This is a letter from William to his longtime friend Lynda Koolish just before purchasing the land to create Groundswell.

February 3, 2015 at 4:05:09 AM PST

Dear Lynda,

I’m chagrined that I’ve failed to be in touch for so long. It’s not that I’ve forgotten you, it’s more just habitual procrastination, compounded (as the years have gone by) by the sense of what a long message I would need to compose, if I were to truly catch you up on the arc of my life.

But since the latter seems impossible, I will give you the short(ish) version, which will be long enough. Back in 2009, when I was still living on Martha’s Vineyard, I had an epiphany that, if I were ever to realize my dream of living in queer intentional community, I would need to begin the quest without delay, since otherwise inertia would win. I spent the next few years on and off the Vineyard, making journeys of exploration to faerie sanctuaries and other communities when I could. My father, whose advancing dementia had required me to move him into assisted living in 2008, and who had required a lot of attention, died in late 2011—an easy passage, with no unfinished business between us, and a considerable inheritance as a result.

After a good deal of looking around, I became increasingly convinced that there was no existing intentional community that fully met my criteria. I wanted three things: queer-identified, heart-centered, and collapse-and-sustainability-conscious. What I found was that most of the queer communities I visited weren’t really doing process very well (I obviously can’t speak to the lesbian ones, but certainly the faerie sanctuaries were noteworthy in their dysfunction as residential entities, even if they were doing okay as sites for gatherings), and while there was (is) no shortage of communities that court queer members in the name of diversity, who are doing good process work and thinking about the need for self-reliance in the face of increasing global instability, I realized that queer-friendliness wasn’t enough for me, I needed queer identity. And this growing sense, that nothing “out there” truly corresponded to what I yearned for, dovetailed with the reality of inherited wealth, so that I gradually came to feel that perhaps it would be my calling, for the culminating chapter of my life, to be a founder of something new.

As it happened, a group of folks I knew in Southern Oregon, all veterans in one way or another of the faerie sanctuary at Wolf Creek, reached out to me in the spring of 2012, as I was packing up my life on Martha’s Vineyard, and asked me if I wanted to join them in a sort of “trial marriage”—they had just rented a house, and invited me to move in with them to see whether we would have the makings of a founders’ circle for a new community. I had been planning on moving to my pied-à-terre in San Francisco, but ended up in Oregon instead, for almost a full year until it became apparent that we didn’t have critical mass in terms of shared vision or energetic resources. Luckily, we hadn’t made any long-term commitments, so it was easy enough for me to go back to my original plan. I did yet another shifting-around of possessions and storage lockers, and settled into my San Francisco place in August of 2013, to see what might manifest.

Soon thereafter, I started getting closer with a charismatic young man named Kyle, whose dreams had a lot in common with mine. We brought together a group of five, and began circling in November. Soon the momentum started to build, and in January we made contact with a real estate agent who specializes in properties for intentional communities in Sonoma, Mendocino, and Lake Counties. The idea was that we we were just going to “see what was out there,” but at the end of February, we found a place in Mendocino County that met many of our criteria. We decided to make an offer on it, and after some agonizing back-and-forth, our offer was accepted.

The property is located near Boonville, a bit more than two hours north of San Francisco (Highway 101 north to Cloverdale, then 20 miles northwest from there, over a ridge and into the Anderson Valley). It was developed about 50 years ago as a kids’ camp, and has numerous structures on it, built to accommodate that use. It’s 186 acres, mostly steep and wooded; one of the most attractive features is that it’s on a year-round creek (though its flow was pretty minimal last summer, and unless we get some good rain this spring, the same will be true again this year). There’s a commercial kitchen and functional dining hall, a two-bedroom house, and a dozen funky cabins, also a soccer field with in-ground irrigation system and deeded riparian rights (read: garden) and various other amenities. Our goal is to create a community that eventually has between 20 and 30 full-time residents, and to operate an educational non-profit offering workshops and events to bring in some of the income that we’ll need to stay afloat. We also intend to have a small-scale agricultural operation (allowable as part of a non-profit’s mission, if it doesn’t make too much money.) The non-profit will employ a few of our community members, and will lease the facility from the LLC—it’s a model that we’re borrowing from Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, with some changes, and we think that it’s a good fit for our needs. I should explain here that I am sole funder of this venture—nobody else has any money to bring to the project, though we hope to get money from events, and from buy-ins of new members, and from donations when we have our 501(c)3 (hopefully sooner, through a fiscal sponsor which we hope to line up this spring). We’ve decide to ourselves Groundswell, and we just got a website up: it’s groundswell.institute —check it out if you’re so inclined.

