What does a world without war look like? How can we live in community? What does it take to become a communitarian?
These are some of the questions 35 people from 11 countries (including me) spent 3 months diving into at Tamera Peace Research Center in Portugal, researching experientially under the direction and guidance of Tamerians.
If someone had told me a few months ago that I’d be doing this, I would’ve laughed at how crazy it sounded. I’m a wild free bird. I live in the moment and follow my flow. Committing to such an engagement with complete strangers, none of whom I found particularly interesting or attractive at first glance, was completely out of the question. Yet the flow had a different plan for me. And I trust the flow, so I surrendered.
The journey was interesting, challenging, and at times painfully so. It was like getting married to 34 people at the same time! Yet I never had any regrets, never felt I was in the wrong place. The physical challenges were real: waking early every day, eating only vegan food, operating on someone else’s (German) schedule, dorms and bathrooms in two different buildings…etc. But the drive to co-create a culture of love and abundance made the sacrifices feel insignificant.
Becoming a communitarian meant transformation had to happen internally, not just around me. Every day, I chose to continue. I marveled at my own capacity to adapt, often reluctantly, and at everyone else’s commitment and resilience. We kept choosing each other. Little by little, I fell in love with each and every one of them. As we revealed our essence, shared our truths, bared our souls, the inner beauty started to shine. Instead of mere faces, I started feeling the hearts. We were all yearning for a better world. Willing to do our share toward collective healing. Refusing to normalize exploitation, genocide, and apathy.
When I started my open-ended journey around the world in 2017, Tamera was one of the first stops I made. Back then it was curiosity that brought me. This time it was grief.
As my free-flow life became overshadowed by the rage, the sadness, the sheer helplessness of watching genocide unfold in Palestine in real time, and the silence of people who should have said something, I felt the need to do something with that weight, because carrying it alone was unbearable. Not to escape it. Not to look away. But to ask, seriously, what it would take to build a world where this doesn’t keep happening. War doesn’t begin at the border. It begins in the small, daily failures to see each other as human, the same failures of empathy that let occupation, apartheid, and genocide get normalized, footnoted, debated as if they were opinions rather than atrocities. Tamera’s whole premise is that peace has to be researched and practiced like anything else worth mastering, that healing the world starts by healing the wound of separation between us.
Being at Tamera gave me hope. Just like it did nine years ago. Except this time, hope isn’t a feeling I’m waiting for. It’s a practice I’m choosing, on purpose, every day, because the alternative is letting despair win, and I refuse to give it that.
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Unconditional Love 