ODYSSEY PART 17: The High Wind community takes root

Lisa obviously had a profound experience during her three weeks at Findhorn, the “New Age” community in Scotland, in fall 1976. She had been dubious about some of the tales she’d heard and wanted to check these out for herself. Already she’d had a traumatic encounter in Northeast Brazil with a voodootype experience known as macumba and had helped to found Psy-Bionics, a school in Milwaukee teaching altered states of consciousness. On returning from Findhorn she felt that she was a different person.

Q. How did you take to all of this? Did you feel that maybe you had “lost” your wife after Findhorn? Could this have an impact on your position at the university? What were the long-run implications for your life together and your work?

A. I was very perplexed. We’d been married for more than 20 years, but I’d never seen her so fired up. I wasn’t even sure about the best questions to ask that would explain the Findhorn experience.

In those days, the latter 1970s, the New Age had not yet become an over-used cliché. I’d read enough, all confirmed by her scraps of notes, that the New Age means recognizing that mutual cooperation and respect among all living systems are essential if our planet is to survive. Our intellect and greed and selfishness and lust for power have gotten in the way of a more inclusive awareness. Lisa quoted David Spangler, one of the speakers at the Findhorn conference, who had written in his book, Revelation: The Birth of a New Age: “The New Age is fundamentally a change of consciousness from one of isolation and separation to one of communion, attunement, wholeness.” All of this made sense to me.

Obviously, Lisa felt she would soon be dragged back from the heights of such powerful idealism into the mainstream culture of compromise and competition. At this time, I myself was at a point of some openness to alternative thinking. I had joined the University of Wisconsin in the early 1960s and was heavily involved now in dealing with inner-city poverty and racism. I had begun to question whether the university, and the mainstream culture generally, had the capacity to respond to today’s intractable problems without a radical shift in thinking.

Several months after Lisa’s return from Scotland, she talked me into driving to Chicago to attend a lecture by Peter Caddy, the former RAF officer who was a cofounder of Findhorn. I was impressed by Peter’s down-to-earth talk about the community’s successes and challenges and his idealism about serving the planet with a new sense of compassion and interconnectedness. A short time later, I happened to meet with a professor in the university’s school of engineering who had just received a grant to explore advanced thinking on the interrelationship between technology and culture. I introduced him to the Findhorn story with its emphasis on radical lifestyle changes, and to E.F. Schumacher, another of the Findhorn speakers, whose seminal book, Small Is Beautiful, advocated “appropriate technology” –technology relevant to the situation at hand – which also implied frugality and encouraged self-sufficiency. The professor was intrigued and asked me to represent the university on a planning committee for a major conference in Chicago to be keynoted by Schumacher in spring 1977.

Some 2,300 people came to hear Schumacher and to participate in 60 other lectures and workshops about appropriate technology. We’d reserved a room for maybe 15 people where Lisa could report on Findhorn. To our astonishment, 400 folks lined the corridor demanding a larger space. Next to Schumacher, Lisa’s Findhorn presentation was the big event of the conference. I had invited one of my deans, who was so enthusiastic about her workshop that he urged me to organize educational programs around these ideas at the university.

Since people in Wisconsin were thirsty for information, in June 1977 we got the university to sponsor talks by Peter Caddy and his cofounder wife Eileen. In the largest available space on campus, they wowed the 1,200 attendees –students and faculty as well as people from business, government and civic organizations. In short order I got approvals from university officials to begin lining up a series of seminars, not only for traditional students but also for the larger community. To teach with me, we invited David Spangler and his Yugoslav colleague, Milenko Matanovic (who were now back from Findhorn heading the U.S.-based Lorian Association). They soon moved to Milwaukee with their families. Two of our early courses were break-throughs on subjects new to our conventional academic curricula: Planetary Survival and the Role of Alternative Communities, and New Dimensions of Governance – Images of Holistic Community. At a time when campus classes were losing enrollments, these were dramatically oversubscribed.

As increasing numbers attended these courses and workshops in Milwaukee, we began hearing the comment: “We’re seminared out. We’ve had enough sitting in classrooms. Time is running out for the environment. We need to do something practical!”

That’s when we established the nonprofit High Wind Association whose function was to demonstrate the practicality of renewable energy, to work with the land as an integral ecosystem and, at the same time, to cosponsor education on these issues with the university. It was then that Lisa and I decided to make available our rundown 46-acre farm southwest of Plymouth for this purpose.

