Designing Rituals that Stick

My funological comrades and I are in a conversation about what the “central ritual” will be at the Villages in the Sky festival in the Ozarks in 2010. Central rituals play important roles in two of the inspirational events for VIS – Burning Man and the Rainbow Gathering.

At Burning Man there are actually two central rituals. The first (on the Saturday night) is the burning of the man. A 40 foot high effigy is set alight amongst dozens of fire dancers and a host of fireworks displays. Participants run in circles around the burning man and make incredible noise. Crystal actually does not think this is a ritual at all, he prefers to refer to it as “the spectacle” and it certainly is that.

On Sunday night the temple is burned. The temple is further out, and actually much larger overall It is made entirely of wood and is an incredibly intricate art piece. On it participants scribble what ever it is they want to let go of, often sadness about a loved one who passed in the last year (or anytime really). In sharp contrast to the burn of the man, this is a highly somber and quiet. Up close, both of these rituals are physically quite hot. They are also magnificent enuf so that they can be enjoyably viewed from a fairly significant distance.

At the Rainbow Gathering the central ritual mixes noise and quite. Part of the site selection for the part of the national parks which hosts these gatherings is that they need to have a space (for the national gatherings) which can accommodate 25,000 people standing in a large circle holding hands. For the first half of the fourth of July, rainbow kids (some of whom are in their 80s) are silent, doing their daily chores, heading toward a mid day gathering which comes together in a large silent circle. After some length of time which seems cosmologically determined, the kids run into the middle yelling and this is the signal for everyone to run in. Much dancing and partying ensues.

We will have tree houses and zip lines and hopefully turbine platforms as our environment. Presumably, there will be an open field to operate in, and n year one only a few hundred participants. And I believe that this ritual, and its power and effect on people will be one of the things which determines how many people come back for year 2 and beyond.

So I am in dialog with my new lover Premin, who lives in a spiritual resort which used to be a spiritual commune about what gives ritual life and bond people with them. She said these clever things:

The real important thing about ritual is, that it is not a ritual. that it is alive in every moment, that it makes sense, that it takes people into account, and when it doesn’t feel right or fitting any more, it can be changed. It grows with the moment, with the people. It takes presence, and not routine.

Culture Follies

For those of you who have tuned in late, i am a bit of an odd duck.

The other day i was in Boston helping Keyvah and Gpaul and Benji (a charming newish Oaker) set up for the Natural Food Expo at the convention center. Keyvah has a strange addiction to fancy hotels, so we were staying in the Omni Paker House right downtown.

I have trouble talking quietly on a cell phone, so Keyvah had thrown me out of the room while i was chatting about the Testival (test festival) we are organizing for the tree house launch at Acorn. So i went into the hallway at the Omni on the 8th floor and parked myself in front of the elevators.

i did not even think about it a laydown on the super clean hotel floor with my head propped up against the wall, in my slightly strange shorts and continued talking on the phone. My position looked something like the picture below (without the hat and not asleep).

For perhaps 20 minutes no one comes out of the elevator, but then 2 older couples emerge decked out in very nice clothes having an animated conversation. They are clearly a bit shcoked by my presene and position. i ignore them and continue blabbing.

About 5 minutes later a hotel security guy comes out of the elevator, looking for me. He starts with a confrontive manner, clearly a bit unsure of how to deal with the situation. But he quickly notices i have a hotel key in my hand, and he chills a bit.

He instructs me that you cant lay on the floor in this hotel. i am slightly disbelieving, but he assures me this is so. he then points to the collection of perfectly reasonable chairs which are less than 5 meters away from me and asks if i could continue my phone call from there.

i cave to the pressure and sit in one of the plush chairs.

Arguing with Willow

Part of the communities agreements is that children will do small amounts of work for the collective good. The amount they are asked to do is based on age and for a 7 year old, only here part time (because Willow spends part of each week in Cville with Sky) is one hour per week. Next year it will be two hours per week.


