Three of us arrived in the Schule mit Herz
("school with heart") yesterday,
while the others are still up on a mountain catching goats from Hof Allne Wind
Today Aris from Solvenia arrived here to meet up
and make an interview with us for an article for Slovenian newspaper and for Euro 26 (a European "stupid" as she sais travellers newspaper that sometimes does have some useful stuff in it also and that is published in almost all European languages).
We met her through couchsurfing and she also wants to travel with us for a while later on,
but first she'll have to go back to Slovenia for a while.
When we arrived here in this beautiful place in nature,
far off from any towns and cities,
we had big expectations about this school,
that is influenced by the ideas of Sudbury Valley School.
But first thing we had to realise is,
that is is a school without any pupils up to now.
The idea to built up a free school in this area came up 2 years ago,
since then the people have put a lot of effort in organising money and support for the school, setting up conceps and getting permissions.
They have everything now, nice school building, money, permissions ... but no pupils yet.
Irene, who is something like the leader of the school, explained to us
that many people were interested in the beginning
and there is still a lot happening, like parents visiting the place, etc...
but that many people are quite afraid of letting their children be in such a pioneer-project,
as one -of course- can't really tell if their concept will work
and especially if the children will ever have the right exams to go to universities, etc.
The concept os Sudbury Valley School is nothing new and unproved:
there is around 30 or 40 schools worldwide that work with the concepts of this 40 year old school in the USA and define themselves as Sudbury schools.
Sudbury schools are based on the idea,
that every child knows exactly what he/she wants like any "grown up" human being-
and should have the freedom to chose what and if it wants to learn, to play or do something else.
The idea, that children should be given all the time they need
to develop interest in things in their own speed...
Children WANT to learn and don't have to be forced to do it, their natural curiosity makes them want to learn anyhow...
So well, even though the experiences of other also called "democratic schools" already proved
that it can definetely work to let children learn whatever they like,
the Swiss people in this region seem not to be convinced yet and
this school will need some more time to get going.
But Irene, Lena and the other people here are quite optimistic about the future:
It's all just a question of time.
Til then they are livin in this big building as an age spanning community of women
and preparing for the kids to come...
We are spending lots of time in the bureau
enjoying to have as much internet as we like
and be such a small group for a while
- int he meantime having some nice discussions about indigo children
and the new learning and living life-
that has to and that will come, slowly but surely :-)
sudval
sudbury
summerhill uk
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Schule mit Herz
Searching lost Goats in the Mighty Swiss Alps
It has been three weeks exactly since we have been on our tour – surfing for skills and sharing experiences. Looking back it feels like we have been with our ideas on the move for so much longer already as so many places are visited, so many people on our way met and so much experienced…
This particular morning we were ready for new adventures – gaining new knowledge while getting involved in a pretty unique and extreme for us activity – searching for lost goats in mighty Swiss Alps… Though none of us had ever done it, all of us were full of passion, and we started to climb up the mountains as brave as we could, though Hans Peter / Hausi was far in front of us, laughing at us coz we were to slow :)
We got better and better as we spent 3 days searching for goats – listening carefully in sounds of Alps with a hope to hear a goat’s bell sounds. We also froze a lot and got wet till our underpants, slide a lot on muddy, steep paths, crossed rivers and waterfalls and while spending night in 300 years old hut (with no insolation, no nothing, just a simple fire place in the middle with pot hanging over it) surrounded by mountains from all sides we greeted first snow of this year and coming winter.
After 3 days we succeeded just with a 3 out of about 25 goats :/ Wishing it could have been better we still needed to move on as our friends were waiting for us already in Schule mit Herz. And even though we didn’t succeed too greatly with the goats, the experience was amazing and our adventure spirit was awakened in these mighty Alps. Leaving and saying good bye to Hausi we wished all the best for finding the goats,,, With the big smile and calm mind (while all dripping from rain water being out in a cold rain for many hours) he answered: “But of course I will find them, that’s not even a question, question is only when”. And he went on! And we went on.
Taking and Giving
Personally I found it really great that we are not only visiting different cool places and projects and learning about their way of being, gaining experience and theoretical base but also taking active part in one place’s everyday life and giving some input from our side – no matter how can we help in each particular case and each individual place – whether we are painting wagons, making mosaics, searching for lost goats in Alps, building stove, cooking for seminary, making beds for cows or doing something else, and who knows what is waiting for us in the future :) it definitely helps us to integrate better, it feels good to be useful and be in a role of givers, not only takers, plus we can honestly admit that we truly are a traveling school of live by this - each day gaining some new and practical knowledge which at the end builds up whole wonderful spectrum of skills learned from this tour.
