After resistance comes creation. In order to be truly free from that which we resist, we must grow something new.

Finding the Good Life

by Kate Storm

live in a small New Mexico valley in a very particular way, a way that I have, as much as one can, crafted intentionally. The weaving of my simple life began as an act of resistance. Six years ago I graduated from college. I knew what I did not want: the nine-to-five carbon copy of so many of my peers. There were many voices telling me that I could not survive beyond an urban or suburban lifestyle and career, the only norms I knew from my upper-middle-class family and East Coast college. How I would live drew a frightening blank. I felt intuitively that I could not thrive on "no’s." After resistance comes creation. In order to be truly free from that which we resist, we must grow something new. This creative growth is what author bell hooks calls "the movement from object to subject." Through personal choice and action we become someone who acts rather than one who is acted upon. This is the story of how I actively landscaped my life, chose seeds and starts, watered and fertilized them, and how I am now choosing which ways to cultivate and which to cull.

After graduation I landed at an intentional community north of Taos called the Lama Foundation. The place was full of older folks living on little money who were sometimes very happy. They ate simple food, some of which they grew. They looked into each other’s eyes. They sang songs -- not to children, to God. Watching them sport thrift and free-box clothes while dancing, gardening, praying and finally sleeping in straw-bale adobes, school buses, geodesic domes and tents assured me that there were other options besides the world I had known. I learned that one way I wanted to live included song and dance.

After three months at Lama I visited my family in my hometown of Chicago. I stepped outside one night, and above the city lights that usually obscured the night sky shone La Luna in all her waxing glory. "The moon!" I exclaimed. Relief washed over me at seeing her so clearly amidst the cement and steel, as well as surprise at the intensity of my response. Her light was like water at the end of a fast. I wanted to kiss her all over. My city friend seemed confused as I stared up, breathing deeply.

I followed a boyfriend to New Zealand, where the youth are less afraid of living. Many of their parents accept the dole without stigma. Education is free. Organic farms are abundant -- there are more than 450 on the small South Island alone. "Housetrucks" are everywhere and not just inhabited by the young or unstable. Families, grandparents, writers, gypsies and artists abound in tiny, rustic towns. They’re odd, like most of us, but they’re willing to admit it.

I spent a week at my friend Hana’s childhood home, a one-room house that was dark at all hours. The ceiling was thickly cobwebbed, spiders randomly fell on people, and mice ran along the rafters. No one flinched. Hana was the first person I knew well who does not have a college education. She is brilliant. She introduced me to bell hooks, Barbara Walker, Susun Weed and Emma Goldman. She is a self-taught, self-motivated feminist with her own painting studio who sleeps in a shack no bigger than the mattress. I slept with her there. One night, Hana built a fire under an outdoor bathtub, and I had the best bath -- a "bush bath" -- of my life. Instead of growing colder as I soaked, my body warmed down to my bones. Another "yes."

Around this time I was suffering from chronic ear infections. When I left the United States for New Zealand, my doctor gave me several packets of prescription Zithromax in case I got sick. I did -- again and again -- and the antibiotics would take the edge off for a month before the ear infection returned. Finally I went to a Kiwi clinic. The doctor listened to my story and told me to stop taking the antibiotics. He was dismayed that my American doctor would recommend multiple doses of the same medicine. He told me to drink lots of ginger tea, put hot washcloths against my ear, and rest. He gave me some mullein-garlic oil for my ear. The infection went away. So did my use of antibiotics. A window opened into other ways of healing. Hana shared books on herbal medicine, and I harvested my first nettles.

Back in the States, I moved to Eugene, Oregon. I spent a few months at the Lost Valley Educational Center, another intentional community. Then I realized I was scared of the rent/work cycle. I moved to town and proved to myself that I could make it out there with my skills and passions. One sunny day, I met my man. Samuel sported dirty Carharts and patched Converse shoes, and he always carried a knife, matches and a pen. He sewed. He tended the garden. He sold poetry on the streets. When he felt moved, he put his hand on his heart and cried.

