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The Good Life
Growing vegetables, chopping wood and morning meditation … Vicky Allan visits two Scottish communes and finds out what life is like when self-sufficiency and caring for others is judged more important than living in a material world
You might imagine life in a commune to be more alien than this. That there must be dancing to the moon goddess, acid visions and free love. But when I visit Monimail Tower Community, near Cupar in Fife on January 14 there is just work, food, chat, work, food, chat, wood chopping (work), pumpkin eating, tea drinking and talk of the occasional cocktail party. As Marion Rose, Monimail’s longest-standing member, says, “It’s much less unconventional than people think it’s going to be.” The weirdest thing they do here, she says, is fell trees and make their own planks.
There are many popular misconceptions about living in a commune, mainly based on that Sixties golden age, when it seemed half the world was growing their hair, tuning in and dropping out. But the idea of the Utopian community has not disappeared, nor was it new then. Scotland has long had its attempts to create ideal societies, from Robert Owen’s early 19th-Century socialist model villages at New Lanark and Orbiston, to the Camphill centres, the first of which was set up by Austrian refugees in a manse outside Aberdeen in 1939 to care for children with special needs.
More recently, there was Findhorn, established in 1962 by guru-like matriarch Eileen Caddy. Famed initially for its 40lb cabbages and communications with nature’s spirits, it is now an advanced eco-village with a programme of events and courses, a place of pilgrimage for those interested in alternative living.
There are around 100,000 Britons living in “intentional communities”, the inclusive term for eco-villages, communes, housing cooperatives – anywhere, in fact, where yoghurt might be knitted. The Diggers and Dreamers website, a guide to communal living, lists 15 intentional communities in Scotland. They range from Balnakeil Craft Village in Sutherland to the Faslane peace camp, to Laurieston Hall in Dumfries and Galloway, which claims no strict philosophy, just that they “believe in compost, laughing, wellies and freedom”.
Communities tell us a lot about how people live together, not just within them, but outside them. They tell us about the things we want to escape (the rat race, consumerism, isolation, waste) and the things we crave (contact with nature, time to think, cooperation). Stay at one, as I did, even for a couple of days, and you begin to see how certain questions are raised and answered. How do you live intimately, yet find privacy? How can a decision be made to satisfy everyone? What happens when people clash?
In the Seventies, the French intellectual Roland Barthes delivered a series of lectures on the theme of How To Live Together. He was reflecting on the possibilities of forming small communities, in which people could experience personally intense relationships, yet live with freedom, following their own paths. Barthes noted that during the 10th Century the Greek monk, Athanasius, founded a monastery on Mount Athos, where monks could attend liturgies when they wanted, living what was termed an idiorhythmic life.
We now live in idiorhythmic times. That’s how most families run, coming together occasionally, possibly for a meal or to watch Coronation Street, then dispersing to pursue their own private activities. At Monimail, there is some group routine and some space for idiorhythm. A group of us start the morning together. This is winter and the community is quiet. Windfall apples line the path, mushed and pocked. The once riotous sunflower patch is an emaciated crowd of brittle spindles. The earth seems desolate but expectant, waiting for the summer when the gardens unfurl with colour and volunteers crowd the veranda. Currently there are only seven people at the centre; three permanent members, two lodgers, one visitor and myself.
Four of us meet in a room at Monimail Tower at 9.30am for meditation. Marion Rose reads from a Buddhist book. We sit in coats and fleeces, breath clouding the air, legs crossed beneath blankets. A series of chimes on a small round bowl. Fifteen minutes of silence follow, 15 minutes of pins and needles. The day has begun.
There is no leader, though Rose seems to know the 16-acre site best. Brought up in Kinross, in a ‘conventional’, middle-class family, she has worked as a gardener most of her life. She studied ecology in the Seventies, and was there at the beginning of Monimail in 1985, one of the initial group of gardeners, farmers and alternative thinkers. The centre retains its constitution from then (that it is not owned by the individuals but by the Monimail Trust) but has evolved its practices with the members. It is centred around the garden and tower, and by the cycle of living off the land. Each member has their crop. Catherine Wright, for instance, has onions, which she wept over this year when they rotted in the wet ground. Each pays a rent of ?146 a month and works two days a week for the trust. There are certain rules and systems: a rota for communal cooking, an “ethically sound” food policy – which includes not eating food that has been transported from further away than north Africa – and a monthly committee meeting.
