When Twin Oaks was planning to branch out around 1990, there were two pieces of land they had to decide between, one 1 mile away, and one 7 miles away (by the crow flying - it's much farther by road). They were worried the Acorners would be always over, mooching dinner, so they decided to go for the farther site. Bad idea, in my opinion, as now they're constantly burning fossil fuels driving back and forth (although you can go by canoe, it's difficult because of fallen trees and so forth unless the water level is high.) The land is primarily rolling fields, there's quite a bit of woods, and a semi-big farm, used to grow seeds primarily, which they sell in a famous seed catalogue. It's a pretty cool operation! Summer 2004 saw Acorn down to only four members, though now it's rebuilding with a strong and stable crew, and has just paid off its debt for the seed business it bought several years ago, so it's in stable financial shape.

There are three different houses on the property - an old converted barn (drafty, total hippyvibe), the modern house (with big kitchen, living room, bedrooms and offices), and the original, slightly ramshackly country farmhouse, now bedecked with hammocks, tapestries and hookas. This is where I lived with all the cool twenty-something kids, who were there doing internships and stuff. I had an awesome time, and in just five days got to know everyone, forming as many strong and intimate-connection moments as during three weeks at Twin Oaks.

Perhaps because of its small size, or the fact that they actually really needed help (unlike every other community I visited), I found everyone at Acorn incredibly welcoming. They had lots of rooms, and there was little beauracracy to deal with, like over at Twin Oaks. In the morning I just jumped in. A gigundous pile of scrap metal had to be moved, so we got all twenty of us out there hauling the big old pieces across the yard - without any "leader," just groupmind. Hug circle and singing when we were through. Then it was time to remove stumps, mulch, dig holes, and by the next day we had planted a whole mini-orchard of blueberry bushes. When I sat down to dinner that night, there was a very nice sensation of family and accomplishment that I've only experienced pieces of before. I think it's so palpable here because the community remains so small.

Then it was out with the wine glasses and along the candle-path through the woods to the ghetto hot-tub - a huge watertank cut in half and heated up from underneath by a log fire. Nice moments with the friendly Acorners. And bouncing on the trampoline. And being followed around incessantly by a 10-year old girl who's totally in love with me, and won't shut up. And hanging out with Paxis, who calls himself a "Global Mimeticist," but is actually a sort of middle-aged polyamorous communist on perpetual sabbattical, who seduces me into playing Magic: The Gathering when I should be planting

garlic. I really had no need to leave. I could've lived there forever, had babies, felt useful. I keep thinking, perhaps I will someday.

Alpha Farm

Address: 92819 Deadwood Creek Road, Deadwood, OR 97430-9706. Phone: Farm number is (541) 964-5102, their Alpha-Bit stores is (541) 268-4311. Email: alpha@pioneer.net. Webpage: http://www.pioneer.net/~alpha/

It's fairly easy to visit Alpha-Bit, just call about a week beforehand, no fancy-shmancy visitor period needed. I recommend you head up during the week, when dinners are served family-style around the table, with crazy babies making messes and silly jokes being made by all. Because most everyone's on a 9-5, Monday-Friday schedule, on weekends it seems everyone heads off in their own direction, and as a visitor you can feel abandoned in the empty house (though there are sometimes parties and gatherings, there's no dinner served or events scheduled for visitors). During the week you'll be assigned a work position and be integrated right in, a great way to feel useful and meet people. The main work done around the Farm is gardening, house-cleaning / childcare, and office work having to do with the Alpha Institute, an organization that sends Caroline around the country to teach Consensus workshops. There's also some maintenance-type stuff to be done, and like many of these older, smaller communes, much of the farm equipment, old barns and workshops and houses are in various stages of degeneration and simultaneous regeneration. Pretty much everyone else heads down into town to work at their store.

I lived for just a few days in that soggy, foggy green valley. It's really quite a beautiful spot, about a half an hour on a winding country road to the nearest town of any consequence, a riverside hamlet called "Mapleton." Unfortunately this is the commute you'll be making three to five days a week if you end up living at Alpha Farm. Their main source of income is a little cafe/bookstore they run down there, called "Alpha Bits," a pretty hip place, with good food too.

Arcosanti

This is another model community for urban design, built out in the desert on the top of a canyon edge. Check out the pics on the webpage - it certainly is a physically impressive place. The architect Paolo Soleri has definitely transcended his mentor, Frank Lloyd Wright, in the postmodernist department but at the same time retained a wonderful Italian feeling to the whole place with cypress, and olive groves to harvest, lots of stairs and terrace paths carved into the steep hillside, etc. If only they could finish their full design! It's supposed to be a whole city, population 5000, that is dense high-rises arcs of shops, offices, and apartments, all south-facing and energy efficient, made of an an impressive technique for futuristic-looking "earth-cast" concrete panels, and preserving the low-lying flat land for agriculture. But it becomes clear after poking around the (superbly professional) visitor's center that they basically ran out of money around 1980 and haven't built a thing since. Which is sad -yet again another community petering out before it even hits population 100. Also, while Mr. Soleri's planning vision is revolutionary architecturally, Arcosanti has no progressive social or cultural agenda that I could see, in so far as even now it remains a project controlled primarily by Paolo and the Soleri family ("the owners").

Right now they're making all their money off giving tours and six-week workshops, and selling windchimes and earth-cast pottery - they have only 3 or 4 people working on construction. I think you can sustain a community off income from crafts, but there's no way they're going to get the city built this way, and the point of Arcosanti is that it's supposed to be huge and URBAN. Instead, to be honest, it's like a weird architectual oddity out in the desert two miles from the freeway, a dumpy construction yard surrounding a really neat but empty museum-edificial "downtown performing arts" kind-of-feel district, though some people do live there, in strangely-shaped half-domes all built one upon another. The concrete is a perfect building material for the Arizona weather pattern - the arced floor of one dome on the cliff is the patio of the neighbors above. I really enjoyed being in that space, but walking around, the comparisons with the Gila Cliff dwellers, whose town I just had visited the day before, became too much. Arcosanti is very much a contemporary version of those cliff-houses, perfectly adapted to its environment - south-facing, built into the cliffs for shade, using local materials. But I started to wonder if people will be touring this site in 1000 years, as an architectural oddity, just like I'd done there - wondering how these people failed - where they went.

I stayed at Arcosanti for just one night. While it was fun to wander up dark staircases and empty, surreally-lit corridors (like being on the set of Murnau's "Nosferatu"), it wasn't a vital place. The only people I found were the dudes in the community lounge, who all clicked away on their Macs rather than actually talking to each other. In the morning I walked down in the canyon-river flats past the lake, through the farm and olive groves, and checked out where all the interns live (in tiny "cubes"). I really

want Arcosanti to become this crazy vibrant city-of-the-future and model for the world, but the place is dead, and that's a bummer.

Black Bear Commune

Address: Drive to the end of "Black Bear Road," south of Sawyer's Bar, California. No phone or internet.

Pulling into "Black Bear Ranch," the friendly and bearded residents will come up and greet you after not too long - they don't get visitors all that often. They may very likely tell you something like,"Welcome to Black Bear. You can stay as long as you want. Our only rule is: don't grow marijuana."

The place is gorgeous and huge and surrounded by national forest. It's two main sloping valleys are criscrossed with little streams, in which a whirring Pelton wheel generates all their electricity. They do humanure-composting, and are totally off the grid. What's crazy is the whole village of shacks and rotting old barns used to be a town of 3000 back in 1849, Gold Rush era. Now it's a little sleepier, and very untouched by the world. A true commune in the old sense of the world.

One guy there is a glass-blower. Some hire themselves out to other farms in the area as seasonal workers. Besides this, the place doesn't have any income coming in. Black Bear is a highly transitional place; when I visited, the longest-term resident had lived there about 18 months. The land itself is held in a 99-year Land Trust. The continuity of community is provided by the "board of trustees meeting", i.e. a party held every year. There is pizza, oven-baked in their outdoor oven (it cooks in about one minute and is so good) and much beer and merry-making. A family reunion.

In the morning I harvest sweet parsley for our breakfast burritos - out of breath, climbing the steep hill up to the "Crows Nest" - the mugwort growing in the creeks, the tiny ogre statue sitting in an upper garden - the heavy, summer air. Sitting around in the evening in silence, with the men on the porch, during a thunderstorm listening to the CB radio report, which crackles with each far-off lightning blast, as Clarence the fireman radios in his report - they're heading up to the summit to check out a fire, reporting in at each mile marker, and we listen breathlessly...Mile 8...Mile 9...Mile 10. Everyone gets a tad too stoned around this old farm for my taste. For a community that doesn't grow bud, they sure smoke a lot. There's an air of peaceful decrepitness, in the buildings as well, and you get a slightly depressing feeling, that nothing is ever going to "get done." But maybe that's the point of Black Bear. There's nothing to be done. There are lots of piles of junk and half-finished Yoda-mud like buildings sitting around. You could definitely come up here with a crew of cool, motivated friends, and totally create any kind of life you want. It's an open community.

I have never felt so utterly free in my whole adult life. No rules, no obligations. You can do what you want. Living and working there is like some kind of magic-drenched summer from a wild long-ago, where the days just flow from moment to moment. The colors are so vivid. And oh, the prettiest grove of cherry trees! The tasty carrots from that delightful garden (overseen by ducks). I was only at Black Bear for a short while,

and don't know if I'll ever make it back, but my memories of that little spot in the world are tender and sweet.

