i want to steward a house or a retreat center

25 Jun 2020

i have been excited about living alone for a long time and in a couple of different ways. for more than a decade i have been attracted to asceticism (i seriously debated becoming a monk when i was 19-21). and since breaking up with my last long-term partner (we broke up in 2015 after ~6 yrs together), i have been dreaming of living solo for a bunch of reasons:

• i want to have the ability to have people over for meals spontaneously
• i want to be able to hold healing spaces when i want without negotiating permission or having to change the setup from a shared use to a private use
• i want to have the capacity to let people sleepover (for up to three nights) if needed
• i want to be able to have lots of physical space for my own morning and eventual rituals/practices

so to be clear, the biggest reason i want to live alone is to be able to have space to be in service to my movement community.

as i have continued to seek out this possibility, two things have become clear to me:

• white supremacy makes living alone much easier for white people because of systemic economic privilege.
• (related to the above point) because of my economic and family/lineage realities, it is unlikely that i will ever inherit property or financial wealth.

for a bit, i was feeling pretty butthurt about the fact that many of my friends will (or already have) either inherit their parents’ homes or they have received money (because of the fact that their parents had wealth directly or indirectly supported via homeownership) that has allowed them to purchase their own home.

but now, informed by scholarship of people indigenous to turtle island, i have come to believe that the idea of private property is the root of most, if not all, of our societal ailments. therefore, i actually reject the idea of individual ownership of property and i don’t actually want to own a home anymore. at least not by myself.

so where am i now?

my current dream is to be a steward for a home or retreat center that allows the following:

• me to have my own space (kitchen, 1 bedroom, office/desk work space, bathroom)
• me to host people for meals and healing work
• me to host my nibblings and be able to play and laugh without feeling like it’s bothering anyone
• me or a team to host people for retreats up to six nights long
• dancing
• growing food
• swimming

is it a long-shot? maybe. am i willing to move into spaces that allow for some but not all of these things? of course. am i gonna work towards the whole package? you better believe it.

in the farthest reaches of my imagination, what i actually want is to be a part of a network of spaces, some in the city, some in rurality (is that a word?), some on islands, in many different climates where people have flexible arrangements to flow and move as needed/desired/wanted. BIPOC-centered, for sure, but sooner or later we will eradicate whiteness as a concept and then… who knows…

EEEENYWAYS… have leads? wanna help me figure this out? email me.

words / writing / post-processing
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