Meanwhile, there’s another piece of the puzzle that has come to the fore. While the camp was (is) well-equipped for hosting events, it’s only minimally supplied for permanent housing, with just one two-bedroom house, and even it in funky condition. Back in May, we had started renting a house that overlooks the camp property, which had been the home of the sellers’ parents until they died in the late 2000’s. Their children—four of them, of my generation—subdivided the land so that they could hold onto the parents’ house, in hopes that a family member might eventually choose to live there. In the meantime, they started renting it out, and we got lucky when it fell vacant in the spring, just as we were negotiating contingencies around buying the camp parcel. With the rental as our base of operations, three of us were able to move here full-time by the end of June. Others remained based in the Bay Area, but we tried to gather at the rental at least once a month as a full group during the summer, in order to discuss the many issues facing us.

We thought that we would be secure in the rental for three to five years, which would give us time to figure out long-term housing for a larger community. But then in November, the owners told me that they were, in effect, offering me right of first refusal—they said that they planned to put the house on the market in the spring, for $800K, unless I could come up with an acceptable offer in the meantime. I had already over-extended myself with the purchase of the camp, and from a financial-security view, it makes no sense for me to buy the rental as well—but I feel like I must do it, both because I’ve come to love it, and because (along with much-needed living space) it will provide us with the barn and well (which we’re already using as renters), in addition to 15 acres of good grazing land, which will be desirable when we get sheep in addition to our goats and alpacas.

There were five of us in the core circle, which expanded to six when a friend officially joined us as a provisional member in July. Our hope had been to figure out our legal, financial, and organizational structures during the summer, before the responsibilities of property management kicked in, but unforeseen differences of personality and approach made this difficult, and we made much less headway than we had anticipated. 

The pattern of ad-hoc, stopgap decisions and unresolved philosophical issues continued into the fall, and we eventually hired an outside facilitator, who did lots of homework with us individually in advance of spending a full day with us in early October. This was helpful, and we hired her for a follow-up session in November, but it remains the case that we have not finalized the organizational structures that we all agree are necessary.

Meanwhile, however, we have hosted several successful events, notably a Halloween gathering with 100 people—that’s the maximum population we can handle when indoor eating space is needed, which is the limiting factor on numbers. Despite being here for a scant three months and still not having a website or other internet presence, we’ve developed a strong circle of support, consisting of people who want to see this project survive and thrive.

The basic vision remains unchanged: we want the property to be in joint ownership, presumably held by an LLC or similar structure. And we want to set up an educational and cultural non-profit which will oversee the programs and lease the facilities from the LLC or equivalent. We anticipate that the Groundswell non-profit will both sponsor its own events, and also rent out the core campus (dining hall, kitchen, cabins, circling areas, etc.) to groups needing sites for their own activities, provided that they are in alignment with our mission. As of now, we have about a dozen events potentially booked for next year—only a few are definite as yet, but it’s a good omen for things to come.

Personally, I have been feeling a lot of stress, but also a lot of joy. I’m working harder than I ever have in my life—washing floors, meeting and corresponding with lawyers and tax advisors, sitting in heart circle, tending goats and alpacas, cooking for dozens, drafting memos, being present for difficult conversations, sorting recycling, etc., etc., etc. I’m exhausted, but at least I’m free from the anguish of not knowing what I’m supposed to do with my life—there’s no question about what I’m supposed to be doing right now, it’s to make this vision a success. 

So, that’s my news. Many things have inspired me to be back in touch—curiosity about your life, concern about your health, questions about your relationship with SDSU and the Grizzly Peak house and any lover(s) in your life. Also, knowing your historic connection with this area, I thought my story might be an interesting walk down memory lane for you. We’ve recently heard about a women’s community (now, we understand, basically just a couple) in Albion, called Turtle Time Farm—is this where you lived, so many years ago? And lastly, when I was showing some photos of my artwork to fellow community members, there was a strong feeling that ultimately we’d like to have my AIDS piece here. Right now, we have almost no wall surfaces where art can be displayed, everything is too humid, etc.—but eventually, I think I’d like to retrieve it. A few years ago, for my big 60th birthday party, I completed a major piece that’s in effect a color-field piece made out of postage stamps—I’m attaching a photo of it, though it seems far from my consciousness these days, focused as I am on Groundswell. I’m also attaching some personal writing that might be of interest to you—don’t feel obliged to read any of it, but feel free to have a look if you’re so inclined. And again, check out groundswell.institute —it will give you a different view of what’s happening here than my words will, and you’ll get some images of what it looks like, too.

I hope this finds you reasonably well and happy, even in this scary world. I send love, and hopes that we may be able to reconnect in the future, before too long—I’d be happy to host you at Groundswell some time, if opportunity allows, or to see you some time in the Bay Area (though my trips there are getting rarer, and I’ll likely give up my SF pied-à-terre some time this year—it’s another long story, which I won’t go into now—suffice it to say that life is complicated, but at least I’m not sitting around waiting to die…)

Love,

William