La Lune Nette aux Lunettes -
"Clear moon through Glasses"
WUHAAAA - - - - WE FINALLY MADE IT TO FRANCE - - - - WUHAAAA
La Lune Nette, the first French project we visit... As it happened already before - getting to some place we expected this one to be quite a big community, but again we met here only 3 persons: Silvayn, Valentin und Natascha. 
Silvayn lives here since the beginning of the project - 12 years. For quite a long time now he lives in his tepee - really comfortable one, with walls from wood, warm interiour... It's size is original, adepted from the native indians -
seven meters diameter. In these kind of tepees whole family used to live in a past and it really is pretty spacious shelter.
Natascha lives here with her son Valentin, whom she schools at home. 
As there is no community left but still they want to live at this beautiful place, they plan to have a living cooperative soon. And we hope they will, as this place is amazing and can host lot more people, sharing beautiful surrounding with river, lakes and waterfalls. 
In Silvayns understanding there are four levels of living together.
First: Tribes. Sharing everything, closest form of living together.
Second: Community. Sharing many things, but everyone has space for oneself.
Third: Cooperative/Ecovillage. Sharing ideas, but with lots of space for everyone personally.
Fourth: Society. Living seperately, maybe as familiy.
As he figured out that for Lune Nette the system of community is too close and probably won't work again... He now works to prepare everything for creating a living cooperative here, which means to him that everyone has an own flat, people might work "outside", there are some common ideas, but no duties, unregular meetings etc.
Still, it's a nice place - they were welcoming us warmly, giving us food and warm shelter as well as exciting stories and knowledge. Such as the idea of organising a community by living with the four elements.
In former times, when the community had 15 people, they were living like this.
Every 28 and a half days each person chooses one element out of five possible.
Five? Well, fire, earth, air, water. The fifth "element" in this system contains all elements.
As for every element there are certain activities and duties (to play music, light fire, pick fruits and vegetables, make candles etc.), the fifth takes care for the others, kind of holds them together. You could call him the guardian of the elements. Lets say, the fire elementh, who is responsible for preparing meal, can't cook for himself as in this style of living no one does anything for himself, so that the 5th element makes food for him. How oposit is that from nowdays society principles (me, me, me behaving) and selfish instincts...?!
To us this elementh acording organisation system seems to be really efficiant - the great elementary thought is to move, to be in change, to go with the flow of life, of the elements. Not to keep one kind of jobs, but to have a wide range of different kinds; to provide a wide range of learning opportunities for everyone.
We didn't stay for long time, but the time we spent there was great - one afternoon we had lots of fun with Valentin, Nataschas son. We had some great jam session with him, he had funn playing with Sani, Peter baked some nice (chocolate-and coffee) bread with him...
All in all this is a place definitely worth to be visited. The surrounding is quainte, the atmosphere in general is very gentle, friendly and warm. Lots of things (tepees, lake, stunning river with waterfalls and old ruins, vegetable garden) and ideas, inspiration waits to be found.
Finally on Wednesday we watched the clear (full) moon through glasses...
Sani & Anna
Thursday, November 13, 2008
La Lune Nette aux Lunettes
Thursday, October 30, 2008
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.
Monday, October 20, 2008
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
Friday, October 17, 2008
Kesswil / Humans Hope
www.humanshope.ch
We rested some days in a nice horse-farm which belongs to friends of anja.
There we had a skillsharing-circle to see what we want to learn and what we can give further to others and built up a little learning plan for ourselves, which means that we founded learning groups, for example different language learning groups, a yoga group, a photo-workshop and lots more...
We also organised a financial meeting and met in the circle to exchange our expectations and our visions of the tour.
The father of the farm family is working on a map-tracking-software which enables you to track your way on a google-map with mobilephone and GPS to reconstruct your route. He offered us to use his invention on our way and gave us 2 GPS-mouses where after we tracked the first route to Switzerland.
After two days we left to find a nice place to stay over night at Lake Konstanz.
On our way we picked up some interesting components in the form of a beautiful pink chair, a mattres and a wonderful blue pillow.
As the sun sat down we stopped in a little village at the lake and parked nearby a park.
By strolling arround we collected some firewood so that we could start a nice campfire nearby the lake to cook dinner in it.
The night was beautiful dark and the big fullmoon was rising up on the other side of the lake which we left behind us, reflecting mysteriously in the dark waters and symbolically shining us the way in the direction of our next level of the tour: SWITZERLAND.
So nice, the first time that we slept outside in the wilderness.. being just for us.. enjoying the fullmoon.
In the morning we were surrounded by fog and after some morning-yoga and swimming in the icy lake we had jammjamm breakfast,
while the sun broke through and a beautiful day began.
The next challenge was waiting for us at the border in Konstanz.
One of us was secretly filming the border-policeman. When he recognized it he got angry and made us deleting the whole film material which took a lot of time as we weren't very used to use the camera. ;)
But all in all we were allowed to pass by without car-check.
After passing 18 roundabouts (WOW) we finally arrived in Kesswil.
The nice family which was waiting for us, created a network called humanshope.
In the moment this network includes thirty persons and it is mainly based on a webpage which presents their ideas and links to many other different projects, which seem to fit in their flow.
The basic idea is that all the "problems" of our world cannot be solved seperately anymore, but need to be looked at from an all-encompassing point of view, so all the different aspects such as spiritual (f.e. the Maya calendar), economical, political and social are included.
So they developed a concept of how it could be possible to reorganise and reform the world system.
Their main idea is based on a bee cell structure which can already be found in very old cultures, and as well in recent sciences, such as RAUMFAHRT, where they found this form in the asteroid-belt which surrounds Saturn.
According to this proposal, the world is split in many hundred cells, of which each one is independent,selforganised and is able to live out of its own capacities. Of course not every unit has all ressources, as oil, specific plants etc.,
so this is where the network of a bigger territory, seperated into six cells, takes care of each other. If there are any problems which can't be solved on one level, it is carried up to the next level.
For more information have a look at www.humanshope.ch .
As the Maya calendar builts an important aspect of the concept's background, mainly the whole group works with it and tries to transfer it into their daily life. They even have a learning group in which they meet regularly every month to exchange and deepen their knowledge.
So we had the great chance to take part in a short introduction and later on in a workshop about more details of the Maya philosophy, which is a lot more than just a calendar, and even more than a horoscope, but a whole life philosophy including a new understanding of time and the complexity of the universal cycles in its past and in its future as well as the humans' role in it.
www.lawoftime.org (official 13 moon calendar website)
www.tortuga.com (planet art network-"time is art")
Before meeting us, Franziska, the mother of the family, was really sceptical about our whole group and expected us to be wild long-haired people covered with wool all over ;), but when we left after two long days she even cried and she and Antonio, the founder of the humanshope-network, didn't want to let us go. We felt incredibly at home at their place and it felt like leaving family. It was such an open minded place, where we could share all our ideas, enjoying ourselves and the whole atmosphere. So one evening we had a workshop of the humanshope project with Antonio, whereafter the evening slowly grew into a wonderful sharing of sound, dance and meditation.
All in all it was absolutely touching to realize, how different people have the same or similar ideas at the same time, and how they get connected in a flowing way, exchange their ideas and dreams and explore ways to cooperate and work together to be stronger and move on.
And we knew it was good that we came.
