The Dream Is Alive, Part 1

The Trellis Community Story

Context of this Article

(Note: for the context of this article, see my main substack, The Dream Is Alive: The Trellis Community Story)

Here below is the full story of a commune I founded with my first wife and ran very successfully for 3 years, 2007-2009. It is also the lead article on my new substack Creating Utopia, which is about the intricacies of Intentional Community (IC) and the process of starting them.

This is one of my long-form (essay style) articles. In general, I try to keep my articles short. But not this one. The memory is still fresh and the feelings alive, even though these events happened over 20 years ago. It’s a good story and I want to tell it.

I will follow-up with The Dream Is Alive, Part 2. It is the story of the next chapter: creating an intentional community which is designed from the get-go around the Authentic Relating paradigm. There are currently only two such communities in the world. With luck, ours will be the third.

But let me get started…

I meet Rebekah (late 2003)

The timing was perfect. I was 43 years old, young, bright, ambitious, horny and looking for love. In the spring of that year I had written the first draft of what would later become my memoir Broke, Single, Crazy and Old: The Redemption of a Sex and Love Addict. The writing had healed me from two karmic relationships which had occurred simultaneously 3 years before and which had almost destroyed me. It was a heady time, as often occurs to me on completing a major piece of writing.

My life tends to follow the seasons of my writing. It was the beginning of a new “epoch” as I call it, the clearing of the hurts and mistakes of the previous epoch, a new stage of life full of excitement and opportunities. A new “epoch” starts with an internal shift, but soon thereafter comes a change in circumstances (as in a move, new job, new relationship, etc.). This is what I live for.

I had just moved to Philadelphia, and I met Rebekah at a Lafayette Morehouse event there. It was an introduction night for their foundational course which is called Basic Sensuality. Rebekah was assisting. She was living at the time in the Morehouse in Yonkers, NY. I thought Rebekah was both cute and intriguing. I like smart women.

I caught Rebekah’s attention that night as somebody asked me if I had a girlfriend. I replied “not yet”. We went on two more dates, her traveling from NYC to Philadelphia. On our second date she slept with me in my small attic apartment. Later she told me she had a strong feeling of “coming home” in my arms. I felt the same. On our third date, I moved into the Yonkers Morehouse.

A few words about Morehouse

I knew nothing about Morehouse, but I liked Rebekah and was very interested in intentional community (IC). Morehouse would be a big part of my life for the next 9 years.

It is a lifestyle and developmental philosophy based on the teaching of a man named Victor Baranco. Even though it started in 1968 (over 50 years ago), it remains revolutionary to this day. Part of my mission in life is to teach this philosophy. I also try and practice it in my own turbulent but deeply engaged marriage with Sophie. Morehouse philosophy is essentially the game of love. It’s a very high game.

I don’t have space here to go fully into the history and philosophy of the Lafayette Morehouse. You can find essays and stories on my other substack and podcast, Relational Erotic Intelligence. I will say here, however, that Morehouse philosophy was ahead of its time. It has concepts around sexual polarity (differences between men and women) which are critical to understand for a person who wants to be successful with the opposite sex. Doubly so now that ideas of sexual polarity are unpopular, and many consider them regressive. The unpopularity stems, IMHO, from a fundamental misunderstanding of sexual polarity. I elaborate on this in my article/podcast What Women Want. It’s a good read, but long.

Aside from the sexual teachings, Morehouse remains absolutely brilliant as an intentional community model. At core it’s about fun, human connection, healthy communication and self-responsibility. It fulfills the fundamental purpose that every IC should fulfill (and most don’t, or do so half-assed): which is to get kind, caring, fun, funny and smart people together and collaborating. People who spread joy and who have enough self-awareness to pull-back when they realize they are NOT spreading joy. Such people attract like-minded people, and as such amplify the value-added. Which is the only way we are going to save this sorry planet, by the way. Not through newer and better systems and philosophies, but through love. Love doesn’t just “happen”, it emerges in the inter-subjective we-space. This idea is what makes me get out of bed in the morning.

But I digress.

I move in to the Yonkers Morehouse (2003)

So I moved into the Yonkers Morehouse. At the time it was an enormous house in Yonkers NY, about 45 minutes by train north of Manhattan. There were roughly 14 people living there, in a true, 60’s style commune focused on having fun. Two of those residents were Rebekah’s girls, who were at the time 5 and 10, respectively. I became a step-dad to two vivacious girls overnight.

I thought I had died and gone to heaven. The girls were “commune children” and hence way more relationally intelligent than the average child (although later they complained about this, of course they wanted “the white-picket fence family”). As Rebekah puts it: “they got to inherit other people’s neuroses”. Lucky them, even if they did not realize this at the time.

