woensdag 22 januari 2014

A life that gets your hands dirty

The dust has finally begun to settle, in my third week here in Davis. Ever since my first party here, a week and a half ago, I am no longer to be found on the edge of this wild universe. They took my hand and led me right in. So perhaps it’s time to turn to some descriptions of what has turned out to be, even within such a short time, the setting of a profound personal journey, the meaning of which I have elaborated on a little last week. Maybe if I tell you about this place in a little more detail, you will understand why Davis, and the Tricooperatives specifically, are having such an impact on me.

The Tricooperatives are an ecological community, set up as an alternative living experiment in the 70s. The three houses, Davis Student Coop (DSC, where I live, housing 16 people), Pierce (with 16 people), and Agrarian Effort (Ag, with 12 people), share a big garden, chickens, and pretty much all the rest of their lives, situated by the Northern edge of campus. They’re not the only quirky community type thing around here. In town there’s some 2 or 3 other cooperatives (mostly UC Davis students) that I haven’t visited yet. And just a ten minute walk from here, in a far corner on campus, there’s ‘Baggins End’, a dozen white domes shared by two people each. While the Domes are taking the alternative living environment thing to a whole new level, people tend to be more involved with each other here in the Tricoops, where we live together in such close quarters. And this is where the parties are at, which is great. In the weekends, people wake up from the workday slumber and there are parties to be found all around. The weekend mornings are great for sitting downstairs and watching the one night stands squeamishly trying to leave the house unnoticed.

 Party at the Domes - full moon, stars, Xmas lights, couches, a Yurt, 
and trees and Domes in the background. Man, what a crazy setting for a party.

Fluidity
I had deliberately (tried very hard to) kept my expectations of the Tricoops blank, just opening myself up to whatever would come my way. So when I arrived here, was shown to my room, and I saw the cobwebs, crazy murals, and dirt on the floor, I thought, ‘Alright, so this is how it is here, I can live with this.’ In all my open mindedness I didn’t even think to clean the room, which hadn’t been inhabited in the winter break, in the first few days. By now, however, I have come to see that one of the main characteristics of the place is its fluidity. The whole house gets mixed up every quarter, so you’ll only spend about 12 weeks in any of your rooms. You can paint everything over, and if you need drawers, a mattress, or any other furniture, you just go ahead and find an idle piece somewhere in the three houses. It’s all that I have longed for for a long time: a living space that those who live there give shape; leaving their mark, creating their own most natural habitat.

While there are house dinners 5 out of 7 days a week, it doesn’t matter all that much in which of the three houses you have your bed. People just walk in and out of all three houses, sitting down without a word on the couch to study, visiting friends in their rooms, joining for dinners, hanging out on the porch, pretty much like it’s their own home. When I stored my dinner leftover in the Pierce fridge for the night, it really almost felt like a second home. Some of my favorite moments so far were when we would merge house dinners and all 44 of us (plus guests, which are always around) would eat in one of the living rooms, or when one of the other houses forgot their cook night and when the clock strikes 7, a dozen Piercians or Agrarians magically materialize in our kitchen, right in time to be served. All our meals are vegan, mostly gluten free, and complemented with fresh produce from the Davis Student Farm where some of us (me included!) volunteer, and later on in the year probably also from our own garden. These dinners are my favorite time of the day, and the time that comes after, when I’m done for the day and just roam around, walking into rooms at random and getting to know all the amazing people here better by the day. That said, it’s funny how fate determines your allegiance. I live in DSC, so I like DSC best of all three houses, and am closest to the people here. Nonetheless, I’m taking advantage of my newness while it lasts. I do not yet have a feel for the subtle relational dynamics of this place. I am ignorant as yet about the intricate webs of who hangs out with whom, and everyone’s respective personalities. I’m still in the privileged position where I’m (mostly) not yet inhibited by such sensitivities, and boldly hang out with as many different people as I can. I’ve been reaping the benefits: I already feel deeply embedded here, have gotten to know some pretty great people, who have become allies, safe havens from which to keep exploring.

