Khilah and Ryan
The story is likely familiar to anyone who has kids, or knows people who have kids: a couple finds out that they’re about to have a baby and, suddenly, the magnitude of bringing a new life into this world; of keeping a baby safe, healthy and happy; of rounding and guiding that grasping, suckling little life into a well-balanced, maybe even good, person, dawns on them. They’re excited, scared, humbled by the coming responsibility. They start thinking about the world they want to create for their child, and this makes them look more intently, more thoughtfully, even critically at themselves. They decide to make changes. Before they can be charged with shaping a brand new worldview, they have to make sure their own affairs are in order, their own worldview in sync. For many couples, this means shoring up their worldly securities and comforts: making sure they have good jobs with health insurance, a house with a nursery, a car that won't roll over on the highway, grandparents and close friends on call to drive or fly in, the “issues” (oh those "issues") of maternity and paternity leave worked out, sensibly, with employers.
Khilah Butler and Ryan Ratigan went through the first half of that equation. Living in Omaha, Nebraska, they were working, respectively, as a manager at a bank and a criminal defense attorney when they found out that Khilah was going to have a baby. They were excited and scared. They were humbled. They reassessed. They decided they needed to be thoughtful and sensible about the kind of world they were going to create for their child. And then they quit their jobs, left Omaha, moved into a car, traveled for awhile, and landed in Summertown, Tennessee at one of the most iconic living places of the bygone hippie-era: The Farm.
“We didn’t want to have our child when we were both miserable in our corporate jobs, living in city-seclusion without any real community,” Khilah tells me over a campfire in the front yard of the little white house she and Ryan are renting at The Farm. “Ultimately, really living meaningfully was just more important than the other stuff, which was bullshit anyway.” In the flickering lights of the flame, the rows of herbs they’re growing are visible beside my tent, which is pitched on their lawn. They are the kind of people around whom I can imagine anyone feeling remarkably at ease. Grounded, welcoming, open, thoughtful. All this in the reality of the painful circumstances that have kept them at The Farm, which I'll get to below. Ryan throws a new log onto the flames.
In these parts, Khilah and Ryan’s version of the new-parent tale is the more familiar one. Young couples, disenchanted with the same broken systems of society that lead the Cohens and the people of Earthaven to search for new ways, new places, true Community, come to The Farm to have their children. Indeed this influx of expecting couples is one of the ways The Farm has managed to stick around for going-on forty-five years. Why specifically do couples come when a baby is on the way?
Well, for the midwives of course.
I’m going to come back to those midwives. First, an introduction.
The Farm: An Introduction
The history of The Farm is recounted amongst its early members like mythology. If the residents of Earthaven casually lamented the lack of a commonly told founding story for their village, this is certainly not an issue at The Farm. Monday Night Classes, The Caravan, Stephen and Ina May, the Midwives, the Festivals, Plenty International. All worthy, in the tellings, of their upper-case designations.
….And I’ll be re-telling about all those things in the next blog post. (So keep reading! And subscribe so you don’t miss it!)
Today, the basics, and the midwives.
They call themselves primarily a spiritual community, with “intentional” sometimes used interchangeably with “spiritual.” I might go so far as to call it an intentional small-town. Though they’ve had as many as 2,000 people living there in their history (in the late 70s), they now have a population of about 200, the process of individualizing incomes that they went through in the ‘80s having driven many away (more on that in the next post too). They’re located on nearly 2,000 acres in Central Tennessee, about an hour-and-a-half south of Nashville. The area is one of mostly flat lands with some rolling hills, country farms spread out along winding one-land roads, with horses and a few cows to be seen along the routes. They’re about three miles from the historic Natchez Trace, and (for the history buffs) specifically the spot where Merriweather Lewis mysteriously died of a gunshot wound in 1809. More than one of these neighboring properties is adorned with a Confederate Flag or two, though it is worth noting that the self-proclaimed hippies of The Farm say that they’ve had fantastic relationships with their country-folk Tennessee neighbors since the beginning in 1971. Most of the acreage of The Farm is preserved under a trust as a wilderness sanctuary, and the rest is what you’d expect to find in a small intentional town, with maybe a few quirks specific to this particular hippie paradise. There are individual and shared houses, a shop, a bookstore (The Farm has its own press), a few community buildings, solar panel fields, a fire house with everything necessary for putting out major conflagrations (there have been a few over their history), a school (“lots of kids from the surrounding area who don’t fit into the mainstream school systems come here,” I am told), an area dedicated to a budding ecovillage, and then, what you may not find in other similar places: the building where they manufacture handheld geiger counters ("business went nuts after the Fukushima meltdown"), which is one of the primary sources of individual income for members.
