I’ve always known that what we are doing here in Green Acres Village is radical. Rad-ical, i.e., “to the root,” and therefore very hard to put into practice unless one is willing to uncover and discard layer upon layer of conditioning, most of which gets more and more calcified with age. For what we are doing here, in this college town, is fundamentally intergenerational, the old living together with the young. The other aspects of this experiment — how we are permaculturing the grounds of three contiguous houses with paths between them, how the nine people who live here consciously ride the shifting edge between individuality and community; how we work consciously to both unearth and integrate our own “shadow” material; how both permaculture and the resulting goodwill, conviviality, and (let’s face it) evolutionary thrust is infecting the surrounding neighborhood; how others from near and far flock to see and what we are doing, to participate in our weekly community meals, and hopefully, to return to where they live and manifest the latent villages within their own neighborhoods.
All, all of it, depends upon intergenerational bonds of, as Wendell Berry says, affection, a deep and abiding affection that only grows through time.
I feel deeply fortunate and grateful to have stumbled upon this powerful seed which has proved so surprising, fruitful, and resilient. Halleujah!
