Tamera and Dreams of Utopia(#1)

Despite the dire times we are living in

It’s been over two weeks since I attended the 12-day residency at Tamera, an intentional community in Portugal. I’m still attempting to process it all. Despite continuing jet-lag and sleep deprivation, I’m pushing myself to write daily before my memory blurs the whole experience into a haze of impressions and loses some of the precious details.

I tried writing a post while I was still there but never finished it due to a wicked cold/cough, insomnia, and the desire to be fully present for the process we were walking through.

If some of my writing seems a little awkward in phrasing, please know the context. I was having daily contact with an international community where the dominant language was English spoken as a second language. I’m a chameleon when it comes to accents, so I picked up some of the inflections and interesting grammar of some of my co-residents. I was also speaking bits of multiple languages - attempting to pronounce the phrases I know with respect and some deep amazement that I still remember the words that I learned at age 16 or 22. I love languages, and being with an international community was a rare treat that I truly savored.

This past January, a link to a movie about an intentional community in Portugal called Tamera, randomly landed in my inbox - It was a rich discovery. I watched Village of Lovers twice, once by myself, and another time with two younger friends who had lived in a communal house in Tacoma, both of whom were quite curious about this community. The content of the film lit up something inside me that I needed to pursue. After discussing the movie with some activist friends who live in other parts of the country, one of them told me that she had actually been there back in the late ‘90s. She shared her excitement about my discovery of the place, and said she had gone to facilitate a workshop in the place of Joanna Macy (our mutual friend) who had been too busy to make the trip.

As I began my research, I discovered that Tamera is both an inspiring experiment and a pioneering project. If Bob and I had known about this intentional community 30+ years ago, we would have made time to visit and learn from the community. We often dreamed about living and/or participating in project that was not so dissimilar - an international community that is anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal, ecological, activist, engaged with the local and the global, and spiritual - what could be better? During our first summer together in 1989, we actually searched for such a place on a road trip from southern California to Portland, but we disappointedly learned about many failed experiments, and shelved that dream as other life challenges became more immediate. So visiting Tamera was a way for me to land inside that earlier dream and test it out. I don’t doubt that Bob’s spirit led me there - he was studying Portuguese on Duolingo for two years before he died with the plan for us to travel there (and we did NOT know about Tamera then).

Searching for a community that values liberatory ideals, collaborates in healthy ways, while working for social change has often been a preoccupation of mine. I’ve understood from my conversations and research that the desire to find a true home and sense of belonging concerns many in our modern world. Whether it’s our fractured lineages, the long histories of displacement that many of us carry, the many challenges caused by living in a capitalist and ecocidal system, and/or an epigenetic yearning for ancestral land that causes this phenomena, this obsession with finding a home that is nourishing and where our gifts can be put to good use can plague us, causing us to feel like an outsider wherever we go. Listen to this episode of this wonderful podcast by Joshua Michael Shrei, The Emerald called Let Us Sing of the Syncretic Gods of Outcasts and Wanderers to hear his reflections on the human desire to belong somewhere and the spiritual and cultural hybridity that has emerged from our nomadic journeys.

As a teenager, I began to dream about living communally; much of this desire was fueled by the romantic idealism so prevalent in the counterculture movements of that time (late 1960s/early 1970s). The civil rights, anti-war and liberation movements also inspired many of us to look for ways to heal the destructive energy riding within the behavior of so many humans. I was determined to find an alternative to the alienation of living in consumer culture, especially within a nuclear family in suburbia, but found little to read about the topic.

When I briefly lived on a kibbutz in Israel/Palestine at age 15, I thought I had found a taste of utopia, but the shadow of something that I could not yet name was present. Something deeply disturbing was licking at the edges of my fantasy making it feel inaccessible. At some point, during that two-month visit funded by my Zionist maternal grandparents, I learned about the multiple forms of racism in Israel from a politically progressive tour guide. This trip was in 1969 and the apartheid was not as exposed as it is now. A few years later, I learned about the painful reality of the Nakbha, and became curious how such idealistic experiments like kibbutzim could exist in such a fraught and oppressive situation.