The other big source of income? Now we're back to the midwives.
Spiritual Midwifery
Of specific interest for this post is the midwifery practice at The Farm. The Farm’s founding couple, Stephen and Ina May Gaskin, the former a teacher, and the latter a midwife, were intent from the beginning that their grand experiment in sensitive, intentional living be a haven for women who wished to have deeply meaningful natural births. It was Ina May who, therefore, began the midwifery practice in the mid '70s.
Ina May has written many books on all manner of topics related to childbirth and early child rearing, the most famous of which is probably Spiritual Midwifery. It is that particular book, which has been translated into many languages, that I've been led to understand brings young couples from around the world to have their babies at The Farm. Indeed, while I was there, I met a couple who’d come from Turkey to have their baby, and from their dispositions, I would not be shocked to find out sometime down the road that they're still there.
Rather than try to summarize Ina May's philosophy ("have your baby naturally, and let it be the spiritually meaningful experience it is" is, maybe, the nutshell, but that doesn't really touch the depths or breadth of her beliefs and practices), or postulate too long from a male perspective on something that is, frankly, beyond my physical ability to deeply grasp, now that I have your attention, I’ll let Ina May’s own words speak for her. (And if you're interested, here's a link to Spiritual Midwifery for sale on ABEBooks.com)
So, some quotes from her works:
On the female body: “There is no other organ quite like the uterus. If men had such an organ they would brag about it. So should we.”
Lamenting the attitude some doctors have toward childbirth: “The problem is that doctors today often assume that something mysterious and unidentified has gone wrong with labor, or that the woman's body is somehow 'inadequate' - what I call the 'woman's body as a lemon' assumption. For a variety of reasons, a lot of women have also come to believe that nature made a serious mistake with their bodies. This belief has become so strong in many that they give in to pharmaceutical or surgical treatments when patience and recognition of the normality and harmlessness of the situation would make for better health for them and their babies and less surgery and technological intervention in birth. Most women need encouragement and companionship more than they need drugs.”
Writing directly to women (the first half really applies to all humans, life): “Remember this, for it is as true as true gets: Your body is not a lemon. You are not a machine. The Creator is not a careless mechanic. Human female bodies have the same potential to give birth well as aardvarks, lions, rhinoceri, elephants, moose, and water buffalo. Even if it has not been your habit throughout your life so far, I recommend that you learn to think positively about your body.”
And on the spiritual power of birth: “When a child is born, the entire Universe has to shift and make room. Another entity capable of free will, and therefore capable of becoming God, has been born.”
(That last quote is a juicy one, isn't it? Is free-will the key into the master lock of Godliness? Are human-beings all capable of "becoming God?" I'm not sure I see it that way.... But all this will have to wait for another post!)
Khilah and Ryan: Grief and Community
Khilah and Ryan came to The Farm a year ago to spend the final months of her pregnancy and have their baby boy. As Khilah tells me, Natchez Forest Ratigan “was born sleeping." When they talk about the day of the birth and the months afterward, they are open, honest. They are striving, consciously, to heal, neither consumed in grief nor detached from it. In sum what happened: Khilah went into early labor and was taken to a nearby hospital, the midwives she’d been seeing for the previous months at her side. There came the discovery of the previously undetected anomaly. The baby boy did not make it.