-Sani
Hof Allne Wind
Hof Allne Wind www.hofallnewind.ch is an organic farm and community in Birmensdorf near Zürich.
9 people live there at the moment, including 5 children.
Hausi, the owner, inherited the place and built it up again after it burned down totally about 15 years ago.They are living there self-sustaining and also selling what they produce (vegetables, meet, eggs, milk) on the local market in Zürich.
The community (that doesn't really define as one) is open to guests in general,
who are expected to help with the work on the farm and follow clear rules,
but when we came there with ten people it was getting too much for the wife of Hausi,
who is mother of 3 children, and she told us we could not stay long.
So we spent one night in the hay house... freezing a bit but enjoying the smell...
and me I felt quite sad about having to leave this soon,
as I met the boyfriend of an old friend of mine there,
who comes from a neighbor village of mine (in Bavaria)
and knows lots of people that I know...
for me a circle was closing....
But still it was good to have been there anyway
and so 7 of us left with Hausi to go catch the farms goats
that spent the summer running around freely on a mountain
in the Italian part of Switzerland and are brought back to Birmersdorf in winter.
(See entry about Alps (soon, it was so amazing were still trying to write about it!!)
The rest of us -after trading some of our nice pumpkins and SoWell for some selfmade goat cheese and eggs -went on to Schule mit Herz already.
Ludmilla in a rut!
On the way to Hof Alle Wind we got slightly lost and ended up going up one small farm road on this dark rainy night and so it happened that the bus drove off the narrow road and into a very wet and muddy ditch and promply got stuck there despite the efforts of 10 people to try and dislodge it! So we spend a few hours contacing ADAC (emergency roadside assitance) and trying to figure out if the bus was properly insured otherwise it would be way to expenisve. in the end we decided to leave it there overnight all alone (since prolly all it really wanted was a night along in the forest!) and in the morning it happened that Hansi had a large truck and pull her out!
(no more posted ;) )
Casa Cristallo / Aura reading
ABOUT AGE SPANNING DONATION BASED COMMUNITIES AND AURA READING
At the travelling school of life workshop in Glarisegg we met Evelyn, an amazing person who is an aura reader and very interested in travelling school of life and free education in general (her children are also going to the gasser school in Glarisegg)
She invited us in her generation spanning community in Steckborn, Casa Cristallo, with 8 people living there in between 12 and over 70.
This house was about the most beautiful house I had ever seen
with a lot of mosaics and paintings.
The house is also used as a social centre, people can use the shower, the massage room and wireless internet for a donation.
Though some of us were sceptical in the beginning, it was an amazing experience to see all of our auras and Evelyn also told us that the combination of those auras have lots of potencial :-)
In exchange for this tsolife-lesson, 2 of us were making some mosaics in the bathroom and living room of this beautiful house.

working on the wagons
In a place with some great trees about 10 or 15 km from Steckborn
there is strange things going on:
there are some lonely circus wagons there...
and a guy called Frank is painting them, putting floors in them and renovating them...
and sometimes a bunch of hippies come to help him with that - well, that happened one time at least ;-)
And what for?
Frank, who is a quite crazy teacher (that I would have definetely liked in my school time)
wants to build up a wagon place where "difficult" children can come (with or without their parents, depending on the case)
... to hang out there, sleep and play in the wagons, play and climb in the trees
... to get away from their daily stress
... and learn about their feelings and wishes again...
It was really nice taking and giving:
for helping Frank to realise this colourful place
we were allowed to stay in his holiday house in Steckborn
that he is renting out to tourists in summer time
Sunday, October 26, 2008
say goodbye to bodensee
After celebrating a really great brunch with our new friends from Steckborn and Kesswill
we are leaving Bodensee where we spent almost 2 weeks
with one eye lauphing, one crying...
We were going through first group processes here
getting first impressions of how it will be to visit projects and people
and spending an amazing autumn with lots of sun and warmth
nuts, pumpkins, apples and other nice plants... :-)
Learning about yoga, maya kalendars, flow pedagogy and auras,
baking bread and putting floors in wagons...
learning also how to do tsolife-workshops...
dumpster diving lots of cool stuff...
learning that some of us are crazily addicted to internet...
and that nights can be pretty cold... :-)
bye bye lake of Konstanz
Monday, October 20, 2008
trying to update this blog!!!
Right now we are ssoo busy in our mobile bureu trying to organize where to go next and what to write online etc etc etc, so this blog might be a little disorganized for now...
And here is the rest of it.
Z.E.G.G. @ Glariseg
About skillsharing, networking, community live and "free love"...
