As the vision holder for HOME, I carry a particular responsibility: to gather a team of people who will live and work together through the most tender thresholds of life — birth, midlife transition, and death. This is not a task that tolerates half-alignment. Without real coherence among the people who share this work, conflict isn't just likely — it becomes insurmountable.
I've spent years studying intentional communities, and a pattern emerges again and again. Three things destroy them: the absence of a shared philosophical framework, unresolved disagreement around money, and unresolved disagreement around sexuality. The communities that endure — often religious ones, Buddhist or Christian — tend to survive because a shared belief system gives people a way to contextualise their differences. Money divides groups when people are left to fend for themselves rather than bound by a common need. And sexuality, left unspoken, becomes the fault line no one saw coming. None of this needs to be solved in any single "correct" way — but it does need to be named clearly, from the outset.
The philosophy that holds HOME together isn't a creed in the conventional sense. It's an orientation toward mystery. I was an atheist once, until an out-of-body experience made it impossible to explain who I was without acknowledging something beyond the material. I hold enormous respect for atheists still — this isn't about a belief checklist, it's about humility in the face of what can't be fully explained. Anyone convinced that everything will eventually be accounted for by diagram or language is carrying a kind of hubris I don't want taking root here. What I'm looking for is a lifelong commitment to learning, and a willingness to treat pain and conflict as doorways rather than threats.
Alongside this sits nonviolent communication — not as a perfect system (I've watched it get twisted into a weapon in the wrong hands) but as a shared language for negotiation that every member needs to inhabit. It saves time. It defuses what would otherwise fester. I can't picture a functioning community with someone too stubborn to learn it.
Modern life has taught us to celebrate every dietary preference — vegan, vegetarian, omnivore, carnivore — and in wider society, I celebrate that too. But a single kitchen cooking for vegetarians, vegans, meat-eaters and carnivores at every meal is doing four times the work. That's not sustainable, and more importantly, it's a quiet source of division.
I've lived communally before, where each person cooked for the group just one night a week and was fed the other six. It was a revelation — hours of life returned to me that had previously gone into daily cooking. That kind of liberation only works if everyone is genuinely aligned on what's being cooked.
Fasting sits at the centre of my own practice — for healing, discipline, spiritual connection, and preparation for death. In my experience, it's best supported not by raw or vegan diets but by an omnivorous, ancestral approach: bone broths, well-raised meats, good fats, minimal grain. I've watched people damage their health on vegan and vegetarian diets — lost periods, osteoporosis, mental fog — and I don't say that to condemn anyone's choice, only to be honest about what I've observed and what I want to build my own life around. I'm not rigid about it; I love bread, and I'll never pretend otherwise. I just don't want to live somewhere it's constantly within reach. This isn't a judgment of anyone else's ethics — it's a practical recognition that a shared kitchen needs a shared table.
What binds a tribe together is shared need. I once lived in a community where everyone earned separately, and I felt it as a condensed version of the wider cultural myth of independence — the idea that each of us must secure our own survival first, regardless of what's happening around us. That model quietly drains money out of a community even while people are living inside it.
HOME needs a shared business — not because everyone must do identical work, but because a common revenue stream, built from living and working together, creates real interdependence. It also needs to offer something of value to the wider world. A community that becomes a total island loses its function; one that produces something useful stays connected to society and sustains itself for the long term.
One of my deepest inspirations here is Tamera, a community in Portugal now over thirty years old, which has turned arid land into something abundant through extraordinary discipline. At its core was a long experiment in polyamory — not naive, but supported by years of workshops addressing jealousy directly. What's striking is that, over time, more members have gravitated back toward monogamy, and the community has folded that into the experiment rather than resisting it.
I don't claim to have this fully resolved. I believe deeply in touch, sensuality, and the beauty of physical love — but I also believe stability matters enormously, and that a great deal of pain in communities comes from unexamined desire. Tamera's insight is that nothing between two people is truly private in a shared tribe — what happens between a couple ripples outward. So I'd frame it this way: a basic respect for monogamy, held alongside a conscious, examined freedom — one that asks not just the body but the mind and heart what's really being sought, and that holds real regard for existing partnerships, especially where children are involved. What this rules out clearly is anyone who treats their own desire as something owed, without regard for its cost to others.
Building a tribe from its foundations requires people capable of doing the physical work of pioneering. I once nearly joined a project with two core members already carrying serious health conditions in their fifties and sixties, and I could see immediately how much of the group's capacity would be absorbed by that. I want HOME to be a place where people can come to reclaim their health — but not a place where someone arrives already dependent on ongoing medical management, expecting the tribe to carry what they can't yet carry themselves.
Village dances existed because everyone participated — by stomping, clapping, singing, not necessarily performing. Joy generated collectively is different from joy performed for an audience. Tribal music from cultures around the world isn't beautiful because every voice hits perfect pitch; it's beautiful because everyone sings with heart. So "I can't sing" isn't a valid exemption here — everyone has a voice, and everyone has hands and feet.
None of this has been arrived at lightly. It's the result of years of living inside communities, studying why they succeed and why they fail, and being honest about what I've personally observed. My hope is that naming these things clearly — rather than leaving them to surface later as conflict — creates a container that draws in the people who are genuinely aligned, so that together we can do the work of building something that lasts.
This essay was drawn from a longer spoken talk — you can watch the original here.