The mountain farm of Greta Fields, aka Ravenkeeper.

Greta Fields’ neighbors over the ridge are strip mining. Greta is planting wildflowers. The contrast is palpable as Greta tells me of pressure from the mining company to sell her land. Greta has other plans.

“I thought of calling this place Mine Pony Farm, to honor all the ponies who lived here and died in the mines,” she muses between pointing out and naming bunches of flowering plants in the understory. We walk in and out of woods on her land, a mountain, actually, in Appalachia. She was raised in these mountains and is clearly as rooted and natural here as the flowers and fruit trees she’s sown.

Her family has a rich love of the theater and Greta has authored several plays. Her ties to the regional and national arts communities lead to the brainstorm of turning her farm into a playwrights retreat, complete with homes for writers and actors and a stage, where playwrights can hear their works in progress performed.

She’s well on her way. Many fledgling groups struggle to find and purchase land. Greta has plenty of land, owned outright, and she’s researching putting it in land trust. Often getting the first houses on the land is an ordeal. Her farm has 4 homes and a trailer now. The single story homes range from one to three bedrooms, with complete kitchens and baths. All have been rewired. At the moment, all need some repairs. She used to maintain them herself, but she’s been away from the property attending graduate school and now she’d like to hire or trade with a handyperson or caretaker who will occupy the farm during the work.

Greta has a biocentric  (life centered) philosophy and she protects and nurtures a population of rare, large ravens on her land, hence her online moniker, Ravenkeeper.

I’m excited at the possibility of preserving Greta’s farm in land trust, protecting it from unsustainable practices and holding it instead as a platform for exploring and preserving the rich cultural and arts traditions of Appalachia. “ I used to think the idea of ‘Appalachian place’ was meaningless,” explains Greta, “Now I realize it is everything. If you lose your sense of place, you lose your soul.”

Few words could be more powerful for me, as I visit Greta directly from visiting my family farm in Bloomfield, Kentucky. Our farm as been in our family since the land grant days. It has always been a touchstone for me, a living soul I sometimes call my “second grandmother.” I wrote my screenplay, Bacca Blooms, as an exploration of my bond with our farm and the generations of my bloodline there. 

As I approach 14 years of life in the woods of Heathcote Community, I ponder how mobile our society really is. During this trip I heard an NPR report that more than half of the human race is now living in urban settings. So few of us put down roots and sit still with any piece of land for very long. What are we denying ourselves? This loss must diminish us. No wonder so many humans can’t view their purchasing and lifestyle choices through the filter of their impacts on the environment. Their choices so rarely come directly back to them. And the land doesn’t get the time to “speak” to them, as when we slow down, getting still and wordless.

Greta has many of the elements in place to make a difference on this piece of land, and to offer it as a sanctuary to artists who might then spread their “sense of place” to the world. Who can help her with the next step, which is getting her houses ready for artists? The caretaker should have carpentry, plumbing and electrical skills and be able to work independently with direction. And s/he should be prepared for rustic living, these are the mountains. There are snakes, bobcats and bears. Nature is not a Disney movie!

If you’re interested in being a caretaker or getting involved with Greta’s farm in another way, contact her via her gaia.com profile:

http://ravenkeeper.gaia.com/

If you'd like to find an Intentional Community near you, or just learn more about it, join our group:

http://pods.gaia.com/tribe__choosing_intentional_community

You might be a redneck if...

Local color from Elk Creek, Kentucky

Come on people! You're handing me blog topics on a lead free, made in USA pewter platter!

Buying for my store, Heathcote Earthings, I have tried to order buttons and bumper stickers with the slogan, "coexist," written in letters made of spiritual symbols from around the  world. I've been told by Northern Sun, Gypsy Rose and others that it's unavailable. I'm bummed. Is this because it's such a popular idea that, like me, they keep selling out? No! They aren't able to offer it because there's a copyright dispute over the "coexist" design!!!

This is a repeat of the episode when Aurora Glass, a charitable non-profit benefiting the homeless, had to stop producing suncatchers in the Celtic tree-of-life design we all used to doodle on our middle school notebooks because someone registered it!!!