At the encouragement of my anthropology professor in college, Paul Riesman, I went back to live on a kibbutz in 1972, partly to shatter any remaining romanticism that I might have about that way of living. Despite my idealism about these socialist-inspired communities, and my preference to raise children outside of a two-parent home and within a supportive community, I discovered a great deal that demanded critique (especially underlying patriarchal behaviors and the racist treatment of Arab workers). In the research paper I wrote about the experience, I documented how dysfunctional behaviors will always exist if people are carrying lots of unhealed trauma (although I didn’t have access to that particular vocabulary then, it was the gist of what I described). The people who founded this kibbutz were all Holocaust survivors.

Of course, it was very affirming when I discovered that Tamera took the work of healing trauma seriously. As I deepened my knowledge about Tamera’s philosophical underpinnings, I saw that they were deeply aware that the lack of insight relation to one’s trauma can destroy relationships and communities. With continuing curiosity, I took one of their online courses, “Introduction to Love School: Learning to End War.”

Tamera’s “love school” program gives an overview their research into how to create more honest, transparent, and trusting ways to form sexual relationships, how to undo the pattern of seeing sexual partners as property, and how to noursih more intimacy and connection with the community. This pathway is believed to lead to a less violent world.

If you are curious about their multifaceted philosophy, I strongly recommend taking this online course, or any of their offerings online. The full titles for the first three webinars below in the “Intro to Love School” are: Webinar 1: Paths from Collective Trauma to Forgiveness, Webinar 2: Social Architecture to Support Truth in Love, and Webinar 3: Queer & Indigenous Perspectives on Healing Love.

I signed up for this online course during a very hectic period when I was on the road. and only attended two of the series of six webinars. I’m currently listening to the recordings so that I can harvest more from the teachings. Some of the discussions are particularly useful for those who want to have healthier relationships with their partners. Because I am currently solo, the discussions have helped me reflect on what it means to be alone and still be in a loving relationship to others, and how trauma and fear can create blockages in my ability to connect in good ways. In contrast, I have not found it useful to ruminate about the positive and negative patterns that existed in my marriage, especially since my mate is no longer here to be in dialog around this topic.

Tamera has an activist approach to peace work and has brought together people from conflict zones for deep conversations in residencies over the years. Their ecological sustainability program includes permaculture design (water restoration, composting toilets, and solar energy are just a few pieces of that work). Their community has been part of direct actions in relation to ecocidal extraction enterprises. Representatives of the community have traveled to conflict zones to learn more about what is causing the conflict, and has brought people back to Tamera from those zones for deeper work together.

There are impressive water restoration projects on Tamera’s land, and last winter’s rain made this human-made lake particularly stunning.

Tamera’s unique orientation to dismantling patriarchy as a strategy to end war was discussed a lot in their online course. They talked about how the suppression of Eros can lead to the rise of fascism. Some of their focus on this topic was informed by witnessing the frequent failures of marriage as an institution, but this research was much more multilayered than this alone. The founders of Tamera, radical activists from Germany, looked towards the liberating power of sexual energy as a strategy to create a less violent world; they found inspiration in the work of the late psychologist, Wilhelm Reich, and there were other philosophies about raising children in a healthier configurations than the nuclear family that influenced them.

Some of Tamera’s experiments with ways to dismantle capitalism and patriarchy (and the ways this destructive system can sneak into behaviors) are through loving practices of mutual aid and a social technology process to support community transparency called The Forum. The latter structure offers a safe haven in which to develop more insight about one’s patterns and behaviors in relationships, in one’s inner world, and in community.