Dancing Rabbit

Lightning flashed and corn-stalks waved as I pulled in past the boogeying bunny sign, late in the lightning-storm summer night. The rain had ebbed but for far-off flashes, and it smelled wonderful, this great prarie, like herbs, as I wandered around the muddy roads under the full moon, peering into many strange buildings. Everyone was asleep. I lay in a hammock for awhile, before doing the same. In the morning, I was

given the whole tour and introduced to the "Blue Stem" food co-op, where I was to eat during my week's stay. Although still small, Dancing Rabbit is an Eco-Village and thus not centralized organizationally, so while there you deal with different organizational entities, like the SkyHouse income-sharing house, different eating co-ops, a bio-diesel car co-op, as well as private buildings, etc. for individuals and couples.

After living on the old commune, it was a bit disconcerting to see how this group had socially financialized their relationships with each other. I mean, one group who owns a solar panel will sell excess electricity to one of their neighbors, not just give it. But they may buy carrots from her later, or labor - help erecting a roof. It's a total medieval, village market economy, which will be awesome once the village grows enough for this to make a lot of sense. In addition there are some collective elements. Members, who lease land from the centralized land trust (for a cheap price), also have to do a certain number of hours of planning meetings and community work each year (emptying humanure buckets, etc). So the guy who gave me my tour was actually fulfilling some of his work hours. These can also be bought and traded amongst members.

They've planned out a whole 500-person village map of how the place is going to grow, and it's all already subdivided. So you lease a "warren" (a 30 * 50 foot lot) from the land trust and have to pay 1 cent per square foot per month (in this case, it would be $15 a month). You have to pay all sorts of membership dues too, and then of course you have to build a house, which everyone is madly hammering away at. This place was formed by people from my old college co-op, Synergy, and I do have to admit that in those six years they've accomplished a lot. There's about 30 people living there now and about 10 finished buildings, and although it doesn't feel like a village yet, you can definitely see where the streets will be (muddy paths right now) and how it will work, but the truth is, most of them are living in total 3rd-world hovels -we're talking lean-tos with tarps and scrounged-brick ovens, while just across the way the finished buildings are almost too ritzy for my taste, all beautiful wood-finished and fancy carpets and sterile hotel light switches and what-not, even though they were constructed with mud-cob or straw-bale walls, with recycled timber beams, a wood-powered furnace heating the floor, all filtered rainwater-collection-off-the roof for water, solar power arrays and windmills and humanure composting and graywater run-off and...it still left a slightly weird taste in my mouth, because:

Still, when and if this is a town of 500, everybody with their own "yard" and is paying different organizations for different services, it will be a hella-lot cooler than a comparable suburban privatized neighborhood, because of the "eco" element if nothing else. These are the most advanced eco-people I've seen. To join, you have to sign a contract saying you will not use any fossil fuels at all. I mean, they have only biodiesel vehicles and are completely off the grid. When too many clouds pass in front of the sun you have to stop your electric wood sawing because then the fridge won't have enough power that night.

The nearest town, Rutledge, full of abandoned houses and beautiful classic homes for sale for $5,000, and it's kind of funny because there's exactly three kinds of people: 1) old white grandmas with their perfume, 2) Mennonites in their hoods, who have recently started to take over, and then 3) the hippy kids. That's the word, from the frontier...It's really dirty & muddy out on the prairie, pioneer time for sure, but unfortunately the land is not as magnificent or varied as, say, East Wind, nor does it have any trails to walk on - the swimming pond is bug-infested and kinda brown, the solar showers are kind of cold, and because of the (awesome) lightning storms, it's all too wet to walk out on while I'm there, so I feel a little claustrophobic, especially since there's no "visitor program" per se, I'm the only one and left to fend for myself, not even assigned any tasks (I did help empty all the toilets and throw them in the stinking manure heap, a fascinating process). Although my visitor period was supposed to last a week, I left early, because I didn't feel any point to being there, I had no purpose and wasn't needed. A better way to get involved might be to become an intern. The interns were cool and it seemed hard-core, they were camping out and building a kitchen out of natural and recycled materials, learning all sorts of crazy things.

You have to admire how they fully use all the materials from the area, clay for making walls, reeds to make mats, local medicinal flowers and roots, all homegrown food and

weird egyptian fermented beverages. I have no idea what the food served to me was, but it was colorful. Dancing Rabbit is either the future or the past, I'm not sure yet.

Earthaven

Rural North Carolina: Eco-Village, population ~65

Address: Earthaven Ecovillage, 1025 Camp Elliott Rd Black Mountain, NC 28711. Phone: (828) 669-3937. Email: info@earthavenlearningcenter.org. Webpage: www.earthaven.org

Basically, Earthaven is fruckin'-tastic. My god! I've never lived in such a beautiful and human-scaled world. I think everyone should visit, because once they do, I can't see how they could not want to secretly live in an Eco-village like that.

It's a total funky village in the full-sense of the word, designed for the walkable, livable experience, and it's all built in cozy-steep mountain valleys along a series of creeks and joining streams, with wooden bridges and forest paths connecting swimming holes, gardens, and seven different neighborhoods. Seven! And they've only been building for ten years. Population is almost 70, ten of whom are kids. It's very impressive, especially since all the buildings are so individualistic, most built out of low-cost local materials, so we're talking adobe, straw-bale, mud-daub, and wood from trees right off the property, trees that needed to come down anyway. The architecture I would call "Dagova Contemporary."

Earth Haven is an "Eco-Village", not an "income sharing" commune or anything crazy. In this Eco-Village model you come into the community with your own family and assets, lease land for 99 years (it's inheritable and renewable, lots are either $11,000 or $19,000 for a 1/3 acre), build your own home, and start your own business or whatever. Because of that, there's a certain amount of capital you need, just like in the real world, and this is what turned me off at Dancing Rabbit, along with the $3000 membership fee, which they both have. But Earthaven is much farther along in development, not just a muddy construction site, and the variety and diversity of the economy and people is refreshing. There is already one Co-Housing building, an inn, and a sort of Short-Term Housing Neighborhood called Hut Hamlet, where a lot of the young folks live who are on internships or work-exchanges to learn natural building techniques, or teach at the school. Hut Hamlet is also the coolest looking neighborhood because the lots are small and close together, so it's like twenty rainbow flowy-stucco houses perched on a steep hill, Italian style. It has a very nice community kitchen that you can join for $60/month, for collectively-ordered locally-grown bulk and natural foods, and all the members cook one night a week. So, co-ops and things within the greater village provide ease of access into community life. As a visitor, there's also a campground you can stay at, which is $10/night.

The Saturday tour was fantastic, I highly recommend it, it was given by a crazy evolved old Texan dude, who showed us his hobbit-like house he's building up on his hill, complete with round door, weird breed of ducks, ponds, solar panels, etc. He has a great vision, and if the whole crazy contraption doesn't wash away in a storm, I can't wait to come back and see it completed.

They have built themselves a very nice giant-gazebo of a community meeting hall, where I went to their Sunday consensus meeting, and they are also building a central community complex which will have a dining hall and places for offices and businesses. They're aiming at a village of between 200 and 300 people. While other Ecovillages I visited were organized around a Land Trust, at Earthaven the land is held by a homeowners' association. I think this is genius! Because by now suburban dwellers are totally comfortable with the idea of homeowners associations - ceding some individual rights and paying some dues for community services. This particular homeowners association is bad-ass. They hold most of their 300 acres in a nature reserve and for agriculture commons. The dues are about $250 a year, and that includes property tax, road maintenance, water & garbage. In addition, you're supposed to do some community hours of work every year on work days, attending meetings, etc. By doing work for someone you can get one unit of the local currency, a "Leap." You can trade Leaps with other residents for work you want done, and to pay off your yearly community commitment. I really like the idea of micro-economies like this, because it helps support things that are good, you know your labor isn't going into exploiting third-world girls in fumy factories, etc.

Unlike Dancing Rabbit, which was all 20 & 30-year old white couples, I found a much more vibrant mix of people at Earthaven (still unfortunately, a lack of ethnic diversity). While some kids at the full-on communes I visited seemed to be either a bit neglected, or a bit spoiled (walking right over their parents, who perhaps are afraid to be authoritarian), the kids at Earthaven were great, and particularly the teenagers were some of the most advanced souls I'd ever met. There were two who were orphan-types but had been accepted there, even without parents, and were doing cool things and got full respect as people, you know? Hanging out one evening at the "White Owl," a sort of medieval but homey tavern/cafe, a local "Dixie Chick"-like band had come to play, and there was bluegrass dancing and general merriment amongst all three generations, the place was packed, and as the evening wore on, the kids fell asleep on pillows and couches in the corner. Very sweet. They even sell powerful Kombucha there for $1.50 a glass.

The other main businesses in operation so far are a general store/internet cafe, and a mail-order herbs company, as well as a Bed & Breakfast (called the "A&A," after the initials of the owners). There are also healers and hairdressers, and some of Communities magazine is edited and run out of Earthaven, along with some people doing internet-based web-stuff. It's a small economy, and many people commute down the hill to make real money, but people are growing some of their own food, and some cash crops, and it is not an expensive place to live.

Went mountain biking one day and then running off along enticing paths into the woods, then off-path, swooping down through gulleys and up along sculpted ridges, all soft with leaves and clear of underbrush, along a mysterious creek and into a tunnel of rhododendron, finally panting at the top of a hill enclosed in the mazy green branches. It was a warm November afternoon, I was watching the sun set, thinking, "Wow, I could totally live here."

Afterwards, there was a sauna and a leap into the freezing streampool - steaming and looking up at clear stars. I left Earthaven all inspired in so many ways.