For a while we often did part of Willow's quota in the hammock shop. He was getting pretty good at winding shuttles and toddling them over to the welding station. But the economy and our own inability to market hammocks swept the business and now the hammock shop is nearly closed. Hawina has been having Willow do a bit of food processing (where we preserve our harvest for later in the year) and he has been unloading the dishwashers are Tupelo and MorningStar. While we continue to seek places to find labor credits for him.

We had an argument about it yesterday.

Our clothes were up to dry outside MorningStar and Willow and i were taking them down. "You can take labor credits for this." i replied casually. "No i cant." replied my clever son. "These are our clothes and not community clothes" And i realized he understood the system better than i had given him credit for. Indeed, normally one can not take labor credits for work which just benefits ones self.

I explained to Willow that there was actually a policy which gave members labor credits for drying their own clothes on the line, instead of using a dryer to save electricity and money for the community. He was having none of it.

"Can i get labor credits for taking down our own laundry?" Willow asked Hawina, skeptical of my claims. Hawina explained about the perhaps passed eco-laundry labor credits. But i could tell it was not sitting well with Willow. "You should not get labor credits for doing your own stuff." i could see him thinking.

When i was 7, i had quite some notion of family, and some vague notion about states and countries. But i had nothing like the sense of fairness and equity that my small partner seems to have developed.

Just one question

Burning Man was quite the bust this year. We had an amazing team and an interesting project to hype. But dear friends were caught up in this crazy sting/entrapment escapade and much of our energy was defused in getting them sprung.

Ironically, with all the amazing art and bizarre contraptions on the Playa, the best part of this years Burning Man for me was a set of conversations i had with my dear friend Crystal which could have just as easily be held in a Santa Cruz coffee shop.

Crystal wants to build an international camp at next years burn. US nationals could participate, but everyone who is there must pass a short admissions test, which is in it's entirety the question "Are you a revolutionary?"

Armada

There are 17 people at East Wind (including 3 on their way) who will be deploying the Villages in the Sky Burning Man equipment. After a Herculean effort, we finally found an affordable truck to carry all the stuff (thanks Keyvah, yeah Sara). It is an impressive array of stuff:

1) Circus/Revival tent 20' but 60'
2) A Healix tower with two wind turbines on the top
3) A mobile kitchen
4) A small tent village
5) a somewhat undefined collection of vehicles

We are at 6:45 and Fossil. If you are coming to Burning Man you should definitely stop by and especially for the funological brainstorm and naming party on Friday at dusk.

This is getting exciting.

And yesterday East Wind approved the hosting of the Villages in the Sky festival in June 2010. We have a home, at least for a couple of years.

Night Owls

On my way to the Yaffa Cafe (where Tobias and i are now geeking) this morning i asked myself "Why am i going there?"

There are 2 bazillion great places it eat in NYC. It appears that industrial capitalism, which i dont have much good to say about, really works for Manhattan - the average restaurant is better than the national average, by a lot. In this hyper competitive/information rich environment only the great survive.

It is not the charming wait staff, who rolled with it when i said "if you touch that i will hurt you" when the waitress tried to take my nearly empty plate.

The mock leopard skin chair covers and table designs are cute, but actually i had not noticed them before today.

No, it is that it is open all night, every night. Of course it is not at all a strange for Manhattan and i am not currently using this feature, because it is the middle of the day. But i want to support outfits which keep the odd hours i do.

My big complaint about most of the cities i love (Am*dam, San Francisco, even Berlin) is that they roll up the streets between midnight and 2 AM. What is up with that ? i want to be in the city (which as Mz DiFranco calls it) "never shuts up".



We have had amazing hosts in the 3 Burroughs we have inhabited. Teagan and Arrow in Manhattan have put up with a parade of organizers and activists which i seem to hang with these days. Teagan fell in love with Sara (this is easy to do, everyone seems to these days). She seems unstoppable despite being gloriously pregnant. Arrow was immeasurable help with the dozens of details associated with the Villages in the Sky camp at Burning Man. [I have been a few times, but i have never been involved with setting up a real camp before]. He has also agreed to be on the board of directors for our shell company International Funological Initiative Limited, which is something of a relief for me, because he is experience in both big festival organizing and clean fuels.




