apartments into school buses. Ended up a couple hundred plus of us moved out of our apartments, left our jobs at the post office, fixed our buses up to be livable, little stoves and beds for our kids -- some of us had kids, not many -- and headed out across the country.
It was October 12, 1971 when we left San Francisco. I was just talking to Steven today and he reminded me of a story about the caravan. We went up to the Oregon border, the word had gone out that there were hippies coming and they had a lot of dope, marijuana. We get to a rest area in Grand's Pass, Oregon and the cops are there waiting for us. They found, I think on Steven's bus, a peyote button, which he used, kinda, as an emblem on his dashboard. And they found a little grass. There was grass on these buses and people were just throwing it out the window or whatever. But they busted Steven being, "We'll take the main guy out".
So we actually went into court and this judge says, "What's the deal?" And Steven says, "We're about to go on this tour and we're actually peaceful and our whole message is that we are not scary, we want to help bring peace." You have to remember this time in America, there was a war between generations, and actual fact, people were actually arming themselves on campuses. Kent State, it happened in 1970. There was some people saying it was time to hit the streets with guns and we said, "You know what, that is not the way, this is a revolution but this is a different kind of revolution. This revolution is about peace, guns are not going to work, we tried that, and it's never worked."
So judge said, "Hmm, that's interesting. Well, tell you what, I am going to let you go out on your tour but we're gonna watch you and we're gonna follow exactly what happens with all you people going around the country in these buses. And if it looks like you are doing what you say you are doing, well, we'll re-examine this. But if not, you're going to have to pay a price." And that's what happened. We went out, left, in October, we were in Washington, DC at Christmas, we came back through Nashville, landed back in California in January of '71, and we did not have any apartments to come back to or jobs or anything. So now what?
We needed to put our money where our mouth is. We should think about making a community where we actually put into practice some of the stuff that we had been talking about, which is, honesty, could we actually live together peaceably, unarmed? Without fighting and killing each other? We have to prove that we are not just talk here. We have to experiment with a new way of living together. And in fact, it looks like the only way that we're going to survive as a species is if we become more co-operative in a different way than this whole capitalism game of competition and stabbing each other in the back. That does not seem to be sustainable so let's try something different.
So we headed out this way we had 2 places in mind, Minnesota and Tennessee. We thought, Minnesota is too cold, okay, we're off to Tennessee. And we come across the country and we get a lot of news coverage: "The hippies are looking for land". We hit Tennessee, everybody is scared to death of us. Every time we are almost getting a piece of land, it falls through because the neighbors call the guy and say, "Don't sell to the hippies". But we got lucky and we met someone, the daughter of a businessman in Nashville, says, "You know what, I like you guys. I got a piece of land down in Lewis County. It's not the land that you are looking for, but go on down there and you can camp there, out of the limelight". Because we were in a park in Nashville, and we were the thing to do on the weekends for the gawkers. So we came down an 800 acre piece, right over here, next door.
Some guys looking for work came over and went to work for the guy that owns this land that we are sitting on, a thousand acre ranch, Carlos Smith. And Carlos says, "I like you boys. You looking for land, huh? You know what, I am trying to sell mine, seventy dollars an acre". One thousand acres, boom! Next thing you know, we've got this place and we come on with our buses. So a lot of our energy in year one and year two is survival: digging the out houses, getting the first shower built, getting our first crops in the ground. And, learning how to live out here in the woods: dealing with ticks and chiggers and snakes. Figuring out a diet, because we wanted to be vegetarians but we had to learn how to be vegetarians. So then we learn about soybeans and pretty soon we were making tofu and soy milk.
Things were coming together. Steven came up with, we were having Sunday mornings. We would get up at sunrise and watch the sun come up, and then have a service. It was kind of our church thing, where we basically talked about anything under the sun from spiritual principles to what are we going to do about the soybean crop this year, or whatever. He was the one that came up with the idea: We've been here since 1974, we've been here four years and we're feeling like it's happening, we're making it work. We're eating good, we're having our babies, we've got own little clinic going on, we've got some businesses happening, we've got crews going out doing construction, we're learning how to do stuff, we learned how to fix our trucks, we are getting along with our neigbours.