Dinner just doubled in size

We have house meetings every week, and a big Tricoop meeting every month. The house meetings are one of the moments I look forward to most every week (together with the parties in the weekend, weekly garden parties, and shopping for the house). These meetings – in my opinion – keep the house unified and connected. We start with emotional check-ins, which are great. It is really wonderful to know what is going on with the people you share your home space with. We end with thank yous, just going criss-cross around the room thanking anyone who did something nice for you that week that you hadn’t thanked them for yet. At the first meeting we divided the chores. You’d think cleaning the bathrooms and the like wouldn’t be things people would be stoked about, but everyone avidly vied for their favorite chores. I got great ones for this quarter: feeding the chickens (so I regularly get my own freshly collected egg for breakfast), garden coordinator (thinking about the ‘vision’ for our garden and coordinating the weekly garden parties), volunteering at the Davis Student Farm (bringing home fresh produce that you pulled out of the ground for your little Tricoop family feels really really great), and shopping. Doing groceries has never been this much fun. We only buy at the biggest fanciest organic supermarket in town, because we get a discount in return for some Tricoopers volunteering there. We bring all the empty jars and bottles and refill them with almonds, spices, rice, beans, self-ground peanut butter, sugar, soy, oats, agave syrup and anything else that comes in grainy or liquid format. Next we go to the other side of the store, which is overflowing with the most incredible vegetables I have ever seen. And all of it is organic, save for one tiny little section labeled ‘nonorganic’. Some people get cook nights, others are assigned as ‘staplers’. This means that almost every day as you get out of class, there will be people baking cookies, bread, cakes, granola, sauces, you name it, for you, to snack on! Can you imagine?! This place is simply heaven.

Harvesting our own honey

While there’s something sad about the massive flux of residents (for 13 out of the 16 people in DSC this is their first year here), it also keeps this community vibrant. People come in with fresh excitement to further enhance the living environment here. I talked to one guy who’s been living here for almost 5 years who told me that, understandably, he had come to feel very detached from the Tricoop life, desensitized to the perpetual change. Luckily, most of the people here have not yet grown tired of forging new friendships, losing them, and starting over. They have welcomed me here with open arms, quite literally, willing to invest in me as a real friend.

Sharing
Next to fluidity, sharing is another big theme here, as you might have guessed. Just about everything is shared. We share our food (what you label is yours and yours alone, all the rest is ‘house’, and will be gone within a matter of hours) and our clothes (there is a massive ‘freebox’ in Pierce that recently provided me with an entire outfit for the Californian winter I had underestimated). We drink out of recycled glass jars, because all the cups always go missing. We share catchphrases (everything here is ‘gnarly’), heartbreaks, colds and sicknesses, lice outbreaks (glad I wasn’t there for that last quarter), our bored and animated moments, sleep, study sessions, our lives, generally. And I love it.

About those heartbreaks, though. While everyone will shout ‘hippies!’ as soon as you’ll start talking about this place, it’s not a place of free love. People love to cuddle here, but often there will still be a hidden sexual agenda, and when you fall into that trap, more often than not, emotional consequences will ensue. Hearts do get broken here. People are forced to live alongside those they are trying so hard to forget. Life here is intense, but then it’s exactly that which makes me feel so alive here. I was made for this full, dynamic, communal lifestyle. I’m sharing my room for the first time in my life, and that with two people, but already it feels boring and empty when both of them are gone for the night.

Learning
The Tricoop population is really very diverse. It ranges from introverted solitary figures who easily get overwhelmed and make you wonder how they cope here, to flamboyant types who stomp around yelling and laughing and hanging one boob out of their shirt. You get  spectacled science nerds and zealous gender studies majors. People who hate gardening, people who love it. People who are young to take drugs, and those who are young to study. People who write on the walls, and people who tell you to do your f*cking dishes. People who collect dead birds in jars, or gauze fairy wings, or keep fruit flies in test tubes. Name and identity fluidity are big here. Some people have changed names or the spelling of their names, and some are in the process of gender and sexual identity transitions. You have to be careful with the way you talk here, political correctness is very big in a place that where many political minorities find a refuge.

What I’ve been finding is that this diversity is very activating. Every day, there will be people that go out running, to the gym, rock climbing, or to open mic and improv nights, concerts, or jamming on the roof, or juggling, hula hooping, gardening. It motivates me to join them, and here I am finding myself more active than ever before. I run several times a week, twice already with a couple of housemates on a spontaneous 4 mile run. I have done all of the above (except the gym and jamming on the roof, though I do pull ups on the pull up bar in the Pierce kitchen and play guitar every day) and much more. This place is helping me actualize all of those things I know make me a better person: I am fitter, more creative, studious (as ever), more socially embedded, more in touch, more outdoors, more intellectually challenged outside a school setting, and more productive than ever before, and all of it at the same time. This place is challenging me to grow on every imaginable level, and I have felt myself slipping into a rapid in this personal journey that is life.


