Once and Future Hometown

B"H

The Seattle Weekly recently ran their 30th anniversary appreciation of Ecotopia. One piece of the history they don't cover is the Ecotopia Babies, like me: children born into the landscape and the culture of Crunchy Cascadia in the '70s, who are now "grown up" and building families, enterprise, and a part of the region's future. Ecotopia is, for me, more than a naive 30 year-old ideal, it's also the cradle of my childhood, so it holds a real persistence in my thinking.

I think one overtone of G!d's voice to the individual's guidance is childhood memory of a specific sort, the kind of past-memory that is at once also a future-memory, the utopian hometown, a striving to perfect that which was the original model for good. For humanity, this utopian hometown is Gan Eden. For Israel, it is Jerusalem. And for me, it is Olympia.

I try to be a champion of Place in general, and I will continue to strive for many community-building endeavors in a variety of settings. But Olympia is the Alpha Hometown, and the motivation behind all of my utopian visioning. It's one of a handful of communities in Greater Cascadia where the Ecotopian civic ethos survived the '80s. (Others arguably include, Saltspring Island and Nelson in British Columbia; Bellingham, Port Townsend, and Winslow in Washington; Eugene, Ashland, Corvallis, and, some even say, Portland itself in Oregon; and a number of Northern California towns right down to the Mothership -- or should I say, Gaiaship -- Berkeley.) At its least silly, that ethos produced an earthy, do-it-yourself communitarianism that, I believe, represents the most spiritually faithful, and the most worthwhile, synthesis of New World and Pacific Northwest values. Ecotopia happens to have been pioneered by not a small proportion of Jews (and not coincidentally, I think); consequently it has all sorts of Torah folded into it, and, in practically every one of its remaining vital pockets, a genuinely funky Jewish community persists in living out, almost invisibly, the vision of the Jewish Catalog.

Olympia's distinctions among this surviving archipelago of rarified hippydom are that it: is geographically central to the system, features unusually rich volcanic soil, is literally the greenest (also dampest), produces the best strawberries by far, and has the strongest independent music scene. Most importantly, though, Olympia does not function as an island -- meaning, it is both geographically accessible, and culturally porous, with respect to the contemporary "mainstream," to an extent that I consider rare. Consequently, I think it would be easier to use Olympia as a sort of entryway for North American Jews from conventional lifestyles in conventional cities (like, say, Seattle, which is just an hour away) into a more deliberate, self-owned kind of Jewish domestic life. It also happens to lack visionary Jewish leadership at this moment, but the population is there and the possibilities are vast.

My ultimate hope is that, b'ezrat haShem, I may live and labor to see the cultivation of the following, based in Olympia: an intentional Jewish community, co-operative Jewish education, and religious self-sustainability collectives (farms, if you will) for arts, for Judaica craft, and for agriculture (and textiles? anyone for textiles?). Imagine the domestic functionality of an early kibbutz, distributed into a small West Coast city. I would also like to see meaningful interfaith dialogue sustainable outside of a tailored institutional context, which I believe is possible in a small city.

This will take more time and organization and energy (not only mine, obviously) than I can say. In the meantime, though it doesn't seem Aviel and I would be able to plant our family there, the Point Roberts "artists colony" model is, I think, a worthwhile project that should give us the opportunity to lab-test the vision. (Because property there is artificially cheap, self-employment and self-sustainability are forced somewhat by the geographic isolation, and yet a full big-city complement of religious resources is just a 30-minute drive away.) And we have hatched a plan for planting our first seed in Olympia itself, which involves working with The Evergreen State College to build a contemporary version of The Integral Urban House, which would then constitute our personal landing pad. :)

So there you have it -- in celebration of Ecotopia's anniversary, a canvas bag-load of granolabar-in-the-sky idealism for the next generation. These are my dreams of Home.

Ameyn.