After we had visited the Gasser school (next post)
we accidently came across a presentation of the Z.E.G.G.-community in the Schloss Glarisegg:
2 people that are living in the "Zentrum für Experimentelle GesellschaftsGestaltung" (centre of experimental society creation) in Belzig near Potsdam (that exists since 1991 and is one of the biggest communities in Germany)
were telling the Glariseggers (and us!) about their experiences with community live in the last 17 years...
skillsharing as it should be - and we were surfing it :-)
What was quite interesting to me is that the roots of Z.E.G.G. community
(and it's sister community Tamera in Portugal that we are propably goin to visit later on our tour)
are here in Steckborn, where the "spirit fathers" and founders of those two projects lived in another community before (that went through the media as a strange "sect" and was quite known for this).
Moreover - as the Glarisegger told - the community of Glarisegg maybe would never have come into being without the community experiences of the people in Z.E.G.G. and Tamera.
So we felt it was quite an important and inspiring meeting taking place there
and hopefully the beginning of a friendship in between two communities that are so connected in their histories anyhow.
The main idea that is connecting the 'bout 80 people living in the Z.E.G.G.
is mostly the wish to experiment with different forms of loving and with nonviolent forms of comunication - and creating peace in this way by working on themselves and raising consciousness...
A grand part of the conversation with the people of Glarisegg was circling around the topic of "free love" and around how people in the Z.E.G.G. are living it - propably as it is a theme that is interesting for everybody and that you don't get to talk about a lot in "outside world"...
To prevent misunderstandings: "free love" doesn't mean that having sexual relations with more than one person is a dogma in the Z.E.G.G. - even though it was more like that in the beginning of Z.E.G.G, but people there learned from their experiences
and found out that there is thousand ways of loving
and that everyone has to find for him/herself the way that feels good for him/her.
"Free love" just means that everybody is free to chose his/her form of loving freely,
from not having any sexual relations at all, monogamic relationships to having several relationships at the same time
and that people try to support each other in their relationships and loving without judging over the form of loving...
They said that this form of loving and living feels much more "normal" than most of the people who don't know it might think: open communication about sexuality and problems coming up in relationships help a lot - that's the same thing in monogamic and polygamic relationships.
"If there is no peace in love, there cannot be peace on earth... "
They also said that the ways of how people live their love and relationsships in this society mirror the big problems of human history:
people believe in possesing people they love in they same way as they believe in possesing land and other ressources... wanting to keep control about everything and for that reason coming up with "moral", laws, borders, wars ...
To confront yourself with letting go of your fears to loose somebody (something)
and to realise that you do not in general loose someone (something) just because you share with others
can help to raise consciousness about what is happening on this planet
and how we could live something else...
Most important in this (long and difficult) process of changing one's mind is to speak with others about the problems coming up,
so that information can float freely through all the relationship-networks and there is transparency about the feelings of all people that are involved...
Interesting topic -but well, let us come back to the meeting and Z.E.G.G. in general:
The Glariseggers and Z.E.G.G.ers were also talking a lot about organisational questions, like what forms of organisation people in Z.E.G.G. chose, how about finances, etc ... :
Most of the people in Z.E.G.G. are working outside of the community and similar to Glarisegg they also have a seminary and guest business going. We did not talk about self-sustainibility.
There are some "leaders" in the working groups, which is the people that engage most or have most skills about something. The people normally decide together who wants to and whom they want to be in charge of something.
Organisation structures are changing from time to time, but at the moment it is like this:
There are
*working-group meetings (like the cooking-groups meetings, etc),
*"forums" (where you have a platform to talk about things you want to promote, like new ideas etc or emotional things) and
*"plenums" ( to decide in concensus about important topics that cannot be decided about in smaller circles)
When you are living with 80 people, you cannot always be in contact with everybody
and know how everybody is going, so normally the people you are sharing your flat with or the groups are the people you know best and you got to do most with.
There are various forms of communication in the Z.E.G.G. , from group meetings to emails... to keep transparency about all the processes going on
To get a community member in the Z.E.G.G. doesn't need as much money as in expensive Switzerlands Glarisegg community, but about the same time and process:
You do an introduction course of 5 weeks, then you can stay there for up to a year as a guest to see how it feels for you and the community. After this time you can become a full community member.
There would be space for up to 20 or 25 more people in the Z.E.G.G. buildings.
There are about 10 children in the Z.E.G.G., for whom the parents don't have to pay rents and food, but those costs are carried by all the community.
One of the last topics we talked about was the relation in between Z.E.G.G. and Tamera, which is still strong even though there is some "family fights" every once in a while...
People from Tamera are always welcome in the Z.E.G.G. and the other way round.
As we already had contact with people from Tamera also,
I am right now really curious about how this community looks like.
