Sedentary Travelogue #7: Diving In

Hello friends!
Life here continues to be great. With the warm weather and longer days, everything seems more free and easy and comfortable. I can't wait until I've been here for a full turn of the seasons. Spring here really brings a sense of life exploding into action. That also means that life feels very busy and even hectic at times. There are many more people here now: interns, visitors, college classes, etc. It's hard to even keep track of all the people I'm now living with sometimes. Yet, it all feels a bit more like a village. The double-wide trailer is no longer the focal point of life here, as the warmer weather has let us spread out onto the land. Some folks are in the strawbale cabin, some have moved into a camper and trailer we have, while many tents are now tucked into the countryside. My own tent is finally repaired and now set up under a large oak down the hill and to the west of everything else.

Recently Jenn and I went up to Iowa to talk to a college class on Religion and the Environment at Simpson College. It was a treat to be given the opportunity to talk to the students about our work here. This was part of my hope in living my life this way -- that I would have important and compelling life experiences of my own to share with the world, not just research I had done about other people's lives. After we had talked for a while, the professor (Sidney Brown, she was fantastic) passed around paper (re-used, naturally) for the students to write down questions for us. We went through and answered the ones that seemed to come up a lot such as what we do about clothing, how we make money, what relationships are like, etc. After the class, we went back to Sid's house for a few muffins and to talk a little more. We came across one of the questions that we hadn't answered during the talk: What about your children? What if they grow up and don't want to "live your dream"? To live that way is your choice, not theirs, isn't that unfair?

It was a great question and Sid asked how we would respond to it? My basic feeling is that children never choose what life they're born into. And I wouldn't expect that children here will necessarilly decide to stay at Dancing Rabbit. However, I expect that we will instill in the children here the idea that whatever they do with their lives, they should do it deliberately and not just because it's "just what you do".

When I first ran across the term "intentional community" it struck me as being a bit... euphimistic or academic. I quickly came to accept the term, but I often see other people having a similar initial reaction to it. Recently I was surprised to discover that the term might work for me better than I had first thought. I was reading through some old journals of mine from around the time I graduated college and started working in Chicago. I was struggling with how to define my life and began talking about wanting everything in my life to be meaningful. I didn't want to get caught in just working my job because it was what I was already doing. I wanted to examine my life and make sure that my time, the most precious resource I have, was well spent, from productive activism to making personal connections to just loafing around and enjoying life. In the journal entry I was going on about not wanting to live accidentally. I wanted my life to be deliberate and I wanted my actions to be intentional. As I read this recently, the word "intentional" kept leaping out at me and seemed to be in every other sentence. Of course I had never heard of "intentional community" at the time and was simply trying to apply this concept to my own apartment-bound life. It amused me to see it from this side of my decision to move here.

Indeed I do find it fulfilling. Even when I do "menial" tasks such as washing the dishes or digging a ditch, I have a sense of how these tasks help build this community, improve the lives of the people around me and support the important work that Dancing Rabbit is doing. And when the fruits of our work are readily tangible, in hearing excitement from people reading our website, or seeing our eco-friendly buildings go up, or watching the baby hawks born in one of the trees in our wildlife preserve area... I am overjoyed to know that my life is helping to make this happen.

Still, there's a difficult side of this kind of living that I didn't fully see before. When you choose to make everything in your life intentional, you automatically open everything up to question. I think this is good, but it can also be tiring. There is a sense that you have to be actively choosing your life every day, every week. There are parts that become easy and automatic, but there's always something new to examine, question, decide about. I think this is exactly what makes this life so rich. I am often energized by the excitement and challenge of it, but sometimes it tires me out. And that's just how I imagine it should happen. I stop and take rests and give myself a break when I need it. It would be foolish not to. And then I jump back into the rich and chaotic fray that is life and keep on moving. There's no other way I would want to live, whether here at DR, working a job in the city or doing whatever life might bring me. And having started this path, I think there is no turning back.

I discovered an oddity in my psychology some years ago. I don't know when it happened, but at some point I apparently developed a fear of deep water. It's not a horrible debilitating thing, but when in water that is deeper than I am tall, my strength quickly ebbs and I have a hard time swimming. I'm sure I have the physical ability to swim just fine, but something else wears me out. It's apparently one of the most common human fears and it seems like it may stem from good instincts, but it goes beyond being a useful instinct in my case and prevents me from perfectly safe action. I don't know when or why it developed, but I hope to overcome it. The feeling of being weary that it places in me is more scary than the water itself.

We have a marvelous swimming pond here. A nice trail winds past our young apple trees to the dock. The pond has many trees hanging over it's waters, and the birds and frogs provide constant music. The other day I was standing on the edge of the dock and I felt a hesitation before getting into the water. Just past the dock, the water is over my head. When it's warm enough I go in every day. I hope to spend more and more time swimming and build up a resistance to this phobia. Unexpectedly, it had caught me for a moment, and I stood there, toes over the edge, just long enough that I could no longer think the hesitation comfortable. Instead of pushing myself, I just relaxed for a moment. I thought about how much I enjoy the water, its sounds, its refreshment. I thought to myself, if you're going to swim every day, then you will have to make a point of it and encourage yourself to learn comfort in swimming. And with that, I dove in.