For this month’s loft piece, Josef reflects on living and working for the past year at Earthdance:
Creative Living
I did not choose to live at Earthdance. I didn’t even know she existed before I ended up on her doorstep. The Farmhouse looked to be made from disparate Lego bricks, Contact Improv sounded like some sort of sketch comedy, DJ might have been Harrison Ford in an alternate universe with that roguish smile, and Olive looked, moved, and felt an awful lot like the woman who had just dashed my heart against the rocks.
In that moment, I did not want to be here either.
A year later I am paid staff. Contact Improv might not be sketch comedy but it does look and feel sketchy, and I am in the unlikeliest of romances with someone else who didn’t know Earthdance – or Contact – from Adam before she came. There is much I could say about Earthdance. This place can be wonderful, it can also be terrible. I often feel like a stranger in a strange land, especially during events where I act in service to a community whose dominant culture is alien to me and values counter to mine. And, I have no desire to use this space for anything other than gratitude for the Earthdance that matters to me, the one that many who visit never know.
I’m grateful for my time here. You can have your jams and your global community, the Earthdance that is mine and that I love is the one that exists in the people who live here between events. Once I leave this place I may never come back, but I will bring them with me.
Victor is a world unto himself and must be the only Bodhisattva I’ve ever met. He, at least, looks remarkably like an ordinary man. I want to be more like Victor when I grow up, infinitely patient, knowledgeable, kind – unintentionally stylish as the devil himself. I want more play in my life, though I can hear him even now saying that everything he does is play.
The only thing that needs to be said about DJ and Lina is that they’ve raised some of the best children I’ve ever met. They are complicated and controversial figures in the community, and if I knew nothing else about them all I would need to know of them is their children. They are also generous and kind, and DJ carries the great weight of Earthdance’s impossible existence on his shoulders.
All of the work done at Earthdance is important, but Neal and Tamara put the Earth in Earthdance, and it is their work – both in the ground and over a lifetime of moving through alternative communities – that elevates this place beyond some hippy playground.
Faith is my sister, and one of my best friends. If I have less to say about her it is only because our relationship is more personal. Everyone who has ever spent any amount of time in the Farmhouse knows her kindness. With her I feel like less like a stranger, and I can be more authentic.
There are other important staff members of course but I don’t have strong relationships with everyone I work with. Work exchangers are important for jams, and important for the spirit of the Creative Living part of Earthdance. I’m glad to have met many of them. One of them is my favorite person. No one wants to read a checklist.
That said, Liv is one of the sweetest people I’ve ever known. Olive is a joy to be around. Ryan gives and gives and gives. Liana (a work exchanger) works like she is being paid much more than any of us and has a great attitude. I have the utmost respect for Tal, he is a good and gracious man. And there is someone with a mountain of poetry, who knows how I feel about her.
Josef | 
