High Wind: Community Lives, Personal Loves

by Lisa Paulson

The High Wind Association, near Plymouth, Wisconsin, functioned as an intentional community for about a dozen years, beginning in 1981. Its members later changed the organizational structure to a village of people who still share values about living cooperatively and sensitively in their environment, but who are pursuing independent paths. Now with 272 acres, High Wind has developed into a new entity, Plymouth Institute. Several of the original residents have joined with innovative scientists, builders, area universities, and public school systems to create models for sustainable living. This includes research and development, technical demonstrations, educational programs, national and international outreach, and a consortium of small businesses.

HICH COMES FIRST, SERVING the community and the larger whole, or looking after personal relationships? Is the euphoria of coming to live in an experiment with planet-wide implications--and sharing this dream with a partner--a solid enough basis for the attraction to last? What is it like for older couples who join community?

High Wind is one of those communities--and there are well-known precedents--founded by a couple in their middle years whose lives had been a succession of shared cosmic adventures, "preparing for," as it were, starting an intentional community.

Founding High Wind

You might say that my husband Belden (Bel) and I are one of those couples who bring complementary strengths and sensitivities to the relationship. We are sufficiently seasoned by risk-taking and hardships and rebuffs from outside that we grow closer and strong enough to become fierce advocates of an enterprise as uncertain and difficult as building community. We each claim roots in communal experience going back some 45 years. I had lived and worked with a group of young internationals out of a farmhouse in the Green Mountains of Vermont for the Experiment in International Living, arranging home stays for high school and college kids all over the world. Bel created a settlement house-style relief center in the bombed-out post-World War II waterfront slums of Naples, Italy, living on the premises with a dedicated group of young Italians.

It was there in Naples that we met and joined forces in what was, clearly to us, not only a personal love connection, but a powerful mandate written in the stars to do the work together, whatever that might be.

Coming off this experience, we started our first community in 1956. We brought some hard-core Eastern European refugees from detention camps in Naples to the austere Island of Sardinia. With help from others, we bought land, dug irrigation ditches, planted orange groves and artichokes fields, started making concrete blocks, and built simple housing.

I think there must be some kind of aberrant gene, a vision gene that gets lodged in the heads of people crazy enough to attempt starting communities. It has to do with seeing things large, perching high in a tree, as it were, to look at the world more broadly. For us it was a kind of pre-Peace Corps enthusiasm where we didn't care if we made any money as long as we could be useful. In the 1950s this was weird behavior. It was still strange in 1981 when we founded the High Wind community in rural Wisconsin.

When I had visited the Findhorn community in Scotland I watched 300 people trying to live together cooperatively and non-judgmentally, intent on redressing the balance between humans and nature. At a time when few in our country were worried about environmental degradation, here was a group that foresaw the dangers looming, that recognized the sacredness of each life form, and that articulated the opportunity for a global shift in consciousness.

It was this idea--to walk gently on the earth--that attracted a little band of enthusiasts to High Wind where, with a small grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, we began to build a passive solar bioshelter. We moved fairly unintentionally from being a task group to a community focused on ecological values and education, and now, in the last three years or so, to what we simply call a village.

How couples have fared

Among the 70-odd members who have lived at High Wind over l4 years, they are about evenly split among: a) couples who arrived together (13); b) couples who met in the community (11); c) those who came as singles and stayed single, some of whom met significant others outside or at our workshops (11); and d) children (14).

Of those couples who came as couples, eight were married, three married while here or after they left, one divorced while here, and one split up a year after leaving.

Of the couples who found each other at High Wind, four either married or stayed as strong partners (here or after they left), and seven did not make it. Five of the latter formed powerful alliances here, but broke up within a year of leaving; the issues that kept them together at High Wind were not compelling enough to hold them once they were out in the world.

Because High Wind stayed small (around 20), it was most comfortable for those in the predominant group, singles or couples, at any given time. For instance, in the early years there were only two couples (including Bel and me) and we were somewhat outside the in-group that developed among the unattached singles, who ranged in age from 20s to 50s. Gradually the balance tipped and more couples either came or formed. This coincided with a move away from the early extreme closeness that involved living and eating in one farmhouse with everybody working together to build the bioshelter and garden, organize programs, and take care of visitors.

In search of greater privacy and autonomy (we always characterized ourselves as feisty individualists who would never do well in the economic interdependence of egalitarian communities), we began to decentralize and claim or build our own living spaces: a room in the barn or converted chicken coop, a crude experimental dome, and, eventually, state-of-the-art solar homes. This became especially important for couples.

A huge question--which ultimately resulted in our releasing our public identity as an intentional community three years ago to become a village--was always how to balance serving the larger whole (the community and the public), while at the same time honoring and nourishing individuals, couples, and families. At High Wind there was the strain of earning a personal livelihood, since work for the community was largely voluntary. Often time and energy for a job on the side to support oneself were minimal, and the result was burnout. Such tensions often played out with one's partner.

Some of us are diehards and try to do both. For example, I think of myself as enjoying in turn relationships with four communities: my family; the others at High Wind; the hundreds of visitors who over the years have crowded into our living room to hear the story and trek through our woods, farm, and buildings; and a host of kindred national and global groups and communities working with similar agendas.

Now, with the new village structure, residents are free to pursue their own creative enterprises, but some also choose to plug into the outreach and global work, education, research, and so on, and some of these jobs are now paid. Interestingly, with the formal release of the community image (which inquirers still unrealistically read as Utopia, total togetherness, and sharing), there has actually been greater caring for each other, precisely because now there is no obligation or expectation to love, get along, and process personal issues publicly. There is more space to take care of partner relationships without real or imagined guilt trips laid on by the group, without everybody looking over each other's shoulder. Probably because we had become so accustomed to the intimacy of dealing with feelings and interactions, even when acrimonious, we feel a need to create or maintain friendships. And when a couple becomes a secure unit, that is a solid base from which to extend loving and magnanimous hands to others.