Wow, our neighbours, a lot of them are old moonshiners, but rebels in their own right, which made it a little easier for us to be accepted. And, the Amish were already here, so we said, "We are just the Technicolor Amish, we are like the Amish", and that helped. So, [Stephen] says, "Besides just guilding our lily and fixing our community, let's not forget that we did promise to try to save the world. So let's have an organization".
Okay, so the idea came up that we should stand ourselves beyond the boundaries of The Farm. What are we going to do? Well, we'll call it 'Plenty,' we'll go to the IRS and get ourselves classified as a non-profit. Now what? Well, what does a non-profit charity do? Hey, some of our neighbours are actually hungry! We're living in the poorest county in Tennessee. We knew that. There are neighborhoods in our local towns -- Larksberg, Mount Pleasant -- that are not doing well. They actually need food. We're farming now. We went whole hog farming -- although we didn't have hogs -- but we went big into farming thinking that was how we were going to support ourselves. So we had a lot of surpluses. Sweet potatoes, okraÉ and we had our canning and freezing operation set up so we were preserving food. We had food trees.
So, okay, we've got extra. We start giving food away. First to local communities, then Nashville, Memphis. We just read about a whole neighbourhood in Memphis where people don't have to eat. You have to remember, this is the early seventies and we had just gone through the Nixon era. Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty -- if he hadn't gotten mixed up in Vietnam, he would have been known for his war on poverty which did a lot of good things. But all the things that he set up with the war on poverty, including food closets funded by the Federal Government, had been squeezed down to nothing by Nixon. So, we're actually supplying food to the Federal food closets so that they have food to give out.
So then, there was a tornado in a town in Northern Alabama. Let's get a bus, a bunch of guys that knew how to build, let's go down and see if we can help out. When we got down there, we met the Amish, some of our Amish neighbours. They always go out to these things. He told us about the Mennonite Central Committee, which was the Mennonite version of Plenty, and we started learning from them that they had projects in Haiti, Honduras. And we thought, Haiti? Honduras? Wow. So we're starting to get the idea that there's a lot of different things that we could be doing besides disaster relief and giving food away.
Early days, mid 1975, somebody brings a ham radio to The Farm, because we have a few guys who know how to do the ham radio. So we're getting on the international circuit. No internet yet. We've got typewriters, we've got CB radios, and we've got ham radios. Whatever technology is available, we've got it, because we like our technology. And so, the ham radio guys are tooling around and they hearÉ We start hearing reports of this big earthquake in Guatemala. 1976, February 4. Massive. Seven-point-plus. Thousands killed, huge. And we're getting first-hand reports because of the ham radio. So we decide -- we should be down there, to see. Where is Guatemala, by the way?
And so I flew down with my wife, who spoke Spanish, and was a medical person, and we landed in this incredible place where everybody in uniform is carrying a live weapon. And then we meet the Mayans, who suffered most of the casualties from the earthquake. We end up spending four years in Guatemala helping rebuild towns and schools. Of course we end up with the Mayan. But we start to understand, too, the politics of poverty. See, these people aren't just poor because they don't have jobs. They're oppressed. They've been oppressed. Oh, they're indigenous peoples, ah! So we start understanding something that was completely new to us. Indians, military dictatorships -- cruel, murderous military dictatorships.
And we're bringing in the technologies that we're learning, to survive here. Soybean for protein, midwifery, primary health care, communications. We set up FM radio for the Mayan Indians in this one big town. And water systems. Realize, these people aren't just hungry because they're not getting enough protein -- they've got so many intestinal parasites because of the water that they drink. And they don't have access to clean water, so we're understanding the kinds of technologies that we can assist with. And meanwhile, we're absorbing all of this incredible culture of this people that is thousands of years old. Makes us feel like babies. Plus, we have the same religion. HeyÉ we all think the same.
