April & May 2017
How can we as a community become more resilient?
*This one started out as being just for April of 2017, but when I interviewed the 6 people for that month, they all had so much relevant stuff to say that I was having a problem with editing them down. After a discussion with my editor about it, we decided to split the column into 2 months, with 3 participants each month.
Matthew Crowley
By spending more time outdoors! I need to spend more time outdoors. And I think it would serve us well as a community to spend more time outdoors. I read Mary Oliver this morning, and it brought me to that simple metaphor of – we have all this wind in the spring in the valley, and the bushes and trees that bend in the wind are resilient. The ones that are rigid and inflexible break and fall to the ground. So it’s very simple, but we put up with 4 or 6 weeks of wind here, so those of us who have been here for a while are pretty resilient to things like that. The sand blows in the wind, and it doesn’t matter. The seeds blow in the wind and they land where they do and the plants and the trees that will grow in this harsh environment grow. There is great, profound, simple wisdom all around us on how to be resilient. We all know how beautiful this place is, but I am as guilty as anyone, I don’t spend enough time in it. When we get together and spend more time in it, it really helps. Right away it changes our attitude when we’re outside. The sky is blue, the sun is shinin’, Spring is here, the birds are singin’ and it’s like right away I feel more resilient. Of course, there’s the tangibles we’re all thinking about in terms of resiliency – being sustainable, growing as much food as practical, being more energy independent – but it starts with our sense of community, with our compassion towards each other, our flexibility with each other. I think we get jaded, or I have become jaded, being here 13 years. A lot of initiatives come and go. I met a new person to the community yesterday who was filled with inspiration and enthusiasm. I don’t wanna just talk them down and say, “you’re just not being realistic,” like I’m jaded. We need that inspiration and somehow as a community we need to learn how to channel that, to sit down with new people and say, “yeah, you’re right, you’re inspired and enthusiastic – let’s support that!” I think we need to know each other’s stories. If we consciously bring new people and longtime people together and really listen to the stories of new people, and share our own experiences of living in this community for a long time, that may help us become more resilient as community to old-timers and the constant tide of people coming and going. Maybe we’re missing the boat with a lot of that energy that comes to this community.
Nick Chambers
That’s an interesting question. There’s a lot of kind of resiliency that I think about. There’s the emotional, spiritual, familial, which entails practicing forgiveness, having love in your heart, being good people, staying close to your family, etc. Then there’s the resiliency as far as a society, a community, food, energy, utilities, waste water treatment, and those types of things. What I think about then is standing on the shoulders of what’s already been done and what infrastructure is already there. I think we have a great backbone infrastructure as far as the great stores that we have – the Mercantile, Elephant Cloud, the Hardware Store, the Brewery – there’s also that kind of resiliency. And so I think that’s really important. Baca Water & Sanitation and the town government and the Saguache government, I think we have a really great support network – they all wanna see us be resilient, too. I think it’s in their best interests. I’m in the food business, so utilizing what we have as far as food in the valley is huge, and realizing that we have an amazing farming community and producer base here, and that our restaurants and our grocers are great supporters of that, so, go to the store! Go to the local stores, more than City Market and Safeway, and really invest here and buy here. It goes a long way to tap in to what we have growing in the community. I mean, Crestone’s local food has been a clear demand of expression here. A great disservice to achieving our resiliency is putting a ton of energy and time and money into, for example, the free-energy thing. I don’t think anything comes out of anything that’s free. And I don’t think humans deserve anything that’s free. And there’s no excuse or substitute for just rolling up our sleeves and just gettin’ going. And I think that the greatest limiting factors that I see are labor and capital. There's no short of ideas and there’s no short of opportunities, there’s really just putting the boots on the ground and gettin’ r’ done! Capital and labor are the big constraints.