Stephanie

maandag 13 januari 2014

Gravitating into communal living at the Tricoops

Time for an update. I am not going to tell you what I have been up to, but believe me it’s been a lot (alright then, in bird’s eye view: sitting in on 15 classes in my first week of school, cooking and shopping for a family of 16+, exploring as much as I could of the 7300 acre (30 km2) campus on my flashy new road bike, wandering into rooms and kitchens to get to know dozens of new people, sharing my room with two other new girls and bonding over our rookie-ness, visiting a dozen new cafes and restaurants, learning to juggle, watching squirrels, and many first-times: the first garden party, the first egg from our own chickens, my first party at the Tricoops, my first house- and Tricoops meeting, etc etc). But I wasn’t going to tell you about this. Instead, let me tell you what it means to me.

The UC Davis quad, the center of campus

Our kitchen

Learning to juggle

Before I left, when I talked to people who had gone on exchange, many of them spoke of it as the best time of their life. It intimidated me, and I could only hope that my time here would be half as good as what those people made theirs out to be. But now I’m here, and I can honestly say that I, too, am having the time of my life, and I think I know why.

It’s got to do with that blank slate feeling, the freedom that comes with it, and the temporality of this life here.

Novelty
This novelty of everything here is the sensation that stands out most of everything. I’ve felt it many times now, in different forms. I felt it when I saw land come into sight below me on my way here, when I emerged from underground with the train in San Francisco, on New Year’s Eve when I stood there with empty hands, blissfully, when I walked onto campus a week and a half ago, into an uncharted world that I knew was going to steal my heart, and I see it every day, in everyone’s eyes here.  My empty gaze sees so much more than I would see on familiar terrain. I feel like a baby, and it’s such a delight to drink in the new sunlight, all the colors, new words and gestures, and all those beautiful faces (did you take a proper look at the humans around you today, they are so beautiful!).

And apart from their novelty, these people are so incredible because of they are. Every day I’m coming home to a community of over 40 people that live here, with always a few extra bumming around, that hang out on the porch, hula hoop in the sun to blaring hip hop beats, study around the dining table, congregate in the kitchen, working in the garden… And they just open up to me, welcome me in, love me as I come, without even knowing me. Can you believe that I am just falling head over heels in love with this new world? I am mad in love with over 15 people already, and all I want is dive into all this, no reservations. I have nothing to lose, because I came in clean and empty, a blank slate, empty hands, open eyes.

Our house, the Davis Student Coop

Freedom
But this time, I am conscious of the life emerging around me, unlike the life I grew into at home. And I am so ready for it this time. I feel such freedom. I feel strong, independent and fully capable of taking this life of mine in my own hands and start steering it. And I can do so unbound by the relations and commitments and claims on my time and energy of those at home, however much I love them and want them all to be there when I get back, I am now free to take this life wherever, and feels so GOOD. All the credits for that go to Spencer, for his trust in me and our strong relationship, to my mom, who has the deepest understanding one could ever ask for of the necessity and bliss of freedom for this venture, my dad, who has come to believe in my autonomy, and all their big hearts.

My roommates, also both new, talk of being overwhelmed by it all. I think I’m in a better position: to me, not only this crazy-ass living environment is new, but this whole continent, everything here is entirely new to me. I had expected nothing less than being completely overwhelmed, and so I was ready for the wave to hit me. What’s more, I can make myself fully available to it. I have no other friendships here that demand maintenance, so I have the freedom to be a full part of all this whenever I want to, and I can also fully withdraw if I need some alone time. But apart from being ready and available for it, I actively seek it out. I am here, eagerly taking in all the new impressions and people and experiences that wash over me, and I just want more more more of it, relishing every second of it.

Our bedroom. My bed in the left bottom corner

Temporality
The fact that I can’t get enough of it, and that it doesn’t seem to tire or overwhelm me too much, is thanks to that other special lining to this big adventure. The horizon that was always going to be perpetually in sight. I am at any point so aware of the transience of my time here. And while it could make me sad and unwilling to commit, instead it makes all this novelty so vivid, that I cannot think of a time where I felt more alive. You see I am a thinker, and as such a regular victim to being yanked right out of life, and looking at it from the sidelines. Not here. Never have I felt such an integral, vibrant part of life. And that in such a sunny, powerful, colorful existence. I am here, strong and free, to absolutely maximize my time here, dive into it deeper than I ever have before, because I have nothing to lose, everything to gain, and the time is now.

And beside all this, I was born for communal living. I have never been in a better place and a better fit. I’m very very happy here.