That was eight months ago, and while both Ryan and Khilah have grieved and continue to grieve, they have found the Community - that all-important word referring to the group of people working to live in better harmony with, and support for, each other - at The Farm to be a comfort to them. They told me about all the notes left for them by Community members, the pies baked, the hugs offered, the listening ears, all the kindness and love that’s helped them persevere through a trying time. In the face of the kind of difficult mourning that can, in many areas of society, send the grievers into the extended pain of deep seclusion, and lead the people around them to shy away, for fear of saying the wrong thing perhaps, or discomfort with the pain of those around them, Khilah and Ryan found the opposite at The Farm. Indeed they found what only true Community can provide: the strength to carry on, to try to heal, to continue the search for peace, both together and, at times, separately. It’s led them to consider The Farm more of a home than they previously had and, meaningfully, their son is buried in The Farm cemetery.
On that note, I’ll end this post with a story from Khilah. She recounts to me that one morning, sometime before the burial, she was sitting with her baby on a swing by one of the birthing cabins. She was saying her goodbyes, and, in that moment, the grief was overpowering her. It was then that Marty, an older man who moved to The Farm in the last few years, came by wishing to convey his condolences and lend some supportive will. He didn’t want to disturb the parents though, and was not quite sure what to do. So he decided to stand and sing to the cabin. “It was beautiful,” Khilah says. She tells me that hearing his song, feeling this man’s deeply conceived desire to provide comfort, consolation, emotional sustenance, in her time of deepest anguish touched her as much as anything in such a moment could have done. “He had no idea I was there,” she says, and she didn’t tell him for some months afterward. “But it was perfect,” she says, “exactly the right thing.”
*Coming Next Week
More posts about The Farm: Its history and some deeper investigations into the spiritual philosophies that brought this group of hippies together, and to Central Tennessee. Gather your thoughts on telepathy and vibrations.
The story is likely familiar to anyone who has kids, or knows people who have kids: a couple finds out that they’re about to have a baby and, suddenly, the magnitude of bringing a new life into this world; of keeping a baby safe, healthy and happy; of rounding and guiding that grasping, suckling little life into a well-balanced, maybe even good, person, dawns on them. They’re excited, scared, humbled by the coming responsibility. They start thinking about the world they want to create for their child, and this makes them look more intently, more thoughtfully, even critically at themselves. They decide to make changes. Before they can be charged with shaping a brand new worldview, they have to make sure their own affairs are in order, their own worldview in sync. For many couples, this means shoring up their worldly securities and comforts: making sure they have good jobs with health insurance, a house with a nursery, a car that won't roll over on the highway, grandparents and close friends on call to drive or fly in, the “issues” (oh those "issues") of maternity and paternity leave worked out, sensibly, with employers.
Khilah Butler and Ryan Ratigan went through the first half of that equation. Living in Omaha, Nebraska, they were working, respectively, as a manager at a bank and a criminal defense attorney when they found out that Khilah was going to have a baby. They were excited and scared. They were humbled. They reassessed. They decided they needed to be thoughtful and sensible about the kind of world they were going to create for their child. And then they quit their jobs, left Omaha, moved into a car, traveled for awhile, and landed in Summertown, Tennessee at one of the most iconic living places of the bygone hippie-era: The Farm.
“We didn’t want to have our child when we were both miserable in our corporate jobs, living in city-seclusion without any real community,” Khilah tells me over a campfire in the front yard of the little white house she and Ryan are renting at The Farm. “Ultimately, really living meaningfully was just more important than the other stuff, which was bullshit anyway.” In the flickering lights of the flame, the rows of herbs they’re growing are visible beside my tent, which is pitched on their lawn. They are the kind of people around whom I can imagine anyone feeling remarkably at ease. Grounded, welcoming, open, thoughtful. All this in the reality of the painful circumstances that have kept them at The Farm, which I'll get to below. Ryan throws a new log onto the flames.