Kate Steichen
I looked up ‘resiliency’ in the dictionary, because I love words, and it’s, “the capacity to recover from or adjust easily to difficulties or change.” There’s inner resiliency, of course, and there’s outer resiliency. We often don’t think about both of those. The inner-resiliency to me is, having a spiritual practice that creates inner peace, appreciation, and acceptance of all. So, I lead the Sufi circle chants. I find now, in this time, even just my own personal, daily practice is so important. People are more fearful than usual now and that tends to make us contract. So we need a practice, whatever it is, we need something, that can day-to-day help bring us back to ourselves and bring us back to what we love. And then of course there’s the outer resiliency, which is probably more what you were thinking of when you asked this question. Again, I think first of all it’s the ability to work and play well with others. That’s a real outer resiliency which involves an individual sort of integrity, but especially acceptance of differences and especially forgiveness of ourselves and others. And minimal drama! (laughing) This community is like one big family, and family has good and bad aspects. The bad aspects are, when we have an unpleasant experience, we tend to hold that against the person. “Oh, I don’t want to do anything with them cuz they’re blah-de-blah.” We’ve got to get over that. Going outward more, how do we develop community independent systems that are flexible with backups? That could be solar/wind power, access to water, access to local food, security, care for the least among us, the elderly, the children, the sick, the needy in whatever way. And I also think we need to look at governmental solidarity. Having a town government and a POA that are distinct doesn’t really make sense in terms of our own resiliency. We need to develop co-ops. We need to develop our own banking system. There are a lot practical things and the ideas for these things will come out of this Crestone Baca Resiliency Search conference that will already have happened by the time this comes out. The conference brings people together to get to know each other better and meet people they’d never maybe talk to or meet. And then to work together to make this place more resilient. I don’t know what’s going to come out of that. People keep asking me, “Well, what’s your action plan?” Well, there’s no action plan. Whoever comes will create the action plan. I’m just setting it up and offering it as a gift to the community because I can do that. And it’ll be up to us what happens. And then what happens long term after that. That’s the key, is how do we do these other things, how do we forgive each other? How do we appreciate each other no matter what? Because that’s what it takes to create, to work together. So that’s the place where I see us falling apart. This is a place where it’s easy to have ideals, that’s the energy of this place. It’s really hard to implement those ideals.
I’m in my 27th year here and I’ve seen a lot of community projects succeed. There’s a lot here that wasn’t here 27 years ago, including a lot of people, of course. One thing I’ve seen over the years is that sometimes someone has an idea for something, and it doesn’t manifest for 5-10 years afterwards because the right people have to move here to make it happen. So, even if things don’t look like they’re happening on the surface, they really are underneath, the seeds are planted. This Search conference should plant a lot of seeds like that, and they will mature. Most of them do, actually!
Laurie Jiminez
I have to say that first off, as a community, we have to coalesce together. In any kind of emergency, you’re going to have people coalescing to help the situation. So, as far as the town goes, I’m not worried too much about their survival. There’s enough people out here to help. As far as coalescing, that’s being able to trust your government officials as being trustworthy, as your community being trustworthy, your small niche of friends that you know will be there no matter what. And those are the people you want to coalesce with because they’re going to help you. Resilience also means to be prepared. The town could be more prepared in the sense that they are actually buying up water rights to protect it for ourselves, not just the town protecting the water rights for the community, because water in the desert is like gold, and once the well dries, everybody’s moving out. That’s part of it. Another thing is that we could be putting together co-ops. One of my suggestions would be a computer center, where people can come and be able to rent the computer, the space and the internet to be able to do online business for themselves, whether that’s data entry, change of address card, transcribing, computer design, or whatever. People doing the at-home kinda thing can get a little lazy but if they have the discipline to get up and go to this place where they check-in, sit down, check in with the company and start transcribing for a court, hospital, coding, any of those things, you’re creating jobs for people who need jobs. And Crestone is small enough that it’s hard to find a job, so put in a community co-op computer center and then people can go from their campsites if they have to, because they needed work, down to this place to sit down and do data entry and make a paycheck. It’s as simple as that. And the computers could be donated by the community.
Being resilient also means being prepared and having some kind of preparation. That also means individually. If that means having to figure out how to can food, dry deer meat, take care of chickens or milk goats, that’s also part of being resilient. Because as I like to put it, there are too many chiefs and not enough Indians. And we need the cooperation of Indians to be more resilient as a community. I know there are a lot of great ideas out there, and they need to come to the surface and we need to step on it, do it. And co-ops I think are the best way to go because everybody gets to share in the process, not just the one-percenters. And I think that will also help to improve our community and bring more people in. We could have a community college at the Charter School, an adult night school where people are learning Spanish, computer programming, or auto mechanics. We need those out of this community and there are a lot of people who want to be chiefs, but not Indians. We need more Indians and we need to do the job and not just sit around and talk about it.