---Anja
Gasser school
We met Marianne Fischer, the teamcoordinator of this privat school, for the first time to arrange an appointment when to have a guided tour through the schoolbuilding. This was already an impressing exchange about our ideas and we were couriously looking forward to met her again, to get to know more about her way of teaching, being and learning, which is based on the ressourcive padagogy, the flow pedagogy.
The whole idea of their way of working with children is grounded on the groth and greatness of every single person, so as on one hand everybody is great, on the other hand everybody needs to learn something, if as grown up or as child. While stateschools mainly work on the level of notes, thinking, pressure, success, knowledge and work, freeschools include the second level of personality, individual needs such as learning rhythm, interests etc. The Gasser school mainly works on the third level, the energetic level, that which tries to reach above human beeings - divineness in the here and now, happiness, life power. This means, that they communicate on an energetic level with the children. To insult others or to hit others is taking their energy, so always when this happens, it belongs to the schoolculture to give this energy back by finding something great in this person and tell it to him or her. It is not a discussion at all that there is something great in every person. Following this "rule" no teacher is scolding pupils or telling them what to do or not to do. One good example of this is that when they meet in a classroom to work together everybody who feels ready to start, is present with his/her mind, feels serene enough to start, just lifts up his or her hand. So slowly this readyness spreads and when everybody has lifted up his or her hand, to say that he or she is ready to start, including the teacher, they start. This ritual enables everybody to decide by themsemelves when they feel ready and are not manipulated by others.
...
to be continued...:)
...Read the rest here!
Travelling School of Life-Workshop in Glarisegg
Today we made our first workshop on education networks /travelling school of life in the Schloss Glarisegg.
There were 6 people - 2 community members, one aura healing therapist from the nearby village and three people working in the Gasser-school in Glarisegg.
We started with a little game - everybody should write down 3 skills (s)he has
and 3 things (s)he wants to learn.
There was a lot of different skills, from healing to project management, from photography to Spanish...
It is always amazing to see that even in small groups there is always interests and skills fitting together... and that very often you could just off from the workshop start a learning group with someone...
They were all quite interested and open and we will propably meet up with the aura therapist woman to learn from her. She also gave us a contact to a friend od hers who also wanted to build up a learning network but never started as there were no people with him...
We also talked a little bit about the Gasser school
and discussed about alternative education and economies...
When asked what possibilities of selforganised learning there are and there could be in Glarisegg, the community members told us that living in (this) community anyway means learning and having to learn a lot :-)
But up to now there is not a lot of skillsharing groups in the community, as there isn't so much time for it in the daily working life and routine...
When I asked them about possible low budget learning for visitors in this expensive place,
they said there is not a lot going on yet, although this kind of learning does happen sometimes (e.g the instrument builder had someone learning at his place and helping him).
This also might change in the next years, as the community is still building up... so in a few years there might be more possibilities for travelling school of life as well...
---Anja
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Schloss Glarisegg
Their Website > Schloss Glarisegg
Since 3 days we are in the area around Schloss Glarisegg,
a community in an old castle nearby the lake of Konstanz.
When we left at Antonios (humanshope) place in Keswill
we knew that we would get a whole house (in exchange for helping the owner with his project) in Steckborn nearby Glarisegg from Sunday 19th on.
But in our decentralized organisation chaos we had made a date with Kathrin (a Glarisegg community member) to show us around the place on the 17th,
why we had to come 2 days earlier
and so there was another 2 nights to spent somewhere else than in the house...
Friday, October 17, 2008
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Exiting the EU!
We left our lovley horse farm + biggest bureu ever on the evening of the full moon and went to a small town on the shore of the Bodensee / Lake Konstanz and spent a relaxing evening making a fire in lakeside park, waking up while old people are going for their morning walk past our food circle on the steps to the lake, and taking the opportunity for a fine cold swim!
In the morning we packed up with our new pink chair we "dumpstered", grabbed another nice folding couch on the way out and headed for Konstanz to make some last purchases before leaving Europe!
The last couple days weve been staying in a small village house with some very nice people, one of whom is working on the project Humans Hope.
Monday, October 13, 2008
Switzerland, here we come!
I am sitting in the biggest and nicest bureau I ever had,
in the horse farm of some friends of Anja,
tryin to figure out what happened the last days.
Thursday, October 9, 2008
On the road at last!
The big night! The beginning of dreams that have been waiting to become reality for months, and even years, and its finally here! Like the moment when after a long climb to the top of the roller coaster and it slowly starts it rapid decent and you realize, oh wow here we go!!!
After several last hour/minute changes and fixes to the busses we rolled out of munich in an almost dream like state and headed for our first destination in south germany, where we are now spending a couple days repacking the bus, planning routes, and generally getting more organized!
...Read the rest here!