They are not completely disconnected from the rest of the world. There is the computer, email, the radio and, during my visit, two of the members glam up to go out, one to the cinema, the other to her ballroom dancing lesson.
The thing, Rose says, people find most strange is that they carry out work which is not profitable. “Sometimes we do things which aren’t economic. A lot of people won’t do things that aren’t worth it. And it’s never going to be worth it financially for people to live here. Because we work for nothing. It’s a bit counterculture to work for nothing.”
“Here you start thinking about how all life is quite temporary,” says Sarah Whiteside. “But you also see yourself as part of the bigger picture; there’s something nice about planting things in the ground that you know are going to be there for the next lot of people.”
For Catherine Wright, who first arrived at Monimail to stay for a couple of weeks, then came back for what has now been two years, one of the best things about living in a community is the pressure it takes off relationships. “When you live with one other person, you want them to be everything. You want them to be your friend, your lover, the person you do things with. But here everyone’s so different. Living in a community, there’s less expectation the other person will change, or will just iron out these wrinkles in their personality. It just doesn’t happen.”
Monimail is a land-oriented sustainable community. Wood is the practical focus of the time I spend here. We shift wood. We burn it. We make a chicken shed. The rain starts and the chopped wood that is sitting outside the main shelter must be shifted to the covered shed . This takes about ten minutes and leaves a mound of pink sawdust on the grass which we rake up and take to the compost toilet, a hut complete with china jug and wash basin. The shed now cleared, there is space for more unchopped logs which must be taken from another shed several hundred metres away. These are balanced on wheel-barrows, wheels and feet slipping in the mud, until this second shed is empty, ready to be filled in turn with slimey, fungus-covered logs lying in a corner of the Monimail woodland. These we carry by hand.
I am just a newcomer, but already I have the sensation that this cycle of wood transfer is unending, that, if it weren’t for the evidence of the logs firing up the stove, these jobs are part of some Sisyphean cycle in which, ultimately, the final logs are returned again to the forest.
Wood shifting is one of many jobs that the Monimail community cycles through – planting, raking, weeding, cleaning, building, repairing . Boring, pointless, seemingly mundane jobs. Yet no one at Monimail seems to mind. This is what it means, after all, to be part of a community. You put the work in, you share parsnip soup, tell stories, feel the warmth of a cup of tea, and the world seems to connect.
Monimail, with its mania for logs, is just one type of intentional community in Scotland. But there are many others: spiritual-oriented centres such as Samye Ling in Eskdalemuir; therapeutic communities that work with people with mental health problems, such as Loch Arthur Camphill; protest camps such as Faslane. Most have an ideology which binds them, and stops them fragmenting when times get tough.
Three hour’s drive from Monimail, in Dumfries and Galloway, the therapeutic community of Lothlorien sits in the gentle hills. It seems strangely serene. Eight people gather round the table. There is mushroom and vegetable soup. Gentle folk music plays in the background. There was a time when there were many such therapeutic communities, an era when the most fashionable approach to mental health was to break down the distinctions between staff and patient, RD Laing-style, and bring everyone together.
Most of the therapeutic communities of the Sixties have disappeared, often transformed into mainstream clinics. Those that remain are more structured than the Laing model. Lothlorien, for instance, has a management committee, who live off-site. Though it’s difficult to tell as you wander round who is a co-worker, who is staff and who is a resident, there is a light hierarchy.
Manager, Brendan Hickey who has fallen off his bike on the way into work, limps on a swollen knee. “I think,” he says, “community works for people because, when they go through the mental health system, they’re recipients of care. Here they can make a contribution.”
I meet Hickey with fellow staff member Heather Dudley in the meditation room. The floor is strewn with chaotic, riotous paintings. This is where the residents come for relaxation, basket-making, and to practice massage on each other. Hickey’s background is in social work. He lived in a therapeutic community in Ireland and has worked in residential hospitals. Dudley is a trained therapist and one-time resident of the Samye Ling centre. The ideological underpinning of Lothlorien, though lightly stated, is Buddhist.
According to Hickey, “When you have a lot of mental or emotional difficulty, the elements are out of balance and the simplest way to get them back in balance is to work through the earth element. I think that’s true not just for people with mental health problems but for everyone. That’s the basis of what we do here.”
This sounds esoteric, but it’s not difficult to see what he means. “You could ask, what is the therapy here?” says Dudley. “It’s everything. It’s the rhythm of the day, the structure, the routines. Even the ritual of meals together, the work periods and working outside, and winding down to the end of the day. ”
The system is set up so there are eight residents plus four volunteers, called co-workers living in the main lodge, and five residents living in a satellite house called Rowan-Lodge.