I had a car then, which had enabled me to move around the country. I was using it about once a week, mainly to visit Lost Valley. I knew I didn’t want to have the car "by the time I was 30." A friend asked, "Why don’t you just get rid of it now?" I did.

Eugene, Oregon, is serious about bikes. A farm, pizza place and taxi service all work by bicycle. There is a donation-based bike-repair shop whose tools anyone can use. The bus system is so extensive that one can bus and bike one’s way to a camping trip in the woods, as my love and I did one weekend.

Then Samuel and I moved to Santa Fe where, no offense, we barely survived the year. I got the training I wanted in teaching yoga. We stuck out like sore thumbs on our bicycles in dark, Northwest-style thrift clothes. At rush hour I wove my way among lowriders and SUVs, hoots and even, occasionally, angry shouts. A sustainable education center hired us as the live-in caretakers, and the 11-acre campus was our saving grace. Not only did the staff love our dumpster-diving and free-box idea, but we were paid to learn about tending chickens, growing food, operating solar systems and putting up food for winter. The campus was biking distance from the yoga studio and the Santa Fe Farmers Market. We worked with beekeepers, permaculture teachers, organic farmers and others folks on the fringe of the Whole Foods "alternative" culture. Yeah, we shopped there from time to time -- but mostly we ate samples.

Then Samuel heard about a man in southern New Mexico who lived in the woods, packed by burro and ate wild foods. This man sometimes camped on a residential land trust that could not be bought or sold. We thought, Maybe people there do not believe Earth can be owned. At the end of my yoga-teacher training, we moved to the Gila Valley.

The Gila Oak Land Trust is 18 acres that a Quaker peace activist and longtime Santa Fe resident, Mary Burton Riseley, bought in the 1980s with her former husband. When Mary actually moved to the property a decade later, she found it inhabited by folks living under tarps. For years they had used this land as a stopping ground between long treks into the Mogollon Mountains.

Mary didn’t kick them off. With their help, she put the land into a residential land trust. It is a kind of unintentional community -- I have been here more than a year, and we have had only four or five meetings. Unlike any of the intentional communities at which I spent time in New Mexico, Oregon and New Zealand, the land trust functions very well. We all have our own lives. People hang out together because they want to. Folks do not leave burned out.

The first summer Samuel and I camped under tarps. When winter hit, a neighbor lent us a school bus complete with woodstove. Then a tiny adobe hut was passed onto us, smaller than some bathrooms, with a bed outside and an outdoor kitchen with counters, a sink and, when the sun’s powering the well, running water.

These are some of the yes’s: I write. I teach yoga to my neighbors. I sleep under the stars. On warm days I bathe, swim and cool off in the river. I type by candlelight and charge the computer on my friend’s solar panel. I walk barefoot. Sometimes spiders fall on my head. I cook on an open fire. I make love at any hour. On the first day of my menstrual period I do not do anything -- it is the first vow I have ever made. When I’m feeling something intensely, I have the space and opportunity to feel it. I eat food my neighbors and I have grown or gathered. We share crops, herbal medicine, childcare and unwanted clothes with one another. I am tan. I am strong. I use my body every day shoveling, hauling water, splitting wood. I practice yoga in the sunshine or in the shelter of our tiny house. I pray. I burn sage. I play the flute and drum.

I live in a way reminiscent of old. And all things old have a tendency to be held romantic and cliché, like my grandmother’s hands and the smell of her twice-baked potatoes. But like with my grandmother, with whom I often fought, the reality of how I live is not as sweet as it may sound -- my life is real. Several of my favorite things have been ruined by the rain and mice. My pillows smell faintly of mildew. The walls of our house are slowly crumbling, and I don’t really like to be inside at night when the mice come out. Because we keep our food in a cooler under a wet towel rather than a refrigerator (we have no electricity and do not want to use propane), food rots quickly in the summer months and can freeze in the winter.

Something is shifting for us. As Samuel puts it, "I’m tired of trying to figure out how to live. I just want to live." When I first began this walk, I judged and refused many things: cars, food from far away, new clothes, money. Upholding these judgments became an exhausting ordeal. Going to the grocery, for example, meant a harrowing dialogue with myself about what I wanted to eat and what was wrong with eating that. Instead of simply choosing food, I battled with my cravings and needs, eventually judging myself as I ate the California avocados and yogurt from a plastic container.

