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Farm Videos: Solar Panels, Earth Shelter, Permaculture Garden, Stephen & Ina May Gaskin, Third Planet Report, Radical Civics, ...more |
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Ina May Gaskin, an outspoken advocate for natural childbirth since the 60s, with Bonnie Read and her newborn daughter Margaret. Reed's son, Truman, was also born on Gaskin's commune, The Farm. Photograph: David McClister
Ina May Gaskin drives cautiously round the winding dirt tracks of the Farm, an eco-community buried deep in a 100-acre backwood south of Nashville. She slows down to wave to a young woman with her two children: "Both those were born at home," she murmurs, "as was the mother." A deer ambles across the road. Every so often, a clearing reveals a ramshackle house with a rusting 70s school bus in the driveway. We overtake a large, bearded teenager on a bicycle. "That guy just fell into my hands," she chuckles. "He was enormous."
A closed....
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"Kids to the Country" is one of many programs that
brings non-residents to The Farm
PHOTO: The Farm |
The Farm In 1970 a group of around 300 young people left San Francisco in a caravan of school buses and traveled across the country looking for a place to call home. Because of their clothing, hair length and lifestyle, these young people were regarded by many people as hippies -- and the "hippie caravan" made big news.
After a journey across America, they settled in Lewis County, Tennessee, and started their community, which they referred to as "The Farm." For the next few years it was mentioned in books, newspapers....
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I have been browsing the internet today, checking out new websites and looking for people who might be interested in joining our Cirkla Directory. I just browse and look for interesting websites and then I write to them and tell them about Cirkla. I find some really interesting people and places that way, so today I would like to share with you a couple of new sites that I found…
One is a guy named Warren Grossman.
I first browsed his links page and it was a lot of fun. You get a real sense of the guy just by looking at his links page! Being a person myself who really loves the woods, trees and nature, I liked him immediately. I especially liked the part where he talked about having shoes that are like feet to stay grounded. In the summertime, I so prefer to go barefoot! There is something about being barefoot on bare earth that is so wonderful! (Unfortunately, though, not in Minnesota winters!)
Then I went to his Services page to see what he does.....
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Early one warm Saturday morning in January 1967, people strolling near the polo field in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park might have been roused from their reverie by the sight of two shaggy, bearded men in white clothing walking slowly in a clockwise direction around the field. Or perhaps not. After all, the Haight-Ashbury district lay just beyond the park's eastern boundaries, and, with all the strange goings-on in that part of town over the past eighteen months, perhaps the sight of unkempt men chanting in strange languages and occasionally sounding cymbals and bells was no longer arresting. If passers-by paid little notice that morning, stories in the next day's newspapers would have informed them that a Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In had taken place the previous afternoon, with thousands of hippies in attendance. Earlier that morning, the perambulating, chanting pair, Beat poets Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg, had performed pradakshina, a Hindu ritual of purification,....
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The Farm School in Summertown, Tennessee, is a kid's dream come true.
Students decide their own class schedule, who will teach what subjects,
and where they'll go on field trips. In addition to traditional subjects
such as trigonometry and English, they also take classes on "Personal
and Planetary Well-Being" (a hippiefied biology class) and "Radical
Civics." Last year's history class was titled "History of U.S.
Imperialism."
On a Friday morning, nine youngsters, ages 10 to 17, are gathered in
a circle in a modest classroom. Some sit on ragged couches or recliners.
Others sit cross-legged on the floor. A few gently rock in computer desk
chairs. One kid fiddles with a buck knife.
Their T-shirt-wearing teacher/principal, who calls himself Peter Kind
Field, also sits on the floor, hugging his knees to his chest as he reads
the students'....
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The Farm was established after Gaskin and friends led a caravan of 60 buses, vans, and trucks on a speaking tour across the US. Along the way, they checked out various places that might be suitable for settlement before deciding on Tennessee.[2] After buying 1,000 acres (4 km2) for $70 per acre and another adjoining 800 acres (3.2 km2) for $100 per acre, the Farm began building its community in the woods alongside the network of crude logging roads that followed its ridgelines.