Diana threw parties, hosted workshops and was stunningly available for our many needs. I want every lawyer in america to be just like her. In fact, if every lawyer were just like her, i would be so out of a job. Just a few steps from the Williamsburg bridge, Diana brought Brooklyn to life and hosted of us in her tiny flat and panoramic roof. And connected us with her lively collection of rad artists, activists and troublemakers.



George at Ganas was gone for most of our visit but i did get in my few conversations about the Tamara in Portugal, why peak oil is not a play, kids in community and why the world would be a better place is we stopped worrying about counting everything.

I leave NYC understand better peoples love of the place.

Headline News

In one of the many late night metaphysical rants Modok and i shared in Santa Cruz, he once said to me "You need to live your life like your are trying to keep the reader of your biography engaged." It has been a good few weeks for my fictitious biography readers. I can't really do justice to any of the topics i am going to hit on - but things are just going to get worse if i dont do some chronicling - so off we go.

Summer Camp: Network for a New Culture does several camps in the US each year. My take on the these events is they are efforts to look at what kind of culture we want to have in a better world we want to be part of. There is an eclectic mix of topics at summer camp, but the ones around crafting a sex positive culture are the ones which get the most attention. A significant number of people who go to summer camps have a transformative experience, especially people who go as first time participants (interestingly, these revelations usually don't have to do with sex, or at least not primarily so). This years camp did the most radical workshop i have ever been in.

Paul who does work with imprisoned sex offenders in Washington state lead a workshop that didn't just take on the myths about sex offenders. Included in these myths is that sex offenders cant change - when in reality, if fully treated sex offenders have the lowest recidivism rate of any major crime except murder. But the big myth (which i bought into until this camp) was that sex offenders are different from us, that we could perhaps tell them if we were close to them and that they are conveniently "other-able".

A space was created for people to confess anything which they had done to the group and hear the groups response to it. This is a restorative justice exercise, where the group takes responsibility for its collective behavior. Several people admitted some shocking things and the response of the group was pretty impressive. There were a fair number of people who were pretty angry and expressed it in clear terms. Others were appreciative of the daring. Still others were thrown for a loop (including me) and forced to face these things as not distant and other, but as part of my community which is working to heal itself. I cant say much about the stories here, but i can talk about the overwhelming sense that i had in the workshop that if the work is going to change around this type of problem it is going to be thru this kind of daring and this type of community commitment.

And i had my own ideological struggles with summer camp. One of the favorite bromides is "Ask for 100% of what you want, negotiate for a win win, be willing to hear "no" as an answer" When i first heard it i thought it was clever and the more that i watch it, i fear it is too sweeping. I prefer the honest seduction stuff, which deals with disclosers and the complex situations where "yes" actually means "i am doing this for the wrong reasons"

Premin

Also at Summer Camp i met and got romantically involved with Premin (pictured above in some tree i have never seen her in, courtesy of facebook). Working with the organizers of summer camp this year i was able to help provide some scholarships for people who could not otherwise attend camp. Premin (who i had never met) was one of these people.

I was worried as i went to Shana's place (where Premin stayed before camp) that our interaction would be weird, since in the past when i have offered financial help to someone who does not know me they think they are in some unspecified way indebted to me. So i stepped into my first encounter with Premin with some trepidation. But i was alone there.

In my first short conversation with Premin, i was blown away. She was there in her simple magnificence. Money dynamics and hidden obligations to me were undiscussed and clearly unimportant. Her power of presence reflexively drew me into my power. I walked out of our first encounter, with its unremarkable transcript, thinking to myself "i could fall in love with this woman". And in the coming days i promptly did.

As a story teller i am drawn to highlight that she lives in Puna, India tho of European decent. She has a camel named tiger which she has invited me to ride and she teaches several workshops on meditation and empowerment thru self awareness. But this misses the essence of her, which as my karate instructor used to say about trying to use words to transmit meaning "is like trying to hold jello to a tree with a knife."

