New Jersey 37, or Invasion of the Fairy Tales

C. A. P. asked:

How did the community start?
Do you guys ever travel together?
Has anyone ever left and why?

The community started after the conference mentioned in the first of the fairy tale notes (really, someday I'm going to have to organize these), when everyone in the back of the room realized they were fundamentally dissatisfied with some aspect of their lives. For some, it was the cycle of poverty they couldn't break. For some, it was a lack of connection with the people they lived with and around. For some, it was the feeling that they hadn't stayed true to their dreams, and had allowed themselves to settle into something comfortable, predictable, and boring. In short, we were a bunch of dreamers who had been sidetracked and derailed, and saw each others' support as the chance to get back to where we wanted to be.

And even though this is a fairy tale, I don't want anyone getting the idea that it was easy. It was labor. It was as frustrating as trying to hammer a nail and always hitting your thumb. It involved a lot of sore backs and shredded egoes and arguing and fighting and debating about The Best Way To Do Things (tm). We had to buy land, restore the houses, figure out how we were going to support ourselves. Many of us had good communication skills, but some of us lacked the tools to navigate serious conflict. Among us, we had three races, a fistful of ethnicities, four nationalities, six religions, a myriad of class backgrounds, a few genders, infinite sexualities, mostly-but-not-all able bodies, and about 23,000 opinions. How could it have been easy?

I want to say that the thing that made it all workable was luck, honestly. Just when it seemed like things were going to splinter, or literally sink into the mud, we would run into some piece of luck or privilege or just pure delight that helped rally us. Like the 100 pounds of cement Michel found in a Dumpster. Like the crew of plumbers who did most of the work in exchange for a two week vacation at the House for Waywards. Like the time Eirik and Thunder nearly came to blows over the rewiring of a house, and it seemed like Thunder was going to take off and leave us without an electrician, but Diana broke it up by throwing both men in a mud puddle, and turned it into a mudfight that left them laughing. Or like the time when we were writing the neighborhood ground rules and it took almost 60 hours of meetings to decide on them, but finished one night in the middle of a massive thunderstorm when a tree fell on Esperanza, Esme and Eirik's house and we had to work together to clear it.

As for traveling, we don't go as a group because there's always got to be a bare minimum of people around to handle the animals and maintain the gardens. The four Jews generally stay through Christmas, and Maria, Thunder and Diana don't believe in Thansgiving, so that covers a lot. Each of the adults is granted a few weeks of vacation per year - I always use some of mine to go to the National Poetry Slam, the Women of the World Poetry slam and the Individual World Poetry Slam. Jo and I try to take one vacation together, usually to visit family. Even those of us who have regular jobs with much less vacation time are granted their "vacations". If a grownup with a full time job calls for a "vacation", it means the neighborhood picks up their slack as if they were really gone. So, for one week, all they need to worry about is their outside job - their chores will be done, their kids taken care of, and they're not required to be at any meetings.

We lost two members in the building process - one to cancer (she went into a hospice, where we visited her until she died at the age of 32), and one to ideology (she said she couldn't live in such a communist arrangement, and left in the early planning stages). We're working on writing down a plan for what happens if people want to leave permanently. We've had some neighborhood folks take sabbaticals of a sort, move away and come back.