Stephanie

My first garden party

Eating together

The Ingress
Early Beginnings of a Whole New Life

3 January 2014, Davis, CA

Fifth day in the U.S. completed. What a ride it’s been so far. The predominant feeling, even now, is that I just really don’t know what’s going on. I am completely in control of all the little things I have to take care of, and I’m having a great time, but it just won’t dawn on me where I am. So far away, on the eve of such a massive adventure that will no doubt impact me profoundly, it is all so much to take in, and still much too unreal.

Starting with the mere idea of being inside America. Hirtherto a place victim to so many preconceptions and stereotypes, but none of them mine. On my subjective mental map of the world, the United States are a pristine blank spot. And here I am, coloring it in for the first time, inch by inch, image by image, encounter by encounter.

Before reaching my final destination Davis, YOLO County (can you believe this one?! this is too good), CA, I had one day for each of the best two cities here: New York and San Francisco. I could go on for a while about just those few hours, but I’ll keep it short.

New York – 30 December 2013

My New York day mainly comprised a virtually nonstop six hour walk through Manhattan, covering Chelsea Market, the High Line Park, Empire State Building, Broadway, Times Square, Central Park, the lobby of Guggenheim, the Chrysler tower, and all the streets in between. I was so surprised by the familiarity of it all. Sure, the buildings were a lot taller than anything I’ve ever seen with my own eyes, but I discovered there that TV and internet plant much more life-like images in your brain than you’d think. I wasn’t blown away by it or anything. And apart from the height of the buildings, New York was like any other world city really, like London or Paris. Actually, it shouldn’t be surprising of course, New York’s familiarity, it being the Capital of the Western World. This is where we all got it from, in a sense. The Original City. Still, somewhere I expect to find a completely different world, because all we ever do is emphasizing how different we are from those stoopid Americans. Here I was struck mainly by our similarities. Which was beautiful in a way. It’s what I’m always looking for in other, more exotic places: the peopleness in all those different people. At the end of my hike up north, by the big lake in Central Park, I was musing on these insights, and my numbness to reality – I still didn’t miss anyone, and New York didn’t affect me as much as I had expected – when a bespectacled young Dubaian engineer came up to me and asked me if I was “from around here”. Out of nowhere, I had a metropolis-exploration buddy for the next two hours. It was so nice to talk to someone, anyone, about anything. Share your experiences fresh as they are imprinted on your retina. It grounded me, made everything a little more real. Thank God for other people!

 
The crossing                                                                Elmo and Cookie monster on Times Square, NYC

San Francisco, 31 December 2013

Then I had one day in San Francisco. I came in exhausted, still jetlagged from my first flight, having had to get up at 2:00AM again this night, and knowing I’d have to stay awake for another while because it was New Year’s Eve, but I really wanted to make the most of my one day in San Francisco. Only problem being was that I had made no plans at all for finding people to stay with, who would also be willing to tag me along to their NYE parties. Some friends and family back home had asked around for me but all those contacts had fallen through. It was only on the day before that Eda, my awesome friend from Peru (who had given me her bed to sleep in, fed me pizza on the night of my arrival, and drawn a map of all the places I needed to visit in Manhattan that day) that I was staying with in New York, came to the rescue. Within a couple of hours, she had put me up with a girl, Morgan, she knew had just moved back from Barcelona. And what a rescue it was! I was happy enough that I would have a roof over my head that I need so floor, couch, I was fine with anything. But it turned out that she and her brother lived in a beautiful apartment completely redone by her parents to be rented out on Airbnb, and as we got in, she pointed “this is where you can stay” to a gorgeous, romantic, sun-drenched room with a king size bed. Then, she took me out driving all over San Francisco for four hours, I saw everything! And then she also took me along to the NYE party she was going to. And all of this in such good spirits and completely happy to tag me along. Such hospitality is just so heartwarming, what an amazing welcome to America I received from both Morgan and Eda. I had never done anything this outlandishly random and unplanned when travelling, and all I could think of it how well it worked out was this: You can’t imagine what you could end up with if you don’t risk to ask. Reach out, ask the question, ‘I need help’, have a little faith in that it will work out, and be amazed by the wealth of kindness and hospitality and warmth waiting for your call.


The New Year’s party was also an invaluable experience, not because it was such a great party, but in fact because it wasn’t, objectively speaking, and the insight I gained from that. We had come to the house party of friends of Morgan’s friend, ran ashore in some tension going on between different parties, and so we went to a bar with the three of us to celebrate midnight there. Morgan’s friend had trouble letting go of whatever had happened between those people and was clearly preoccupied. The magical thing for me to realize was this: I had nothing here in this continent, so anything was something. I was perfectly happy with any sort of New Year’s party, however modest, and the fact that I had no social relationships here at all that could get tangled up and give me worries made me feel so light. I remember this clearly from my travels to Peru, four years ago: being lifted out of an entire existence you’ve spent years and years building up, is such a liberating experience and provides such perspective on it, even if what you are leaving behind is very dear to you, like my life in NL is to me now. Soon enough, I would get engaged in plenty of social relationships, but in that moment, at the turn of the new year, it was bliss, this burdenless existence, this blank slate beginning of a new life.