So all of a sudden we're all dressing ourselves in Mayan traje and we're bringing Mayans up to The Farm. We had a hundred Mayans up here over that period, that we got in here on different visas so they could live on The Farm and learn some of our stuff. And we're living with them and eating with them, and a few of us married Mayans and we're adopting Mayans, so there was this whole integration of hippies and Mayans that was a beautiful thing. But this was really where Plenty went to Graduate School in the field of development and what you can and can't do and how you do stuff.
In every project there's been a connective tissue person within that culture. Often times, it's kind of a key family who really has a vision of wanting to help do some work in that community. We plug in with that family or that group, and then we've got leverage. And then we stay. We don't parachute in, dig a well, and leave. We stay. And we stay so long that after a while we're getting invited to the weddings and the funerals. And we know, that way we have really gotten to a place where projects have some hope of sustainability, and it's no longer our project, it's now a partnership. That's what I like to see, when we get a partnership going. Because then those people do other projects and do other projects, and it spreads.
And from there, we've had projects in the South Bronx and throughout the Caribbean. Today we have a project in Belize. We have a project where we bring kids out of the city down here in the summertime, Kids in the Country, where they can ride horses and have gardens. Working at Pine Ridge we've continued to work with Native Americans. Since that time, after we met the Mayans, we realised that the Indians are at the bottom of the pecking order, wherever they are. Plus, they're living in the most threatened ecosystems, and are the best protectors of those. So, if we can help keep these cultures alive it also helps the environment and so forth.
So, that was some of the kinds of things that we were learning, and we've gotten support from incredibly faithful -- not a big number, but a few thousand faithful donors that make possible everything that we do as Plenty. And these are people that share our values and they want to see 'Small-Is-Beautiful' kinds of operations -- villages-scale, small stuff where they can see exactly what their support is doing. And over the course of this last thirty-plus years that we've been doing Plenty, I've seen a million 'Plenty's or 'Plenty'-like things pop up, mushroom all over the planet. Which is a beautiful thing to see. One of the most hopeful things I see is that there are so many people taking the initiative. And it'll take all of us and then some.
You know, I've been blessed by being able to do this kind of work. And I got into it at the beginning, and I think partly because I got a tick bite and got Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever back in 1974 and was recovering from a four day coma and everything and didn't have a full time job at that time. So I got picked to help with Plenty at that very early stage and then have stayed with it ever since because there's nothing I'd rather do. But we've always seen that the work that we do in Plenty and our other non-profits, like Peace Routes, the midwife training project, Steven's Rosanante project, elderly care, the Swan trust, our land trust organization -- that all these things tie together and are what keep the community strong.
We truly believe that The Farm, as a community, we needed the outreach programs that we did. We needed to stay out on the cutting edge. And the Ecovillage Training Center is another non-profit that keeps us in touch with people like yourself, other communities. You know, we want to be relevant. We like being relevant. We like being in the mix.
We started out, like you say, as a collective, shared everything in common. We had limited housing, so any given household would have at least thirty people living there. You had a constant flow of new people coming in to be integrated and so forth, which was fine when we were in our twenties. But then when we started having kids, it got a little more difficult to keep track of your kids, and so forth. We were weathering that, but in the early 1980's there was an economic downturn. Ronald Reagan came in, ripped the solar panels off the White House, and immediately went to war against poor people. And the people that really paid the price were Indians all over the world, leftist-leaning groups throughout South and Central America, Indians on reservations, and hippy communes. We all paid a steep price.
And the economy got so bad around here that our construction crews didn't feel like we could compete for the jobs -- the few jobs that were available. And we weren't able to really support ourselves. Our population had gotten too big and we had so many people that we were 'taking care of', that we bit off more than we could chew. So certain things were breaking down from that. And we were also getting older and people are starting to think, "You know what? My number one responsibility is to my family, my kids. I'm going to have to do what I have to do, which is go back to Texas or California and take care of my family." So a whole bunch of people left. So, everybody who was left here was also facing a big land mortgage on additional land that we had bought and so forth, and, oh, it was teetering a little bit. It looked like, jeez, we could lose it all.
