Ecovillage, hippie commune, off-grid community, intentional community…
These are some of the terms that bring people to our website, and looking over the list makes me think of when I first started searching for something different. I knew that I wanted community, but I didn’t really know how to find it.
Christina here, writing about what we look for, what we find, and how names sometimes get in the way.
A few years before I started really searching, we had moved to a small town in New Hampshire. I remember one of the first weeks we moved there we were at a summer magic show at the local library. I looked around at all the families and thought I don’t know these people now, but this will be my community one day! Fast forward to three years later and I still only knew one other family in the whole town. It’s not that people were closed off or that they didn’t want to make friends–it was that I just didn’t have enough time. Most of my life was spent getting ready for work, going to work, and recovering from work.
So I started looking for something different.
The only term that I knew at the time was cohousing and maybe I thought to look for an ecovillage. What I wanted was community but I didn’t know what people were calling it.
Eventually, after enough research, I learned that what I was looking for was an intentional community.
Now that I’ve been here for over 10 years, I’ve answered a lot of the same questions from visitors (I actually love answering the same questions over and over. As a former teacher, having someone ask me something and then actually listen to my response is a delight of which I never tire!). Some of the common questions we get are, “Is this a commune?” or, “Are you off grid?”
As someone who was once looking for something that I didn’t exactly know how to name, I generally assume that people are asking something that they don’t quite know how to ask.
Technically, since we aren’t income sharing, this isn’t a commune. But I do know that people frequently find our website by searching for “hippie commune.” At this point, 60 years after the 1960s, I think that “hippie” has, for better or worse, become more of an aesthetic than a political belief or a way of life.
So then I wonder what they are really looking for. My guess is that people looking for a “hippie commune” are actually looking for a place where people work and live together, where they share and take care of each other, and where they have some hope that they can do things differently–and better–than the mainstream way of life in the U.S. And if that’s the case, then I think we might have a lot of what they’re wanting.
I also think there’s a bit of an overly romanticized version–a search for something that they feel is missing in their lives–which we don’t offer. I’ll never forget a visitor who years ago asked, “Isn’t it great to live such a simple life like you do?” Of course, other people’s lives always seem less complicated. And in many ways I do think that our lives are more in touch with the seasons, the land, growing food and raising animals.
But also, my response to someone saying that our lives are simple is just, “Ha!” Because let me tell you, human beings are anything but simple. We are all complicated and messy and prickly and difficult and when we work and live in close proximity to each other, our lives are definitely complicated. Not to mention when you are trying to create your own governance; if you spend any time reading over our agreements, you’ll quickly see they are very much not simple.
Similarly, when people look for an off-grid community, I suppose plenty are genuinely looking for a place where people aren’t connected to municipal water or the electrical grid. And by that technical definition, we are not an off-grid community. There are still a few houses that are not grid tied and just rely on their own solar panels for power, but the community as a whole is tied to the electrical grid, and everyone who lives here uses the Common House and other shared buildings that are grid tied. We also catch and store a lot of our own water, but we use plenty of municipal water as well.
But again, I think that often people are trying to name something that they don’t quite have the words for; in this case, I think it’s something about being unplugged, metaphorically speaking. And so again, it’s a yes and no. I think that we are unplugged from a lot of the stresses of the outside world like commuting and pollution and keeping up with the Joneses. But we are also very much connected to, and a part of, the “real world.” We’re online, we’re informed, and we’re also involved in the world outside of our little village.
So I guess what I’m saying is that what people are looking for and what they actually find here are sometimes the same and sometimes not. You can get some idea of what it’s like by working through the website and watching the YouTube videos, but ultimately you have to come and live it for a while to see if we really do meet your definition of whatever the thing is that you’re looking for but can’t quite name.
Christina Lovdal Gil is currently serving on our Village Council. She is a regular contributing writer to this publication.