Villages in the Sky

When i first went to Burning Man in 2001, i realized that from a pagan elemental perspective there were a couple of important festivals missing. We had Burning Man as a fire festival, the Rainbow Gathering was an earth festival, but where was the sister air festival ? Where was "Flowing Woman" beside the sea with healing and spirituality?

So myself and some talented comrades have decided it's time to do something about this. We are going to try to build the air festival. Tho Tobias hates the name, for now at least it is called Villages in the Sky ok, he does not hate it, he just thinks it is too long.

The rough plan is have a festival in the summer of 2010 which celebrates and experiences wind. We are planning on building windmills and tree houses and doing a myriad of other interesting things in hopes of creating an event that is so sexy other people want to organize their own versions in their regions (as has happened with both Burning Man and the Rainbow Gathering). But unlike these venerable events, we do want to leave a trace behind - we want to start building a different and better world that lingers.

At first we thought we would do the event near the intentional communities near Rutledge Missouri. Rutledge was attractive because there are three different Eco-villages all in close proximity (Dancing Rabbit, Sandhill, Red Earth Farms). Tobias, Sara and i trekked out to Missouri to try to entice them into joining our project. There was some interest, and there were lots of concerns. And what we discovered is that these communities did not need any help in promoting themselves, they already had more guess and visitors than they could handle.

Time to rethink our strategy. If Rutledge was not the right place where was? Well, one of the other reasons for selecting Missouri is that they have some of the most relaxed zoning laws in the country. If we were going to be building funky towers for windmills and strange tree house villages, it would be nice to not have to be getting permits and explaining everything to building inspectors. And as soon as we were looking for alternative to Rutledge in Missouri, the sister community of Twin Oaks, East Wind, jumped to mind.

In my mind East Wind has always kind of been the wild, wild west of the communities movement. Located on a thousand acres of beautiful land in the Ozarks, it is younger in population and more far more relaxed than it's older sister Twin Oaks. One indicative story, a few years back my lover Deborah was slightly drunk at East Wind and was in the music room looking up at the ceiling and said "we should build a skylight in this room." The next day she and some friends cut a whole in the ceiling and started to install the imagined skylight. Such a project would take months of discussion and planning at Twin Oaks, and might well not happen because of concerns about the roof leaking or budget priorities.

Several East Winders got excited about the project and decided to jump on in a big way. Lion and Zeke are both helping with a demonstration tower for the event and helping Sheppard the project thru community process. Unlike a skylight in the music room, a several hundred person festival and a large foot print tree house village need to be discussed and agreed to - even in the wild, wild west. We are not completely through our process with East Wind, but there is much more enthusiasm and more supportive festival culture there than we found in Rutledge.

Acorn Tree Houses

We wanted a testbed for the tree house village, so decided to build a smaller version locally to learn about how to build then to so they were 1) safe for kids, 2) low impact on trees and 3) serious fun. Perhaps the martest thing i have said in years was to ex-Oaker Pilgrim who is working on the Acorn aerial village, "Put as many platforms up as you can, dont worry about stairs, railings, safety - someone will follow behind you and get these things." Then, with nothing in place, i went to summer camp. I came back 11 days later and he had lofted 9 platforms, the highest was 35 feet up and over half of them were over a dozen feet high. And my thoughts about the entire project changed - especially my thoughts about what was possible and how the organizers interact with the participants.

"Build then design" became the unofficial motto of the project, perhaps to show up on t-shirts soon. Our job, in my current world view is to create spaces up in trees (these platforms) which others can build on top of and around. The test for carpenters working on the project these days is there ability to work without plans, since there are not any. We will ultimately do drawings of the Acorn Tree houses, but they will be describing what is after it is built, rather than design documents.

Burning Man

So i have been saying for a year that i am not going to Burning Man, it was a lie. It is not that i dont like the event, but there ar only so many festivals a year i can go to and i feel like i understand this one reasonably well having been 3 times including the last two years. And it is also and amazing place potentially for networking and to hustle Villages in the Sky. So we are going to go in a big way, we are pulling together a camp complete with tower, school bus, circus tent and a bunch of enthusiastic funological ambassadors. Watch this space for more details. We are hoping to find an existing theme camp to be near - know any good ones ?