And there were still 300 people or so here. So they started meeting -- I wasn't here, I was in one of the satellite communities in Washington, DC they had from 1978 to the period of the change-over, around '84. We didn't even know this was going on. We were up there, we were still a collective and so forth. At any rate, gradually we caught on and realized that there was no longer a guarantee, as far as Plenty was concerned, for our volunteers, that our volunteers could just work for free. Everybody was going to have to do something to support themselves or have some way of getting support. So, that winnowed down the population even further here, so that the only people that could stay were the people that had some way of supporting themselves. We had a few businesses that kept going, the book company being one of them.
But like I say, I was still in Washington, DC, and I was still doing Plenty from there. It didn't really matter where I was, as far as Plenty, but we also had a Plenty office here. And I ended up going out to California with my family, because I didn't have a place to come back to here. But I kept doing Plenty from there, in touch with the office here and so forth, and Plenty kept going. The thing that had energized the projects in the Bronx and Guatemala, was that we had ready-made, skilled volunteers that we knew and trusted, that we could go, "Hey, could you go up to the South Bronx? They need another EMT". "Could you go down to Guatemala? We need a nurse", or "We need a farmer down in Guatemala." We could recruit out of our community, our overhead was under five per cent, and we were really able to do a lot of big projects that way.
So okay, now everybody we hire has to be a volunteer. And also, we're not going to have them live on The Farm for two years to get to know them, which had been one of the rules. So, we're going to have to assume some other people's good will. And one of the first volunteer groups that we had after that, in 1987 -- I got a letter from a group of MBA students from the School of Business in Philadelphia: "We want to work on a Plenty project after we graduate, before we go to Wall Street and become bankers." In 1987, in the middle of the Reagan years, when MBA's had the reputation of 'get rich quick, millionaire before you're thirty', here's eight MBA students from the top business school in the country and they want to do a Plenty project.
So, I actually went out to see them in Philadelphia. I grew up in Philadelphia, so I go back there from time to time, so I went out and met with them. And I looked in their eyes and I saw us, twenty years previously. Except that they were coming out of, most of them had lived internationally, spoke two or three languages. These kids were really bright, and they were really idealistic and really wanted to help. Except the project that I had in mind was gonna cost 15,000 dollars, just for the parts, because we were going to build a soy dairy on the island of Dominique for the Caribindians. And we didn't have any money to pay them to get there, so they were on their own.
I said, "Here's the dealÉ" They didn't blink. They went right to work, and within a month had raised 15,000 dollars from two donations from graduates of the Wharton School of Business who liked the idea of them going out and doing a project like that. And they went down and did a great job, did a really good project. So then I had volunteers from MIT, Stanford University. All of a sudden, we were getting all these 'next generation' young people, who had nothing to do with The Farm, had never been hippies, but who shared the vision and the ideal. And I have never had a problem with one of them, and I have had dozens and dozens of graduate students.
And since then we've had volunteers from all walks of life, from lots of different countries. So there's that thing that binds us. People respond to opportunities when they see them. So, we live on in terms of our volunteers and all of our people that are like that. Our director of our project down in the Gulf, the post-Katrina rebuilding of New Orleans, was a hippy that grew up in Pennsylvania and had never been here before. A good friend of his runs our project in Belize, another guy that grew up in the hippy scene in Pennsylvania but was not a Farm guy. So, at this point, The Farm has been integrated into the rest of the world and vice versa. I don't see a boundary between us anymore, and I look at our young people that got raised here and their friends and their friends, and I feel like it's really spread far and wide, and is really pretty powerful.
One thing that just occurred to me is that in the early Farm, besides being here and working on getting our systems set up and so forth, we were also a bit of an evangelical group, in that we were going out on tour with "Steven and the Farm Band". We had a pretty good rock 'n roll band, very accomplished, great lead guitar player. We had a scenic cruiser bus, and we were going out on these tours to colleges and community centres and city parks all over the country. We had several tours. We had one tour just in the west, the 'Great Western Tour', and then we had tours. I remember one concert at Yale University one time where we got there and were in an auditorium and the band came out and started to play, and joints -- rolled joints -- started raining down from the ceiling. The Yale University students had rigged it up to have that happen. 1973! I don't think that would happen today.
