A Quest for Community
Wednesday, October 01, 2003
In March of
2001, I first visited Damanhur,
an
esoteric mystery school of about 500 full-time citizens located in the
Italian Alps. My first impressions were very positive and I thought I
had perhaps found our community. So I've spent 6 months
per year there for the past two years, and Kim has visited there 3
times for a couple of weeks each time. We've learned many things and
deeply respect what the Damanhurians are attempting to
do, but slowly began to realize that we didn't feel inspired to live
there
full-time.
There were many reasons for this, which I'll perhaps get
into later. But one of the strongest for me was the deep influence
of its location in Italy. Most of the resident citizens
are
Italian, so you really need to speak fluent Italian to assimilate into
Damanhurian culture. I don't, though I've spent hundreds of hours over
the past couple of years trying to learn it. So even though the
Damanhurians were very friendly and I participated in many different
projects and activities there, I couldn't get over an uncomfortable
feeling of being outside the core of their community, even with the 20
or so English-speakers that I became close friends with. I'm still working
on a few Damanhur projects via the Internet, but my focus has shifted toward a new possibility, a fascinating
community in India
called Auroville.