Living separately and attending to the needs of High Wind (and sometimes holding outside jobs as well), the few singles who have come along in recent years have been lonely. Group social life now tends to revolve around board meetings and task group work and the odd potluck.

The interplay between community issues and personal relationships

What happens in relationships is so tied in with how the community is constituted and organized that one can hardly separate them. However the people in the group function, by agreement or default, has a major effect on couples, just as personal foibles affect the community.

If anyone comes to community without having resolved parent/child/control issues, one of the first reactions is to rebel against those with perceived power and authority. This stance can throw such a person into an alliance with another member who feels the say way. This rebellion can "blossom" into a relationship: the two become confederates against the community, or against those whom they see as enemies or obstructionists. Bel and I, especially in the early days, were fair game for such members. We were older ("parent figures"); originally the farm had belonged to us; and we were founders. Heavy baggage there! If this was the primary reason for the liaison, the partners quickly split when they left. Two people finding comfort together from the pressures of community life, for whatever reason, discovered when they departed that this was not enough to sustain the relationship.

Living in community can evoke buried demons around issues of patriarchy that, for the women here, sometimes boil just under the surface. One member exploded against the powerful, dominating men at High Wind, and eventually against her husband, who actually was relatively mild and acquiescent. This family had to leave in order to heal the marriage.

Typically at High Wind, when there is a traditional marriage with a submissive wife, invariably, the woman gets stronger. Encouraged by the other women, she demands equality and recognition, and if this is not forthcoming, she revolts and leaves. We had a classic example of this. A middle-aged couple arrived ostensibly in love and dedicated to working very hard for the community. After the wife left, the husband stayed on and eventually paired off with a newcomer and that lasted only a year. She too was too strong and walked away. He hadn't gotten it.

There were some couples who, in the first rush of falling in love (with each other and the community), seemed to be in perfect agreement about why they were here. Both partners subscribed to the highest ideals and plunged enthusiastically into endless community chores and meetings. We had an instance where one such partner then got exhausted and disillusioned and pulled away, announcing that she was disengaging from community life. This was tough on her partner whose heart and energy remained devoted to High Wind's mission. There was less to share and the two now are building their lives along partly different tracks. In another instance, such a couple separated.

At one point the dichotomy between process types and doing  types became acute at High Wind. There were the "I-want-to-hear-your-pain" members who initiated sessions where we brought out tensions and feelings (often negative) and imported facilitators to teach active listening. Others saw jobs to be done, money to be raised and time running short and got impatient with what they felt was an excess of introspection and reflecting. Bel leans toward the latter and I the former, so occasionally we were aligning with different camps. This has made for bumps in our lives together as communitarians, but overall it has resulted in a learning curve for us both and has brought us much closer as allies and real friends.

Looking at our own relationship (with community help)

With prodding from the group, Bel and I moved out of our entrenched polarities to better understand the other side and to compromise. The lesson washes over into private situations as well. We find that High Wind has helped us to grow beyond the impasses of our early marriage when typically I might hold in grievances and then (in Bel's view) explode irrationally, and he (in my view) would shut down or walk out and not hear my side. So High Wind has been an enormous gift to us in softening our edges, getting us to mellow out and talk out points of friction. I have learned assertiveness and his sensitivity quotient is way up. Community the teacher, the leveler!

In fact, High Wind has forced us to look at a number of long-standing dynamics in our relationship. Husband earning, wife financially dependent and supportive, is a key to opening quite a few cans of worms right there, and we are survivors of such a '50s marriage. Fortunately the community has watch-dogged the fallout from such proclivities, like the tendency some men have of "taking charge." Bel had to look at his inclination to have a great idea and run with it, instead of waiting for the whole group to come to consensus around it so everyone could own it. I have been forced to work on a critical, perfectionist nature that (from the resident vision holder) can come across as exercising unfair power and influence.

The most treacherous dynamic we have had to weather is the emergence of factions. People are always apt to see situations from their own perspective, to which they bring a lifetime of biases and conditioning. An influential member of High Wind rebelled against the predominant view and then persuaded a number of others that his stance was right. An unpleasant polarization resulted that divided the entire community and sowed mistrust for years. At the same time the situation caused couples to draw closer to each other for safety and solace.

Sex? Not a big deal. One longtime stalwart developed serious relationships with two High Wind women before marrying a third who came to a workshop. Others fell in love, moved in together, and for the most part stayed in that partnership, at least until they left. Bed-hopping has not been prevalent, but we tend to cheer when two people get together.

It is in the nature of communities, and certainly has been true of High Wind, that an intensification of life lessons occurs because of a tendency and commitment to be more open and honest in giving people feedback. In this sense there's an exponential speeding up of personal growth as well as a confrontation with issues peculiar to couples. Communities serve as a dramatic backdrop for playing out these issues.

Some couples have drawn closer at High Wind because of genuine love for each other and deeply shared values and life purposes (factors outside the specific dynamics of community). We have seen this propinquity strengthening their relationship and solidifying their commitment to each other. (We have also seen the reverse.)

Generally, though, there is something about the example of couples doing planetary work together that is important. It is a love affair with each other that becomes a love affair with the world.

Lisa Paulson and her husband Belden Paulson co-founded High Wind community in 1981. She serves as Outreach Coordinator for High Wind/Plymouth Institute, and is a "vision holder" for the com munity's sacred connection to the land.