This is what I am learning: A life lived in reaction, guilt and fear is not sustainable. Only that which is nourishing can be sustained. This is as true for the planet as it is for us. The most radical action we can take is to deeply care for ourselves. From that care, the well-being of Earth naturally unfolds.

The yes’s are becoming flexible. Last summer I bought a stove and some propane so that I could stay out of the heat. When I go to the co-op in town, I buy avocados and dates and occasionally even yogurt. We’re going to get a car so that we can visit the city more easily, attend and teach classes, have more young friends, participate in art and culture. I want more comforts: a dry, bug-free bed, a couch, a more spacious, clean and insulated house, and a room of my own and one for Samuel, too. While I enjoy gardening, I’ve learned that I do not want to be a farmer. I am using money and participating in the gift economy. Recently we flew to visit family rather than taking the train; I had not flown in three years, Samuel in six. I daydream about and have given myself full permission to live in San Francisco. The rules of what makes and does not make a good life are falling away. It’s a relief. In that flexibility and permission I discover that I really want to eat beans and rice, help grow food, and sit with an open fire.

I am not sure what this shift will mean for us in the long run, only that I do not want to live quite as rustically as we have been living. Patiently I imagine different possibilities -- I’ve learned by now that I’ll be cared for. Six and a half years ago I only knew what I didn’t want. Now my life is rich from old strands, things my grandmother might have taught me if she’d stayed on the Illinois farm instead of becoming one of the first women lawyers in Chicago: growing and putting up food, milking cows and goats and processing their milk into cheese and yogurt, stoking the woodstove on cold nights. And beautiful metallic strands are part of the weave, too: I use the computer often, I rock out in the dirt to my rechargeable-battery-operated stereo, I get all dressed up and knead bread. All the while, I feel my way to what is truly nourishing me. My lifestyle, which began in resistance, grows full.





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	Samuel in the outdoor kitchen.


