Leaving the commune

Dreaming of a New Earth while learning to live in this one

The call of birds and the sounds of drums and cars mesh into a haze that I’ve come to associate this symphony with my temporary new home on the shores of this very peculiar lake.

It’s a mix of earth and human, of harmony and disjointedness. It’s the song of life on Earth, at least at this time and in this place.

For a while I awoke every day without hearing the sounds of the city or humans at all. It was always silent on mornings at the farm, silent except for the call of birds and the sigh of the winds on the lake.

I spent the past three months in an eco-conscious spiritual community called the Mystical Yoga Farm by the shores of Lake Atitlán. These were, I can say without a doubt, three of the best months of my life. Within the arms of that community I felt held, nurtured, healed, inspired.

Photos from the farm

There, I wrote countless melodies and sang them around countless evening fires. Songs flew through me like migrating birds, blooming out on guitar strings like breaths of wind. There I made deep connections, led vocal activations, taught guitar, prayed for the healing of the earth.

There I laughed, fell in love, jumped in the lake almost every morning, and let my body and being unfurl in the arms of a community guided and directed by forces much greater than myself.

Now I am out in the world again, living with a new partner I met while on the farm. Our relationship is fresh and tender and delicate, shaped in moments of peak experience now brushing up against life inside the reality of living. It feels humbling to enter a relationship in this time of great change.

Was I briefly in a cult? I wonder on this calm afternoon, listening to the dogs bark and the wind race across the volcanoes in the distance. Or was I briefly introduced to a paradise, a pristine example of the way life could be? It certainly felt like that most of the time. We spent afternoons packing trash into eco-bricks to create zero-waste buildings, and planted beans and bananas and psychoactive cacti in soil so lush it laughed up worms and mycelium wherever we dug. We learned old songs, played them together.

Almost everyone who passed through that community ended up learning guitar in a matter of days; it was as if there was a creative spirit there constantly whispering in everyone’s ears, pulling them towards the dance, towards the fire, towards the instruments, towards life.

Who am I now, here? In the arms of that community, I felt completely aligned with my purpose. But even within it, I was still confronted by flows and waves of emotion and challenges and questions.

Still, I found that at the farm, all those emotions passed quickly, swept away by the tides of change, ritual, dance, and the fresh flowers that constantly grew from the bushes around us.

So no, I don’t think I was in a cult. The farm certainly had cult-like elements, but it lacked one major cult hallmark: everybody, at one point or another, eventually leaves.

And I’m certainly leaving changed. Now I’m leaving with a newfound certainty that most humans are meant to live together, to co-create together, to be carried by waves of energy and faith much greater than we alone can manifest.

And I believe that to create a New Earth — one focused on a sustainable way of living that is kind to mothers and children and all beings — we need to re-learn the art of living in community, of trading, of sharing, of all weaving our skills into one great tapestry of life.

Now, in the silence, I realize that in my own way, I am grieving the community I’ve just left. I’m already missing the person I was in that little oasis, a person who could craft events, inspire others, lead prayers, weave anything as long as it was woven with love. Now I get to be her in the day-to-day.

The farm was like a nest, as many of the best ceremonies and incubators and healers are. I arrived a bit broken-hearted and exhausted and confused, and it allowed me to first be held by others, and then to rekindle deep love for myself. It reminded me that I am most alive when I am being held by others, and by the land.

Over there, there was no city or town nearby, and one could only reach any sort of substantial civilization by boat. The little farm hovered beneath Grandfather Rock, a massive rock face surrounded by greenery that often seemed to developed facial features if you looked at it right. Huge trees coughed their giant roots over massive rocks, and everything, including me, bloomed and was alive.

I’ll always hold it within me — those memories of crazy joy, those strangely regimented yet awesomely free days of yoga and gardening and wrangling new volunteers and hosting beautiful events. Of sinking deeper and deeper into love and trust each day, of rooting in the soil, of blooming.

I hope to create and live in a space much like it someday, a space that lets people come and go freely and is a home for all. I think so many of us share the same dream. To have a place where we can be together with others, and where we can truly be loved and seen as ourselves.

In the meantime, I’m coming back to myself slowly, coming back to the rhythm of this blog and my writing and my work. The Internet is a vast and confusing cacophony of signs and signals, and while there is so much beautiful writing on this platform, reading about self-help online is very different from actively going and embracing nature and being held by other human bodies.

One of the reasons I left the community instead of staying longer was because for all its perks, volunteering and eventually managing there didn’t allow much time for my own projects, and I missed Substack most of all.

So I’m back with plenty of new ideas and visions for this newsletter. I don’t want Ink Roads to be an ordinary self-help newsletter designed around selling courses, but I also don’t want it to merely be a collection of travel stories anymore. Now I hope to weave my passions together and use this platform to create more community, and to inspire readers to look away from the computer, to go outside, to return to their guitar strings and their own creativity and their own hearts, just as this community did for me.

In the meantime, I’ll be spending the next month here on the shores of the lake, re-acclimating, writing, and figuring out what’s next. But I am unbelievably grateful for the last few months, and so ready to keep that dream alive.

Over and over again the farm taught me: Separation is not the answer. We need to listen to nature. We need to open our hearts and ears and fields to the songs of the earth. Our souls yearn to live and create with each other.

We can do this — we can create a world based on beauty and harmony with all beings. It won’t be perfect. But it can be real. It is, because I’ve lived it.

I’ll need to return to that knowledge and that remembering again and again as we move through the uncomfortable transitions, dissolutions, and alchemies that this era of life on Earth requires. In the next few decades, massive systems need to collapse and new, regenerative ways of life need to be rebuilt.

Yet even in this liminal time, this time of more questions than answers and so much fear, flowers still bloom. Love still breathes even in the dark. It always does and always will.

So that’s my update and a little where I’ve been. You can expect a lot more from me coming soon — more community, more offerings, more calls to go outside and embrace your own creativity and soul callings — more aliveness, more light.

In the meantime, thanks, as always, for reading. It’s good to be back. I love you so much.