My first night in the Tricoops

Davis, 1-3 January 2013

Man, I really don’t know how to capture these first couple of days here in Davis. I am in the middle of a deep-reaching process. I’m witnessing a full-fledged genesis from the inside: a whole world unfolding itself in front of me, with a unique, Stephanie-shaped place opening up in it for me to occupy. When my train thundered off leaving me on the platform of a deserted little adobe-brick station lined with some crooked old palm trees, I had the words of the woman in the train ringing in my head, “Oh Davis, yeah it’s really small-town America.” This was it, this was where it was all gonna have to happen. As I walked into the 60,000 man strong town of Davis, the loudest sound was my rolling case on the cement sidewalks. Over the past three days that I’ve been here, more people have begun to trickle in, but it’s still very quiet on the streets of the village and the university campus. I actually like it that way. It gives me the opportunity to ease in, to first get acquainted with the space and only then the people. The quiet town, the beautiful and unfamiliar trees and birds and squirrels, the sweet-scented air and bright sunlight, the deserted campus, with empty streets, roundabouts, parking lots, grassfields, and buildings, all those things and I got our little private moments now, before all the people swarm in.

When I arrived at the Tricoops, the three student cooperatives in the middle of campus where I’ll be living these coming months, there were only 3 people. Over the past 3 three days, more people have started arriving, but all 40+ of us will only be here probably on Sunday, the day before classes start. I got the chance to familiarize myself with my room at my leisure, which I’ll be sharing with two other girls for the rest of my time here, and the rest of the house, which I’ll be sharing with sixteen other people in total. I can’t believe how lucky I am to have this place to come home to in these vulnerable, early beginnings. Especially at the international student orientation day today I realized how much more I’m already embedded in the world that is UCDavis than the other students. I’m so glad I didn’t have to be welcomed by nothing more than four blank white walls like the others. The Coops are really a fully alive and thriving organism that is taking me up within its middle with open arms. Last night they came and took me along to a concert in the city of Sacramento, half an hour drive from here. They really went out of my way to make me feel welcome: “We loved your video, we all really wanted you to come and live with us, you were a hot commodity”, and “I just said that we could drive past the IKEA so you’d come.” He had needed to convince me with IKEA because I still needed to get bedding somewhere. And so as I got out of the concert, they said “Alright let’s go!” and took a whole detour at 11PM especially for me to get my bedding. And in such good spirit, messing around in the store and making jokes all along the way. And during the show, one of them reached across the others to me and asked me “Stephanie, are you okay?” It’s those little things, so attentive and so warm… Man, I couldn’t have been blessed with a better home away from home. I can tell that now already, on the third day. An incredible time awaits me here.

The international student orientation today was also surprisingly helpful. You’d a expect a boring, tedious event with all this information you already knew. Instead, it really set something big in motion here for me. The past two days, despite the warm welcome I had had from the few Coop people that were already back from their holidays, had been zombie days a little bit. I didn’t what was going on, where I was, what was coming. All the new students at the international student orientation day provided a new social framework that placed me outside the Coop minicosmos for the first time here, which gave a better sense of the bigger picture of the UCDavis experience that lies ahead. The campus tour was a really magical experience. I could consciously notice my brain working hard to fit all the pieces of the puzzle together into the mental map of a new world. It’s incredible how fast you pick stuff up. In my three days in Davis, and my five days in the U.S., I have already accumulated so many puzzle pieces that I start reencountering them in the world around me here. Like I was surprised by how much that we were told and shown on the campus tour I already knew, after only two days of being here. A unique new life is gradually starting to take shape around me, and I’m being drawn into the universe that I am now still circling on the perimeter of. Soon, I will be so far in, I won’t even be able to tell all the pieces of the puzzle apart, and I won’t be able to look at this place with the open, empty, unknowing gaze I have now. I’m excited for it, but it’s also a little sad. This ignorance is bliss, and these early days, alive with expectancy but so light and unburdened by the weight of existence are precious to me now. I will cherish it a little longer, while I still can. Starting Monday, there’ll be no going back.        


Stéphanie