(Among the questions in the site’s FAQ section: Sorry, what’s Anabaptism? and Do you ever have fun at the Bruderhof?) ‘‘Amish-adjacent’’ is probably the easiest way to describe them, but they’re allowed to have smartphones, drive cars and upload (utterly delightful!) YouTube videos.Īt some point in my friend’s residence, a pregnant couple from the community went to an outside hospital to give birth.
Members are pacifists who renounce private property, live simply, dress modestly and - to judge by the official Bruderhof website - have a distinctive sense of humor. The Bruderhof is a constellation of settlements numbering about 3,000 people, spread over four continents, with roots in Anabaptism - a 16th-century radical offshoot of Protestantism that believes in a separation of church and state and adult baptism, among other reforms. Some years ago a friend of mine lived with a community called the Bruderhof. What was the life-altering lesson in that? ‘‘Sleep more,’’ maybe. This went on for a minute before the sensation faded and was replaced with a moment of alarm at the banality of the hallucination, which was like being on the world’s lamest drug: Instead of experiencing ego death, I momentarily penetrated a sheet of drywall. During one morning of considering I felt my head entering the wall, or sort of dipping in and out of it. The word ‘‘consider’’ implies, correctly, that these thoughts at no point turned into actions. I considered investigating the stain under the boiler. I spent hours sitting on the carpet against a wall, doing nothing except considering. Little by little, my fidelity to personhood diminished. I couldn’t stop finding harebrained new ways to warp reality.
#Stamding on the eag of instanity free#
None of these ‘‘hobbies’’ were fascinating or impressive - and they’re even less so when I type them out - but they were placating, free and legal. When people talk about fasting, this is what they talk about: the surge of power that arises from realizing you don’t need what you thought you did. If lacking something as fundamental as furniture did not impair my life, perhaps the same could be true of recently banned fundamentals, like social contact or walking outdoors without a muzzle. ‘‘This is how a monkey sees the world,’’ I thought, dreamily. I spent a day working from the floor, squatting before and around my computer as though it were a campfire, with glutes aflame and feet unshod. I watched a hypnotic two-minute video of Riddle, serene and barefoot, as he moved through 10 positions designed to help support my ‘‘ancestral movement system.’’ Was he a maniac? A genius? Only one way to find out. This, according to him, helps nourish a person’s ankles, knees and hips, as well as ‘‘rewilding’’ her feet. Instead, he recommends ‘‘ground living’’: banishing furniture in favor of endless variations on squatting and kneeling. He has sinuous muscles and four children and does not believe in normal furniture, especially chairs, which he considers unnatural and expendable. Riddle looks like a Viking warlord and does stuff like try to run 900 miles across the entire length of Britain barefoot. Over the course of a routine internet stroll, I discovered a ‘‘natural lifestyle coach’’ named Tony Riddle. The adaptations began during my third week of quarantine. If I can’t be productive, I have three choices: Do nothing, do destructive things or do neutral things. Being an inessential worker in every sense of the word, there has been no obvious way for me to channel my bad feelings into civically productive activities. I daydream about which elected officials most deserve to get Covid. The physical manifestations of my own dread have included insomnia, a bumper crop of gray hairs and an absence of self-control around any form of alcohol or drug. Like characters in an Edgar Allan Poe story, every person I know is suddenly confined to a small space and forced to meditate on existence, death and his or her own satanic impulses. I’ve made out beautifully, and I feel terribly unhappy: a pair of conditions that are tough to either reconcile or deny. I was able to get out of the city I don’t have the virus I’ve lost some work, but not all of it and just under 17 percent of my immediate family members have fallen seriously ill. Insanity Can Keep You Sane If you can’t live normally, why not find little harebrained ways to warp reality? By Molly Young
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