At any rate, when we would be out there, we would be talking about The Farm. "We're setting up this community. You want to come live with us?" Or, "Hey! Why don't you start your own?" So, a lot of people would start their own. "Say, you know what? We're here in Missouri, we've got a little piece of land. We want to start our own. But we want to be hooked up with you guys. We want to be part of The Farm 'thing.'" So, a lot of them started that way, where people said, "We'll start one in our own place. Plus, we had too many people, and we thought it was a good idea to have some safety valves. You know, so there were some other places people could go.
Sometimes these centres or satellites coalesced around a Plenty project. I was in Washington, D.C., we had a couple things going on up there. For one thing, we were suing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to shut down atomic power. For another thing, we were helping Native Americans who were coming to meet with their congressmen and senators about various issues affecting them. We were helping what we call "Atomic Veterans". These are the guys that flew through the mushroom clouds back in the early 50's atomic tests and now had cancer, and we're trying to get some help for their widows from the Veterans' Administration. And then we started a clinic for Central American refugees who were pouring in to Washington, D.C. In New York, in the South Bronx, we had an ambulance service going on. Everybody in that satellite community, which was thirty-five people in a tenement in the South Bronx, was involved in that ambulance service. In Miami, Florida we had a home for the elderly.
So that was oftentimes the reason behind or the integrating factor of a satellite community, but it was also just a rambunctious, energetic time, where we were just going crazy. We were all over the place. We didn't see any limits. It was like, "Let's go!" Like I say, we thought everybody would be living like us in ten, fifteen years. We thought that was the way to go. And the fact that it didn't go quite the way we expected it to go was a lesson learned. And then, that's when we realized, "We're not going to do it all. It's going to have to be other generations and this is an ongoing process". And I think we're continuing to evolve.
But we're aging. We're dying. We've lost four board members in the last five years, in their fifties. So we're also very aware that we need to pass the torch. I can't predict exactly how it will go, but right now we're at a place of watching. We have a lot of people who used to live here, are old friends, of our generation, that want to move back. Their kids are grown. They're retired. They want to move back. I think that the future of this community will be not necessarily the young people that grew up here, but the young people who are looking for community for the first time. A lot of them come through the Ecovillage Training Center and stay, and others come through the Midwife Training Program,young women with young families. Our children who come back here, it's usually after they're married and are gonna have a kid. Then they want to come back. So, it'll be interesting to see how that evolves.
But I'm not worried about it, because our kids are really talented and your generation is really way ahead. I can see how things evolve enough to see how far ahead you guys are at your age from where we were at a similar age. That's pretty impressive, and that's the hope of the world to me. That's proof that things are growing, that the human mind is evolving, is getting wiser. I'm only really shocked that we still have war at this late date. And the thing that I can't emphasize enough is that everything that we want to do about ecology and the environment is a waste of time if we're still having war. We've got to get rid of that. And that's when we'll know that the human race has reached an area of true growth.
And when 9-11 broke, all of us understood the same thing at the same time: this is an opportunity to break the habit, the war habit. This is a perfect opportunity. We don't need to go bomb anybody. We don't need to. It's not going help. We could do something really interesting, that would shake things up in a way that would change the course of history. And I feel like everybody who was in the street before that war in Iraq had that same feeling: why are we doing this again? How many times to we have to go down that road beforeÉ Wasn't there an old song about that? [Sings Bob Dylan's Blowing In the Wind]. Anyway, that's the ongoing thing that we all share and that's the dream that we all keep working on.
I think one of the most destructive things that we built was a hierarchy. We're less collective but we're much more democratic now. I don't think anybody feels oppressed by the hierarchy, really. The hierarchy could be oppressive then. And it was difficult. Once you have a hierarchy in place it's difficult to penetrate it. So, if I could have changed anything it would have been, I would have tried to get ahead of the hierarchy, and instead of just either ignoring it or participating in it, if I could've just said, "Yep. Uh, hold it, hold it. We got this hierarchy here. We've got to switch that now. We need to move that."
