My Life on America’s Largest Commune

My sister and I were born on America’s largest commune, The Farm. Our parents –-an unlikely coupling of a Jewish girl from Beverly Hills and a Puerto Rican from the Bronx — were some of its early founders in the 1970s. We lived there as kids and left in the 1980s.

We are currently completing our feature length documentary AMERICAN COMMUNE about growing on The Farm. The impetus for making our film was born out of the simple desire to understand where we came from. Before starting production, we had vivid childhood memories, but no concrete knowledge about why our parents founded a socialist experiment in the backwoods of Tennessee, how it worked and why it ultimately disbanded. Making the film gave us the opportunity to explore our lives on the commune, ask our parents the difficult questions and ponder the values we’d been instilled with from a young age.

On The Farm we lived in huge communal households that held between 20 and 70 people. When members came to the commune they gave up all their personal possessions and agreed to share everything. Contrary to negative stereotypes of hippies at the time, our parents vowed to live a spiritually pure life and dedicated themselves to doing whatever it took to build their new society. They taught themselves how to farm, deliver their babies at home and build a town from scratch. The Farm midwives, led by Ina May Gaskin, created an at home birth method and the international best seller book Spiritual Midwifery. News of their commune quickly spread and by the late 1970s they had nearly 1,500 permanent members and 10,000 visitors a year. Many women came to The Farm to deliver their babies naturally and for free.

We lived off of what we planted in our fields and the commune store stocked basic dry goods like flour, oil and sugar. Each household would send a member to the store to pick up weekly rations and they would be distributed equally to members. We were officially living below the poverty line on a dollar a day per person, but none of us kids knew any different, so it was not how we defined ourselves.

The Farm was also a non-consumer based society. We didn’t use money and would barter goods and services. The commune had a construction and farming crew that worked to bring in outside capital. In many ways, we were unintentionally more ecological because we didn’t waste anything. Our clothes were always second hand, the food was unpackaged and made from scratch and we valued relationships over material possessions.

As a kid in our state-certified school, we were taught all of the normal subjects, but there was an emphasis on the environment and world politics. From a very young age we were taught that it was our responsibility to grow up and save the world. This is a pretty weighty idea to place on a child and I’m not sure how it translated for others. I know for myself that I will never entirely be able to escape the feeling that it is my job to do something with my life that will make the world a better place. However, to be totally forthright, being a documentary filmmaker is not something I could ever support myself on entirely. Both my sister and I have had to work commercial television jobs to support our documentary. But the important thing for us is that we strive to do things that can make a difference or at the very least incite discussion about alternative ways of existing in our world.

We’ve recently launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise finishing funds to complete our documentary AMERICAN COMMUNE’S post-production. In order to have a successful campaign, we will need to engage an enormous community of like-minded people. Countless reporters – everyone from Walter Cronkite to Dan Rather – have covered The Farm in news segments but we are the first insiders to tell our story. We feel the world is hungry for examples of alternative lifestyles and know that together we can make a difference (and movie!).

American Commune Kickstarter campaign, http://kck.st/R6Hhzc.

Learn more at: www.americancommunemovie.com, Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.

Rena Mundo Croshere and Nadine Mundo are completing their documentary about growing up on The Farm called AMERICAN COMMUNE. 

The Farm in Summertown, Tennessee is no longer a commune, but operates as an intentional community based on principles of peace and respect for the earth.

My Life on America’s Largest Commune is a post from: Modern Hippie Mag

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