In these parts, Khilah and Ryan’s version of the new-parent tale is the more familiar one. Young couples, disenchanted with the same broken systems of society that lead the Cohens and the people of Earthaven to search for new ways, new places, true Community, come to The Farm to have their children. Indeed this influx of expecting couples is one of the ways The Farm has managed to stick around for going-on forty-five years. Why specifically do couples come when a baby is on the way?
Well, for the midwives of course.
I’m going to come back to those midwives. First, an introduction.
The Farm: An Introduction
The history of The Farm is recounted amongst its early members like mythology. If the residents of Earthaven casually lamented the lack of a commonly told founding story for their village, this is certainly not an issue at The Farm. Monday Night Classes, The Caravan, Stephen and Ina May, the Midwives, the Festivals, Plenty International. All worthy, in the tellings, of their upper-case designations.
….And I’ll be re-telling about all those things in the next blog post. (So keep reading! And subscribe so you don’t miss it!)
Today, the basics, and the midwives.
They call themselves primarily a spiritual community, with “intentional” sometimes used interchangeably with “spiritual.” I might go so far as to call it an intentional small-town. Though they’ve had as many as 2,000 people living there in their history (in the late 70s), they now have a population of about 200, the process of individualizing incomes that they went through in the ‘80s having driven many away (more on that in the next post too). They’re located on nearly 2,000 acres in Central Tennessee, about an hour-and-a-half south of Nashville. The area is one of mostly flat lands with some rolling hills, country farms spread out along winding one-land roads, with horses and a few cows to be seen along the routes. They’re about three miles from the historic Natchez Trace, and (for the history buffs) specifically the spot where Merriweather Lewis mysteriously died of a gunshot wound in 1809. More than one of these neighboring properties is adorned with a Confederate Flag or two, though it is worth noting that the self-proclaimed hippies of The Farm say that they’ve had fantastic relationships with their country-folk Tennessee neighbors since the beginning in 1971. Most of the acreage of The Farm is preserved under a trust as a wilderness sanctuary, and the rest is what you’d expect to find in a small intentional town, with maybe a few quirks specific to this particular hippie paradise. There are individual and shared houses, a shop, a bookstore (The Farm has its own press), a few community buildings, solar panel fields, a fire house with everything necessary for putting out major conflagrations (there have been a few over their history), a school (“lots of kids from the surrounding area who don’t fit into the mainstream school systems come here,” I am told), an area dedicated to a budding ecovillage, and then, what you may not find in other similar places: the building where they manufacture handheld geiger counters ("business went nuts after the Fukushima meltdown"), which is one of the primary sources of individual income for members.
The other big source of income? Now we're back to the midwives.
Spiritual Midwifery
Of specific interest for this post is the midwifery practice at The Farm. The Farm’s founding couple, Stephen and Ina May Gaskin, the former a teacher, and the latter a midwife, were intent from the beginning that their grand experiment in sensitive, intentional living be a haven for women who wished to have deeply meaningful natural births. It was Ina May who, therefore, began the midwifery practice in the mid '70s.
Ina May has written many books on all manner of topics related to childbirth and early child rearing, the most famous of which is probably Spiritual Midwifery. It is that particular book, which has been translated into many languages, that I've been led to understand brings young couples from around the world to have their babies at The Farm. Indeed, while I was there, I met a couple who’d come from Turkey to have their baby, and from their dispositions, I would not be shocked to find out sometime down the road that they're still there.
Rather than try to summarize Ina May's philosophy ("have your baby naturally, and let it be the spiritually meaningful experience it is" is, maybe, the nutshell, but that doesn't really touch the depths or breadth of her beliefs and practices), or postulate too long from a male perspective on something that is, frankly, beyond my physical ability to deeply grasp, now that I have your attention, I’ll let Ina May’s own words speak for her. (And if you're interested, here's a link to Spiritual Midwifery for sale on ABEBooks.com)
So, some quotes from her works:
On the female body: “There is no other organ quite like the uterus. If men had such an organ they would brag about it. So should we.”
