Building Wild Life – An intentional community to connect, heal and rest

I’ve been looking for my next project for a while. Or more truthfully, I’ve been looking for what to do with my life for a while. The last experience that deeply energized me was building Buffer, a software company that got mightily successful in my eyes. And successful in a way that had heart and meaning and human connection baked into its existence at every turn. After I left Buffer I spent some much needed time with my inner world, heading off to live in a Buddhist monastery for a while, healing, going to therapy, learning about all the prickly and painful old parts stored in my body and mind. And it was wonderful, a downtime of almost 6 years. As my healing progressed, I stepped into the role of coach and healer myself and worked with hundreds of people, most notably founders and tech execs like myself, who wanted more from life than just chasing the big company dream. 

I liked my life these last 6 years and yet it also lacked a clear vision as I was figuring out who I even was, what drove me, what patterns I had programmed into myself, where I came from in my line of family history and so forth. I painfully concluded that a lot of what drove me wasn’t serving me much anymore and yet I hadn’t quite found what or where I wanted to step into next. 

Towards the middle of last year I felt more deeply depressed than I probably had ever been. I had setup my life exactly like I wanted, with plenty of free time, fun activities, a huge apartment that I had decorated with a lot of care and yet, I felt more lost and empty inside than ever. I felt so disconnected from myself and others around me in a city where I struggled to feel close to anyone. The story I told myself then was that I just didn’t fit in. I didn’t have a job and wasn’t looking for one. I didn’t have a family or kids and wasn’t looking for that either, especially not in the way I saw all the young parents struggling through the days sleep deprived and restless. None of that made sense to me. It was all wrong. They were all wrong. And I was all wrong, in the wrong place entirely with no place else to go or be. 

I had meditated diligently and was hoping for some sense of peace that would finally set in, in accepting it all or in some grand vision finally coming to me on what to do next. As the weeks wore on, nothing happened, except that it took me longer into the day to get to my daily walk in the nearby forest and it was as if my life force dwindled by the hour. I wasn’t even interested in hooking up or dating anymore, something I had done plenty of in the years prior. I didn’t understand myself at all anymore. 

Then, one day in late August something shook me and I didn’t know what it was. I saw myself get up and walk to my car to drive to the office managing my apartment building and announced that I was leaving. I signed some papers and just like that, I had given up my apartment which I had spent years decorating and crafting. I had decided I needed to leave, to get up and go and see what’s out there. Enlightenment didn’t come to me so I had to go and find myself somewhere out there, it certainly wasn’t coming to me here in Vienna. 

I asked my dear next door neighbor to help me sell all the stuff in my apartment and offered her a 30% cut for everything she sold. She accepted and a few days later I packed a couple of suitcases in my car and was on the road to, well, nowhere. I had booked a 5 day retreat gathering near Berlin, so naturally that was my first stop. Slowly, over my seemingly endless roadtrip over the next 3 months, a new vision emerged. A vision for living in community. For being surrounded by people I loved and cherished. I hate making appointments with people for hanging out and how it kills all the spontaneity of knocking on someone’s door, seeing if they are home and then doing stuff together. I wanted that again. I wanted that back, how I had grown up as a child and going to my friends houses and hanging out with them.

I learned about conscious life and project design from Brad Blanton’s book “practicing radical honesty” and something clicked. It combined many of the “get it shit done” tips and tools I had learned and picked up over the years as an entrepreneur building a software company with the heart-centered sensing abilities I had cultivated from the years of therapy, therapy training, mediation and other modalities I had practiced. I was in love and felt deeply rested and at peace. It gave me a blueprint for combining two aspects of myself I had struggled to make peace with and who had been pitted against each other for years. The me that wants to do and create and explore. And the me that’s interested in sensing, feeling, connecting with others without agenda. And here was just such a way to do it. 

The road trip experiences, especially the retreats I attended all helped me shape more and more clearly what kind of community I wanted to build and live in. And I began to jot it all down. 

As my background commitment I wrote: 

“I am committed to living in community with people from all kinds of backgrounds, skin colors, ages and ideas about life and the world. I want to be surrounded by babies and people in old age, to take in the wisdom of the whole wheel of life. I am happy to be alive in my tribe of fellow humans that share a commitment towards honesty, authentic living and being in our bodies. I want to make this work by living in touch with the earth, farming, swimming, caring for each other, with community evenings and events and generally being in each others’ company as we all go about our lives.”

As part of the project design outline I also wrote down some vision pictures, as follows: 

Picture1: We live in simple tiny houses surrounded by a shared, large community building. We spend most of our time outdoors, have access to delicious and plentiful food from our farms, fruit trees and other naturally growing herbs, seeds and spices. We live among animals that we take care of and honor and also acknowledge that they serve us with their meat, wool, eggs, backs to ride and company.

Picture2: We open our doors for visitors to spend time with us and learn how to live in simple, conscious and alive community. Our gatherings are fun, lightweight and impactful to transfer the ancient knowledge about human life that lives in all of our bodies over to everyone who comes, waking up that ancient knowledge inside of them. We laugh together, cry together, process together, get drunk together and live in peace with each other most of the time.

Picture3: Everyone is going after what they really love, caring for horses, farming the land, working on laptops, caring for animals and babies and humans, yoga, moving their bodies, teaching, swimming, building buildings, cooking, singing, dancing, there is something for everyone and in the end it is a beautiful work of art we have all created together.

And finally a description of the overall project: 

Description of overall plan: By 2030 I am living in a flourishing community of over 40 people that share their lives together. We live in nature, are living mostly off of the land, laugh, enjoy each other’s company, offer retreats and are in love with each other. We have learned deeply about conflict resolution, are able to connect with each other even around anger, disgust, sadness and other emotions and feel safe, grounded and connected even when the going gets rough. We have several children, babies on the way, as well as old people close to death. We are thriving and growing, soon to be 50 people in the community and are receiving massive amounts of media coverage for the unique way of life we created, which includes deep simplicity and some technology.

I like reflecting on all that’s happened to help me get to this point of articulating how and what I want to focus the next chapter on my life on. Since then, or rather, right now, I’ve been drawing up sketches for house plans and looking at properties here in Croatia where I feel most called to explore for now. 

I’ve chuckled a bit earlier when I told a friend of mine that in summary I basically spent 6 years of my life to find out that what I really want is to live in nature with family and friends. It seems so strikingly ordinary, almost bland and yet I couldn’t be happier that this is what my heart calls out for the most. It seems simple and deeply authentic in its depth and I’m beyond excited and also grounded to get to work on a project that may take me 10-20 years to realize or make meaningful headway with. I imagine it’ll be a true test to my spirit, stamina and contentment to hold a steady course while life happens along the way. 

My reflections on the insight are that I deeply believe for me to be happy living in community and in nature are two essential elements of it. I like to idealize this a bit further saying that I believe this is true for everyone at their heart of hearts, yet our varying degrees of trauma have shaped us to come up with distorted ideas for how to live and be, away from this simple approach. Sounds a bit preachy now that I reflect on this paragraph and yet, so be it – go forth all and live in community bitches! 😀 

Photo by Helena Lopes on Unsplash