Living in a State of Grace Community

 

In branding A State of Grace, we have paid special attention to our verbal language:

 

Much of what we do requires us to become proficient in the vocabularies of the industries, sciences, and professions that we are attempting to integrate, so we are, both literally and symbolically, knowledge translators serving disciplines largely foreign to each other.  Our bridge building is intended to take knowledge and technologies from the fringes of creative and innovative processes into mainstream legitimacy.

 

Farmers, medical doctors and other health-related professionals, architects, builders, teachers, scientists, researchers, artists and craftsmen of many kinds will interact with one another, with respect for each other’s contributions, as we bring basic services and life skills closer together in community experience.

 

Language which creates a spirit of patience, support, freedom, valuing, cooperation and enthusiasm is to be encouraged throughout. We desire to create concepts which feel inevitable and irresistible, and inspire confidence in our ability to fundamentally improve processes and systems.

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Surrounding and in support of our goals, is the prototype community in which we live. It is modular and based in permaculture principles. Neighborhood groupings provide for a variety of living conditions, depending on family or personal needs and preferences. Neighborhood centers encourage cooperative, collaborative gatherings and efforts: means of generating and sharing the products of our labors, play areas for children, and sharing meals, and communicative, artistic, musical and recreational activities.

 

Integrated into and surrounding the community is the means of our livelihood, a manifestation that honors what it means to be alive, and celebrates individual talents and abilities: quiet places for personal worship and/or meditation, artistic and mechanical workshops, business centers, schools, barns, greenhouses, recycling and composting centers, gardens, fields, streams, and woodlands. We are exploring several versions of hybrid economic systems so as to interface well with the outside world, but also to experiment with more cooperative and interactive systems which may promote happiness, human dignity, and creation of opportunity.

 

We come together as a community in service to a higher purpose: to learn and teach principles of harmony with the Earth and one another in an oasis of ecology of nature and spirit. It is expected that members of our community will take advantage of the opportunities for growth, learning and enjoyment of a more natural lifestyle.  Each person will fulfill responsibilities according to their talents, preferences and the community’s needs.

 

The members of our community come from a wide variety of disciplines, traditions, and backgrounds, all with the desire to share their talents with each other and the world at large. While it might be easier to develop a community of one religious or spiritual persuasion, such groups tend to become insular and opportunities for growth may be stunted. We celebrate the multiple expressions of human tradition and endeavor. It is our intention to provide a climate which will raise the level of conscious interaction within the community, where compassion, service and trust may advance. We are developing a constitution which outlines the parameters of our vision and mission, and the behaviors desirable to it. Some will be permanent members of the community and others will come to learn on a temporary basis and then return to their homelands to teach, and plant the seeds of what they have learned among their own people.