learning some wacky shit from this profile of a commune called The Farm, founded in 1971 and still going
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"They have energy and enthusiasm. They take long hikes, they chop wood, and they actually bother to take part in marches against the war. They build their own photovoltaic solar panels, they grow tomatoes in backyard gardens, and they try not to be grouchy with one another."
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"The Farm has morphed into...a hands-on environmental think tank. Its self-reliant residents are comfortable with the long-lost country skills of natural home building and midwifery, but they're also adept at the newer arts of biodiesel mechanics and nuclear-radiation detection."
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"We should all notice that being here is like being stoned," he said at the beginning of a session preserved in his book Monday Night Class, "and that the Karma's very fast, and any little idea you take off on will go farther than maybe you think it will."
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(this is the first wacky part)
"Ina May asked the right questions and discovered that the mother-to-be had concerns about her marriage: she and her husband had omitted the "till death do us part" bit from their ceremony."
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"The dilated woman and reluctant man played bride and groom a second time. In place of "till death do us part," Gaskin went with "as long as we both shall live." The baby emerged soon afterward, Ina May says."
BRO WHAT
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"The next day Gaskin called a meeting and issued a decree: "If you're sleeping together, you're engaged. If you're pregnant, you're married." Six or seven men who had joined the Caravan for the free love split."
(sup )
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"Four marriage was a deep mystery." When I ask the Gaskins about the former setup, Stephen says, "That was something that happened spontaneously when couples took acid with other couples.""
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"They encourage the husband to fondle and French-kiss his wife while she huffs and puffs. Pictures in Spiritual Midwifery show wildly glowing faces. Ina May's informal research... roughly 20 percent of women attended by Farm midwives have experienced orgasms while giving birth."
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AGAIN BRO WHAT
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"Everybody's tits worked. We even had a man lactate. Not because he wanted to, but because his girlfriend moved down the road with the baby. That's the sort of thing that can happen if you love the baby a lot and feel anxious about whether they're getting enough to eat."
W H A T
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"The kicker is that as soon as the Saturday work money got collectivized, guess what happened? People quit going out to work on Saturdays. This was a bitter pill for us to swallow, to see [that] there really was something to the capitalist, free-enterprise philosophy after all."
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"After making a detailed study, the committee recommended that the Farm's best chance at survival was to give up the dream of a cashless communal existence and go back on the grid—to rejoin the U.S. economy and its dollar system."
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"He has worked as a farmer, a horse trainer, a flour miller, an Emergency Medical Technician, a mason, a typesetter, a patent-holding inventor of a solar-hybrid automobile, a pro-bono lawyer... an administrator... an author, and a touring lecturer..."
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"As hippies of the 60s and 70s, we endowed our kids with this meta-program of peace, love, and ecology, and now they're holding our feet to the fire and saying, 'O.K., let's see it.' It's like we sent a reminder to ourselves down through time."
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okay i was really hoping to come away from this with a clearer sense of the nuts and bolts of how to make a commune last 50 years but i am SO DISTRACTED by the pregnancy and midwifing bits still, thread about the book ina may wrote:
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ok book thread maybe twitter.com/made_in_cosmos…
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oh nice there's a freely available documentary:
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