In the seventh grade I made friends with Maggie Weimer, who
was a year ahead of me in school, after a middle school dance. Both she and I
were standing around waiting for someone to pick us up. Maggie offered me some
chocolate out of a box of sweets some young rocker or genius nerd had given her
(love the brilliant nerds). Our friendship started to develop once I got into
high school. Maggie is one of three of the Weimer sisters, “The Weimers.” Her
middle sister is the same age as my sister. In a nutshell, my sister and I
pretty much spent our entire adolescence in the Blue House (or Animal House,
depending on when you lived or partied there), and Maggie and Gretchen spent
theirs at our house.
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| Arroyo Seco, New Mexico |
The reason this is important is because we were part of a
pack of artists, musicians, philosophers, activists and vegetarians or vegans.
We went to concerts, hung out listening to music and doing art or cleaning the
house up after a group meal. This was my very first exploration of community.
Imagine this pack doing the things teenagers do, such as skip school to hit all
the second hand stores, go skinny dipping at Pilchuck, or talk about the fucked
up destruction of our environment (with Led Zeppelin, Van Morrison, The Pixies,
or Dinosaur Jr. playing the background).
Our conversations of living communally, buying land together
and building our individual houses really didn’t begin until 1991. A group of
us spent a lot of time up at the Big Lake Land Trust in Skagit Valley, and at
the Love Israel Ranch near Darington, Washington (they first started in San
Francisco). We had a couple of very different examples of community and even
became involved enough to be representatives of the Israel Ranch at the Oregon
Country Fair to educate the public about community living in 1995.
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| Under the walnut tree: G.R.U.B. Cooperative. Chico, CA |
We were all exposed to various building techniques, mediums,
and systems of construction; social organization, decision making and power
structures, as well as farming methodologies and how and where private and
communal spaces were laid out. All of us talked to various degrees and for
numerous hours over the last 21 years, but Gretchen and I specifically spent a
great deal of time at different swimming holes, talking about how we want to
live in a way that is congruent with nature’s systems, as well as what kind of
shape or form our house would be. Our minds were extremely open and I’ve always
run with people who are brilliant, expanding their consciousness and living on
the forefront. We started talking about not building with wood but with
salvaged materials like glass and how bad-ass it would be to build a house in
the shape of a mushroom with a winding staircase – private quarters in the stem
and common space in the head.
Now it all comes together. Twenty years later, I arrive at
the Earthship Biotecture visitor’s center for orientation. I sit down, fill out
the liability forms and so on (you know how it goes), and then I noticed a
large diagram on the wall. I could not believe what I was seeing! It was a
moment I could not breathe, my heart stopped and time stood still. It sounds
dramatic, but it was an incredible moment! What did I see on the wall?! It was
a multiple schematic of a freaking MUSHROOM HOUSE!!!
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| Earthship Biotecture Visitor's Center: Greater World (GW), NM |
It was one of those visceral engulfing moments where I knew
I was exactly where I was supposed to be at exactly the right time. We all put
the wheel into spin long ago about how we aspired to live, and what kind of
home we would want to build. From living at the Animal House in Warm Beach, WA
to living in community in Jerome, AZ back to the Skagit Valley, The Department
of Safety in Anacortes, WA, to three different housing co-ops in and around the
Seattle area, and now in Chico, California and Taos, NM. The sign to me is so
strong and so obvious it does not seem real!
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| The Dream Lives On |
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