Lamenting the attitude some doctors have toward childbirth: “The problem is that doctors today often assume that something mysterious and unidentified has gone wrong with labor, or that the woman's body is somehow 'inadequate' - what I call the 'woman's body as a lemon' assumption. For a variety of reasons, a lot of women have also come to believe that nature made a serious mistake with their bodies. This belief has become so strong in many that they give in to pharmaceutical or surgical treatments when patience and recognition of the normality and harmlessness of the situation would make for better health for them and their babies and less surgery and technological intervention in birth. Most women need encouragement and companionship more than they need drugs.”
Writing directly to women (the first half really applies to all humans, life): “Remember this, for it is as true as true gets: Your body is not a lemon. You are not a machine. The Creator is not a careless mechanic. Human female bodies have the same potential to give birth well as aardvarks, lions, rhinoceri, elephants, moose, and water buffalo. Even if it has not been your habit throughout your life so far, I recommend that you learn to think positively about your body.”
And on the spiritual power of birth: “When a child is born, the entire Universe has to shift and make room. Another entity capable of free will, and therefore capable of becoming God, has been born.”
(That last quote is a juicy one, isn't it? Is free-will the key into the master lock of Godliness? Are human-beings all capable of "becoming God?" I'm not sure I see it that way.... But all this will have to wait for another post!)
Khilah and Ryan: Grief and Community
Khilah and Ryan came to The Farm a year ago to spend the final months of her pregnancy and have their baby boy. As Khilah tells me, Natchez Forest Ratigan “was born sleeping." When they talk about the day of the birth and the months afterward, they are open, honest. They are striving, consciously, to heal, neither consumed in grief nor detached from it. In sum what happened: Khilah went into early labor and was taken to a nearby hospital, the midwives she’d been seeing for the previous months at her side. There came the discovery of the previously undetected anomaly. The baby boy did not make it.
That was eight months ago, and while both Ryan and Khilah have grieved and continue to grieve, they have found the Community - that all-important word referring to the group of people working to live in better harmony with, and support for, each other - at The Farm to be a comfort to them. They told me about all the notes left for them by Community members, the pies baked, the hugs offered, the listening ears, all the kindness and love that’s helped them persevere through a trying time. In the face of the kind of difficult mourning that can, in many areas of society, send the grievers into the extended pain of deep seclusion, and lead the people around them to shy away, for fear of saying the wrong thing perhaps, or discomfort with the pain of those around them, Khilah and Ryan found the opposite at The Farm. Indeed they found what only true Community can provide: the strength to carry on, to try to heal, to continue the search for peace, both together and, at times, separately. It’s led them to consider The Farm more of a home than they previously had and, meaningfully, their son is buried in The Farm cemetery.
On that note, I’ll end this post with a story from Khilah. She recounts to me that one morning, sometime before the burial, she was sitting with her baby on a swing by one of the birthing cabins. She was saying her goodbyes, and, in that moment, the grief was overpowering her. It was then that Marty, an older man who moved to The Farm in the last few years, came by wishing to convey his condolences and lend some supportive will. He didn’t want to disturb the parents though, and was not quite sure what to do. So he decided to stand and sing to the cabin. “It was beautiful,” Khilah says. She tells me that hearing his song, feeling this man’s deeply conceived desire to provide comfort, consolation, emotional sustenance, in her time of deepest anguish touched her as much as anything in such a moment could have done. “He had no idea I was there,” she says, and she didn’t tell him for some months afterward. “But it was perfect,” she says, “exactly the right thing.”
*Coming Next Week
More posts about The Farm: Its history and some deeper investigations into the spiritual philosophies that brought this group of hippies together, and to Central Tennessee. Gather your thoughts on telepathy and vibrations.
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