I spent 3 years in Yonkers – turbulent but highly developmental, and mostly fun years. I started a website development agency, which scraped by most months but every once in a while hit the jackpot through affiliate promotions. I was with a woman I loved and who loved me, two adorable children, and later we got married. We traveled quite a bit, including to the Morehouse campuses in Hawaii and Lafayette CA to take courses. Rebekah and I started leading Mark groups in NYC. We attended and helped produce Morehouse courses at the house. It was a good life. One of our house-mates adored the children, so we got free babysitting too. And in general, the commune took care of the children. I was not a very good step-dad, but I learned a lot about parenting. The girls are now 27 and 33. And they are doing okay.

Things started going south in Yonkers…

After 3 very good years, things started going south between us and the Yonkers Morehouse. Finances were challenging, we did not like the absentee housemother who lived in Hawaii. Later (when I myself became a “housemother”) I realized this is very normal: people whose time it is to leave, project all their stuff on to the community leaders, give them the finger and leave. They make the community leaders responsible for their choice to leave, when the simple truth is that it’s just time. In Morehouse this is called “assigned author”. As humans, we naturally look for other people to blame for our choices. In truth, our three years in Yonkers were spectacular. But it was time for an upgrade. It was time to start our own commune.

We buy Trellis House (2007)

So here is our situation at the time: we had a very unstable business which paid the bills some months and others not, and was barely supporting our lifestyle. No savings, and Rebekah wasn’t working. Rebekah did some research and said to me: “why don’t we buy a house in Philadelphia”. I replied: you must be crazy.

This was early 2007, right before the sub-prime mortgage collapse, when anybody could buy a house on a so-called “no-docs mortgage”. This means: you tell the bank what you make, and they don’t verify it.

In the end, we found a large house in Norristown PA (near Philadelphia) which could fit up to 12-14 people (more depending on how the space is organized), and bought it for $380k and two high-rate mortgages costing $5k/mth in payments and taxes. They paid us $10k to move in (we only needed 5k in cash, which we borrowed from a friend and promptly repaid), and in the end, 6 years later, they also paid us $5k to move out. We lived in that house for a total of 6 years, and did not pay the mortgage for the last 3. It’s kind of hallucinogenic, really.

What we did not know – and the real-estate agent did not tell us, probably deliberately – was that the house was not zoned for a commune. It came under so-called “single-family housing” also known as the “up to 3 unrelated people” rule. This means you can live with your 8 aunts and uncles and 24 nieces and nephews, no problem. But you can’t live with four unrelated friends. Even in a house with 12 bedrooms.

This is true, by the way, in most urban-zoned houses. Zoning boards do vary in how much they enforce the rule. We would find out that Norristown did enforce, and also that they were rather brutal.

The first 2 years (2007-2008)

We hired a truck, packed up and moved the whole family to Norristown. I will never forget sleeping that first night on the floor of the living room, all of us. Our youngest was just 8 years old. It was a heady time. I had never owned a house before.

Then came the rather difficult and risky (due to time-pressure) job of filling the house with people. At the time we charged $600/mth rent per adult and half that for children. In a Morehouse you don’t get a fixed room, rather the housemothers assign a room for you, and will occasionally change it. Also, in a Morehouse you are always building / shifting and sometimes sub-dividing the spaces according to the needs of the people and the community. The idea there is that the living space is less important than the quality of the relationships. We spent quite a bit of time, for instance, building walls in our basement. That project took a hit when our sewer got blocked and flooded the basement with shit. This happened periodically, but was actually the only building challenge we encountered in our 6 years there. That house was spectacular, and perfect for a commune (other than the zoning).

Because we decided on who got the rooms, Rebekah and I carried a lot of power. In a best-case scenario, Morehouse is an “enlightened dictatorship”. In a worst-case (and I have seen this happen), it is pure-and-simple hazing. Our rental rate was significantly above-market (perhaps $100-150 more than market) but it brought the benefits of living in community. This included a lot of holding by the house-mothers and other house-members, fun events to participate in, and your very own on-call therapists (Rebekah and me). Honestly, I think it’s a pretty good deal. Depending on how enlightened the “therapists” are. I would say that, by and large, Rebekah and I were pretty good house-mothers. Or at least “good enough for the working class”, as I like to say. That house was a happening place for the first few years.

