It was 1980. Janet and I were in hiding (from my creditors) at Shasta Abbey, a monastery in Northern California, where we had been ordained as Zen postulants. Suddenly, out of the blue, I became seriously ill, and when the illness got worse, I handled it as I had done everything in the past: I ran!
We took the bus to the Bay Area and settled into a small apartment in a nondescript building in Lafayette, California. Janet went to work at a stationery store while I got a job at Radio Shack, where she knew she couldn’t stay long before someone tracked me down. We were both walking or looking for work, since driving a car was out of the question, even if we had one. The persistent sensitivity we developed at the Abbey, which was only exacerbated by my illness, prevented any aggressive activity. And in the Bay Area, driving was an aggressive activity! In order to function again in the world, I had no choice but to numb my mind in some way, a numbness that had the unfortunate result of preventing further knowledge from arising for the time being. I needed a place to cool off.
The zen sickness wasn’t getting better and I was getting bone-tired from looking down on bill collectors. I knew I had to change things, so one afternoon I found myself writing another note to Janet and boarding my trusty Greyhound, this time bound for Tennessee. With only a few bucks in my pocket, I was just hoping to be taken in at “The Farm,” the famous commune headed by San Francisco’s original hippie-refugee, Stephen Gaskin.
When I boarded the Greyhound, I noticed that the smell hadn’t changed: diesel fuel mixed with . . . humanity?
I finally made it to Tennessee and hitchhiked from the bus station to The Farm within walking distance, and in the midst of mad anticipation of great new experiences to come, the zen sickness mysteriously disappeared. This was always my reaction on leaving a monastery, it seemed to take all the accumulated insight and dump it out into the world again!
A couple of miles later I was still walking and I wondered if I might have taken the wrong path, again. But then, up ahead, I could see a dilapidated garage-type building in the middle of nowhere. God! This wasn’t The Farm, was it?
Oh no! A long-haired hippy was guarding it! Yeah, it was The Farm, all right. She had reached the front door.
As I mentally kicked myself for not doing my homework before spending my last few dollars on a bus ticket, the skinny doorman ushered me in. With strict instructions not to go beyond the front door, I stayed there for the better part of a week sleeping in a loft with people from all over the world and being interviewed by a constant stream of hippies asking me unusual questions.
The Farm, I discovered, was packed with women and children, so newcomers were carefully scrutinized. I must have answered all the questions more or less correctly because one morning I was escorted to the main compound about half a mile from the gatehouse, and from there to a small three-bedroom house with an attic a little further. — my new home that I would share with 6 men, 10 women and 11 children.
Some fifteen hundred people had settled on the two thousand acres that made up The Farm—thirteen hundred women and children and about two hundred men (who worked hard to support the women and children. Some things never change!) The Farm routinely did Spread the word to young women across the country that if you have a child and not an old man, you are welcome to The Farm! I reminded myself again to do my homework before going cross country!
The soy dairy (my first assignment), the bakery, and the kitchen fed the entire community and were the hubs of activity. At the dairy, we soak hundreds of pounds of soybeans every night in giant stainless steel vats, processing them the next day into tofu, tempeh, miso, soymilk, and soybean ice cream that farm moms lined up at the windows with their five gallon buckets
After a short career in the dairy, I helped the farming crew hand-plant fifteen acres of tomato plants, then got a job on the masonry crew that hauled trucks every day to the Nashville area, sixty miles north, to build solar houses.
The Farm was extremely active with cottage industries; homebuilding, tie-dye T-shirts, professional bands that toured the country, nuclear weapons destroyers (small handheld devices for detecting radiation from clandestine government trucks illegally transporting nuclear materials), and other ingenious entrepreneurial ventures, such as a vegetarian restaurant in Nashville. All of these helped support the commune, bringing in about a dollar a day per person on which we lived by eating a lot of soybeans, baking our own bread, growing a lot of our own vegetables, and above all, hoping that some of the parents in the community people contribute some money, or at least some peanut butter and Hershey bars.
The Zen sickness never came back, at least while I was on the Farm. At the time he didn’t know how the spirit world worked, and that this was just a brief respite from past karma that he would eventually have to face. . . great time. So I was privileged to meet so many kind people, each spiritual in their own special way, from my skinny, scarred friend who lost his scalp when he got his long hair tangled in a potato picker, to friends that I had scattered here and there throughout the commune.
We had doctors and lawyers, some dentists, and a lot of love. They all took a vow of poverty upon entering the commune, giving up all their worldly possessions (easy for me), so they were all in the same boat, and all apparently in the same house: mine! Married couples and their children slept in the three downstairs bedrooms, while singles slept in the loft (where one would never know who they would end up with and in whose sleeping bag)!