After resistance comes creation. In order to be truly free from that which we resist, we must grow something new. Finding the Good Life by Kate Storm live in a small New Mexico valley in a very particular way, a way that I have, as much as one can, crafted intentionally. The weaving of my simple life began as an act of resistance. Six years ago I graduated from college. I knew what I did not want: the nine-to-five carbon copy of so many of my peers. There were many voices telling me that I could not survive beyond an urban or suburban lifestyle and career, the only norms I knew from my upper-middle-class family and East Coast college. How I would live drew a frightening blank. I felt intuitively that I could not thrive on "no’s." After resistance comes creation. In order to be truly free from that which we resist, we must grow something new. This creative growth is what author bell hooks calls "the movement from object to subject." Through personal choice and action we become someone who acts rather than one who is acted upon. This is the story of how I actively landscaped my life, chose seeds and starts, watered and fertilized them, and how I am now choosing which ways to cultivate and which to cull. After graduation I landed at an intentional community north of Taos called the Lama Foundation. The place was full of older folks living on little money who were sometimes very happy. They ate simple food, some of which they grew. They looked into each other’s eyes. They sang songs -- not to children, to God. Watching them sport thrift and free-box clothes while dancing, gardening, praying and finally sleeping in straw-bale adobes, school buses, geodesic domes and tents assured me that there were other options besides the world I had known. I learned that one way I wanted to live included song and dance. After three months at Lama I visited my family in my hometown of Chicago. I stepped outside one night, and above the city lights that usually obscured the night sky shone La Luna in all her waxing glory. "The moon!" I exclaimed. Relief washed over me at seeing her so clearly amidst the cement and steel, as well as surprise at the intensity of my response. Her light was like water at the end of a fast. I wanted to kiss her all over. My city friend seemed confused as I stared up, breathing deeply. I followed a boyfriend to New Zealand, where the youth are less afraid of living. Many of their parents accept the dole without stigma. Education is free. Organic farms are abundant -- there are more than 450 on the small South Island alone. "Housetrucks" are everywhere and not just inhabited by the young or unstable. Families, grandparents, writers, gypsies and artists abound in tiny, rustic towns. They’re odd, like most of us, but they’re willing to admit it. I spent a week at my friend Hana’s childhood home, a one-room house that was dark at all hours. The ceiling was thickly cobwebbed, spiders randomly fell on people, and mice ran along the rafters. No one flinched. Hana was the first person I knew well who does not have a college education. She is brilliant. She introduced me to bell hooks, Barbara Walker, Susun Weed and Emma Goldman. She is a self-taught, self-motivated feminist with her own painting studio who sleeps in a shack no bigger than the mattress. I slept with her there. One night, Hana built a fire under an outdoor bathtub, and I had the best bath -- a "bush bath" -- of my life. Instead of growing colder as I soaked, my body warmed down to my bones. Another "yes." Around this time I was suffering from chronic ear infections. When I left the United States for New Zealand, my doctor gave me several packets of prescription Zithromax in case I got sick. I did -- again and again -- and the antibiotics would take the edge off for a month before the ear infection returned. Finally I went to a Kiwi clinic. The doctor listened to my story and told me to stop taking the antibiotics. He was dismayed that my American doctor would recommend multiple doses of the same medicine. He told me to drink lots of ginger tea, put hot washcloths against my ear, and rest. He gave me some mullein-garlic oil for my ear. The infection went away. So did my use of antibiotics. A window opened into other ways of healing. Hana shared books on herbal medicine, and I harvested my first nettles. Back in the States, I moved to Eugene, Oregon. I spent a few months at the Lost Valley Educational Center, another intentional community. Then I realized I was scared of the rent/work cycle. I moved to town and proved to myself that I could make it out there with my skills and passions. One sunny day, I met my man. Samuel sported dirty Carharts and patched Converse shoes, and he always carried a knife, matches and a pen. He sewed. He tended the garden. He sold poetry on the streets. When he felt moved, he put his hand on his heart and cried. I had a car then, which had enabled me to move around the country. I was using it about once a week, mainly to visit Lost Valley. I knew I didn’t want to have the car "by the time I was 30." A friend asked, "Why don’t you just get rid of it now?" I did. Eugene, Oregon, is serious about bikes. A farm, pizza place and taxi service all work by bicycle. There is a donation-based bike-repair shop whose tools anyone can use. The bus system is so extensive that one can bus and bike one’s way to a camping trip in the woods, as my love and I did one weekend. Then Samuel and I moved to Santa Fe where, no offense, we barely survived the year. I got the training I wanted in teaching yoga. We stuck out like sore thumbs on our bicycles in dark, Northwest-style thrift clothes. At rush hour I wove my way among lowriders and SUVs, hoots and even, occasionally, angry shouts. A sustainable education center hired us as the live-in caretakers, and the 11-acre campus was our saving grace. Not only did the staff love our dumpster-diving and free-box idea, but we were paid to learn about tending chickens, growing food, operating solar systems and putting up food for winter. The campus was biking distance from the yoga studio and the Santa Fe Farmers