Retreat center in the Sangre de Cristos

We bought some land on the East side of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, near Angel Fire. Here’s what it looks like in October:

Quick specs on the land: 100 acres, 9,200 feet above sea level, 13-18 inches of rain

The big idea

My vision is for an autistic-run retreat center. The place will be built for spiritual renewal and communal living, a place to be yourself and connect to others and to nature in a simple direct way. There will be simple buildings with kitchens, a place for tents and bunk beds, and a place for meetings and meals. Churches and non-profits will be able to use the space. Participants will be able to walk down to the cliffs or to other places to be alone in the woods.

Some of the features of the management and architecture that I’m currently envisioning are:

1. It is compact and accessible. Each building will be wheelchair accessible, and the whole place will be clustered for easy access. It will not be sprawling like a typical campground. Cars will be kept away from the area with the buildings, and there will be no RVs. This will allow it to be scaled down for walking, not for cars.

2. It is built for communal experiences, not for escaping. There will be only a few private rooms and everything else will be done together. People can contribute to the whole group regardless of their age or position in a family. You can choose solitude by going away from the center, or choose to engage by going into the center. It is not for the kind of vacation that involves getting away from people or consuming entertainment. It is much more geared to working with and being with other people.

3. It will have a light environmental footprint, mainly by being communal and tightly clustered. Plans include solar electricity and water heating, solar cooking, simple construction, composting toilets, and rainwater harvesting. We’ll try to bring in as little as possible – mainly food, and keep trash to a minimum.

4. It is about options over conformity. Groups are different; people are different. Some groups will rotate chores like cooking and clean up, and others will hire helpers for that. Groups can have whatever kind of meals they want. Using tents gives privacy, or being in a bunk room gives community. A communal experience succeeds when it is possible to meet a variety of different needs.

5. It is about convenience and efficiency, not about “roughing it”. The work involved in providing for all the daily needs of a big group of people should be minimized. There is no virtue in being uncomfortable. Therefore we don’t anticipate hauling water, cooking on camp stoves, walking long distances to a shower, or any of the other inconveniences that are often experienced when camping out. Hundreds of design details need to be worked out so people can, for example, wash laundry, charge cell phones, keep personal items handy, and get through the day with a minimum of hassle.

The money

The land is only perhaps 20% of the total costs, and we don’t have money for the rest of it. So this has to become a bigger process in order to work. It should ultimately be profitable or at least pay for staff. People normally pay $50-100 per night to go to retreat centers, and my idea is that this one could charge substantially less and still cover costs, by being very efficient.

My history

I have an engineering mindset about things, so when I’ve attended other retreats, particularly those held on college campuses, I’ve said to myself, “there has got to be a better way.” From there, I kept on pondering the architecture ideas. I’ve been amazed at how expensive these experiences can be, and the result can be cumbersome and regimented. There are long distances in the heat of the summer, no place to cook anything, and too few ways to get any specialized need taken care of. This center will address those kinds of needs.

A second relevant part of my background is in gardening and permaculture. This interest is also about efficiency but more from an environmental land management perspective.

A third thread from my background is quakerism, with its communal decision making, honest relationships, simplicity, and related factors that lead me to believe that the way environments are set up can foster genuine growth.

Growth

The process of building this is an opportunity for growth for everyone involved – staff and visitors. I don’t want to lose sight of that in the effort to get things done. However, there is a balance between a focus on the self and a focus on the whole. Yes, it should be therapeutic, in the general sense of helping people align with their growth path, work through challenges, and have life-changing experiences. It should not focus so much on the individual though, the way therapy is too often limited to the shallow goal of just changing a single person’s behavior. Factors that can make the work environment therapeutic include a general atmosphere of respect, participation in decision making, and a focus on finding ones role as a contributor to a large project. I don’t want to make this about “helping people with autism”, which paints autism as a problem.

Underlying all this is a general truth that we all go through life carrying burdens, and this fact of life is not a bad thing. Burdens are ways that we prevent ourselves from being free – past traumas, blind spots, anxieties, beliefs and judgments. These burdens may look like weaknesses from the outside, and in our fix-it society we may have subject ourselves to programs aimed to exterminate parts of ourselves that others don’t like. Particularly if we are autistic we may have gotten the message “There is something wrong with you.” So it feels very important to me to treat those burdens as very private things that we are given to carry for a larger purpose. It is like an assignment from the soul – “Here, carry this.” If we treat them as gifts, and if we carry them tenderly and with dignity, we can, from the inside, turn those weights into strengths. Our paths of development are unique. Especially as autists (people of the self) we are each on our own journey, which is often not clear to anyone else. There is no specific person who is a “therapist” in this larger sense of development.

For me this project is part of finding my own voice. It is a chance to put together things from many threads of my past interests – building, sustainability, intentional community, and decision making. I haven’t taken my own perspective in life enough.

Why autistic run?

Being autistic is partly about being disadvantaged or disabled by a lack of acceptance. I want to use the land to challenge the powerless position of our people. People have told me that this idea is too difficult (just imagine the cost of insurance, road maintenance, and other complexities!) and that I should instead help people by giving away money in the form of scholarships to go to retreats elsewhere. Perhaps some feel that autistic people are incapable of doing anything complex, or that we shouldn’t own anything – that we shouldn’t have power. My intuition tells me that this idea might be hard for some people to hear, and might even be threatening to some people.

