Tim Bennett and Sally Erickson, creators of the powerful documentary "What A Way To Go: Life At The End Of Empire," now own and operate the Gathering Inn
in Hancock, Vermont -- a lovely bed and breakfast on 2.5 acres of gorgeous
land between two stately mountains on the southern portal of the Mad
River Valley of Central Vermont. In addition to a lovely setting and
lots of TLC, the Gathering Inn's cook, Kathleen Byrne, creates a
variety of scrumptious palette-pleasers for guests, seasoned with love
and many years of culinary expertise.
***
Ecovillages,
intentional communities, anarchist collectives, Community Supported
Agriculture, bicycle culture, animal husbandry, natural building
techniques, biochar, sail transport network, and the path of the
peaceful spiritual warrior. And more, add away. If you are not a part
of these things, or aren’t supporting them, then you are definitely
part of the problem and will be left behind in today’s Consumer Age.
Whether the latter is a good or bad memory, we'll see. --Jan Lundberg
A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. --Lao Tzu
(World News Trust) --
If you're watching the state of the
world and are up to speed on the collapse of civilization, and if you
want to take a vacation or just get away for the weekend, where do you
go? Do you want to hang out with folks who haven't noticed that
"normal" is over and that a new paradigm is foisting itself upon us
whether we welcome it or not? If that's you're only option when
planning your getaway, you may lose your motivation to pursue it-unless
you could escape to a place where you'd be surrounded by people who
know what you know and are willing to talk about it with you.
Tim Bennett and Sally Erickson, creators of the powerful documentary "What A Way To Go: Life At The End Of Empire", now own and operate the Gathering Inn
in Hancock, Vermont-a lovely bed and breakfast on 2.5 acres of gorgeous
land between two stately mountains on the southern portal of the Mad
River Valley of Central Vermont. In addition to a lovely setting and
lots of TLC, the Gathering Inn's cook, Kathleen Byrne, creates a
variety of scrumptious palette-pleasers for guests, seasoned with love
and many years of culinary expertise.
Fall is has arrived in Vermont, and the brilliant colors of foliage season grace our hills and
valleys. It's a short season, but a perfect time for a weekend escape
to the crisp, clean air and the magical, serene beauty of the Green
Mountains in autumn.
I caught up with Tim and Sally a
few days ago and had the privilege of spending a couple of hours asking
them questions about their new venture, and a lengthy dialog ensued. It became so extensive and rich that I felt we needed to present it in two segments.
Carolyn Baker: What are you guys up to these days?
Sally Erickson -- We've done this really
"crazy" thing -- we've gone into debt buying an inn in Vermont in the
midst of a resource crisis that will never end at a time when tourism
and the hospitality business are likely to take a huge dive as we
stumble over the threshold of a Second Great Depression.
CB: Well, I'm laughing at this somewhat black humor, but I'm also wondering how do you feel about that.
SE: I feel alternately really
grateful and excited, and occasionally kind of terrified. We had gotten
ourselves debt-free, and it was a big thing to step back into a
mortgage.
CB: Well, tell me how all this came
about. This is a pretty gutsy thing to do in these times. But why don't
you first tell me how you ended up in Vermont?
TB: Vermont has been on our radar for years now as we started hearing about the Vermont secessionist movement and the Vermont Manifesto
by Thomas Naylor. That was intriguing, and having lived for a couple of
decades in the South and never having felt at home there, it was time
for me to get back to the North where I was born. So as we went on our
screening tours last summer and fall, we had our eyes wide open, and we
spent some time in Vermont and compiled a long list of reasons why it
made sense to move here. Actually, there's a way in which it felt as if
Vermont decided that we had to move there, and we had to
obey that. We received "marching orders" to move to Vermont, and we
did, and we had to get our rational minds on board, and that's what the
process has been about the last few years.