East Wind

East Wind is really the classic commune, thousands of acres of woods and fields and creeks, and the freedom is palpable, everything is free while you live there, and the people are great, and most importantly they're awesomely sucessful, with huge factories for making nut butters of all kinds - truck loading docks, a giant refrigerated warehouse, as well as lots of beautiful houses hidden down paths and kitchens and libraries and music rooms and an exercise/meditation room and free acupuncture, and it's the Ozarks and the air is warm, the forests alive with shrieking-chorus cicadas and wolf spiders and copperheads crawling into the laundry room, vines and bright stars and the campfires every night are surrounded by drumming and hammock swings and good old country tunes, these are all just unique individuals really enjoying life, though some are definitely missing-teeth twangy Missourians, who wink and show me down beneath a secret trapdoor, where their secret still is fermenting the sweetest blueberry wine in the world. Then its time to stumble home through darkened woods following the blinking, rising fireflies...the moon a drooping misty jewel, shooting pleiades silently streaking.

There were about 80 people at the East Wind Commune while I was there. Most of the residents are from Missouri or nearby states - a blue-collar vibe, and almost completely white though there was one black bro, one Asian mom and daughter, and a couple of Central American dudes. Still there was a wide variety of people in terms of ages and education and background - lots of kids, lots of Santa Claus Grandpas playing poker on the porch, and crazy characters - like Pepper, a big lady who says the food served in the main kitchen all "tastes like curry" and revealed to us, behind a curtain in her dome-house, her stash of "real American food," cans of baked beans and macaroni & cheese - to somewhat forlorn, radical, goateed Will, who lamented the end of freedom in the media-dominated age and revealed his conspiracy theories - to Mitch, a mumbling greybeard from the '60s, who worked all day making hammocks and telling long, gruffy, barky-laugh stories about swingin' London, though you couldn't really understand a single word.

There are 74 rooms available at East Wind, and everybody gets their own room, except babies younger than 4 years old. So a family of three would get 3 rooms and could arrange them how they like, or could apply for money to build their own small house. There are a lot of large, co-op like houses, but also, down any little path through the green woods you wander, you're liable to find a magic, whimsical cottage. You have to have a room to be on the payroll, and there were a few new residents waiting for vacancies while they lived in camps in the woods, down by the creek, etc. East Wind is going to build another central Kitchen and hang-out facility, to replace "Rock Bottom," which is kind of crowded at the current population level, but first they have to finish an elaborate $200,000 (in Missouri money!) Shower House / Sauna / Hot-tub complex. So it'll be awhile before they grow any more because all the building projects are backed up.

East Wind has a three week visitor program which I highly recommend. It was the best of the visitor programs I've participated in. Each day you learn about a different aspect of how the community works, and participate in almost every kind of work, even eco-forestry - there's a whole northern 1000-acre parcel with an eco-forestry lumber mill and trails out to a resevoir where there are cliffs for jumping, boating, and a really nice cave that all the visitors went in one day, finding our way all the way to the back cavern by the light of a digital camera.

One thing you should be forewarned about living on the old commune is that personal posessions are liable to be borrowed. I definitely lost my favorite pen, and my bike disappeared for days at a time. One must label private stashes of food or they disappear within minutes, and sometimes they disappear anyway, with or without later retribution.

Every night old dudes hang out by a campfire and play bluegrass. The average age at East Wind is actually 42. I've never hung around with so many cool older folks. There are about twenty people over 50, some of them very retiring, yet some quite the partiers. East Wind would be a definite good place to retire, especially because of the work quota system, which is 40 hours a week, but one hour less for each year after age 50 (for the same pay). Seems about right to me.

The younger coolkids sit inside smoking pot and laughing ha-ha-ha all night long. Somewhere on East Wind every night is some party that lasts until at least four. You get up at eight in the morning to go gardening and they're still (already?) awake, sitting on the porch smoking. Unfortunately some of the teenagers have gotten into this scene, and seem more than a little adrift. Because of the party atmosphere, I don't think I'd want to live there long-term, and some of the girls in the visitor group were hassled in uncomfortable ways. East Wind is definitely a community with conflicts, a dynamic environment with much to learn.

But then there's also Daniel, who lives in a teepee, peaceful and enlightened, honest, humble, and hard-working in the factory, and when they all argued at the endless meeting about a graywater system he ignored the babble and just went out in the woods and built one, out of PVC. Good old Daniel, wearing just his one plain linen shirt and overalls - a single frail cord holding them up, and they are so extremely dirty, and hang so low, revealing his muscled tone, his skin dark and severe looking, his eyes strikingly blue beneath that fierce brown beard, he seems like a friendly muhjadeen, but it could be that he just needs a bath.

In the morning after the rains, I go on a walk up the glade-trail, crashing through lots of spider-webs, and among the wet, rich, leafy forest floor I see turtle after turtle poking along, their mouths stuck full of green bits and yummy insects. The Ozarks are the second most diverse ecosystem next to the southern rain forests, and it shows - when I walk home through the grassy field, I find my legs covered with hundreds, literally, of new freckles. But they're not freckles, they're tiny tiny "seed-ticks" and they're slowly crawling up my legs!

Then, back to work. The work system requires you do 40 hours of work in any of a couple dozen categories (laundry, cooking, farming, metalwork, etc.) You fill out your hours on a weekly sheet and turn it in on Sunday night. Besides a few permanent shifts, you can put in your 40 hours in whatever way you see fit, which is freedom I like. Say I want to make ice-cream with the kids - so long as eight people eat the ice-cream when it's done ("The Rule of Eight"), you can mark that down. If you want to hold classes for the kids, and the parents approve it as part of their homeschooling, then both you and the kid can mark that down on your sheets. I like the spontantaneous feeling, and the fact that if you miss hours one week you can make them up the next, or accumulate extra hours ahead of time - also, that you can put in as many sick hours as you need. They also have a free acupuncturist, free herbalist, and as a member you get complete medical and dental.

As a full member, you also get $125 pay a month (plus possible year-end profit-sharing), which (if you're not addicted to alcohol and cigarettes like a lot of East Winders seem to be) actually almost seems reasonable, because many things that suck away your bank account out in the normal world are provided (banking, bills, soap, floss, chocolate milk, DVDs, gasoline, cereal, snacks, internet, phone, etc.) It's not enough to fly around the world, but enough for other purposes, and if you need more money you can put in extra hours in "the industries" (currently making sandals or nut butters) at $7.50/hour, and of course if you want to purchase something big all you have to do is convince the group it would be a good communal investment.

There are 9 holidays a year on which you receive 8 "free hours," and you also get 8 free hours on your birthday. As a full member, you get two additional weeks for vacation. To accumulate more vacation days you'd have to work more than 40 hours a week and save up. If you want longer vacations there are options for a "personal leave" that you can take for up to a year every five years, there's also educational leave or civic service leave, etc. but you wouldn't get paid during that time. All in all, it seems like a really just system and jives with the economics I've always believed in, which is one hours pay for one hours work, no matter what job.

In the end, I actually liked East Wind a lot, especially because of the "float trip" this super-dad named Kee took us on. That was the best way to see the Ozarks for sure. I liked how there was always a game of some sort going on every night. And the food was fantastc, too, always with vegetarian and vegan options.

Oh, how I will remember harvesting tomatoes in the Zen mornings! Kneeling in the damp earth, pulling back the boughy branches to reveal in those shady green depths the gleaming fruit - like red and orange plump jewels, still hooked on viny umbilical cords, until you give a tug, and pop!, they bear themselves into your palm. Huge five-inch grasshoppers watch dispassionately, content that their camoflage will protect them. Giant yellow tomatoes grow in big clusters, hanging like pumpkins, they're striped in rainbow colors, tie-dye style. Then going down to swim in the hot afternoons, and whole schools of little minnows come up and begin to nibble on your

naked flesh, like benign pirahnas. When I drove away from East Wind, I had tears in my eye. I'm definitely going back as soon as I can manage - just for fun, of course.

Emma Goldman Finishing School

At first impression, Emma Goldman seems like a very nice adult co-op in a beautiful green-and-purple Victorian up on Beacon Hill, within striking distance of downtown Seattle. They have four stories, almost all restored, a nice garden in back, everyone gets their own room, and on the first Sunday of each month they host an Open House / potluck for anyone interested to come and join in a spirited discussion over that weeks' featured topic ("relationships", "the great collapse", "cooperative games").

It turns out, however, that their intentions are much more serious than being a mere co-op. They consider themselves more of an anarchist activist community, that happens to live together. "We are the radical fringe of the radical fringe," Elijah tells me, "but we're trying not to go the way other intentional communities have gone, which is either to find a niche within capitalism, and become very comfortable there, and thus end up supporting it in the end, or to remain idealogically pure, and completely isolated from the world."

Living at Emma Goldman, you commit to a low-level of income sharing. There's a requirement for 100 hours a month of work - any combination of housework and outside jobs. Any money you bring in over a certain amount they put into their Social Action fund, with which they're trying to start up more egalitarian communities, to build up a whole alternative, self-supporting progressive economy. They're part of a local "Food Pantry" where they buy and collect food in bulk with several other communities in the Seattle area. Riseup.net is run by "Emmas" as is the Homestead Community Land Trust and several other activist groups. They also have a politically-radical "hackers night" meeting on Tuesday nights. These are cool and dedicated people in their 30s and 40s, with one couple about to have a baby, and it is rare to find an urban adult community like this. Unfortunately in terms of actually living here the membership process is very slow, and requires being in the area for several months and stopping by every week or so while you slowly build a relationship of trust with them (even though they have tons of spare guest rooms, etc). I did this for about a month and then was able to arrange a live-in visitor's period. This caution is necessary because of the income-sharing element I guess. It's like a whole dating process culminating in a financial marriage: if you own a car you're going to probably have to sell it. Although you don't have to give them assets of any kind, while you live there you're limited to a certain amount ($6000) of spending per year, to insure egalitarianism. Pretty hard core. Beacon Hill is a beautiful place to live, with views east to the Cascades, west over Puget Sound to the Olympic peninsula. Though many days and nights the house itself is fairly quiet and empty (everyone is off saving the world, in different ways), and the residents defintely keep private lives, not trying to be "family", several nights of the week all sorts of awesome things are happening and you're right in the radical hub of the action!