Autistic people can have a tendency to become disabled by typical institutions, as we are automatically the losers in the game of social status. Having a business or large project like this be run by autistic people is a key to making it an experience of not being disabled, because that status game won’t be played out in the typical way. Coming to work on the land, you will be coming into autistic space, where the social rules are shaped to fit our way of being. One of our strengths is that we have a tendency to work towards a whole vision without as much ego involvement and without competition or politics. An autistic run project in autistic space can focus on the contributions, the work and the results, and not the congratulations and the winners. If we decide for ourselves how we want to live, how to run our own businesses, how to be friends with each other, and how to contribute to the world, then we are no longer just the customers of the services that the autism industry doles out.

Non-autistics can be there of course, but I don’t feel they should be there in positions of power or in great enough numbers to take over. That would take away the advantages of effectively working together and experiencing the freedom and bonding that is possible in autistic space. We can help each other remember to think and communicate in our own voices, and to maintain our own perspectives. On the other hand, in a mixed team, the terms of the conversation are more likely to change into ways that don’t fit with how we think, and we might be more likely to back down.

Organizational challenges

Autistic people may have less experience in running big projects than others, and we may have a hard time getting organized, but these could be reflections of some collective burdens that we have to carry together as we work them out. There has never been an autistic economy, and there is only the beginning of an autistic culture. We are new at this.

We may find that to achieve the same outcomes that neurotypical people would achieve, we will need to find new ways that fit us better. This could involve the way contracts are made, the way expectations for work results are presented and negotiated, and many other things. It is not necessarily a given that we should conform to the general ways of the Americans. There are other groups that live within the country but have very different ways – the Amish being an obvious example. Although we aren’t a religion and we don’t usually (or ever?) have an extended living/working community, we do have a different way of perceiving the world, and a different way of thinking, which could give rise to many differences in culture if given the chance.

It might turn out that when it is time for the visitors to come and interact with us, there may be sparks, and again this is just part of what we have to work out.

I feel it is pretty important to make positions to fit people, rather than to make people fit into positions. Each person has different gifts and needs, and there won’t be any guaranteed fairness that what one person gives is equal to what someone else gives.

The factors of profit and ownership are an open question for me. If we do things so-called normally, we will have people who own and other people who work for the owners, which doesn’t feel entirely good. Alternately a non-profit sets up a different power arrangement, which can have other problems. Autists seem to be universally adamant about our integrity with respect to power-imbalanced relationships – we need to retain our autonomy as independent spirits, and typical employment relationships can be a threat to us.

Because of the simultaneous need for up-front clarity of expectations and the need for gaining experience in the face of the unknown, we may have to give special recognition the variable of time in work relationships. Time can be very different in relationships for autists as compared to others. For example, we might not be able to answer questions on the spot, particularly about commitments. In the realm of employment, there may be a way to build the time variable into the expectations, so that the need for a change in a person’s contribution or compensation can be handled in an orderly and unambiguous way.

Why reinvent the wheel?

There are a thousand or more retreat centers in the US designed for small conferences or spiritual renewal. I made a mental detour to consider using one of them for what I was envisioning, but came to the conclusion that what is important here is the process from the ground up. I’m thinking of one person from Israel who thought it might be possible to come to New Mexico to participate in this. His particular spirit strikes me as tuned with nature in a way that would allow him to know, over the course of some time contemplating it, who the animals are who live there, and how they move, and other aspects of the environment. Supposing my intuition is right about that, what is the value of this skill or activity? In our economic system it has basically no value. But still I find myself motivated to serve rice to the people meditating over animal tracks (that was just my fleeting vision of it); or more generally speaking, I want to make it possible for autists to serve according to their specialized talents. It feels powerful to convene a place in the woods for these sensitive independents to found a new enterprise, not just to fulfill a job position in some existing enterprise.

If it starts with the heart, perhaps it will be a magic place where people working there or visiting there will love it in a way that encourages them to move forward in their paths. I also hope it will be a place where people will fall in love with each other.

There can also be an intergenerational aspect to it – a multi-age summer camp to provide autistic space to younger people. This would be very new territory.

Global contributions

This project might show something important to the wider world: that the supposed 3.5 million dollars that “it costs” to raise and support the average autistic person for her life is not a necessary expense. Generally speaking, we want to contribute, not be a cost to society. By creating autistic spaces and supporting each other, we may be able to provide powerful counterexamples to the prevailing myths around our limitations and the need for constant, expensive, and damaging behavior control.

Beyond just doing this one little enterprise on a tiny piece of the earth, what is our global contribution? We’re not even asking the right question when we assume that we are a cost to society. Consider how the political system is incapable of solving big problems, and how a quagmire of cultural assumptions about race, gender, power, and privilege perpetuates the cycle of wars, environmental catastrophes, and poverty. Most people can’t change those big assumptions because most people are wired to replicate the thoughts of the people around them. But some of us have to think independently; we can’t think any other way. That’s our burden, which is called a disability. I feel we were given that burden to address the bigger problems, which others cannot. We haven’t started doing our job in any internationally visible way because we are still isolated and many of us are dispirited and believe we are broken. Projects like this one could help awaken us as a community of givers.

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