SE: When we heard about the
secessionist movement in Vermont, it wasn't so much that we thought it
was viable, but rather, what was impressive was the high level of
discourse -- that it would even be talked about and talked about with
incredible thoughtfulness. For a long time I had been thinking about
the scale of things -- that it had gotten so huge in the United States
that there was no way for any participatory democracy to happen. When
the scale of things gets so big, it just invites corruption and
disconnection so that people can engage in all kinds of crazy,
psychopathic behavior and never be detected because the layers of
government and power are so hidden that we don't even see what's going
on. So the fact that Vermont was having this conversation about things
like human scale just felt really inspiring and inviting.
TB: It also told us that there were
people here that are involved in questioning basic assumptions, and
that's what we feel like we are about most of the time -- questioning the
assumptions at every level of our lives in this culture. We wanted to
come and do that here where other people seem to be doing that.
SE: So there were all kinds of
rational reasons, but I think it just felt like an extremely good fit.
There were other places in the country that we traveled to. For
example, there's lots of consciousness and awareness on the West Coast
and in the Southwest, but we both have families -- grown children on the
East Coast, and with times being as tumultuous as they are, I couldn't
bring myself to consider living as far away as the West Coast and being
that far away from my adult offspring.
CB: So you're living in Hancock in
Central Vermont, and I'm wondering exactly how that happened. How did
you end up living in an inn?
TB: While we were traveling back
from Michigan in June where we had gone to Traverse City to do a
screening at Michael Moore's theater, we got an email from a realtor,
whom we had met last August, saying that she had found the perfect
place for us which had just gotten listed. Within a couple of days of
returning from Michigan, we went and checked out the inn.
SE: It was another one of those
kinds of things where it just felt right -- like it fit, just as Vermont
felt like it fit in terms of scale. The little town of Hancock which is
right next to the small town of Rochester and not far from the small
towns of Warren and Waitsfield and the whole Mad River Valley -- it all
just felt like it fit in terms of scale. For one thing, we want to know
our neighbors.
TB: It came to make sense to us to
put ourselves on the edge of a village. The phrase "be on the edge of a
village" kept coming to us. When we looked at more rural places far off
the main road, it just didn't feel right -- they felt too remote and
isolated. The inn is right on the edge of a little village and right on
a main state highway. There's something about that that feels really
good in terms of going into the future. It's a place where life is
happening on human scale and where we can join in that.
SE: And as for "why an inn?" we had
the option of just getting a little house on a small piece of land, but
there was something that didn't feel big enough about that. It's like
the movie "What A Way To Go" and having a conversation at the end of a
screening -- people can wake up and have breakfast with us, and if they
want, they can continue the conversation with us. But we want to go
into the conversation in deep and profound ways. To just have a house
that didn't have any sense of a public place or purpose or
interface -- that didn't feel big enough. So when we walked into the inn
it felt like "this fits; this is right." It was really very intuitive,
and we realized that this was a way that we could open ourselves up to
continuing the conversation but on a very intimate and local scale,
both with our local community and with people who come to stay at the
inn. The first thing in the morning, a person can have coffee with us,
and we can talk about the state of the world in quiet, thoughtful ways.
Something really felt right about that.
TB: One of the best things about
the inn is that it only comes with 2.5 acres of property. So we will
never be tempted to do the "do it yourself" survivalist thing because
there's not enough land. We are forced by that structure and by being
on the edge of the village to develop relationships with everyone else
in the valley to get what we need and to provide them with what they
need. So it will naturally compel us to create not only our little
community at the inn but to find ourselves in this larger community. An
inn by its very nature is a place of outreach, as Sally was just
talking about, so we can end up becoming in Richard Heinberg's terms,
more of a preservationist community than a survivalist community.
We can become a place that reaches out, makes itself useful in the
wider community, and in doing so find whatever security is available to
have in these days.
CB: So it doesn't sound to me like it's going to be the traditional "eco-village" establishment.