I certainly can recommend

their great vegetarian food and hospitality at the Open House night, it's the place to be - first Sunday every month. The other thing I should share about Emma's is that they have the best chocolate chips in the world. They're very small, but very sweet. Check them out. Second drawer down on the left.

FrogSong

Across the street on one side is "Charles Street Village - A Burbank Community", basically a nicely landscaped housing project with the houses all facing in towards each other and a center square and common house, but without the happy vibe or environmental concern. I was looked at with scrunched up, suspicious glances as I walked about. We see here conventional housebuilding techniques, lots of cement, and a small "Garden of Eatin'," which in this case was some planter-box tomatoes.

On the other side are your standard giant-garage suburb tract, and a small wetlands preserve.

FrogSong is to me nothing special at this point - it's just people who came together, built a small village with a sense of place and a name (amphibious in nature because of the drainage creek running right through, I assume) and started living the good life. To me, CoHousing like this should be the base, from which we go forward. It's frustrating that it's going to take the rest of America probably 30 years to even get to this standard of community involvement.

Ganas

One afternoon while visiting a friend in New York, I went over to Staten Island on the ferry to have dinner at this community called "Ganas," and they loved me, and said come live with us, they needed help sorting books in their used bookstore. So I said, "Sure." I ended up living there for a week in an atticy treehouse-like room full of plants and skylights and a sunny Buddha deck. The houses are all kind of collegy, old 1920s and 30s homes filled with ten people each. They own ten of them total, so around 100 members (which again I find is the top population threshold for communities at this point in history, i.e. forty years after the '60s renaissance - any larger, and shared facilities are strained, as is the small village familiarity).

Ganas is exciting because it's very ethnically and economically diverse and urban...they are slowly buying up a whole hilltop neighborhood and knocking down the fences in-between. It's a great and very sucessful community, a co-op for adults (some kids too), which is kind of just what I was always looking for. I go on bike-rides along the shore and all across the island to the preserved foresty greenbelt areas. Staten Island is as suburban as you can get, I think, kinda lower-middle class New-Jerseyish, a mixy mix of ethnicities so that no one seems just white - in fact, I got yelled at on the road for being "white trash."

Ganas owns four businesses, just a five minute walk downtown, near the ferry port. I am quite happy working all day in the used bookstore, something I've always wanted to do. Dinners are pretty good in the central living-room house; a few people are full-time cooks. After dinner some of the people do a weird activity called "Feedback Learning," which is sort of co-counseling on life decisions. You give feedback to people based on things you see about them that they might not be aware of. It seems kinda interesting, the only thing that seems initially cult-like about it is that it is facilitated by an older lady in her 60s who apparently has through the years married younger and younger men within the community. But the process itself seems totally worthwhile. These are some of the most truly honest and aware people I've met on my journey. According to what they believe, "falling in love" with someone is something that can be chosen, as are almost all things in life, you can gain control with intention.

The other interesting thing of note about Ganas is that the "core group," (those who are income-sharing), have meetings for 3 hours every morning during breakfast! During these meetings a simple, arbitrary topic is raised, such as the pool needing to be drained and covered for the winter. Although after a few minutes of concerns being expressed, the person in charge of that department says he's going to do it this weekend, somehow the discussion continues down convoluted neural paths, evolving into claims that some children damaged pool equipment, therefore proceeding into various theories of child development and how children's brains work, etc., and how, in a meta-communicative way, this discussion was bringing up really important issues between at least three of the participants. These people like to talk, and they're so good at it in endless recursive deconstruction, I sat in enraptured awe, and eventually, jaw-dropped utter boredom. Luckily you don't have to go to these meetings if you don't want to.

So, four days of work/week here = room & board, for five days you also get $300/month. That sounds like if nothing else, a pretty good way to visit New York. The ferry ride is free over to Manhattan, which is hella fun to bike around, because every few blocks is another landmark and a new kind of neighborhood to explore, and it's all so flat and cruisy. Ahh, I really liked

it there, in the early warm autumn, I could spend weeks sitting in Washington Square. Gotta go back to Ganas for sure, get all deconstructed with Feedback Learning!

Green Gulch Farm

Intentional Community? Buddhists invented the idea. Back when you were stuck in feudalism, white boy. And at Green Gulch Farm they're quietly carrying on that spiritual community life in the ancient and simple tradition inherited from Japan's Soto Zen school. Green Gulch Farm is nestled in a gorgeous coastal valley, in the folds of Mt. Tamalpais, a short walk up from Muir Beach, through farm fields and horse pastures.

Green Gulch Farm (also known as the 'Green Dragon Temple' is part of the San Francisco Zen Center, founded by Shunryu Suzuki, author of the brilliant-on-so-many levels book, "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind."

The Green Gulch monks are somewhat environmental, I mean they're getting an array of photovolatic panels, and all their water is from a natural spring. Because the spring only produces a certain number of gallons each day, they can't grow any larger - a natural form of

What an experience - living in a real Japanese style monastery! You'll sleep in cozy student dorm-rooms right off the main hall, and be awoken by the ancient chiming bell at 4:30 in the morning. You open your door, and monks are shuffling by in the dark, into the zendo. Put on your socks and follow them before the final rapping on the wood! Remember as you go through the doorway to put your outside foot first, and then bow towards the big Buddha statue. You're not, of course, actually worshipping the Buddha himself. You are bowing to honor the energy he represents and to venerate the Buddha inside yourself.

As a guest student, they make you do a lot of things that make no sense, they're just inherited cultural patterns from Japan. During the services there's lot of bowing and chanting of texts in Japanese or even old Sanskrit. There are a thousand rules and customs, such as "no wearing hats in the zendo," and lots of behavior which will likely get you frowns - singing as you walk along the trails, gossiping while gardening, etc. The first lesson you have to learn - and it took me several years worth of visits to begin to grasp this - is that the part of you that rebels against following these (completely arbitrary) rules is your ego. And since your goal is to become enlightened - and the way to do this is to eliminate your ego - this is actually a big help. By recognizing your own resistance, you can feel within yourself the part of you that is saying "me me me," and start to learn how to not be self-centered, start to learn how to go with the flow and just be. That's what these people "practice," 24 hours a day, 365 baby.

I was cutting beets, lopping off their little rat tails - thwack! - hacking off the spiny heads - gerap! - finally slicing through the crisp, snappy skin into the bloody, gleaming core. Revealed were mysterious pale patterns whorling like white jewels inside a ruby. Crranch! Each chop gifted my fingers a subtle, delicious texture - like a jolt of consciousness buzzing up through the knife - like the beet itself were slicing right back at me.

And stripping kale! You grab the stem with your left hand, and with your right run your fist along the length of it. Wallah! - a fistful of kale leaves in one hand, an empty stem in the other.

After a quiet hour of paying attention to my hands this way, I looked up. Everyone in the kitchen was silently involved in their work - washing dishes, minding the stove, peeling fava beans. Some unfamiliar grace poured in through the golden window and made me smile. I let my hands get back to work.

Now it's after-dinner dusk and I'm sneaking up the ridge trail. No way am I going to sit in a dharma talk on this evening. Don't they know that enlightenment is to be had merely walking up in these gorgeous May hills? Ahh - to have lived a single day in Marin - it's to be one of the luckiest people alive.

It's warm up on Coyote Ridge, with some delicious 8 p.m. wind pouring over from the valleys, and as the sun sets behind wispy lingering clouds, sure enough, the coyotes start to howl nearby - a whole pack of yippy barking kids, having a fit of joy at the end of day the beginning of night.

The trail gets darker and darker until it's just me and the stars. It always ends up being just me alone in the night, the truth I return to. But I am so blessed on this, the most beautiful day I've experienced yet.

There's a "yap" from the bushes behind me. I turn about and the silhouette of buck explodes out - horns crashing, wood snapping! He leaps across the path and down the hillside. A dark shape chases him into undergrowth. There's a yip and another one, and a haunting howl! The buck and his pursuers crash down and down the steep endless hillside, as all of nature leans in to listen to the echoes of the hunt.

With each homeward step, I watch my body as it breathes - I watch as it takes another step forward on the faint silver that is the trail.

"Hostel in the Forest"

Address: Hostel in the Forest, PO Box 1496, Brunswick, GA USA 31521. Phone: (912) 264-9738. Email (not recommended): manager@foresthostel.com. Webpage: www.foresthostel.com

"The Hostel," as they call it there, is truly a unique place. It's in the middle of Brunswick, Georgia, a fairly developed place, right off a state highway, but hidden deep within a huge 120 acre patch of woods, with a very hard-to-find entrance - more like a tunnel into the trees - almost impossible to spot in the dark for the first time, let me tell you. Then you bump down a crazy headlight-fern road, park and walk along a path of lights into a friggin' Swiss Family Robinson garden of Eden.

It's all shacky wooden geodesic domes, wooden platforms heading off in every direction through the primeval palm-frond forest floor, and above, pine trees and Spanish oaks filled with tree-houses! A big Jamaican dude and gorgeous Hawaiian girl came up to hug me, saying "Welcome Home," and holding me tight for like thirty seconds or more. Their names were Southwood, and Koalani'i.

