After vetting every entry in a national database of sustainable-ag jobs, I sought and landed an apprenticeship in Chico, California, at Pyramid Farms. I’d get $7.50 an hour, plus a trailer to myself, rent-free, and all the veggies I could eat. I figured I’d save enough in one season to fund trips to the places succeeding Alaska and the Sawtooths in my travel dreams: Hawaii, Australia, New Zealand. Could razing my faith in a faraway Eden unbar my lost garden?
The job didn’t start till mid-March. In mid-November, I moved to the Reevis Mountain School of Self-Reliance, a wilderness homestead east of Phoenix. I’d spent the month of August there in 1998 and returned for three weeks the following June. In 2004, joining four other interns, I found the scene both familiar and strange: this ring of young seekers ’round an older leader embraced me with appreciation and trust. As the orchard filled with persimmons smooth as pearlescent balloons and pomegranates like hives packed with jewels, how I saw myself softened and sweetened. Here I played a free woman bearing gifts—not a slave to unpayable debt.
In mid-December, I took a break from Reevis to meet Hunter for what he must have known would be our final ride. He’d burned his goodbye into the mix CD he handed me as I climbed down from his cab for the last time.
On the first track, a woman begged a stranger to remove her to parts unknown; on the last, a man wistfully released his companion to chase a dream of her own.
Months later, I burned the disc—watched it curl and melt—in a bid to break Hunter’s hold. Grieving my loss, cursing his desertion, I couldn’t dismiss our love as Deathculture bullshit. I did take solace in knowing he wouldn’t keep me from Zendik.
At Pyramid, I worked mostly alone—fixing drip line, digging thistle, harvesting carrots and garlic. This freed me to design my days as I pleased. When summer’s heat set in, I began rising in the half dark to start work at first light. Through by noon or one, I could read books, take naps, hunt fruit: kumquats, loquats, oranges, lemons, figs, cherries, peaches, plums.
But the joys of self-rule couldn’t hold me on their own. As July marched by in a blaze of hundred-degree days, I grew surer and surer I was meant to be a Zendik warrior. The flour canister in my cupboard would soon hold enough cash for flights to my dreamlands. My fellow field hands—a couple sharing a trailer—wanted more space and more work. If I left, they’d get both.
Still. I expected quitting to cost me. In mid-July, gearing up to give two weeks’ notice, I steeled myself for an angry blast.
Instead the farmer asked what he could do to help me beat the heat. Replace the cooler in my trailer? Build a canopy for shade?
But it wasn’t the heat that drove me. It was my story. What he could change in that, he’d already changed.
In late August I set out overseas, hoping my Edens would disappoint me. Hawaii’s Big Island dripped fruit (passion, bread, jack; avocados, sapotes, cherimoyas), as well as fresh coconuts, macheted for water and meat, but yielded no bohemian pocket I wished to slip into. New Zealand—backdrop to the Lord of the Rings films—withheld both elves and Rivendells. The Australian outback, richly embroidered with intricate song lines, seemed a vast, scrubby waste from the cab of a truck.
And yet when my jet touched down at JFK on October 7, 2005, I did not want to call the Farm. At rest at last in my mother’s Brooklyn apartment, assured of shelter, food, and love, I dared to ask why.
Mostly I inquired in private, denying ammo to family and friends threatened by the revolution’s critique of them. As for ex-Zendiks turned critics—they were lying whiners, dodging blame for their failures. Arol’s voice in my head condemned them: “Get a life!” she’d say. “We’re not perfect. Who is? But at least we’re trying. Throw in or move on.”
I had to shun such negativity, lest it infect me.
Thus the Zendik story sealed itself.
But not completely.
I met Sea through the blog I’d started in April 2005. She credited her few years at Zendik, in the late seventies and early eighties, with rousing sleeping gifts and blowing her mind. Yet she’d chosen, without regret, to settle elsewhere. In her first message to me, she said she knew the ache of leaving the Farm and treasured my giving it words. She assured me I could thrive in the outside world.
She slipped through the seal.
With her support, I raised my inner voice. Through October and November, I wrote and wrote, spreeing on thought crime (and bashing myself for it) as I spun strands of a new story:
I wished to live among equals, with reverence for each being’s gifts and free circulation of feedback; I would not serve a hierarchy that lionized some, belittled many, and throttled dissent.
I wished to practice self-rule, based in self-trust. I cringed in rage, recalling all the times I’d sniveled and groveled in the face of accusation. Sure, I might have fucked up. But that didn’t justify ritual humiliation or conviction in a puppet court deaf to my truth. Where was the compassion, the curiosity, that could have unmasked the plea beneath the trespass? Where was my care for myself? Why had I surrendered power to decide?
I wished to shed the weight of all-my-fault, the stain of cowardice. Maybe Cayta’s judgment that I’d craved sexual assault had been neither true nor a move to empower me. Maybe I’d feared Arol because she’d roared, above the law of cause and effect; maybe I’d taken blame I hadn’t earned because it beat risking soul death.
I wished never to sell again. I’d hated asserting my worth through numbers; competing with other sellers (while cursing my competitiveness); dodging them when I was bombing; waking in the morning, still exhausted, to the dread of getting blasted. Stripped of other ways to soar, I’d embraced running the money gauntlet as my highest art form.
I wished to tell my story as my story, not a footnote to Zendik’s, in words dense and juicy as ripe fruit. I saw that my prose had grown more succulent, as I’d haltingly allowed all my flavors—bitter, tart, sweet—onto the page. I admitted that I’d often admired Zendik art only because admiration was required. Now I could freely seek art that moved me—and channel that which moved through me.
I wished to join all who were willing in building a beautiful world. As a Zendik, I’d believed our way of life so enticing that its popularity would one day explode. Yet in the year since I’d left, the Farm’s head count had dropped to twenty-four. What did that mean for Ecolibrium? How would it grow, nursed by so few? Was Zendik pushing something the world didn’t want? Maybe every act of beauty fostered beauty, no matter the source. Maybe Wulf, describing Ecolibrium, had drawn from a well I, too, could draw from, pouring what rang true into my own resurrection song. One thing I knew: in my Eden, we’d receive gifts and good wishes when we chose to move on.
I wished to claim my life as my own, with Zendik a stage in my growth. Wulf, urging flight from the Deathculture, had said, “Forget the old dream; save the dreamer.” Had Zendik become the “old dream”? I saw I’d begun losing heart long before I’d left; had I wanted to flee but, fearing soul death, needed a shove? Could I be neither traitor nor failure, but creature achieving new form?
I wished to belong without condition. Once I’d lost utility, Zendik had dropped me. How could a human settle, and flourish, in a mesh full of holes? How could such a mesh be home? Why call the Farm, knowing no one there cared to hear my stories?
I wished to mate for life. I couldn’t do that at Zendik, where, I admitted, I’d dropped men under duress. Maybe I’d marry after all; maybe marriage, when it lasted, strengthened the mesh.