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How does the Permaculture Internship fit into the deeper context of the Lama Foundation?

The internship is a unique experience at the Lama Foundation. This will be the second year that I am offering the internship. The first year of the program was a huge success, and it gave us a lot to reflect on and how to make the experience richer and more harmonious within the larger context of this spiritual community. This document is intended to provide some deeper understanding of what the Lama Foundation is and how interns can expect to integrate into this diverse community while focusing on the specific curriculum of the Permaculture Internship. This will give potential interns some background as to what they would be stepping into. I see this as the first stage of the application.

Roles and responsibilities at Lama:
Many people come to the Lama Foundation each summer to co-create and participate in a unique community experience. In the summer the lama community swells beyond the year-round resident circle to include guests, "retreatants," long-time friends of lama, summer staff called "stewards," and permaculture interns. Summer stewards often make up the largest group in the summer. These are a diverse bunch of people who have also come from near and far to learn and experience life in this spiritually focused intentional community. (please read more about the summer steward experience on Lama's website - it will have a lot of useful info for interns as well) The Lama Foundation has many aspects, but in the summer our role as a retreat center is in the forefront. This is the main way that Lama supports itself, and therefore much of the focus of residents and stewards is in serving the retreats and visitors - cooking large meals, cleaning spaces, etc. In addition, residents hold various "guardianships" or specific responsibilities to maintain the myriad functions of the Lama Foundation. Interns' focus is of course on the land and the internship curriculum. Starting in midsummer, interns will also participate once a week in cooking and cleaning or other community needs. This is meant to help interns integrate more deeply with the stewards and residents and the broader aspects of community functioning. Stewards will also have the chance to participate in the seva projects of the internship, though this will shift depending on steward numbers and community needs.

Curriculum at Lama:
We often speak of the curriculum that we are each engaged in, and this includes many things: learning how to live together in community, how to approach our "work" here in a broader way: as "seva," or self-less service for the collective benefit of the community, the individual exploration of spirituality and personal growth, and participation in the diverse spiritual practices and teachings offered within the community. All community members are encouraged to offer their own spiritual practices as well.
The Permaculture Internship is a unique experience at the Lama Foundation. Interns take on the full internship curriculum in addition to many aspects of the community curriculum discussed above. Their role is similar to summer stewards, but they are focused heavily on the permaculture curriculum and their seva is mostly out on the land. The interns spend almost all their structured "on " time within the internship group of 4-6 people, which can become a tightly bonded community in itself. This bonding is natural, since we spend most of our time together, and share a common passion for permaculture. At the same time, though, the interns and their seva contributions are an integral part of the Lama community. I want to stress that this spiritual community is not simply a venue where this program takes place. Permaculture never operates in an isolated context. The internship is an opportunity to explore community living, spirituality, sustainable agriculture, all as complementary and interconnected human systems.

Lama's evolving focus:
In the past, the focus at Lama often overlooked how people lived in relationship to the land; the physical systems, the focus tended to be on spiritual cultivation and alternative modes of social living. This yielded many valuable systems, such as consensus decision making, and the revolving role of "watch" put a live link here, too, which could be seen as expressions of social permaculture design. Indeed, these social structures are often credited with helping lama persist when so many of the intentional communities started around the same time, have dissolved. It took many years before the exploration of living in harmony with the land and the living ecosystem was given more importance. The Foundation has in its mission statement that its purpose is to be "a sustainable spiritual community." This is not a factual statement but a vision, a goal, an intention to seek sustainability (I think the word resilience is more appropriate) in all aspects of the intentional spiritual community: financial, energy and resources, social, spiritual and ecological. Indeed, there is still so much territory to be explored within all these realms at Lama. The internship will focus on how to create resilient and harmonious relationships on the physical plane, most specifically agriculture and wild harvesting.

Community structures:
Interns, along with stewards and residents, commit to participate in a daily half hour of meditation each morning, followed by "practice and tuning," Lama’s daily community meeting; which includes a short practice, a heart sharing, and necessary practical sharing. Also, all community members contribute at least 10 minutes towards clean-up after meals. Interns, stewards and residents also commit to attend the weekly practice of "heart club," a community heart sharing session wherein participants have the opportunity to share from their own experience what is present for them. It can often be difficult for new people to adjust to opening to this level of vulnerability with others, but we have found Heart Club to be one of Lama’s most fundamental practices; it serves to create integrity and connection within the community.
Interns and stewards are strongly encouraged to attend the weekly community practices of Shabbat, Zikr [links for more info]. Weekly business meetings are an open forum where proposals are made and voted upon and community-wide concerns are discussed. It’s a great idea for people interested in learning more about community processes and/or becoming a resident to participate in these meetings. Other diverse offerings happen throughout the summer, and all community members can offer their own skills and practices if there is space and interest. These diverse special offerings are one of the many treats of being at lama, but it is not always possible for steward and interns to attend all of these events because of seva obligations. This is especially true of interns due to our limited internship time, and scheduling is complicated.

Internship structures:

Daily;
• Walk the land each morning if possible, observe the micro and macro flows, patterns, relationships, changes, etc.
• Internship gathering; personal check-in, share and discuss daily observations, outline projects for the day.
• Seva (this includes interns' watering and other duties (these will rotate amongst the interns on a bi-monthly schedule))
• Wrap-up all the days' projects before dinner.

Weekly:
• Focused class session usually once per week - includes discussion of readings, films, guest teachings, etc
• Readings usually assigned each week.
• Hike a mile down to do community garden work and goat milking
• Beekeeping maintenance
• We often make fermented foods such as kombucha, kimchi, cheese, kefir
• 2 days off each week, though maybe not consecutively.

Practical realities of community living:
Living in community can be intense. In the summer, there can be a lot of people living on the land (especially in early and mid-summer), and the retreats come through once a week or so, adding many more new people. People here during the summer often form close friendships quickly, and stewards come and go all summer long, so it can be difficult to say goodbye and then say hello again to new folks over and over. This is yet another aspect of the Lama curriculum. At times it can feel quite socially demanding to live and work here. Additionally, I try my best to balance the needs of the community and internship, but fitting it all into a day can feel pretty tight at times. There is generally flexibility to change the schedule and we can discuss the how it is going in our internship meetings and try to adapt it to best meet all the needs.

How a day might look:

7:00 - 7:30 Observation practice (part of the internship)
7:30 - 8:00 Meditation
8:00 Breakfast and meal cleanup
9:15 - 10:00 Practice and Tuning meeting
10:15 - 10:45 Internship gathering
10:45 - 1:00 Seva
1:00 Lunch and meal cleanup
2:00 - 6:00 Seva (wrap-up projects before dinner)
6:00 Dinner and meal cleanup
7:00 Evening programs on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays

Last year this was the schedule we kept during retreats, and during non-retreat periods, we had a two meal-a-day schedule with a later wake-up. This allowed for about six hours of time for focused land activities.

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