Page 14 - C.A.L.L. #26 - Winter 2005/2006

KALEIDOSCOPE

As luck would have it, Uwe Kurzbein of the Olgashof, who usually corresponds with our dear Desk Secretary Sol
Etzioni in German (my, my!) decided recently to send a nice detailed report of his numerous activities - in English,
for once - with the help of one nice niece of his. Thanks a lot, nice niece! Keep helping! Now first, something which
may sound eerily familiar to Israeli kibbutzniks:

Currently there are many people searching for an appropriate community. Nevertheless, at the moment more new communes are
being established instead of old communes growing. I have the impression that this is due to our male pioneering spirit together
with a bit of megalomania. Meanwhile many people who were revolutionary in 1968 have grown old. The political animals of these
years have not been living in communes. They existed alone. Today they recollect and are searching for themselves. Last year some
of them were at our's. Unfortunately, it is not that easy with old people like us and the young ones. While the old look at the world
relatively calmly, the young are still handling their neurotic outgrowths of their childhood. For the young we are wonderful role
models and there are, for example, young women who regard me as their father. From the psycho-therapeutical point of view this
can by very useful, but within everyday life it stifles proper communication in the majority of cases.

And some more quotations from Uwe's letter, no less relevant to us:

As an architect I attend to a huge community including the first trap lefties could get into. All others are already
among others a Demeterhof. Furthermore, I have some caught in this trap anyway. And it is of course alluring.
friends in Schwerin who I love to visit because we are There are so many things we could realise within a short
working together on a project. During the last few months time: photovoltaics, good cars, good energy plants, fairly
all of them have gone into business for themselves. I have annaeled biological houses. However, since we have not
the impression that business is going quite well. In any case run into debts we cannot afford all this. In other words:
it is good enough for making ends meet. There is one thing Subsistence is limited today. Although we produce nearly
we may not do: We may not incur debts. I wrote several everything we need for everyday life by ourselves, we have
times that we do not like the capitalism. Incurring debts is to buy the essentials.

In "Shalom Connections" of Spring 2005, we found an astonishing story by David Jansen of Reba Place - about
newcomer Bill N. of Plow Creek:

"I grew up in a dysfunctional family. My father was often moving around the country pursuing his opportunities as a disk jockey
and then as a producer in a recording company." A decade of cocaine use eventually "robbed him of his spirit, so that now there is
no one there for me to relate to," according to Bill.
Life with his mother was chaotic in other ways. By the age of fourteen,
Bill was homeless and living on the streets. He quickly learned to be
tough and on guard against other predatory people-becoming as violent
as they. All the time he was on a serious spiritual search, distaining any
organized religion, any scriptures - just seeking God directly in the spirit.
This search was a fire that lit up his life.
Among the anarchists and their network of relationships, he found
community and inspiration because of their refusal to exercise power
over others. Bill is capable of speaking in detail about the various
branches and tendencies of the movement that includes everything from
atheistic dialectical materialists and angry nihilists, to generous mystics
and saints.
After the age of twenty, Bill felt his spiritual quest by direct inspiration
hit a ceiling, and he began reading the Gospels. He discovered Jesus as
this mind-boggling radical whom, in his estimation, respectable Christianity still has not gotten to know. Somewhere in that search
he spent six months in an Eastern Orthodox monastery, drawn there by others on a similar journey. They joked about their
vocational move "from punk to monk." That place was good for healing life's hurts - of which he has a ton - but he found it too
easy, this not living the life of Jesus in the world. He stayed without making a commitment as long as they would let him.
Bill claims that God has gifted him at almost anything artistic, learning to play many musical instruments. Graffiti art and
tattooing are in his repertoire.

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