Cedar Moon

Cedar Moon is a community dedicated to growing movement for healing and resilience in the world. We are co-stewards with Tryon Life Community Farm and the Sacred Land Alliance of seven beautiful half-wooded acres surrounded by a 650-acre forest, all inside Portland on a bus line half an hour by bicycle from downtown. (TLC Farm is a separate and independent nonprofit sustainability education and demonstration center–see www.tryonfarm.org. The SLA is a POC and trans collective focused on making the land available to marginalized people who have less access to land.) We are blessed with the opportunity for the work of our relations with each other and the earth to be shared with thousands of visitors. As we learn the skills and practices of growing respect, responsibility, and joy, they resonate out through our communities. In this way, we’re becoming ancestors of an earth people that navigate the coming tumult with spirit and courage. We were born in fire. Our evolution on this land between 2004 and 2006 was galvanized by the campaign to prevent the land we occupy from being bulldozed for a high-impact housing development. We have faced the stresses, conflicts, and tensions this high-pressure environment caused, as well as the “standard” ones all communities face, and have developed a clear focus on community process to deal with them. It is a lot of work to live here. Members pay the equivalent of market-rate rent, and are expected to contribute at least ten hours to the community’s economic work every week, and volunteer with TLC Farm (many do more). We have weekly meetings, alternating between business “meetings of the minds” and relation-building “meetings of the hearts.” We share evening meals and rotate cooking, cleaning, and maintenance chores. We encourage low-impact density and so have relatively little individual space (though a great deal of shared, communal space). And yet the rewards are tremendous. We live deeply interwoven with all our relations. We encourage each other to discover our evolving niches in the ecology of change: political action, deep spirit, earth-rooted wisdom. We reduce our ecological footprint, learn the resonance between autonomy and cooperation, grow into wisdom and compassion, and jam rhythms and harmonies and sutras into the long, warm evenings. Members are encouraged to use alternate forms of transportation (we have a car co-op), minimize energy use (no central heating), and eat local, organic, unrefined food. Our regular community ceremonies (from circles around dinner to high holidays) reflect our eclectic backgrounds, but are earth-based and heart-felt. If your soul yearns to work closely with others in an integrated lifestyle catalyzing the emergence of a new world in the shell of the old, contact us!