As part of the Tamera residency that I recently attended (and will write about in my next post) I did participate in several Forums. There’s a primary facilitator and a secondary one who help to keep the space safe and open. An individual who decides to participate in the Forum brings whatever emotions or stories are alive in them that day, performs in an animated way what they are experiencing in front of the group, and then the facilitator probes them gently and compassionately to go deeper. After they have shared, the performer can decide if they want people in the circle to mirror what they observed. After witnessing and participating in the Forum several times, I saw the huge potential of this process; it felt like a more sophisticated and profound iteration of encounter groups of the 1960-70s or the sensitivity training that I was first exposed to as a teenager (in a Unitarian youth group). This group process can create more momentum in healing our past traumas. It can also offer strategies for bypassing the game playing and passive aggressive behaviors that can cause unhealthy tensions in relationships and the community. Being held by a family of friends and community members whom you trust while you are vulnerably sharing your emotions can be very valuable.

It may not be necessary to remind readers that in the 1970s, many experiments in polyamory and childrearing began to emerge around the western world in response to the oppressive paradigms of family and relationships that had been practiced and endorsed by the dominant culture. Communes and intentional communities of many kinds emerged from the countercultures in the western world. A few flourished, some stalled and had to reorganize themselves, but most of those early experiments failed due to megalomaniac founders, financial problems, unhealthy communication between members, and many other challenges to numerous to detail here. The work of being in community is demanding and uncomfortable, and it’s definitely not for romantic souls who don’t recognize that there’s lots of internal work that needs to be done, and the structures that are necessary for keeping relationships healthy and transparent require an investment of time and energy as well.

Over ten years ago, I heard Karen Liftin speak about her book, Ecovillages: Lessons for Sustainable Community. Her research really narrows in on what elements are necessary for intentional communities to thrive. Unfortunately, her website is no longer active, but her research indicates that eco-village sustainability is supported by four important factors: healthy economic, ecological, spiritual, and conflict resolution practices. Tamera is clearly a good model of how to embody those practices, but like everywhere else, they have had their challenges.

After taking the online course, my curiosity led me to apply to be part of the Sacred Activism program, an in-person experience. I wanted to see firsthand how their ideas and philosophies manifested in their daily lives. When I was accepted, I was both thrilled and a bit daunted about the hurdles I would need to jump to actually arrive there. Traveling across the Atlantic was something I hadn’t done since 2018, and I knew from my recent experience of air travel that it was much more challenging then pre-Pandemic. Thankfully, one of my continual discoveries about travel anxiety is that relief arrives once you are in actual motion to a place. And it’s important to remember that you can’t control unexpected things, and once you surrender to that reality, you can breathe with more ease. In fact, Benjamin von Mendelssohn, in the online course, spoke about this issue, of letting go of control so that you can be open and curious to see what arrives.

Tamerans and visitors participate in non-dogmatic forms of spirituality, with rituals and ceremonies honoring the more than human and the human community. The animated spiritual practices they have developed offer humans ways that they can be in a positive alignment with the natural world. The word resonance is used often to question and provoke discussions, as in: are we creating a resonance that evokes a feeling of respect and trust?

Tamera seems to be well embedded and respected in the local community despite the fact that only a portion of the residents speak Portuguese. There are many books that describe and explore some of Tamera’s research projects, and their website offers lots of resources, so if you’re intrigued about the philosophies that have guided their existence, I suggest you dive in.

Tamera is going through some big transitions at the moment, mostly due to the fact that the pioneers of the project are aging out of their leadership roles, and handing over the reins, whether reluctantly or generously, to a new generation. They are restructuring things and trying to solve their perpetual economic precarity issues. I had a sense that this is an uncomfortable growth period for some folks and a necessity as well.

Interest in the community increased exponentially with the release of the film, Village of Lovers, due to the very positive impression of the community offered in the film. I’m sure it stirred desires in many folks who are dreaming of a better way to live in the world. It’s similar to the inspiration people have felt about the Zapatista caracoles and the experiments in direct democracy and feminist leadership happening in Rojava. As I learned when I went to Chiapas to learn more about the Zapatista movement, the real challenge is to plant the seeds for a revolutionary transformation in our own communities and neighborhoods, as difficult as that may be to do. I will write more about the latter, as I continue in this series of posts.

In my next post, I will share more about the residency itself. Another cliff hanger, Chris….