Okay. I can play this game. Everyone check my photos for a picture of my hand sporting a lovely goddess/ivy mendhi tattoo. You're on notice that I'm gonna trademark that image. Anyone ever getting a mendhi tattoo on their hand is gonna owe me 6 1/2 cents...

Since the mid eighties, he's made his life putting up tipis all over the south, including a wonderful tipi village in Athens, Georgia. Now I'm coaxing Tipi Frank up north, at least as far as Maryland. It's heartening to hear this itinerant idealist wax poetic about tipis and their effect on the people who encounter them. It makes me wonder about the deeper symbolism of tipis, and as soon as I do, he starts to ruminate in that direction. "Tipis speak to people's yearning for something tribal, direct and natural."

When I spoke to him by phone last night, he was visiting a site where he'd put up a tipi for someone's weekend-long Halloween bash last year. When the folks found they had sixteen guests for Thanksgiving, the dinner was moved to the tipi! Stop and soak that in:

Thanksgiving in a tipi...

In north central Florida, where he's home-based for ten years, Tipi Frank has been participating in a forming ecovillage. Community is a hard thing to birth, and after 4 years, it's his tipis that are the standing, habitable structures on this historic piece of land in the Santa Fe River floodplane. Tipi Frank feels a deep connection to this land, which is the site of an American Indian settlement, the first tribe whose culture was intentionally erased by Europeans, a few short years after Columbus.

But it's time to move on. What will be next for Tipi Frank? Like so many of us, he's seeking a tribe, not in the traditional (born-into) sense, but a "tribe of choice." But choice makes things complicated--Tribe where and with whom? Are we ready for a tipi village on the White House lawn?

I'm visiting Ravenkeeper during my Kentucky trip. She's answered her "where." She owns a farm in the mountains with several houses, pastures and a woods with many native plants. She's struggling to identify her "with whom."

Her vision is to turn her farm into a playwright's retreat center. Her profile is:

http://ravenkeeper.gaia.com/

If interested, contact her and visit her place! Maybe it needs a tipi! I'll post a review in TRIBE: Choosing Intentional Community when I get back.

So what does tribe look like for you? Where is your "where?" How are you looking for your "with whom?" I'm sure gaia.com is a piece of the puzzle for many of us. I'll be expanding my discussion of these questions on my new website,

http://www.hippiechickdiaries.com/

which should be up in two to three weeks.

Happy Trails,

Wren

I just learned that this one will appear in the spring '08 issue of Loch Raven Review:

Big Talking Rocks

I’m moving the muscles to breathe in
cold water. They feel like bone in the effort.

We had the same brand of toothpaste
on the night we didn’t speak of the
dimming between us.

Snow that doesn’t stay.

You would kiss me poetically
then pull a story out of me like a
magician’s scarf, red then yellow
through my throat.

I undressed to expose skin
printed with stories I should have
withheld, psychic tattoos with ink so
shiny you were afraid to

touch and be branded.

I’m moving the muscles to speak of
big talking rocks, monoliths like
grandmother trees, who have
stories in whispered radio waves

because they stayed.

They speak in hugging colors and
purring hum smiles because they
watched while mammoths, raccoons,
wrens and Americans

skittered in circles that never avoided
their fate. Their muscles made them do it
while big talking rocks wrote the
mythology of staying long enough

for restlessness to have its season.
I brought the brand of toothpaste
you use. I have enough for the season of

snow that sticks.