SE: No, as Tim said, it's too small to begin with although we did have Chuck Marsh,
a permaculturist, come and stay with us for a week to help us put a lot
of thought into how to make the 2.5 acres provide some of our food, how
we can incorporate sheep, chickens, and maybe rabbits to give back to
the earth and improve the soil.
One of the things we said in our
mission statement was that we're striving to follow the most basic of
ecological principles which is that you give back more than you take.
Anything that is going to sustain itself over the long term has to give
back more than it takes. If that's possible, we want to do that. So
while we're not going to be an ecovillage, we want to align with
ecological principles.
TB: We've also both been involved
with intentional communities for a couple of decades and have founded
and lived in them and have learned a great deal in terms of what works
and what doesn't work and what things are vitally important to the
community. One thing we've learned is that bigger is not better when it
comes to creating an intimate community of people making decisions and
living together. So right now, we're starting very small and moving
very slowly, and we expect that "small" and "slow" will be bywords as
we continue. But that small unit has to build a set of relationships
with the larger community.
SE: Another focus we've taken is
supporting the localvore movement that's happening not only in our
valley but in Vermont as a whole. We've already established
relationships with a couple of local providers of food, and if we're
going to be an ecovillage, it's going to be an ecovillage of the whole
valley, not just of our property. That all fits in with the idea of
scale-small but not too small, small but embedded in a larger community
which is embedded in a 100-mile radius which perhaps could meet most of
our needs.
TB: The fact that I'm buying and
running an inn comes as a complete surprise to me. I didn't see that
one coming. It's a huge amount of work, and there's a huge amount of
stress related to doing something new and hard, but there's so many
ways in which it's perfect. We can take this place, and we can run it
both as a bed and breakfast, but also it becomes a place where we can
hold workshops and retreats and dialog circles and all sorts of things. That's what I'm most excited about.
CB: I'd like to ask you a little
bit more about the dialog circles and community building. Can you
explain what happens in those groups?
SE: We're proceeding in developing
the dialog work from a not very popular notion, which is that intrinsic
to most human beings is the ability to communicate, which means to both
speak and listen in such a way that a rather formless group can
actually tap into a deeper intelligence.
Our experience of most workshops
and trainings is that there's a lot of structure and an identified
teacher or leader, and while there's absolutely benefit that happens
from those structured trainings, we're challenging the basic structure
of hierarchy that the culture of empire is based on by convening groups
that empower the group as a whole to step into leadership rather than
having an identified teacher or leader. So while we start out a
workshop or circle with Tim and I as identified facilitators, mostly
the facilitator's job is pointing to a map that says this is what
groups do if they're allowed to and empowered to.
Groups will go through a series of
stages, and it's predictable and happens consistently, and so long as
the group hangs with it with good intent long enough, by the end,
people have the experience of having tapped into something deeper than
simply the individual ego. And it seems to us that if we are, in fact,
to embrace the notion that Einstein talked about that the only way of
solving a problem is to come at it from a different level of
consciousness from which it was initiated, people need to learn how to
do that. The culture of empire is rampant with the individual ego and
the dominance of it, and dialog seems to take the best of what was
probably tribal consciousness, as well as the highly individuated
direction that our culture has taken, and kind of integrate the two so
the individual is not lost, but yet it can find a deep connection with
the group as a whole and then a deeper source of wisdom through that
connection.
STAY TUNED TO PART TWO OF TRUTH TO POWER'S INTERVIEW OF TIM BENNETT AND SALLY ERICKSON AS THEY DISCUSS LIFE IN THE GREEN MOUNTAINS OF VERMONT AT THE GATHERING INN.
***
Carolyn Baker
CAROLYN BAKER, Ph.D., is a professor of history and author of her latest book, Coming
Out From Christian Fundamentalism: Affirming Sensuality, Social
Justice, and The Sacred. This book and her previous two books, U.S. History Uncensored: What Your High School Textbook Didn't Tell You and The Journey of Forgiveness, may be purchased at her site: CarolynBaker.net. She is available for speaking engagements and author events.