Residents include Ben Grant, who is on his second stay here. Grant, who suffers from schizophrenia, was living in Edinburgh. He had come off his medication and ended up in hospital. “I had two choices,” he recalls, “Either go back to my flat or come here. Coming here was a much better choice.”
Whatever their nature or ideology, all communities have had to develop certain methods for dealing with practical matters such as decision making. Some have guru-like leaders who decide for all, others devolve important matters to management committees; some decide democratically, others look for consensus. This consensus, the agreement of all, is what they strive for at Monimail. It can mean things happen slowly. It meant, for instance, that the purchase of their last washing machine was drawn out over a couple of months and involved numerous procrastinations. But, in the end, everyone was happy. There is too the issue of membership: who gets to join, who doesn’t. Generally this is decided by trial and a consensus decision. At Lothlorien budding residents and co-workers come for a trial two-week period.
Grant recalls his initial trial: “It’s nerve-wracking because the community have to see if you fit in. It’s harder to get into Lothlorien than Oxford. Also, you have to have the funding.” It costs ?328 a week to stay at Lothlorien, and funding generally comes from Social Services.
Inevitably, however, people do clash. As Grant says, “It can be quite tricking living with a big group. People get on each other’s nerves.” Often, if the problem is big, it is resolved in meetings.
“We have a community meeting twice a week,” says Hickey. “We share how we’re doing, talk about difficulties we’re having. It’s a forum where people can address differences. Often it won’t be, ‘I don’t like you’. It will be, ‘I have a difficulty when you play the radio late at night’.”
Life at Lothlorien is a little different from what it was in the Seventies. John Allison, the current horticultural support worker, was around then, when it was run by the Haughton family who set up the lodge. In photographs showing its construction, bare-chested, long-haired young men heave planks and logs into place. Allison confesses he was one of these hippies. It was all, it seems, a lot more chaotic then. He recalls that funding was haphazard, that he sold his house in Yorkshire to pay rent. There were children living in the house too, and experiments in having all members involved in all decisions.
“Back in the Seventies,” he smiles, “we thought we could do anything. How have things changed? Some things lost and some things gained. A bit of me hankers for those times. A kind of idealism got lost on the way.”
Not all communities are as grounded as Monimail and Lothlorien. Communal living, of course, has its history of cultishness: take the mass suicides of the Branch Davidians in 1994, Waco, Texas. Even Findhorn has suffered accusations of “cult behaviour”, listed in a book by Stephen J Castro and including the harrassment of ‘dissenters’. Yet Monimail, and most current communities, are no more cultish than the average family, work-place or group of friends. They are just part of the millennia-long human experiment in how to live together.
What does the existence of communities say about what we crave in our 21st-Century lives? Some things are obvious: a sense of interconnectedness; a slower pace of life; a sense of support. “In some societies,” says Hickey, “if somebody was having difficulty, they would have a healing circle around them. Family and friends. People aren’t just taken out and put in an institution. In the modern world, that’s not the case any more. We have nuclear families where people don’t have lots of support. ”
Most of us, of course, yearn for these things, and there are many other more modern experiments on the theme. Co-housing, the development of intentional communities with separate houses yet shared common areas, is already popular in the US and Denmark, and there are attempts to set up such projects here.
In Edinburgh, Liz Murray is part of a group battling for funding and planning permission for a development of 15-25 environmentally sustainable houses within a 40-minute travel distance of the city. A co-housing community is looser than a commune. People have their own homes, their independence, their lives and work, yet meet for communal meals and meetings. Their common characteristic is what Murray calls social sustainability. “People live there and stay put. There’s not a lot of coming and going, and they work out the problems they have and grow into their responsibilities.”
We are all, of course, part of a community, whether “intentional” or not. There’s some truth to the Friends-style concept of the urban buddies who become our surrogate brothers and sisters . Our work-place too can offer some semblance of a family, but all too often it fails to satisfy.
Curiously enough, while I was researching this piece, a film-maker, Zak Copping, approached me about a mockumentary he is making in which a banker tracks down his sister to a commune on Skye and goes to retrieve her. Coppping had lived in a commune for a short time as a teenager. There is a line in the script, spoken by the sister, when asked why she doesn’t want to escape. It seems appropriate. “As far as we’re concerned,” she says, “it’s the rest of the world that’s mad.”
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