--Wren Tuatha

A rose by any other name might remind some people of a pickle. Whether it’s a person, a house or the street on which they stand, a name is an opportunity to make a statement. Maybe it’s the screenwriter in me, but I think names are important symbols. I have a reputation for anthropomorphically naming everything in sight. Take cars, for example. My car is The Blue Goose. The one before that was Portia Fay. Before that, Scooby-Doo Subaru. Just as people with green thumbs talk to houseplants, I find that my car runs better if I talk to it and call it by name. And it tells me much about a person when she or he has named a car. I have used it as a lipnus test in more than one relationship.
    Someone said people make big money coming up with the actual model names of cars. Whoever named my Blue Goose “Honda CRV” should be washing cars instead. I should have that job, or one naming paint colors--native organic periwinkle, sagebrush compost--I could so do that job. Busstop bench maple...food co-op bubblegum...global warming sunrise...
    Truthfully I connect deeply with the tribal idea that the names of people should have meaning and evolve or change with us through our stages of life. Of course, my moniker here is a midlife invention:

Wren [ren]: a small, unassuming bird with a loud song

Mika [mee-kuh: the wise little raccoon

Tuatha [2-ah-thuh:  tribe, children of, people of; new meaning: she who is followed by goats

    Clearly I’m guided by my love and identification with animals. My own pets are saddled with the names Tuatha, Echo, Wicca and Niabi. In case you’re worried, I would not do that to a human child. I just appreciate the opportunity to make meaning. Wouldn't it be great to be known as,  "flower planter," or "she who brings the best dishes to potlucks?" Before I changed it, my legal name meant, “she who's name is a list of her mother’s ex’s.” Oh joy.
    Anyway, my obsession with the sounds and meanings of names is passionate and long lived. I’ve had a library of baby name books from various cultures for nearly thirty years. Even as a kiddie poet in school, I tried on a succession of pennames, each with it’s own accompanying persona. The most famous one among my family is “Phoenix.” I have no memory of why I wanted to be called Phoenix, but it is legend.
    When I was three, I was adopted by my stepfather and my last name changed to his. My mother tried to explain the change to me and made the mistake of asking what I’d like my name to be. The story goes that I replied, “If it’s all the same to you, Mother, I’d like Theresa!”
    Now when I begin a script I spend days pouring through my baby name books and online resources to pick a weighty and meaningful, if pretentious name. Wren Mika started out as a character in a script. Others I’ve labored over include Persia, Cricket, Nia, Simone and Caprice. There may be a recovery program somewhere but I’m unrepentant.
    So when I moved to Heathcote, my Intentional Community, and the buildings had such generic designations as the mill, greenhouse, carriage house, springhouse, cabin, farmhouse, hillhouse, I had to take leadership. If not

ThresaSheWho’sNameIsAListOfHerMother’sEx’sPhoenixWrenMikaTuatha

then who?
    I moved into a cabin long called the hillhouse. Blah.  After days of scouring the internet and keeping pages of scribbled lists I chose Hina Hanta, Choctaw for “path of peace,” and the chosen name of a Choctaw scholar whose article about the vegetarian history of American Indians I’ve posted previously on this blog. I proposed to Heathcoters that my home be renamed Hina Hanta and that the residents of each building  make intentional choices reflecting what they intend to communicate when they utter the collection of sounds that designate their homes. “Cluttered but contented.” “Place of perpetual pie.” “Homestead too near the skunk den to have a dog.” “Warmth and rest in beloved arms.”
    One home already had the thoughtful name Shanti, meaning “peace.” The new straw bale grouphouse got christened Polaris--”north star.” Most have stayed their plain jane names--mill, farmhouse, greenhouse, etc. An income sharing subset of Heathcoters called their group shantagani, “peaceful tribe.” So one group member has declared his home ShantaHinaHantaGani...As the mother of Tuatha, Echo, Wicca and Niabi, I can say nothing.
    What does your name tell us about you? Have you outgrown it? Who are you? Where do you live? And what’s the name of your car?

Hi onewitheverything,

How thoughtul of you to send me your cd of whale songs set to Klezmer music. From your cover letter I can appreciate how long it must have taken you to find a Rabbi to bless it, without being able to confirm that the whales were Jewish. However, I don’t see and easy way to incorporate your art into Heathcote's House Concert series. I’ll just have to wish you the best of luck,

Lachaiam,

Wren Tuatha

...There seems to be some understandable confusion so let me clear it up. I realize wrens, and raccoons for that matter, do eat bugs. But I do not. So, onewitheverything, thanks, I guess, for the chocolate covered ants. But I have, with many regrets, composted them...