You Have to Want It

     I had a relization about the retreat valley the other day.  I will preface this relization by telling you that I used to live in a commune.  I lived there for about three years and I visited other communes and met many "communards."  I know a little more then your average person about communities in America.  So when I looked out over the retreat valley the other day and counted twenty five individual homes in some state of construction, it hit me.  We are building a twenty five home retreat community and we are doing it in a little over a year.  This is unprecidented.   Usually, communities build slowly over decades or stay confined to a handfull of buildings.  What we are doing here at Diamond mountian has never happened in the communities movement in the States.  The homes will be available for others to do retreat in after the Great Retreat which makes it a real community, in my mind.  There will be no sole ownership of the structures.  They will belong to Diamond Mountain Retreat Valley.  With proper maintenence, they'll last hundreds of years.  Each building is solar powered, has it's own water tank, propane run kitchen.  There's solid adobe and earthbag structures and well built stick frame buildings.  It's intense. 

     The energy here is also intense.  We go through it all; great love and comradery, to confusion, to exhaustion and being totally fed up and overwhelmed.  We recall beautiful scripture. We tell sophmoric dirty jokes.  We say our teachers name and cry.  We gaze at the Milky Way more clear then anywhere else in the lower fourty eight. We tell dirty jokes about the stars in the Milky Way, belly laughing, pounding the ground, pulling ourselves into the weeds sobbing.  We dance like insane fools or we sit bored for hours.  We get so bored we meditate.  We make music amazing, terrible freestyle rap, good freestyle.  We drop albums.  The sun is killing us all day.  Bugs fight to enter our eyes and ears and drink our blood.  The sun is making us strong.  There's a fire in our bellies that we fill with thick soup and bread every night.  The sky is the ocean you can't describe.  We forget about the outside world then try to remember who we were.  The years are a blur. Last week is a blur.  Our teachers are everywhere even when they're not here.  This love works.  This love doesn't work.  We work so hard to hold the line but then cross it, naturally we cross it, then turn it into our Path.  What else can you do?  And where are you?  If you have any small desire to come here do it now.  You won't have another chance like this.  Let this place work on you. You may come and hate it but it works you in subtle ways.  I can't tell you how.  You have to want it.