We got into it without knowing it. We got into it because inevitably, because you're trying to get things done, and everybody's not on the same page, and we had a spiritual teacher with a very strong personality, and we got too reliant on him in some cases, and he got too reliant on our reliance. Also there was a little bit of growing up and getting to the point where you didn't want to ask Steven if you could do such-and-such anymore. You just want to go and do it. So there was a little bit of that. So it was a mutual thing on his part and our part, where we had to disengage from that student-teacher relationship and develop a different relationship. And still love each other, and not be mad about it.
And that took a few years. But it's all cool now. Although I know there are still people Ð maybe their last memory of Steven was when he chewed them out for something they did wrong. Living closely with the guy, he's just as sweet and smart as ever. And in no way is he trying to reinstate that thing -- if anything he's relieved to not do that anymore.
I think it was pretty hard when we went from 'collective' to 'everyone-for-themselves, we can't take any more new people, no we're not taking single moms'. We were automatically compared to when we were open-arms, come-one-come-all. Psychologically, I think we got a little hard as a people in that transition, and I think we're just coming out of that in a lot of ways and healing from what was a bit of a divorce feeling or, "Gee, don't we like each other anymore? Who got the big... Who ended up with the best... You know, all the goodies, after the music stopped, kind of thing. So, there was a certain healing process that we've gone through.
But we have continued to work on that. We have a reunion every year. We get together, we talk about these things. We meet in spiritual kinds of environments, we meet in party kinds of environments. We have a festival. We talk about our various non-profits, and so forth and so on. And we're having a constant flow of people that come through and refresh us and give us new ideas. And we have four meetings a year where we talk about the various things that we're doing and trying to do. I've felt an evolution.
I missed the so-called 'change-over', so I was happy, because it didn't sound like it was a lot of fun. There was some bad feelings, and some people got hurt by it. I floated along doing Plenty and always getting to interact with the best parts of the community, and the best parts of our friends and supporters. So, that's been kind of fortunate, but I also feel that it gives me a certain responsibility to continue to emphasize that part, and build on that, and make opportunities for other people to have that, because you want to have something that makes you excited to wake up in the morning and get to go do. And if you don't have that, then keep looking for it, because it's there.
The key is -- and we've always said this -- the key is your spiritual stuff. Your toolbox, your toolkit. Because the key is -- can we get along with each other? Well, sometimes we don't. Well, what kind of stuff don't we get along about? We have to learn the skills of tolerance, forgiveness, humour. In the early days, we were all up in each other's thing: "Oh, you said something, you sounded angry there! Were you angry? I thought I sensed something". "No! I'm not". "Oh, you're being defensive". We would sometimes harass each other, and we had to learn how to get off it, be compassionate. And a lot of our Sunday Services with Steven was bringing us back to being more compassionate. I can remember, we had a tendency to be hard on each other and get into fights over meaningless stuff, so it was a constant process of learning, "Well, that's not really worth fighting over, is it?"
The key is -- probably, if there was one most important key -- it's the ability to forgive each other, and really don't get hung up on the small stuff that we get into trouble about, and get revved out about. So, if people understand how to climb down off their high horses and when we get on those places that are uncomfortable for those of us who are on the high horse as well as those below.
My wife and I are both on our third marriage and we both that say it took us two to learn. It's a process of understanding the mechanics of getting along and dealing with people's foibles and eccentricities. And living in community is harder in some ways than maybe living in your box in the suburbs where you don't have to interact with anybody, and you don't know anybody's thing, and if somebody dies down the block, well, that's that. In community, when somebody dies -- it's family. But at the same time, when somebody gets married, it's family; when somebody gets born, it's family. The moments where we are still very collective are at our marriages and funerals, our community parties and meetings. We're very collective in those.
We still talk about being in a 'mental nudist colony' where we share mind. If somebody here is mad about something, I feel it over here. It affects me. Not like when I lived in Philadelphia. If somebody was mad... who knows who's mad on the street? But I know when one of my friends is mad. But, at the same time, if one of my friends is happy, that makes me happy. So, you're sharing these things, and everybody doesn't want to share that stuff, see? So that again is something to be learned, but the possibilities for doing things and for self-fulfillment and happiness are also increased in community, in that.
You know, I wouldn't trade this life for anything. This is paradise. It doesn't get any better than this.