We had some community in Philadelphia as I had spent time there before. There was also a smaller, non-residential Morehouse community who initially welcomed us (later they turned on us, for no reason which we could discern). We were connected to a large therapeutic community called Essential Experience (EE). All of our house-members ended up doing the EE workshop, as did Rebekah and I, which connected us even more. We ran Mark groups in our beautiful living room at least weekly, charging “$10 or whatever” at the time. Meaning that we would accept donations. There were weeks we had over 20 people at our Mark Groups. We also rented out the space for weekend workshops. We produced Morehouse courses (which also means enrolling people), we ran the first Philadelphia event for Saniel Bonder and Waking Down in Mutuality, we did raw food weekends, and more. It was, of course, completely illegal to run commercial events at the house. We knew nothing, even had a public website which listed our programs.

I was in heaven. This was the life I had always wanted: doing good work, surrounded by my friends and making a difference in people’s lives, inside a loving family. Unfortunately, it was neither financially nor emotionally sustainable. I was too unconscious at the time to really accept this. But Rebekah and I together were very powerful.

It was always stressful finding house-mates, as naturally some of them move on and have to be replaced, and we were on very tight financial margins. But it seemed that the right person always came along at just the right time. Relationally I was still kind of an idiot in those days, as I had not yet encountered Authentic Relating (this happened many years later, in 2016). I did not even know NVC at the time. Perhaps I compensated for my relative unconsciousness with latent talent, who knows. Perhaps the situation (and Rebekah in particular, God bless her) brought out the best in me.

The third year (2009)

The beautiful dream which we had created started unraveling in year 3. I feel a little sad thinking about it. In retrospect, it’s clear that I / we over-reached. But I also hold to the idea “better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all”. The dream cost me my first marriage, but perhaps (God willing) it led me to the place I am now, 15 years later.

Things became difficult in the third year. Rebekah’s ex-husband sued us for full custody of the children. It was completely crazy (I won’t get into the story), but our connection to Morehouse did not help (it has a reputation for being a cult, which is nonsense). We won the custody case, but it caused us tremendous anxiety. I also lost my job that year as my company closed down. I worked for a while in a well-paid contract writer job, but I was laid off. My marriage was challenged. Particularly when Rebekah got stressed or upset, I could not hold it. Rebekah started feeling that running a commune was a lot of work for not much pay. And who could blame her. I was still too infatuated with my vision to see things clearly.

It was time to call it quits.

The Zoning board shuts us down (late 2009)

Fortunately or unfortunately, the zoning board intervened. We got a knock on the door one morning and found two agents. They asked us if we were running a commune. Having no reasonable grounds for denial, I said yes. Two days later we found a notice on the door that we were in zoning violation and needed all the tenants to evacuate the house, or else it would be condemned. If it were condemned, this would mean our family could not live there either.

Threatening to condemn the property and making everyone leave in a week can be seen as kind of brutal, or excessive force. “Condemnation” means the property is unsafe, which was obviously not the case with us. Later I learned that this is typical of zoning boards. They have tremendous power, and sometimes use it inappropriately. We did have the right to legally challenge of course, but had no money for it. Later we learned that the Norristown construction mafia was involved. Our next door neighbor was the ex-wife of one of the mafiosi and had a restraining order against him. We gave it up.

Conclusion and take-aways

Rebekah and I stopped paying the mortgage (what choice did we have?) and lived in that house for three more years until it was finally repossessed in the summer of 2013. It wasn’t a bad life. Rebekah was relieved, and so were the kids perhaps. We used the time to develop our businesses, and grew a lot as individuals and professionals. Communal activities continued at the house, but did not reach the intensity or the joy of the first 3 years.

We found another therapeutic community called Shalom Mountain and would go there regularly every 3 months for their 3-day retreats. It was magical. Sometimes Rebekah and I would barely be talking to each other, but each time we went to a Shalom retreat, we would come home and be in love for another 3 months. Sometimes the kids would go with us, other times on teenager retreats by themselves. Shalom Mountain has had a profound, lasting impact on them.

When the house was repossessed, Rebekah and I moved to Asheville together and immediately split. Rebekah forgave me eventually. Now we are very good friends.

10 years after Trellis shut-down, I still frequently hear from friends and other prior community members, how important we were to them and how much they appreciated what we did. Needless to say, this warms my heart.

I spent the next 12 years (2013-2024) in a new epoch. Became a digital nomad, traveled all over the world, and tried out other communities. That’s another story. As I write about in the memoir, every epoch of my life has had a primary woman, no matter how brief. Except for this last epoch, but I did write 3 books. Eventually I discovered Authentic Relating in 2016, and became a bit less of a relational idiot.

Then I met Sophie and once again, everything is fresh, new and alive. It’s that relationship, and our peer group which formed out of an Authentic Relating program which I ran with Sophie, which is sourcing this article.

The dream is still strong

The dream is still strong, over 25 years since it began, and 12 years since the first iteration of it died.

Please stay tuned for the next iteration of this dream. It’s happening, Inshallah.