Leben in Gemeinschaft
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I’ve been excited several times reading the article,
although it is a bit long it transmits many of the feelings
that we have those who have made the decision and live away from the mainstream
in the periphery, creating other possibilities for the water of life to flow.
‹‹There is no outside››, we are all in the same place, the planet Earth;
Isolation does not make sense, and also not to follow the inertia of a materialism,
already dehumanized today.
The paradigm shift, the social, cultural and civilizatory transformation is inevitable.
The process is slow because it depends exclusively on the fact that more and more
people develop, open the consciousness, and act accordingly.
To dare to feel, to dream, to imagine another possible world, without wars, without social or environmental injustices, etc. ; it helps to nourish the collective imaginary of luminous, not obscure ideas such as those that today govern the collective unconscious, based on the dependence on money, machines and hierarchies.
Recognize the old world, as such, old, outdated: and free the imagination,
daring to dream free, without fear, how would you like to live? It is a first step.
Another important step is to become aware of the fear that dwells in you,
of your own, family, social and cultural conditioning that governs you.
Seeing it, accepting it, understanding it and releasing it is another process that
leads us to personal empowerment, through which one chooses the path of life
and has the strength to walk it.
There are many steps, continuous tests of physical, moral, ethical, spirit strength.
Getting out of the inertia of the mainstream is like being born again!
Thousands of small decisions, make that every day you tend to the same or
that little by little you tend and transit to another reality,
another way of being here in this life.
It is a creative act and depends only on oneself.
„We are alone but not isolated“, with time you realize that there are more people
who have done the same process, some have even achieve to create islands and
archipelagos of alternative life on this planet.
Life is movement, change is inevitable.
Consciousness is the vehicle and each individual is the protagonist.
Today, progress is spiritual or is not progress,
only decadence and barbarism of a very primitive egocentricity,
submerged in fear and existential ignorance.
Thank you Michael and all the people that make a more human world possible,
here and now.
Q · Valdepuertas (Molinos, Spain) February 12, 2019
We live together with a very smal group, 4 people and after my sister passed away with three people. 15 years ago I started to help people with a consciousness process, to be aware about what we do and experience in our lives. Vaccinations, family with no time for love and not growing up as yourself, school, work, hobbies, earning money, holiday, friends, tv, sexuality as lust, we are totally lost. To come back is a difficult path, nearly impossible, but very beautiful to do.
I began 30 years ago to search the way to myself, had a very lonely way, 12 years no contact with family, except my father, no friends, a therapist, I didn’t know whether I could trust him, it came out I couldn’t, but it was the only way at that moment for me coming out of my pain and problems. At the end I found my mother, I started to give her the love I didn’t get from her, I thought, and so I found myself. When I choose for my mother, I choose for myself, it was against the mainstream, as you write, for me it was also against the family pattern, where it was common that everyone is better and more intelligent than the other. My father allowed that we all may be denigrating about my mother and her love of nature and being kind to everybody. I was very unhappy as a child, crying very easy and often, I was ashamed about my weakness very much.
But when I became conscious I began to understand that daring to feel is the most important thing in life and so I began to grow and grow. Children like me very much, it gave me hope, I am not so strange as people surrounding me let me know and feel. Children are important for me, because they are free from all patterns and labels.
Ecovillage Boekel is an ecovillage, one leg knee deep into the mainstream. We hear the waterfall as loud as the writer of this article. We want to inspire mainstream to divert as a whole before reaching the waterfall. We want the waterfall to dry out, because the water has found a new, more sustainable river bed. We want to be the first in that river bed to inspire the mainstream as a pilot project, a best practice, a living lab for innovations.
We talk with ministries and our province about all the problems that lie ahead. One director of one of the ministries had a meeting on the terrain where we are going to build our houses. After we talked, he said ‚If you are restricted by legislation, let me know, and I will put someone on it, because this ecovillage needs to succeed!.‘ Afterwards, he gave a presentation about Ecovillage Boekel to all eighty directors and said to them: ‚You all need to visit these small, local projects, because out there the real change is being made!‘.
Ecovillage Boekel never has had any problems with legislation. By law we should have been connected to the sewer system, but the municipality has decided we can filter our own waste water and let the clean water infiltrate in the soil. We are mentioned in a law for innovative, sustainable projects where we can test a different way of building. And when it goes well with our project, the general laws changes! That is unique in Europe!
Let the whole river flow down the gentle slope, in stead of over the waterfall. Save as much as we can…
Nicely written, however from the perspective of the reader you need to clarify what you are actually going to say right at the beginning, otherwise most readers will lose interest. Also, what exactly is the point you are trying to make. I am not quite sure.
From my own perspective, eco-villages are not so much a final solution for the entire species as ‚Temporary Autonomous Zones‘ where meaningful experiments can occur with a variety of lifestyle choices, including one that I personally find very hopeful, namely that of living in community and in a situation of direct dependency and response-ability. As you note living in such close proximity to people who we depend upon is not always easy; it forces us to confront dysfunctional aspects of our own character —laziness, materialism, insecurity, inability to communicate, difficulty sharing, difficulty with boundaries etc.
I am very happy to have found a community in which there is no single leitmotif other than a shared appreciation of our natural surroundings and of each other. This, to me, represents the summum of maturity available to us as individuals when we no longer need any specific dogma to hold our communities together but rely instead on our ability to ‚create‘ solutions out of the box, through communication based on love, respect and connection.
As in many other communities there are differences and sometimes tempers flare. I came to this community late and as an outsider I feel able to contribute with a degree of impartiality, discerning the ‚common good‘ without denying the individual needs and finding how each of us can live to the maximum potential by empowering others. Of course this can also be done in any community, also in a city. Wherever there are humans there is community, but usually not actualised through the awareness of ourselves as a community.
In sum, the biggest contribution of the eco-village movement is not in my view necessarily its ecological ethics but the potential for development it offers for those seeking a more meaningful and connected life. That said, I do believe it is fair to say that close proximity to nature and the elements, and work with our hands, development of skills and creativity are important elements of a fulfilled life. I am not anti-technology however I recognise that technology can become an impediment or distraction from this very elementary human need to physically engage with the world and others. It does not have to be this way though; the digital illiteracy of many within the ecomovement is also an obstacle to the forming of bonds of solidarity accross the globe. The rejection of technology is, from a psychological and historical perspective, a form of fundamentalism that sprouts from a very dubious puritanism, that I hope we can avoid.
Ecovillages will often experiment with technologies like wind and solar power. But why accept only those technologies that leave us in an insular, isolated situation? I am reminded of the 1960s film, The Gods must be Crazy, in which a community of hunter gatherers in the Kalahari ultimately reject a gift from the Gods (a coca-cola bottle that fell out of the sky) not because it is inherently evil, but because it divided them (being the only thing in their village of which there was only one).
My point it that we need to evaluate the impact of technology in terms of what we ultimately desire — comfort versus connection for example. My hope is that ecocommunities will continue to promote this message, not as a dogma but as a choice we can make whatever our situation in life. These values will then obviously also become embedded in some of the technologies we create. Ahó