Hanne Strong
First, we should look at a little history. Bringing the community together was attempted 10 years ago, to do exactly this, and it didn’t happen. But now, the signs are there that things are really changing, and changing very fast, which gives the push we need for everybody to come together and do something about it. The big push came when William Howell heard what Amma said last summer in Santa Fe. Someone asked her about the future, and she said, "Children, you have 3-5 years.” To me, that means no electricity, no oil and gas, no food, no medicine. Bottom line, we’re going to be on our own! And if we’re gonna be on our own, we better do something about it and quick. Very quick. So that is the history of what happened. It was attempted before but the urgency wasn’t there. Now it is.
What is it we can do? First of all, we’re gonna have to totally get off the grid. Nobody can depend on the so-called “co-op,” which is a dictatorship and not a co-op. In the last community event, 10 years ago, someone near Moffat offered to put up the land to put in the solar park that would fuel the entire community. So, the land is there and we just need the right solar technology, which should be Tesla. They’re the most advanced in batteries and the most advanced technology at this time, so that’s what we’re gonna go for. And everybody’s gonna have to grow food. Whether it’s in the backyard or we get together in our food co-op – we’re gonna have to do everything we can to grow food. And we’re gonna have to put up huge greenhouses to grow our food in the winter. And we’re gonna have to do grains, because OK we can grow vegetables, but we need to do grains on a large scale if we’re gonna feed 1500 people, and refugees coming in because the cities are not going to viable. That’s another big question. What do we do about that? And we’re going to have to make our own medicines. We have a lot of gifted healers here who know all the plants and know the combinations of plants. We’ll need our own natural antibiotics and, bottom line, we’re gonna have to do everything ourselves and money is going to be utterly useless – it’s not going to buy you anything. So we’re gonna get back to barter. You work, you get food. You work, you get medicine. Everybody’s gonna have to chip in. And this community’s gonna have to learn how to love each other because we’re in this together and if we’re not in this together, we’re gonna be caught like everybody else with their pants down. Bottom line. Let’s get together. That’s the key. If everybody got together, pooled the resources, pooled the knowledge, we have a chance of becoming completely self-sustaining and self-reliant, but it’s gonna to take all of us to do it. That is the prediction for this community anyway. Also, what is the purpose of this place? The purpose is for us to bring forth a new civilization of people that are evolved, good hearted, loving, the people who go after the highest aspect of being human, the human spirit, and the human culture – culture and spirit. The highest aspect of being human is what we’re all here for. We’re here to develop the highest aspect of ourselves. It should be doable if we all get together, and of course water is going to play a major role. We’re one of the few places in the country that do have water, but how to secure that water? There’s gonna be a lot of people after it. Everyone’s going to have to be out there, helping to protect our water. And look at it – 10 years ago, we had a society that functioned, and now we’re going into a society that does not function, where black, red, white, racist, liberal, un-liberal, I mean, everybody’s fighting amongst each other, and when people have that much animosity and hatred for each other (this is my biggest fear), the land dries up. When you have that energy of conflict, the land dries up. And this is the Hopi prophecy – this entire country is gonna dry up and there will be no food available for anybody. And that’s the biggie. Huge. And of course, we wasted most of the water. The Ogallala aquifer is down to nothing and it’s completely polluted. And now they’re fracking and drilling and bombing and tearing the rest of it apart, so we have to be ready to protect what we’ve got.
Peter Gyallay-Pap
The first take on answering the question ‘how’ is how we can get our community together given all the divisiveness that we’ve had in terms of all the political and personality differences. The greatest resources here in the community are the spiritual retreat centers, so I think we should draw on that resource to develop some principles of spiritual ecology that can guide the whole process of resilience. Once we have a vision of working towards an organic community with a spiritual purpose, miracles can happen. Then all the practical things can fall into place because it’s at the spiritual level where you can bridge a lot of the divisions that exist in the community. People can meet at that level, and under the rubric of what defines us as a community more than anything else – it’s the spiritual aspect. So that’s the starting point, for me, as opposed to trying to come up with various specific, detailed, practical ideas. If we can just unite based on, I would call them ‘principles of spiritual ecology,’ however vaguely that may be understood or defined. I mean, Hanne embodies that, for example, that’s who she is. And in many ways she’s the matron of this community and she’s part of this process, too. So, I’m hoping, if we have that kind of vision, miracles can begin to happen and that’s what we need here in this community.