Market. We worked with beekeepers, permaculture teachers, organic farmers and others folks on the fringe of the Whole Foods "alternative" culture. Yeah, we shopped there from time to time -- but mostly we ate samples. Then Samuel heard about a man in southern New Mexico who lived in the woods, packed by burro and ate wild foods. This man sometimes camped on a residential land trust that could not be bought or sold. We thought, Maybe people there do not believe Earth can be owned. At the end of my yoga-teacher training, we moved to the Gila Valley. The Gila Oak Land Trust is 18 acres that a Quaker peace activist and longtime Santa Fe resident, Mary Burton Riseley, bought in the 1980s with her former husband. When Mary actually moved to the property a decade later, she found it inhabited by folks living under tarps. For years they had used this land as a stopping ground between long treks into the Mogollon Mountains. Mary didn’t kick them off. With their help, she put the land into a residential land trust. It is a kind of unintentional community -- I have been here more than a year, and we have had only four or five meetings. Unlike any of the intentional communities at which I spent time in New Mexico, Oregon and New Zealand, the land trust functions very well. We all have our own lives. People hang out together because they want to. Folks do not leave burned out. The first summer Samuel and I camped under tarps. When winter hit, a neighbor lent us a school bus complete with woodstove. Then a tiny adobe hut was passed onto us, smaller than some bathrooms, with a bed outside and an outdoor kitchen with counters, a sink and, when the sun’s powering the well, running water. These are some of the yes’s: I write. I teach yoga to my neighbors. I sleep under the stars. On warm days I bathe, swim and cool off in the river. I type by candlelight and charge the computer on my friend’s solar panel. I walk barefoot. Sometimes spiders fall on my head. I cook on an open fire. I make love at any hour. On the first day of my menstrual period I do not do anything -- it is the first vow I have ever made. When I’m feeling something intensely, I have the space and opportunity to feel it. I eat food my neighbors and I have grown or gathered. We share crops, herbal medicine, childcare and unwanted clothes with one another. I am tan. I am strong. I use my body every day shoveling, hauling water, splitting wood. I practice yoga in the sunshine or in the shelter of our tiny house. I pray. I burn sage. I play the flute and drum. I live in a way reminiscent of old. And all things old have a tendency to be held romantic and cliché, like my grandmother’s hands and the smell of her twice-baked potatoes. But like with my grandmother, with whom I often fought, the reality of how I live is not as sweet as it may sound -- my life is real. Several of my favorite things have been ruined by the rain and mice. My pillows smell faintly of mildew. The walls of our house are slowly crumbling, and I don’t really like to be inside at night when the mice come out. Because we keep our food in a cooler under a wet towel rather than a refrigerator (we have no electricity and do not want to use propane), food rots quickly in the summer months and can freeze in the winter. Something is shifting for us. As Samuel puts it, "I’m tired of trying to figure out how to live. I just want to live." When I first began this walk, I judged and refused many things: cars, food from far away, new clothes, money. Upholding these judgments became an exhausting ordeal. Going to the grocery, for example, meant a harrowing dialogue with myself about what I wanted to eat and what was wrong with eating that. Instead of simply choosing food, I battled with my cravings and needs, eventually judging myself as I ate the California avocados and yogurt from a plastic container. This is what I am learning: A life lived in reaction, guilt and fear is not sustainable. Only that which is nourishing can be sustained. This is as true for the planet as it is for us. The most radical action we can take is to deeply care for ourselves. From that care, the well-being of Earth naturally unfolds. The yes’s are becoming flexible. Last summer I bought a stove and some propane so that I could stay out of the heat. When I go to the co-op in town, I buy avocados and dates and occasionally even yogurt. We’re going to get a car so that we can visit the city more easily, attend and teach classes, have more young friends, participate in art and culture. I want more comforts: a dry, bug-free bed, a couch, a more spacious, clean and insulated house, and a room of my own and one for Samuel, too. While I enjoy gardening, I’ve learned that I do not want to be a farmer. I am using money and participating in the gift economy. Recently we flew to visit family rather than taking the train; I had not flown in three years, Samuel in six. I daydream about and have given myself full permission to live in San Francisco. The rules of what makes and does not make a good life are falling away. It’s a relief. In that flexibility and permission I discover that I really want to eat beans and rice, help grow food, and sit with an open fire. I am not sure what this shift will mean for us in the long run, only that I do not want to live quite as rustically as we have been living. Patiently I imagine different possibilities -- I’ve learned by now that I’ll be cared for. Six and a half years ago I only knew what I didn’t want. Now my life is rich from old strands, things my grandmother might have taught me if she’d stayed on the Illinois farm instead of becoming one of the first women lawyers in Chicago: growing and putting up food, milking cows and goats and processing their milk into cheese and yogurt, stoking the woodstove on cold nights. And beautiful metallic strands are part of the weave, too: I use the computer often, I rock out in the dirt to my rechargeable-battery-operated stereo, I get all dressed up and knead bread. All the while, I feel my way to what is truly nourishing me. My lifestyle, which began in resistance, grows full.