PRINCIPLE ONE: The edge effect

At the end of winter, Lost Valley's great firs wear morning cloaks of mist
in the steady rain, and the people who live here are wrapped in scarves and
raincoats as they work, shoveling new soil, repairing leaky cabin roofs,
leading the community's children in building a meditation hut beside the
lake.

Dianne Brause is fifty-eight, and her pale ginger-blonde hair now fades to
white at the crown. As Lost Valley's community elder, she is no longer a
worker on the land, but its storyteller. On a February afternoon, she sits
on the floor in her one-room yurt and tells stories about her home.

Fourteen years ago, she says, the county wanted to build a prison camp on this land.
But it was clear to her from the beginning that this place was meant to be something else entirely.

Dianne had a "vision," she says, that a small group of people would come to
live together in the property's cluster of tiny woodstove-heated cabins, to
work side-by-side on the land and to educate others about ecologically
sustainable community living; to eat together, pray together, celebrate
together, connect with one another. To live together as a family.

Dianne looks over to meet her listener's eyes. On a colorful blanket by the
window a young man named Gavain sits quietly. He has been here at Lost
Valley for three days, having paid three hundred dollars to be a part of
"Community Experience Week."

Lost Valley is an intentional community - what used to be called a commune.
Fifteen adults and five children, plus various apprentices, interns and
visitors, live and work on eighty-seven rural acres in western Oregon's
rainy Willamette Valley. Community members often speak of Lost Valley's
difference from what they call "the outside world," the mass of people
living isolated lives, disconnected from the land and one another. That is,
everyone beyond Lost Valley's wooded borders.

Those borders enclose a diversity of landscapes: organic garden, forest,
meadow, oak savanna, creek bottom, and healing clearcut. The land is rich
with edges - in the language of permaculture, the areas where two discrete
ecosystems meet to create a third, more diverse, boundary environment. Edges
are considered the most fertile of places in terms of imaginative potential,
the diversity of species and resources that might be creatively applied to
make the human lives unfolding here both richer and less hurtful to the
natural environment.

A contraction of “permanent agriculture,” permaculture is a system of
cultivation founded on the principle that agriculture is most ecologically
sound, efficient and sustainable when modeled on natural ecosystems. It's a
guiding philosophy at Lost Valley, not only in the traditional domains of
agriculture and land stewardship but in human relationships as well. At Lost
Valley, everything is connected, and every piece valued: not only the people
but the relationships among them; the land and its oaks and mallards and
earthworms; the leeks and kale in the gardens; the sun; the spirits of the
earth and its waters and of those who have lived here before.

After three days Gavain already has the sense that the visible and unseen
worlds are more closely allied here than in any other place he's lived. And
yet, all this talk of spirits seems less about magic and more about living
with awareness and intention.

This notion of intention is key. In 1996, friends of the community brought
a workshop called "Naka-Ima" to Lost Valley, and in doing so sowed the seeds
for an extraordinary subculture. From the Japanese for "here/now," Naka-Ima
is a personal-growth practice built from a collage of counseling techniques
and spiritual philosophies from several wisdom traditions, including
Buddhism, Hinduism and Scientology. For three days workshop participants
looked deeply into one another's eyes and "spoke their truths," hugged and
hollered and vented and wept.

With its emphasis on open and honest communication, positive thinking, and
focusing on one's own "attachments" rather than judging others, the weekend
proved to be a good release for a community that had been struggling with
internal conflicts. A few members were trained as teachers of Naka-Ima, and
began to lead the workshop regularly at Lost Valley, initiating visitors
from the outside world into their vision of cultural and spiritual
evolution - for as much as four hundred bucks a pop.

Slowly, Naka-Ima began to work a strange magic on the community. Over time, the community's geographic isolation allowed a self-help seminar to grow into a way of
living. Naka-Ima became not only a cornerstone of the community's economy,
but also a model of how communication happens at Lost Valley.

People hug a lot, talk about their feelings a lot. Visitors to Lost Valley
who naively ask "How are you?" will find they've unwittingly invited a
member to "check in": [I'm feeling like a river, my creative energies are
flowing and I'm writing almost as much as I'd like. And last night I finally
had the chance to mend that quilt I've been meaning to take care of, and
that felt really good.]

And, too, there's a sense that anything can happen here, that everything is
possible. Unlimited by the orthodoxies of the outside world, Lost Valley
creates its own way of thinking: Uncommon sense.