So I got to live in a tree house, and in the morning was awakened by squawbling ducks and geese on the pond outside my door. For the first time on my long trip, I felt like I'd entered a foreign, faraway land. Every day I walked down the path to swim in their clear little lake, complete with canoes and floating platforms. It was relaxing and quiet life, in that hutty forest, chickens pecking as you read your book. The day I got there I was one of only two guests, with like 10 staff! They just live there all year round - this is their normal life. They have a huge meditation hall overlooking a secluded pond, nice kitchen/dining room dome, a fantastic labyrinth, hot-tub, three gardens, and chickens running around everywhere. At night everyone sits around the fire making jokes about lighting farts on fire, spittin' and cussin' copiously. Kinda crude, but still, it's the best hostel in the world.

I spent my Full-Moon Thanksgiving with these people, making pumpkin pies from scratch while all the extended family arrived. About 40 people were there for the very nice, warm, and supertasty meal, though I hear all told there's probably around 200 people who consider the Hostel their real home, and come and go, an extended family with the Hostel as its center. Once you've spent enough time there and know everybody and how to do all the different tasks, it's apparently pretty easy to slip into being "on staff," which means you don't have to pay, and you get access to the staff pantry and fridge. There's only one manager who actually gets paid, and the owner, who keeps a treehouse to himself on the property, but lives with his family on an island 20 minutes away. We were all living his vision come true. He'd been building this place, and aquiring land, since the late '70s.

Definitely a unique model of community, but it works. And it's kept its wild, free, and spiritual feeling, even while the outside town has suburbanized all around (one day on a walk, I stumbled out of the jungle into a mowed-lawn suburban backyard. I'd been living in Tarzan-world for so long, I was all rubbing my eyes, "What?")

One of the highlights of my time at the Hostel was participating in a sweat-lodge ceremony (led by Tom, the owner), which was several hours long and involved not only an Indian tepee and very hot stones (which were greeted as "Welcome, Grandfather, welcome Grandmother"), but also very personal-revealing kind of a ceremony. And then when it's over finally, you're 15 kids in there so hot and pouring sweat you can barely retain normal consciousness, you crawl out into the cold night of stars, and run down and leap into the lake under the moon along with everyone else all naked, and that, that is one ecstatic feeling, that water, oh - goodness ...

I could've stayed at this place for a long time. Forever. At $15 a day, which includes dinner, grab-them-yourself eggs for breakfast, and some odd snacks, it's fairly affordable, and the surroundings are absolutely paradisical, tropical. Definitely

I'd rather come back here for a vacation rather than say Mexico or Costa Rica. The people are just wonderful.

Los Angeles Eco-Village

Address: CRSP, 117 Bimini Place #221, Los Angeles CA 90004. Phone: (213) 738-1254. Email: crsp@igc.org. Webpage: www.ic.org/laev

The Los Angeles Eco-Village is basically just two beautiful old Southern California courtyard-style apartment buildings owned by a non-profit group. There's a nice food garden in the center, a bike co-op, and some other community projects being run out of the space. You can rent a room for a reasonable rate, or build up equity by buying. That said, around this simple project is a whole wealth of vision and social change. Lois is the woman. She takes you on a tour down a yucky alley out back, and says, "Here is the esplanade. A fountain is going to be here, and perhaps a cafe kiosk there. And as for the street, well, we are going to turn it into a river and garden..." Already, it is true, they have taken a run-down ghetto street in L.A.'s Chinatown area, where the people were full of fear in the wake of the Rodney King riots, and through community building (potlucks, door-to-door stuff, street fairs, traffic calming) have turned the neighborhood (a one-block stretch near a school) into a nexus of social change. The only big money project here is a little wetlands restoration project down at the end, next to the new youth center. Besides that, they seem to be accomplishing a lot of change on a non-viewable level, with no money at all, just by changing people's attitudes and interactions with each other. I definitely recommend Lois' tour for anyone interested in community change, especially in a harsh urban environment like this. Also, if you have to live in L.A., this would be the way to do it. Take the

subway there if you can, it's close, convenient, cheap, environmental, and really fun - I swear, the L.A. subway is the best in the world.

Lost Valley

Address: 81868 Lost Valley Lane, Dexter, Oregon 97431. 18 mile drive from Eugene (some bus-route connections). Phone: (541) 937-3351. Email: naka-ima@lostvalley.org. Web page: www.lostvalley.org

Started in 1990 at what used to be a Christian summer camp, Lost Valley added a permaculture farm and conference center. Some institutional-feeling buildings, such as the guest dorms, remain in use, but the residents live in cute wooden cabins clustered in a gorgeous douglas fir grove, around the very nice dining lounge, or in yurts and other eco-structures down along the meadow. They're also doing a forest restoration project and have a very nice, clear creek and swimming hole. They managed to grandfather in the old land-use permit, so have lots of ability to expand, to up to 130 residents/3000 guests a year.

At Lost Valley you apply for and then work one job position (or two split shifts), such as childcare, gardening, kitchen, or maintenance, for 30 hours a week plus 8 hours a week of household chore-type work and meetings. You get minimum wage (which actually is better than almost every other commune I've visited), along with housing and food and a few other perks, like the nice hot-tub and sauna.

The greatest thing about Lost Valley, and the reason it has such a large cultural footprint in Oregon, is that it plays host to some of the pre-eminent progressive workshops of the west, such as the one for eco-building ($200), a summer permaculture certification program ($2000+), and, not least of all, the famous "Heart of Now" weekend ($50 minimum donation, suggested $300-$600).

Heart of Now (formerly Naka-Ima) is a powerful self-transformation experience which I recommend to anybody who feels stuck in their life. There are 20 students each time, and an amazing 30 volunteer assistants and teachers. Through group bonding, meditation and visualizations, the facilitators guide you to a place where you can really accept being here in this moment, beyond your hang-ups and sadnesses and other things you cling to. They can see where you are carrying emotional problems in your body, and see through your protective mechanisms and they actively confront you on this stuff, which is intense!, and challenge you through breath and bodywork and roleplaying, to get past them to the core. Yes, there is screaming and hitting pillows and some of the cliches you've heard about, but at the same time, I have to admit it was a profound, revealing "trip," and I emerged a much clearer person, living in "my vision" with much to think about and perhaps reprioritize in my life.

In the conversations I had at Lost Valley I realized that every single person there had something to teach me - about reiki, energy work, yoga, saving old-growth, activism, bio-diesel, polyamory, etc. I was blown away by every soul, and the level of awareness. Many of them live in Eugene and Portland and form a sort of extended community of hundreds (who come up perhaps one weekend a month), and all love each other. The other fantastic thing about Lost Valley is the kids, who are treated with utter respect as people, not talked down to at all. It's a nice all-age atmosphere, though it is very white. Another thing to note is that, along with the vegetarian and vegan food, there are Raw options at each meal. I recommend Lost Valley for the

quality of the people and the Naka-Ima community. Doing one of their three-month internship looks like another very educational way to visit.

Maitreya Eco-Village

Address: 888 Almaden, Eugene OR 97402. No official web-page or phone number, stop by to ask for a tour or available rooms or houses.

Maitreya is an "eco-neighborhood" covering almost 1/4 of a Eugene city block, at the suburban corner of W. Broadway and Almaden. Although the property is just about completely developed (including seven residential houses and a nice garden and bike house), for that authentic eco-village feel they've left a bunch of building materials and junk - and bikes - lying around the property's edges. Still, they are involved in a Street Reclaiming project, there's a neighborhood park down the street, and it's a short bike ride to the downtown. On top of renting a house or room from the owners of the property (a mother and son who live on-site), each resident pays an additional $20 a month for the straw-bale "Mudlicious" meeting room, which is super cozy and which they rent out for various community uses. A good way to visit is to check out the "Bread & Barter" sessions that take place at Mudlicious, or other community events

(check the calendar and bulletin board out front). The Maitreya Eco-Villagers are a pretty chill yet friendly bunch of people.

Rainbow Gathering

Location: Different spots for different gatherings, usually in National Forests. The big National Gathering is centered around July 4th. Check the webpage www.welcomehome.org to get started.

The National Rainbow Gathering is a weeks-long hippyfest for peace, a gathering of the widely-roaming rainbow warriors :-). Zuni prophecy states: "The Rainbow warriors will arise in the days when the animals begin to disappear and poison clouds fill the sky," and so here we are, learning & ready, practicing really the sustainable way of living that is going to be the future.

It's really a huge camp-out, like the way the late 60s must have been I think, like Woodstock, probably almost as dirty. The smiles from the souls were amazing, more good vibes than I'd ever seen. Everybody kept saying "Welcome home," as we hiked in with our backpacks and my bike. There's no way to really classify what the people were like except to say that the range of individualism was extreme.

What struck me the most was how huge it was. It was several hillsides of pine forest and streams and douglas fir roughly centered around one huge meadow of sage and grass. There were streams and streams of peeps on the paths, the most beautiful people I've ever seen.

It's hard to make any generalizations about Rainbow people, who run the gamut from old crazy hippies to yoga instructors to hari-krishnas to rabbis to famous photographers, to drugged-out teens. All in all, they are amazing good-hearted people. You can ask anyone for anything, and while inhabiting the magic community world of Rainbow Gathering at all, you will be helped. That said, there are definitely some contigents you should know about... Then there's the "A" campers, where Alcohol is allowed. It's definitely a different scene over there. I've never seen such dirty kids. While the parents "drink and cuss" around the fire, I watched their offspring climb a huge mountain of gravel, jump into an old refridgerator box, and roll down head-over-heels. They did this over and over, though the box was just about to fall apart. Fun times at "A" Camp.

Then there are the gutter-punk type kids. I guess some of them show up to the gathering with no posessions of any kind, no sleeping bags even, and kind of beg their way through.That's fine, but it gets a bit ridiculous at times, when on some trails you have to pass through huge gauntlets of rag-wearing young hobos clustering along the edges, dangling fishing poles at you, that they made out of a stick and a piece of string, with an empty glass pipe hooked on the end. Around their neck they wear cardboard signs saying, "Spare-a-juana?" or "Seedless for the Weedless?"