In the summer of 1977, with two friends, we visited the projects of the New Alchemy Institute on Cape Cod and Nova Scotia. We wanted to see their experimental “bioshelter,” a state-of-the-art passive solar building that contained a residence as well as an attached production greenhouse. New Alchemy was a pioneering group focusing on renewable energy, energy-efficient construction and sustainable agriculture. Scientists there convinced us to try something comparable in Wisconsin.

By the end of 1978 I was realizing, like Lisa, that I was no longer the same person I’d been. When Lisa decided on a return visit to Findhorn, I went along and participated in a weeklong intensive living experience in the community. My contact with the leaders and residents convinced me of the significance of this kind of model for rethinking the future of our culture, indeed of the world. My intimate collaboration with David and Milenko and many others deepened my perceptions of reality far beyond anything I had learned at Oberlin College and the University of Chicago.

From many folks I had heard about Spangler’s mystical proclivities and had read his books, including this passage in his influential early publication, Revelation, that helped to conceptualize the meaning of the New Age: “For most of my early life I have been conscious of two worlds, two aspects of reality. One is the so-called normal world, revealed to us through our five senses and their technological extensions. The other is a super-sensory reality, a metaphysical world of light and energy and essence, home to intelligences more evolved than our own in many cases. This might be called a spiritual or even a mystical dimension, entered through intuition and meditation … a world behind the world known to our physical senses.”

While as a fairly hardheaded social scientist I could readily comprehend all of the dimensions of Findhorn in terms of its social organization and governance, and of course its educational programs, I still had to overcome my skepticism about “this other dimension” that Spangler brought. Yet I felt this was the key to the magnetism that drew people to Findhorn and now was drawing people to our “new work” (however vaguely defined). I felt this deeper reality had something to do with Lisa’s traumatic experience with macumba in Brazil that could not be explained by the medical doctor, and the remarkable results people experienced using altered states of consciousness at Psy-Bionics. As I got closer to David and his colleagues and began to understand his esoteric world, my personal “transformation,” so-called, had something to do with recognizing the centrality of this consciousness or Spirit. Later, when I wrote my memoir, Odyssey (that these columns refer to), the underlying theme throughout the book is that economic and political strategies are essential, but the “X Factor” of consciousness is the critical determinant.

With a shift in my personal priorities and understanding of the urgency of some major societal changes, we decided to bring in the New Alchemy architect to give us ideas for our own possible bioshelter design. He flew out and assisted in drawing up a grant proposal that we then submitted to the appropriate technology program of the U.S. Department of Energy. In 1980 we were awarded a small grant of $25,000.

When we convened a meeting on a blustery evening in February 1981 in Milwaukee to announce the grant and to seek volunteers, 100 people showed up. Immediately, an experienced carpenter agreed to be lead builder for bioshelter construction, and a teacher/gardener came to grow food to support the workers. Soon a Ph.D. psychologist signed on to help run the household operation, including the kitchen. Suddenly the farm was humming with activity. The old turn-of-the-century farmhouse had become a “pressure cooker” with 10 residents and two dogs, soon spilling out into the big barn and renovated chicken coop. A construction gang was on the ground that soon evolved into what we came to realize was an “intentional community.” Since we had used our grant for building materials, all personnel had to be volunteers.

Whenever I went to a university meeting, I was asked about High Wind. There was curiosity, even fascination, about the intention of starting a holistic community (whatever that meant). People were impressed that the Department of Energy had invested in this solar building, and that we’d become a magnet for hordes of volunteers who even quit their jobs to get involved. Then there was the fact that UWM’s recently retired chancellor was helping us with fund-raising. Above all, they couldn’t fathom how our classes were drawing huge numbers when campus enrollments were declining.

Since my dean was supportive of my department’s work, he wanted to know more about the new kinds of learning we were promoting. I had to convince the university attorney that there was no personal conflict of interest, even though some seminars and tours took place at High Wind, up in the town of Mitchell on property owned by Lisa and me, although we’d given it for the use of High Wind. Because we played major roles in High Wind’s unfolding growth, I had to submit documents proving that there was no personal financial gain; instead we were helping to finance this evolving enterprise. While I continued working fulltime at the university, Lisa’s commitment as a volunteer at High Wind was full-time. With our other volunteers, we all functioned as a team.

The university had only begun to understand my growing interest in Futures Studies, and none of us had yet comprehended the challenges of creating and living in an intentional community.