Greenhouse of Trust
I’m not on Facebook so much these months, because I am on a safari in the future, catching up on years of Waldorf-Steiner school that I’d missed in life, until now. I’m in Tamera, a visionary Peace Research and learning campus, in Portugal, which altogether feels like a place beyond time.
Neo-Paradise
Here, in this Healing Biotope, a good-sized 150-people colony is thriving on bio-gas and solar-panels from China. Scents of flowers, colorful cacti and a yet obscure Temple of Love resemble my own body of flesh, fear, and hope. Connected to so many others around the world, the community of Tamera is in search of the acupuncture points of today’s sick world. Merely by being here, I’m voluntarily forced out of my individual perception of life and of the world — and so for me at least, a new one begins.
On my day of arrival, the World Council of Global Peace (that’s really what it was called!) had just commenced. A gathering inside a large straw-bale and wooden building focussed on a realizable cross-cultural peace. As an Indigenous woman dispenses droplets of blessed water over the audience, I am silent. Wow! Where am I?
The Global Council meeting is about water. At this point, I have little notion of the crucial position that free, clean and healthy water holds in the world’s political and religious conflicts. How access to natural resources and other abundances is the undeniable foundation for a healthy and creative human life. Water and War, is a two-word pair that we should not forget about, or so I gather.
‘How access to natural resources and other abundances is the undeniable foundation for a healthy and creative human life.’
The absence of a natural basis — fertile soils, free-seeds and homegrown goodness, taken by colonial powers, exploiters and fighting-one-another governments — leads people to despair. The disconnect between humans and their local natural environments leads into the hands of systems of power away from the locality of their own life, inevitably handing over creative autonomy to ‘leaders’ and other authority figures.
Ultimately, the surrender of regional autonomy makes communities vulnerable to the waves of ‘the economy’ and other orchestrated top-down dis-empowerment schemes — at least, this is what I’m being told in this center of learning. So, how to regain Regional Autonomy? Set up Local Collaboration? How to reboot this abundant and free world?
‘Rock Rose, ever-present amongst the breeze.
A zillion chirping birds in Neo-Paradise,’ a journal poem.
Day three — News Theory
In peace, I sit on a brief moment of break in between demanding self-reflexive theater classes and psycho-therapeutical group exercises. I came here to take part in a one-month intense immersion course centered on community. Later today, we will learn about journalism.
I take in the panorama on the terra-formed landscape, gaze across the Water Retention Lakes and see wild connected horses waving their tails from left to right and up and down. Their wiggle provides me with the real news of the planet — and the news is good, warm, chill world news. Buzzing bees.
Truthfully, the Free Love and Sexuality brief that I had received while I was shown my dormitory made me feel a tad bit frightened. The practice of ‘Free Love’ is what this place is most known for, but this fertile enclave in the arid Portuguese landscape is nothing like a ball of orgy-ing hippies at all. Rather, the people here have developed candid ways of giving space for the desire to connect with other human beings. In vernacular dwellings dotted across the land called Love Spaces, the community has organized a certain zone void of labels such as ‘partner’ and/or ‘relationship’. To them, these words put a classification on a sensation that is natural: LOVE & EROS.
‘this fertile enclave in the arid Portuguese landscape is nothing alike a ball of orgy-ing hippies at all.’
Surely, I will devote another report on this topic, but just to clarify: no — people are not fucking in every quarter of the moon even though they could, but instead, attend a class on Peace Journalism, breathe into their abdominal pain and begin to understand that MEDIA -as we know it today- started as war-journalism at the times of the Vietnam war.
The central idea is that from within a zone of war, journalists would write home, which in the time of Vietnam was probably actually quite new. A the back-home nation would follow the ‘developments on the front’ frantically, supplemented with photographs and even videos. Following this model, reporters were compelled to travel from one conflicted zone to the next, writing ‘news’ stories— while moving away from an area (or story) once the conflicts would resolve, change or end. Overall, this created markedly un-integrated and disrupted narratives of place, people and the day-to-day on planet Earth. I mean, who is writing about every damn day where people learn about deeper trust, successful conflict resolutions, reviving ecosystems, happy lovers and landscapes of collaboration?
During the class it strikes me; there really isn’t much else in mainstream journalism than reports on war — with the exception of competitive sports and occasional discussions on immigrants, the economy and if we’re lucky, racism. Oh, and the recurring inevitable end of our ecological homeostasis here on Earth, of course! Violence, terror and desperation —on the fly.
It’s as if news-papers are merely collected stacks of paper, filled with Fear Ads and horrific narrations, that essentially strip us of our powers to create life on earth just as our happy bodies would want us to.
The often distorted (and unrepresentative) reports on what is happening in ‘the world’ are like a general type of information-glue, which holds our ability to conceive of a real-world of abundance down to a mediocre, if not nearly absent level. The resilience of our inner flame is getting smaller. So small, we feel it burning intensely in our deep stomach tissue, where it sits in an embrace with our soul.
While the sales of the Industries of War and Fear increase profit, the world, the people, the hearts and the horses feel only their incoming doom… But is this a real doom? Or is the fear of this doom, so eagerly dispensed through the news a magical formula of sorts, one that calls forth exactly that which it thinks it is trying to escape from? Yes, fear is a tricky sticky thing.
I wonder, can we break out of that space of resonance that attracts exactly the doom it speaks about?
To end a self-fulfilling prophecy we would need a total re-invention of media and a redistribution of ownership of news platforms. Re-write what the feed of the folks at their home computer, breakfast tables, and metro-rides looks like, entirely. The reinvention of our info-stream(1) is the only thing we can do to not turn life into a continuum of fear, anger and/or disassociation — led by the corporately owned sources of the real we call ‘the news’. Reweaving what sort of news is shared, to whom, by whom and in what way is quite a task. Where to begin, I wonder?
Future History
Surrounded by wise elders, homeopathy-cabinets and Ikea furnitures that populate my direct environment in this Greenhouse of Trust, I feel hopeful. If this place exists, other places must be out there too — neatly woven into the weavery of our system like tiny rebellious seedpod-baring threads.
And to imagine, this place is not a secret either; each year a continual influx and outflow of pilgrims, long-term residents and other psycho-somatic and holographic neo-world builders and explorers come here to prepare themselves for another 16.000 years of life to come. So, not all hope is gone. And in this daunting task of rewriting the stories that eventually become a more just history, we are not alone. This I feel very clear.
Around me stands a stone circle. Newly erected by the community. A calendar of sorts, not of time, but of archetypes. In my tummy, the collective afternoon lunch, fresh from the solar cooker, is settling in. I feel fuzzy and inspired.
Tamera. What a cool place! Truly, a site of historic transformation.
I say historic, not because this place is a few 100 years old, but because in the future this situation here will have been pivotal, essential. Like so many alternative communities and learning centers that seek out intersectional justice — beacons of hope for the continual thriving, and the joyful expansion of the cohabitation of this planet. What a privilege to have come here!
I imagine a new life, on the same planet, informed by the lessons of history and the evidence of new sciences, which prove that our connection with the environments and the divine is evidential. Around us, then, is a Matrix of Love that holds us in total trust. Giving us life like a dance, or an adventure… not a fight or flight surviving. This is the image I hold, and which I send out like a new kind of news.
Your Journalist
J_16
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(1) I see the Info-Stream as the nutrition of the probability of potential realities! It feeds what we believe to be possible.
All photographs by author.
www.jaspergriepink.nl