Apparently over 25,000 people were there 2004 at the peak on July 4th, on which there is a silent dawn-to-noon prayer for peace. There's never any Permit obtained or money to be paid. The rough location is decided by consensus and then scouts locate a good spot on public land where the impact will be minimal. And since Rainbow is a non-organization organization, who are the authorities going to arrest? All 25,000 of us who simply show up by word of mouth? Hah.

It is our land, after all. People do stay for weeks afterwards and clean up, trying to return the trampled bush back to its original state. At the 2004 Gathering there was a huge fiasco because they chose Native American land and when digging up toilet and fire pits starting unearthing bones! This was holy land. It was a big mess and a lot of Indian elders came in and got very angry. But in the end, I hope, the net effect will be positive, bringing people together into communication on a deeper level.

Apparently what has evolved over the past 30+ years of Gatherings is the "camp" system, i.e. smaller tribes within the tribe that provide services like filtered water, kitchens, serving food, the central campfire, toilet pits, daytime activities and nighttime parties. This also hopefully centralizes and minimizes the number of holes and firepits that are dug, etc.

There were about 200 official "camps" this year, with names like Art in Heaven, Kid Camp, Mud Mountain, etc. We ended up in Warriors of Light, a camp of about 300 people which turned out to be the total party-camp. I mean, they were crazydrumming every night until dawn or even 8amish! Man. Warriors of Light is very hippyish with an interesting mix of families, little kids, dreaded warriors and elders, including a Santa Clausian old greybeard and his positively Mother Theresa-like mother, who just sat witheredly, toothily smiling in a chair, holding her staff, staring into the fire while wildboys drummed and danced bareshirtedly all around her.

It took me two days to figure out how to eat. I kept going exploring and then I'd come back and the food would've already been served. All I had for 48 hours is one cookie and two bowls of breakfast gruel. Then I finally noticed everybody walks around with a bowl tied to their belt and a spoon ready to whip out, so that if they seen a line by one of the kitchens they can rush over and get fed. There's no organization here, people just get together and shout "Lunch time." Never once at Rainbow Gathering did any one person get up and make an announcement, or anything. It was all group-mind, and it was kind of bizarre, to be honest.

Really how it gets good is when you volunteer to work or clean in the kitchen. Then you make friends along with your tortillas, and have flour fights with the little kids, plus you know when the food is going to be served because you're making it, so that's really the way to do it, and made me feel better about partaking as well.

I also finally learned that in the center circle, there is a group dinner every night in the center of the camp for everyone, you sit in a giant circle and, after a prayer, the servers from all different camps come around with huge buckets and carts and feed you, while you sit there next to your friends.

There is a central information area with a map and a big board where you can write an event up and its approximate "Rainbow time." You sort of have to know, though, that at 2:00pmish in the Yoga & Healing Arts camp is the cool Contact Improv class. On Friday night at New Jerusalem camp they have a beautiful Shabbatz, quickly followed by a concert by Jewish-Reggae superstar "Rocker Tea." Or is it Rocker Tea? Night of July 3rd the cool place to go is the Granola Funk Theatre for the talent show. And in the hot afternoons, stop by the Lemonade camp, for sure!

On July 4th you don't speak at all, you gather in the great meadow and chant "Om" for hours until finally at noon everybody explodes in cheering and laughter, drums are brought out, and a huge raucous mobparty starts. Then sweat lodges at the "IndigenUs" camp, and free massage tents - Rainbow is all about beautiful encounters all around. I could see it was really the way some of those people lived the whole year. I had the most fun when I was just enjoying the people and nature and going to the various free classes, workshops and vision-meetings. Especially Yoga camp, which is where you'll find me next time. All afternoon long under four different tarps, the beautiful gymnastic people would play and chant and dance and play West African umbalas, it was a great and healthy scene, and I encountered many amazing teachers.

You catch eyes with people and introduce yourself and that's that, there's no handshakes, just hugs. You call everybody "brother" or "sister" and when you part, you say "loving you." And it's true, in that world. It's a different world, and I'm glad it's there. I don't think Rainbow is going to take over because it's so unorganized. But it will take care of itself, and that makes me happy, that it exists, at least for a few weeks every year, an extended family. And there are smaller gatherings in regional places, and even International Rainbow Gatherings on like islands off of

Panama and stuff like that. With fewer mustached, chaw-chewing sheriffs there hanging around in trucks and on horses, getting paid to do nothing, I would hope.

Regen Co-op

Regen was the best co-op I've ever seen so I had to do a little write-up on it. It consists of two houses (a block apart), each with a restored Edwardian as well as a "backhouse" and big, gorgeously-herbed and landscaped backyards. And there's a hot tub. And shining happy people. Who somehow only pay $15/week for food, but the dinner I had there was fantastic and plentiful! So were the fruits and soy chocolate ice-cream. Rents start around $300 and the houses are owned by one of the members. Plus, they've been raided by the F.B.I.! Definitely a feather in their cap. It's set in a beautiful mixed-class neighborhood of old Pomona, which isn't the greatest place to live (it's way out there, an hour from most of the rest of L.A.) but if you have to live in that area, you can't do better than the great life the kids at Regen Co-op have put

together for themselves. On the twilight streets, the purple jacaranda leaves drop from the trees.

Sandhill Farm

Sandhill Farm is famous among the FEC (Federation of Egalitarian Communities) and intentional community world for the Sorghum harvest festival, which always happens on the last Saturday of September. This is a giant work-party where you get out there swinging away with a scythe, then feed the sorghum plants (which look kind of like a cross between sugar cane and corn) into the giant press, then it's all boiled in this barn-like factory room into an amazing, sweet viscous solution called sorghum, sort of like molasses, which is Sandhill's number one cash crop. It's a pretty big party, fresh ice-cream covered with sorghum, etc. Watch out, though, I met one girl who got her fingers cut off in the press! The rest of the year, Sandhill Farm is a fairly mellow little country farm, just three miles bike ride down the road from Dancing Rabbit, and it seems a pretty nice place to live. The farm internships look like the best way to stay

there. It's kind of too small and rural to be of much interest to me, but definitely call and see if you can come for the Sorghum Harvest!

Seaside

Address: County Road 30-A,Seaside, Florida 32459. Phone: (888) SEA-SIDE. Webpage: www.seasidefl.com

Seaside is the most famous model town for New Urbanism. New Urbanism is actually Old Urbanism, by the way, replicating the old-town feel of pre-WWII America. Seaside is beautiful from every angle. You've probably seen it in the movie "The Truman Show" with Jim Carrey. It's all sparkling new and has a beautiful green half-circle park as town square, fronting on beachside shops and perfect dunes. All the architecture is eastern-seaboard vernacular, but rising up in delightful, anarchistic individualism. You hear the yell of kids and trumpets being blared, and follow it through a gate-hedge into the schoolyard, right there in the center of town, where some kids are practicing with trombones and some running across the grass with lacrosse sticks.

It's the good life. People live in the balcony-houses right above their shops and seem pretty stoked (though some reminisced about how awesome and mellower it was 25 years ago, when Seaside was just starting up). It's still a life of discovery as you walk everywhere on twisty pine paths filled with hand-made benches & art. Everything is human-scale and I'm happy to pay the extra 1% town tax as I buy Christmas presents at the book and music store, café, grocery store, etc. It's actually not even an incorporated city, but has its own representative government and newspaper, etc. Wandering the narrow picket-fence lanes, you can read the happy names each house has been given, painted on little wooden signs.

I felt pretty good about Seaside because it's surrounded by the sea to the south, and state forests to the east and west, thus protected always as a special place, no matter how yuppified. In January each year they give free housing to a few visiting artists, so maybe I can come back and live that way, if I win the stipend.

I wandered down a path, past a beautiful lagoon, and up near some docks, and realized that I'd drifted into WaterColor, the next-door development. On the surface, WaterColor is also a kind of paradise, it's beautiful houses in peaceful neighborhoods with some mixed-use business/hotels down by the sea highway. In fact, as I walk around and look at the maps, it appears that this WaterColor place now owns all the land around Seaside and is eventually going to develop all the way through the trackless woods north to the freeway & put in a big chainstore supermarket. In their (overpriced) café, I ask the tastefully mixed-race employees if they live in town. The girl scoffs, "Ha, like anyone who worked here could afford to live here!"

I learn later that WaterColor is a St. Joes development, designed by the same guy who built "Celebration," the fake town at Disney World. It is beautiful, with perfectly trimmed lawns (hear the leafblowers) and cobblestone streets. But there's no alternative energy sources being used - the huge edificial buildings are the kind that, as you walk around, you hear the 24-hour drone and whirr of giant internal vans. For a community, there's certainly no one around during the day except the landscapers. I also notice there is a spring-> fall day camp for kids. So it's more like a resort community, really; in an interview, the main architect said he thought one day Seaside and WaterColor would sort of blend into one place. Unfortunately, I believe he's

right. In fact I think you could expand that statement to the future development of all of suburbia. For a peek ahead, check out Seaside.

Synergy

Address: Synergy House, 550 San Juan, Stanford, CA 94305. Phone: (650) 497-0251 (ask for "the RA" if you don't know anyone there). Webpage: http://synergy.stanford.edu/

I have a soft spot in my heart for Synergy, as it was the first co-op I lived in, so I had to include it here. This listing really only applies if you happen to be a student at Stanford University. If so, I highly recommend applying to live there. What a glorious place! It's a giant Victorian mansion from the 1890s, up a winding path and hidden all around by trees, with a great roof view over the San Francisco peninsula. The beautiful first floor is all wooden floors and carpets and grand piano, then follow the great-banistered staircase up to the upper levels, where there are about 20 bedrooms. By strange tradition, these rooms are reassigned each quarter in a grand consensus process, yes that's right, a bunch of college kids spend sometimes up to about ten hours consensing on who should live in what room, and all sorts of interesting arrangements end up happening. It's pointless, of course, as all the rooms are gorgeous, but is a very cleverly disguised exercise in communication and "process."

