Ma'ikwe's Bio

My "Prehistory" and Childhood

Once upon a time, the train lines had guys who stood outside, come rain, snow, sun or large metallic objects and waved their arms to signal the trains whether the could come on or stop or switch tracks, etc. One of those guys was a lad named Richard who was wickedly bright and loved language. Eventually, Richard—ever loyal to the trains and train people—worked his way up to being the editor of the country's biggest union newspaper and became one of those crazy "American success stories".

In another part of the country, a guy named Fred was working his way through medical school. His sister had died in a ridiculously preventable gun accident when he was a teenager and it inspired him into a life of service. He already liked science and had taken up bird banding at a young age. That hobby would be handed down to both his sons, and in turn to their children, along with the service ethic.

These two guys were my grandfathers, and there are days when I see myself more clearly than anything else as their granddaughter.

I was raised by their children: a clay artist with solid working class notions about the world and an idealistic ecologist who actually did save a small corner of the world by being his father's meticulously careful scientist son. My childhood was an odd mix of typical college prep-ness, strands of self-sufficiency training and a biology lab. I followed my dad around, banding birds, camping and playing field assistant, and my best, longest standing friend was my mom. I was the only girl in my generation on either side of the family, and I basically shunned domesticity in favor of playing football with the guys and contemplating what big important stuff I was going to get to do with my life.

Major Themes as an Adult

I ended up at Dancing Rabbit through the convergence of three themes in my life: sustainability activism and teaching, community living and spirituality. At the age of 20, I dropped out of college to take my first professional eco-activist job, as the assistant canvass director for one of the PIRGs. It was a big fat lesson in burnout and I discovered I don't have the stomach for confrontational, enemy-making politics, but I never did manage to get the activist bug out of my system. I leaned into education instead and have almost always since then been involved in some kind of teaching.

At 24, after years of searching for a way to express my deeply-felt spirituality in a way that would satisfy a natural scientist's daughter's brain, I was blessed with stumbling upon a course called Avatar and starting, in earnest, my quest for growth, connection and self-less service. Avatar has been an amazing companion for me over the years, helping me be more self-responsible, appreciative and empowered. I've also had a strong pagan-esque relationship to the land and waters of the midwest, and currently feel held by the beautiful land I live on here at DR. My current journey in growth is colored strongly by being diagnosed with fibromyalgia late in 2009. Thus healing is a big theme, and learning to take care of myself on deeper and deeper levels.

At 27, pregnant with my son, Jibran, I landed in my first Intentional Community. Once there, I feel like I had found my calling: here was a place where you could really walk your talk! Since then, I've been part of 7 different groups and have tried just about ever flavor of community living: spiritual and secular, rural and urban, income sharing and not? you name it, I feel like I've had a foot in it. I got involved in 2001 with national networking as part of the Fellowship for Intentional Community and still do events organizing work for the organization. Now, 12 years in to the IC journey, I'm more convinced than ever that we have a great thing going for folks who really want to live their values.

Along the way, I learned how to cook (and my grandmothers' stopped rolling in their graves) got passionate about consensus and other forms of participatory democracy, and married my mentor, long-time FIC organizer and facilitation guru Laird Schaub. I also had a second child—a girl named Ananda who I birthed for some really close friends to adopt (talk about community building!) I now have a very cool relationship with my birth daughter that is a little like being a grandparent. In 2007, I published a book about the intersection of spirituality and environmental activism and served as the lead teacher for the first US delivery of the Global Ecovillage Network's Ecovillage Design Ed course. I've found a lot of ways to express my grandfathers' legacies, and Dancing Rabbit feels like the culmination of those things for me in a lot of ways.

Home, Home on the Range?

Dancing Rabbit is home for me because it embodies the things I value most from my blood family and life journey: balancing the practical with the idealistic, acting rather than complaining, leading with inspiration rather than anger, working things out through communication and compassion rather than power-tripping? all the while staying clear-eyed and real about the very real pain and suffering in the world, and knowing that we can, in our own small circles, impact things in a positive way. Having companions for this life is about as good as it gets, and I am very, very happy to be here.