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Tipi Frank and the Search for Tribe
Wren said Apr 19, 6:21 AM:
Since the mid eighties, he's made his life putting up tipis all over the south, including a wonderful tipi village in Athens, Georgia. Now I'm coaxing Tipi Frank up north, at least as far as Maryland. It's heartening to hear this itinerant idealist wax poetic about tipis and their effect on the people who encounter them. It makes me wonder about the deeper symbolism of tipis, and as soon as I do, he starts to ruminate in that direction. “Tipis speak to people's yearning for something tribal, direct and natural.”
When I spoke to him by phone last night, he was visiting a site where he'd put up a tipi for someone's weekend-long Halloween bash last year. When the folks found they had sixteen guests for Thanksgiving, the dinner was moved to the tipi! Stop and soak that in:
Thanksgiving in a tipi…
In north central Florida, where he's home-based for ten years, Tipi Frank has been participating in a forming ecovillage. Community is a hard thing to birth, and after 4 years, it's his tipis that are the standing, habitable structures on this historic piece of land in the Santa Fe River floodplane. Tipi Frank feels a deep connection to this land, which is the site of an American Indian settlement, the first tribe whose culture was intentionally erased by Europeans, a few short years after Columbus.
But it's time to move on. What will be next for Tipi Frank? Like so many of us, he's seeking a tribe, not in the traditional (born-into) sense, but a “tribe of choice.” But choice makes things complicated–Tribe where and with whom? Are we ready for a tipi village on the White House lawn?
I'm visiting Ravenkeeper during my Kentucky trip. She's answered her “where.” She owns a farm in the mountains with several houses, pastures and a woods with many native plants. She's struggling to identify her “with whom.”
Her vision is to turn her farm into a playwright's retreat center. Her profile is:
http://ravenkeeper.gaia.com/
If interested, contact her and visit her place! Maybe it needs a tipi! I'll post a review in TRIBE: Choosing Intentional Community when I get back.
So what does tribe look like for you? Where is your “where?” How are you looking for your “with whom?” I'm sure gaia.com is a piece of the puzzle for many of us. I'll be expanding my discussion of these questions on my new website,
http://www.hippiechickdiaries.com/
which should be up in two to three weeks.
Happy Trails,
Wren
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