The University owns the property, unfortunately, so everyone moves out in the summer, and co-opers must comply with All in all they are benevolent landlords. Recently, however, an impressive bank of 54 photovoltaic cells was added onto the roof, and the house is a now mini-power plant onto Stanford's grid, during the day.

If you happen to live in the area, it might also be good to be hooked into the Synergy community (dinner is around 6:00 p.m. every night, it's possible to be an "eating

associate"). I recommend stopping by especially for the famous annual Halloween party, which is always wild, naked and good.

The Farm

Address: Correspond with Vickie Montagne, 34 The Farm, Summertown TN 38483, there's a "Hippy Hotel" on-site as well as camping available for a visit. Phone: (931) 964-3574. For email, try: ecovillage@thefarm.org. Webpage: www.thefarm.org

Rural Tennessee (is there any other kind?) seemed to me, upon first twilighty inspection, to be a white-trashed-out forgottenland. Everyone lives in trailers and has junk lying around their huge, useless yards. The cotton fields are all empty this time of year, just wisps of whiteness left behind on the branches. I followed the moon west through the treebranches. By the time I finally found my way to The Farm it was very late and I was all frustrated because the directions had said Right not Left, and 1 mile, not 5 miles, then I got there and the gate was closed. I didn't know what to do, but I headed to the right in the dark and saw a field with a bus and a few trucks parked in the grass. Aha, this must be the remote visitor parking lot, I thought. So I pulled in, and went right to sleep. In the morning I opened up my curtains andsaw that bus and those trucks...uhh, they were hulked-out skeletons! I looked around and realized I was actually parked in the neighbor's beat-up "front yard." At that very moment, I heard a gunshot. I kid you not! About a hundred yards away, over by the trailer (its single window completely closed off by a confederate flag), was a bearded guy with no shirt on, wielding a rifle. He was shooting at circling hawks. I ducked down, praying please don't see me, please don't see me. Oh my god! I took a peek. He hadn't noticed my van, he was following the birds down into a thicket. Quickly, I leaped into the drivers seat and started up the engine, roared outta there. I made it back to The Farm gates, which were now open, and pulled through, safe(?) in the most famous, and once biggest and most sucessful, commune of all.

The Farm was founded in 1971 by the 400 followers of a San Francisco writing teacher/guru named Stephen Gaskin. First they traveled all around the country gypsy style in a caravan of school buses, then finally stopped in Tennessee, which they found particularly friendly, and bought some land (right between two gun-feuding neighbors turns out), where they started a big old commune in the classic sense.

They were all living in tents for years, making babies and barely surviving at farming, etc., but The Farm prospered while other hippy communes failed because they were such hard workers - they were out there in the fields 14, 16 hours a day, and were united under one spirituality, and so were devoted to radical practices, such as marriage ;-), and never letting resentments build up between people (they had a policy of radically getting everything out in the open, talking about people's hangups as a group, etc.) Seems they were pretty aware of Oneness and feedback energy dynamics, also Stephen as a guru never got out of control, he (mainly) stayed within the bounds of the spiritual-teacher role. So these long-haireds really started a whole new culture out there, with new words and phrases even (such as "taking the juice," for instance, which means soaking up too much attention and/or group energy). They are most famous for bringing veganism and midwifery to the fore, but they also invented personal radiation detectors and had an overall big effect on '70s culture. This was "The Commune" you think of when you think of the word, I mean they fed everyone who showed up, would take in any pregnant women from the area and help them give birth & raise the baby if the mother didn't want it, shelter felons and institutionalized people, they were very generous and there was no money, though the "Cash Lady" would give you personal cash to go into town if you needed to buy shoes or something. They were really successful at first, and expanded as big as 1500 people, with ten different mini-Farms all over the world, and a worldwide-relief organization called PLENTY they ran, among other things.

That said, The Farm was a failure in the end. By the early 1980s the population was 600 adults & 600 children, with no bigtime profitable businesses, so economically inviable no matter what they tried. They voted to give up their communism and became a "cooperative," which means they privatized all the houses and made people have to pay dues to live there. Sort of like the failure of national communism in Eastern Europe basically.

Now the population is around 120, with small families living in what used to be the big group homes. The land is still "held in common," but it's completely up to individuals to make their own living. There's little community structure left at all, though slightly more community spirit than you'd find in any similar suburban neighborhood that shares a school, a store, and a gated entrance.

Biking around, what struck me is that the place is huge...I mean there are literally hundreds of buildings (a lot of different businesses, mainly mail-order and conferency-type things, this being useless rural Tennessee and all) and they're all so spread out from each other, as I pedal around I don't see any PEOPLE at all, just the occasional horse grazing, or a face in the windshield as a car passes me by. Sometimes these faces smile and point at me, which I think must be some particular Farm greeting, but later realize this is a general Tennessee thing. I pass by the "Solar School" as it's called and two teenage girls, one redhead and one black, flash me half-hearted peace signs.

Eventually this somnolent, deserted atmosphere, and the presence of trailers in which people are living, and lots full of broken cars (huge numbers of decaying old school buses) make me feel that the whole place is kind of like an old Indian reservation. Except on this one, it wasn't the Indians who were defeated, it was the hippies.

The next night there's a Community Dinner ($5 donation, goes to fund the school), which is a once-weekly event and one of the only community-events still happening. At this dinner I eat seitan and fry bread, meet all sorts of cool people, am hugged enthusiastically before they even know my name, and there's lots of Santa Cruz connections. I meet a few of the founders, there's a lot of them around, in their 50s and 60s now, and hear their wild tales -- their eyes light up when I ask about the old days.

And the children of the Farm, the second generation born in the 70s, many of them are still around, and my age, and are such cool people! They sound like they've travelled widely and done well so far. I hang out with this crew, including the son of Stephen Gaskin the guru, who still lives there also, and I go back to the Eco-Village and hang out with them, we watch a movie on the civil war in Algeria in the '50s, then listen to the Farm's radio station and play Dictionary (also known as Balderdash I think). One of the girls is psychic; we tie for first.

The Eco-Village is just one small part of the Farm, it's a demonstration village of permaculture and natural-building principles and they do workshops, internships, etc. there, it's also the most alive part of the Farm right now, I'd say, and where all the cool twenty-somethings live and work, definitely the way to get involved.

Overall the Farm was definitely worth getting out there to see. It's sad to again see an older, experienced community, fallen back into itself, having lost it's expansive energy. But the Farm still has a lot of amazing stories and things to teach, and they were organizing while I was there to go down to protest the School of the Americas.

Awesome! Looking at the membership process (two uncertain years, then you have to build your house), I would never want to live there, but it looks like they do have some great workshops to attend.

Try/on Life Community Farm

Address: Try/on Life Community Farm, 11640 SW Boone's Ferry Road,Portland, Oregon 97219. Phone: (503) 245-3847. Email: farm@tryonfarm.org. Webpage: www.tryonfarm.org

The Tryon farm, or TLC as they call it, is a hippy paradise right in the middle of the Portland urban area, just a few miles from downtown, down a steep dirt road that you'd totally miss if you didn't know it was there (and you might miss it anyway). It's surrounded on the other three sides by Tryon Creek State Park, with lots of mellow connecting trails. Show up in the middle of the morning and beautiful, sleepy-eyed dreaded people will shuffle around the kitchen and cook you a healthy, organic brunch. Then volunteer to do some work out in their beautiful garden.
What's exciting around the TLC Farm right now is that they just won their legal battle against the owner / developer for the right to buy the property. Now they have to raise a huge amount of money, so things are all charged up around the farm this year, and it'd be a great time to get involved! The TLC Farm is not only a nice place to live for its members (who pay full rent and are not employed in any way by the farm, it's all

volunteer stuff), it's a community teaching center for organic farming, and has all sorts of public outreach.

Twin Oaks

Address: Twin Oaks Community, 138 Twin Oaks Road #W, Louisa VA 23093. Phone: (540)894-5126. For visits, contact Valerie at: twinoaks@ic.org. The three-week visitor program costs $50, and requires you send a two-page introduction letter beforehand. Web page: www.twinoaks.org

Twin Oaks is one of the oldest ongoing intentional communities in the U.S., and is still a shining and vibrant model for the community movement - here, they've figured it out: how to run a peaceful and well-planned commune. Because they started as a colony based on the teachings of behaviorologist B.F. Skinner, they definitely had some interesting misteps along the way, such as back in the '60s, when they named babies by consensus, and thought that ignoring them when they cry was the best method of teaching them self-quieting skills. At this point, Twin Oaks is doing just as strongly as ever, and have created a stable mini-society of about eighty people, who are happy with the way things are there - so they have lost, I think, some of their outward, expansive energy at this point (earlier in its development, Twin Oaks spawned East Wind in Missouri, and Acorn, which is just 15 minutes down the road).

It's located in the old rolling farmland and woods of central Virginia, halfway between Richmond and Charlottesville - Thomas Jefferson's old hang-out. I did their three-week visitor program in the fall, and while the falling leaves were nice, the land itself did not call to me, it was a kind of gloomy place with a lot of rain and fog. Though I hear people who visit Twin Oaks in April never want to leave, because of all the flowering trees.