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In 1970 a group of about 300 seekers left San Francisco on a journey called "The Caravan." Inspired by Stephen Gaskin's Monday Night Classes, 80 schoolbus loads of hippies went out across the nation, spreading a message of non-violence and a belief that changing the world begins with changing yourself. They eventually settled on 1750 acres in rural Tennessee. The Farm's early use of tofu, soy milk, and other soy dishes such as tempeh and their famous "ice bean" dessert helped pave the way for a greater acceptance of soy as a low-fat alternative to meat across the nation and around the world. Their ranks include influential advocates/teachers of midwifery. The Farm has also pioneered a wide range of social and physical technologies appropriate to low-cost, high satisfaction community living. Originally an income-sharing commune that grew to over 1500 members, in the early 1980s the community was reorganized with a hybrid economy, and now boasts 30+ nonprofits & businesses.
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Thirty years ago, The Farm was the archetype of a model community. Today, it has shed communalism for capitalism.
It was, at its peak, the largest and most famous commune in America—a place where some 1,200 self-described hippies took a vow of poverty, kept house in school buses, and pledged to save the world. When I looked it up a few months ago, I learned that The Farm not only still existed, it seemed to be thriving. Back-to-the-landers had transitioned seamlessly into the digital age. Their website (thefarm.org) abounded with blogs, an ever-increasing tally of the cost of the Iraq War, sound files of poetry readings, and a 25 percent discount on holiday orders of the Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook. The Farm had grown up, shifting from a zero-accumulation commune to a veritable industrial park of creative capitalism, not to mention a popular tourist destination. For me—a brown-rice baby, the daughter of hippies—The Farm represented the ultimate in counterculture....
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The April issue of Vanity Fair-online features The Farm, an intentional community in Tennessee. Albert Bates gets a lot of ink in that article, as he has spent most of his life on The Farm making his mark in both publishing and education. There, his original skill set as a lawyer and horseman in 1972 was expanded to include Permaculture design, and he became an author (Climate in Crisis, introduction by Al Gore, 1990). He became a global authority on ecovillages, founding the Global Village Institute for Appropriate Technology. He directs the Ecovillage Training Center at The Farm, where he has instructed students from over 50 nations since 1994.
More recently he has been warning people about petrocollapse and sudden sea-level rise. His latest book The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook came out last fall from New Society Publishers. He has spoken at Culture Change's Petrocollapse Conferences in New York City and Washington, DC, and has just returned from a series....
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Sex, Drugs, and Soybeans
… and click here for the rock 'n' roll.
In 1970, pot-smoking guru Stephen Gaskin, a former U.S. Marine, led his band of acolytes on a mystic trip out of San Francisco and into the American heartland. But a funny thing happened on the way to enlightenment: Gaskin's hippies learned the ancient virtues of hard work, good hygiene, and crop rotation. Deep in the Tennessee woods, they formed a spiritual commune called The Farm, which has morphed over its 36 years into a high-tech eco–think tank.
The cultural cliché has it that the flower children danced at Woodstock, crashed at Altamont, and gradually shed their naïve ideals as they made themselves into ice-cream moguls, media magnates, and triangulating politicians. But the 200 people who live at the Farm—a 1,750-acre spread in the heart of Tennessee—have managed to hang on to the hippie spirit. It isn't like they sit around talking about peace and love all the time,....
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THE FARM - Tennessee's most famous hippy is getting on in years, but says his
productive days are far from over.
Stephen Gaskin author, speaker, Counterculture Hall of Fame member, and founder
of The Farm, turned 70 years old Wednesday.
Gaskin said he's spent half his life so far - "the more fun half"
- on The Farm, where hundreds of self-described hippies have made their home
since 1971 when they rolled into Lewis County in painted school buses, hoping
to create a Utopia.
"I'm so pleased and happy and content with my family and friends and community,"
Gaskin said, stretching back on his bed with his Macintosh computer in his lap.
Gaskin is a long, lean man with a wry smile and an easy chuckle. His hair remains
uncut, though what's still there has faded to mostly gray.
An ex-Marine who saw combat in Korea , Gaskin became a hippy while teaching
creative writing at San Francisco State....
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"THB" is not a "weed name," promised Mikey Cramer during a recent interview about his band THB or The Homegrown Band. No, the band's name is not a reference to growing marijuana, or anything else, on members' back porches, he insisted.
Instead, "the name was given to us in a newspaper because we all had grown up on The Farm," Mikey explained, a Summertown hippy community. "It stuck."
But Mikey doesn't dispute the fact the band gets high at every show. However, he said, they get that way on music.
"I started playing with these guys eight years ago in November," he explained. "I've loved every minute of it."
Band: The Homegrown Band or THB
On stage: THB will play 10 p.m. Jan. 25 at WallStreet, 121 N. Maple St. in Murfreesboro. Admission is $5. Bean will also perform.
