Adorable infants, beautiful old houses, and sickeningly sweet newlyweds keep hijacking my friends' profile pics. Meanwhile, Facebook shows me in solitude at the end of a pier, reflecting on the setting sun, with nowhere to go but wet. Thing is, I'm generally happiest in water, where, presumably, the inhumane demands of constant marital admiration, incessant parenting responsibility, and unrelenting mortgage risks that plague the land can buoy into honest, polyamorous love, tribal child-rearing, and an imperfect, but better, cooperative ownership model. Lately though, splashing around with the crocodiles is just giving me a massive case of anxiety. I'm looking for other people to join me in taking the plunge, turning our backs on the Facebook-stream and exploring a sea of more sensical ways of doing life. After all, there's more to this world than cleaning house, making babies, and keeping track of a blood-spilling ring and the person who gave it to us. Specifically, I'd like to have time, energy, and support for creating and co-creating awesome things in my career, but opportunities to take off on long, solitary bicycle tours are not unimportant in my vision either.
So is this really an ad for shared housing? Yeah, in fact, it is. I've started a number of co-ops on Craigslist around the country. This is just a variation on that. The goal is to create a house - most likely a rental - of people interested in creating a family like this. The goal, in case you were concerned, is not to meet, fall in love, make babies, and buy a house by the start of the school year. It is unlikely that the initial household will resemble what I describe, but the point is to have a real space to house the vision, where outsiders can visit and consider it on a more flexible timeline. To that end, if you are reading this and it makes you think of someone who would be interested but who is not currently looking for housing, please forward this to them anyway. They, and anyone reading this who is interested in housing, should email me. We'll set up a virtual meeting space and have periodic F2F gatherings to discuss possibilities and self-organize into (potentially) compatible groups. Also, I should note, if you have no plans to stay in Ann Arbor, you're 100% welcome. Families can be global. Good models reproduce.
To begin the discussion, I'll briefly sketch out my vision...
* Polyamory, in the sense of loving freely. Love whomever you want, whenever you want, whysoever you want. Don't force love for any reason and don't fight love for any reason.
* Co-parenting, meaning sharing responsibility for kids without denying the strength of biological or other connections that emerge within groups; using a non-consensus model (i.e. not everyone has to create a child and not everyone has to act as a parent).
* Co-housing - think co-residing in a sex-positive (not sex-crazed!), (unrelated) extended family, where everyone is considered an individual who is both dependent on and responsible to everyone else. Think veggie garden too, because, I mean, the idea is to make sense.
* Co-creating, as in group genius. Work from home; work from across the world. Write contracts; write books. But mostly, write code. There are certainly lots of ways to utilize a close-knit group of brilliant minds to create, but right now, the revolution is in leveraging technology toward minefields of innovation. Be willing to contribute to that in whatever way fits you best.