So it's the Tofu Factory shift and we're all wading around wearing big black galoshes and plastic green aprons and hairnets, I'm squeezing tofu curds into giant cubes with big pneumatic machines while Cuban musics blast. Every now and again water shoots out of the kettles with huge splashes of tofu-juice everywhere! Oh man, that milky spray! That stinky smell. It's enough to make one wanna drink cowjuice and chomp on meat. Well, they have that here too. The milk is straight from the udder, the best milk I've ever had. It's weird how, served up in the dining hall, are bits of ground-up ol' Silky, and one night seven geese, including one who everyone hated, called Peewee. But they have great eggs and cheese and veggies, unfortunately very very little fruit, which they couldn't afford -- just some old leftover watermelons sitting in a pile on the ground, and, when I get desperate, prickly pear fruits growing from a cactus I discovered behind the barn.

The people are fairly hip here, though not as nerdy as I thought they would be from their web-page. Twin Oaks is based on "Walden Two," and was started by eight middle-class social-scientist-types on 100 acres, so it's amazing how far they've come, though it's still far short of B.F. Skinner's 1000-person utopian vision. It's a pretty basic cabiny life round here, kind of like a big summer camp. But it's not summer. I made good friends with the other visitors - who all live together during the visit in a cozy little house called "Aurora," each with their own room named after a different fictional Utopia, but the actual residents here were not all that excited to see me. I guess a lot of Twin Oakers are jaded and tired of the endless visitor parade - though I hear some become immensely more welcoming once you're there to stay long-term. I sit in the hang-out room of the young crowd and take part in the conversation and they still won't really even look at me. They're just so cool. They're all in different bands that practice every night. Those that aren't in a band are in a "circus," that goes around performing with accordions, juggling, hula-hoops, purple hair, etc.

Even though this is one of the most sucessful and long-lived communes in the U.S., they're really poor. They have a 42-hour workweek and pay themselves $2.40 a day, which doesn't really add up to ever taking a vacation or anything. They're in some financial difficulties because they just lost their hammock-making contract with big evil Pier 1. Not only that, they're really truly communist. I mean, they don't allow TVs or personal cars, and frown on cell phones and competitive -games-, all the games they play are like "cooperative" you know? It's the tyranny of equality I tells ya, because to be equal here you do without some things, conforming to group "norms" (they don't have rules, they have "norms", ha ha). They have huge binders full of legislation, and massively complicated worked-out systems, slips of paper turned into this one specific box, etc. for every possible contigency. This here's one of those truly rare societies that values equality over individual freedom.

So it's a long day on the commune. I'm sent to work in the sweet potato mines, as I call them, down in a hot root-cellar, where we're digging through hundreds of crates of cured sweet potatoes, sorting and stacking. They look like ugly, dirt-covered rats to me, complete with tails. I hate sweet potatoes. Some of them are covered in white mushy spores, when I uncover those I'm all, "Holy moldy!" Man...I still have the nasty smell on my hands.

Then off to the cemetery with the afternoon crew, we're all carrying rakes and walking the damp-leaved wooden path (puppies following), giant quartz crystals breaking up through the earth. I haul logs to line the paths, while the Wicca Women are singing down the hill, "Have you seen the ghost of John?" Every now and then I look up and breathe and see all the scarved and knit-hat heads spread out amongst the trees, raking, beneath the canopy of red and golden orange.

On the way home we stop at the "Playground of Death and Rebirth," which is some kind of crazy circusy jungle-gym out in the trees, constructed by Keenan out of junk for kids and adults -- all sorts of ladders to climb, nets to fall in, ropes to swing on, etc. From one high 40' treefort you launch yourself out through the foliage on the "Swing of Retribution." This is awesome but I get all cocky and try tricks and end up crashing and ropeburning a big thwacky wound on my face.

At the end of the day I fall asleep for fourteen hours. This is the good exhaustion of the ancient contented centuries, of stone farmhouses and crumblng spiderweb wooden crates, used year after year. Then I wake up and do it again. I am content.

Generally I had a better time at Twin Oaks once I stopped worrying so much about finishing my work quota, and just went mountain biking, and canoeing softly down the old river (such a totally chill afternoon). Towards the end of my stay, there were also more parties, which was great to burst the whole visitor-member dichotomy,.

An important thing to remember as a visitor, I guess, is that once you're a member you get much more control over your own schedule. As a visitor we were assigned all the most undesirable tasks (digging trenches, cleaning mold, scrubbing rusty back shelves, etc.), because somebody had to do it. The class divide between visitors and members is the only real heirarchy, though, because the three "planners," who are the autocrats of the Twin Oaks political system, live the same poor egalitarian life as the rest of them. Yes that's right, Twin Oaks is not run on consensus, though there is a democratic overide mechanism, and very professional and inspiring meetings.

The Samhain ritual, pronounced "Sahwen," on the night before Halloween, was cool enough to mention. I got to be the faceless dark-cloaked "boatman" who poled people across the lake on my raft. When we reached the far side, they had to hand me a penny to pass over onto "the island of apples." (sort of a land-of-the-dead type place). The lake was covered with floating candles, and the full moon was just coming out, and the witches were singing, it was reallymysterious and beautiful. Then you followed a path of lanterns up through the woods to the circle site, where there was singing, dancing, fire, envocations of the elements, a journey into the graveyard for a speaking-to-the-dead visualization, and then back to the fire to throw seeds into for our dreams for the New Year. I wish I knew all the songs better, it

seems like a fun religion and I'd love to bring my kids to experience it. It was a magical night.

Vedic City

Fairfield, Iowa: Spiritual/Religious Community & University Town, population ~1000

Address: City Hall, 1973 Grand Drive, Maharishi Vedic City, Iowa 52556. Phone: (641) 470-7000. Webpage: www.vediccity.org

The "Vedic City" as they call it, is a unique piece of the Indian subcontinent transplanted smack dab in the middle of white picket America. Rising from the corn fields of sleepy Fairfield, Iowa, this place was founded by the followers of Maharashi Mahesh, the guru who also brought Transcedental Meditation to the Beatles. Now he's spreading "Yogic Flying," i.e. they meditate in two giant golden domes (one for women, one for men) and, as they "Om," start to bounce up and down out of sheer joy.

This is part of a great utopian project that seeks to transform this old community college into a model for an "invincible garden city" that will, mandala-like, spread over the whole world. Supposedly different parts of each house are more suited for different tasks, depending on the N/S/E/W orientation. And the arrangement of houses together is also an art of power. By proper urban design, a city can be peaceful and its ideals indestructible to the forces of decay all around it. Well, the more I travel and encounter different "mind-fields," the more I see how any and all of them can become valid and even powerful via the power of belief.

All the buildings in this city, even the Iowan-style homes, are huge and white, with

tiny golden domes on top. They all face east. So whenever you leave one building, you have to take a lengthy walk around the back of the next building to go inside. Behind one giant gate there is a glorious Babylonian palace with three levels of ornate terraces and pools and gardens and a huge fake mountain. I have a feeling that's reserved for one of the elites at the top of the social heirarchy.

And then it's also just a nice life, with a glorious network of bike paths that roll from the town square all the way out past several lakes, dipping down into dark patches of woods, and on and on into the

rolling red-barn hills. All the way along I'm singing Dar Williams' song, "Iowa."

Yarrow Ecovillage

I have to say my trip to Yarrow was the most disappointing of my short-lived career. It was pouring rain all across British Columbia, and I hadn't been able to catch the reply email from Michael, one of the founding members, who I'd met while visiting Earth aven. From the webpage I'd somehow gotten the impression of a grand town being rebuilt, and that the Eco-Village was the driving force behind this. When I got to Yarrow, it turned out to be a fairly prosperous, medium-sized suburban farm town, and no one I talked to had heard about the Eco-Village. They were like, "Eco what?" It was hick-ville. Finally I found it with the help of the post-master (there's no sign so it's easy to miss, but it's right on the main strip). Turns out it's just a few old houses on a lot, and a huge, mossy barn. Behind that, there's the farm fields. It was a soggy day, and no one was around at all. That was the extent of my experience at Yarrow. I would say that the webpage does give the impression they are farther along than they are, but check back in a few years. Meanwhile, they do apparently have a summer organic farming internship starting up, so that seems like the way to get involved.

Frasier Valley is a beautiful place, with misty, colorful peaks all around, and it's only a little more than an hour drive into Vancouver, a top-notch cosmopolitan city.

Places I Still Need to Visit

New York
Omega – A selfhelpville summer camp, East Coast style. Workshops and fun. Camping is $320/week, but there’s a seven-week work program (30 hours a week for half-time, email: sdd@eomega.org). In the summer the kids run wild, roleplaying in the woods for days. Arts Week July 21st-25th is a festival of music, dance, theater and writing. Omega Institute, 150 Lake Drive, Rheinbeck, NY 12572. www.eomega.org

Scotland
Findhorn – Happy hobbiton-style ecovillage on the Northeast coast, where "devas" helped the originators grow the famous 40-pound cabbages. Now there’s a restored forest, castle, windmills for power, houses made out of huge barrels, even an island. They do cool architecture, the “Transformation Game” and have a Living Machine to filter wastewater. Best way to visit is to do an “Experience Week”: They start on Saturdays at 12 noon, cost 325 pounds. Book well in advance with the online form, telling extensively about yourself. Email: enquiries@findhorn.org. +44 (01309) 691653. Findhorn Foundation, The Park, Findhorn, Moray IV36 3TZ, Scotland. The website has a nice 3-D tour: www.findhorn.org

France
Plum Village – Buddhist retreat center with 7 “hamlets.” Leader is Thich Nhat Hanh. 206 Euros a week, monastary retreat, wake up at five and meditate, work in afternoon, etc. Near Bordeaux. Upper Hamlet. Le Pey 24240, Thenac, France. Email: UH-office@plumvillage.org. Web page: www.plumvillage.org

Index of Communities:

Acorn