THB is: Lenny Cramer (guitars, vocals); Mikey Cramer (drums); Glenn Rohrbach (bass, vocals).
Genre: "We don't play in a genre," Lenny said. "We're like a genre-breaking band.....
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Byline: STACI BROWN BROOKS News staff writer
Source: Birmingham News
Publication Date: 11/14/2004 Publication Info: Volume 117 Issue 211, LIFESTYLE,
01-E
SUMMERTOWN, Tenn.
Jason Deptula wasn't even born when a San Francisco professor and his idealistic
band of followers founded a commune in Tennessee called The Farm
- an enclave where peace signs and minibuses substitute for the hand waves
and SUVs elsewhere. But 33 years later, he shares their vision. ''I have a strange
connection and I don't know what it is,'' the bearded, turquoise bandanna-wearing
31-year-old said. ''I'm the age of the children of the hippies, yet I feel more
like these older ones. I don't know why. It could have to do with a past life
or something.'' Deptula proudly accepts the label: He's a hippie, too. He has
even adopted a friend's acronym of what that means: ''Happy Intelligent Person
Pursuing Infinite Enlightenment.''
Decades....
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Nestled in the woodlands of south central Tennessee's moonshine district, just
an hour and a half south of Opryland and three hours east of Graceland, lies The
Farm, an intentional community of peaceful warriors "out to save the world."
Sociologists call it an "intentional community"; the mainstream press
anachronizes it as a "hippie commune." Residents, however, just call
it "home."
They settled here in 1971. Transplants from San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury
acid scene, they arrived in a caravan of 50 or so brightly painted live-in school
buses. They were a bunch of city kids planning to grow their own food, get high,
groove on the land and teach the world how to live in peace. The Farm, according
to their one-time spiritual mentor, Stephen Gaskin, was going to be a demonstration
project for a sustainable future‹ a nonviolent ecofriendly cooperative
community of pioneers ushering in a new age.
By the early 1980s, when most other '60s-era....
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A few fragments from the press which mention Stephen Gaskin and The Farm
Copyright 1993 The Columbus Dispatch
The Columbus Dispatch
September 19, 1993, Sunday
SECTION: FEATURES ACCENT & ENTERTAINMENT; Pg. 1I; IN ESSENCE
LENGTH: 651 words
HEADLINE: MEMORY GETS HEAVY WHEN YOU'RE STONED IN YOUR OTAGE
BYLINE: Mike arden
I was getting stoneder and and stoneder.
After reading that choice quote from Haight Ashbury Flashbacks, the
memoirs of aging flower-child guru and acid-trip guide Stephen Gaskin, I
decided that, instead of providing the author with a typewriter to show
how many brain cells he fried in the late '60s, someone should give him a
talk show.
I met Gaskin a couple of years ago at The Farm, a rural Tennessee commune
and tofu factory he formed in 1971 with a bush caravan full of love
children and....
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There's a growing national interest in the subjects of home birth and midwifery, as couples who are about to have children feel an urge to return to more natural and appropriate birthing practices. The idea of an aware, drugless childbirth . . . in the comfort and security of one's own home ... attended by an experienced midwife ... with one's husband and any previous children in the family close by to greet the new infant ... is one that just 'feels right" to an ever increasing number of mothers-to-be.
In Europe, as in most other parts of the world, the majority of births still take place in the home. Only in America do the greater number now occur in hospitals. But this peculiarity of our culture is being widely reexamined, thanks to people like Stephen Gaskin (see The Plowboy Papers, MOTHER NO. 45) and his wife Ina May of The Farm in Tennessee.
Mrs. Gaskin's 1975 book-Spiritual Midwifery?now in a second, expanded edition, has played an important part in the....
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RADIO ON THE FARM
Is ham radio really a practical and useful tool for an intentional community? The folks at The Farm think so! That group, as described on the back of the "QSL" card the Radio Crew sends out, "is a religious community of 800 people in southern Tennessee . . . the largest and most successful beatnik community in the world, self-supporting and at peace with its neighbors". The Farm's members are into the third summer on their 1,700 acres in Summertown, and—as Albert (WB4BWR) says—"It looks like we're here to stay."
The community's first major use of radio was to keep in touch with its rock group, The Farm Band, which tours all over the country. This is especially important for Ina May—The Farm's head midwife—who travels with the band and uses its ham rig to talk with the other midwives back home. The Summertown gang also has a Windmill Crew working on the development of "a low-cost, dependable home lighting system", and Albert is active in our Saturday....
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