Simple Living & High Thinking
Sustainable living for our planet

If you’re a fairly aware soul, you probably already know that our planet is in need of some deep resuscitation. Green Living is a necessity of all those who come here to live and study. For starters, we’re completely off-the-grid, which means that we’re enough away from standard electrical lines to NOT be connected to “The Grid” that supplies common electrical energy. Instead, we’re a self-sustaining community making all our own power with a small generator, and other alternative solutions. Currently, we’re working on becoming totally solar and wind, and seeking donors to help. Having our own power plant is a great learning tool, especially in terms of understanding how much we’re able to produce, and how much each of us uses each day of the year. Using lights, computers and heat sensibly becomes the status quo. Here are some other ways we’re living simply in a shared community environment:

Sharing meals together: One large kitchen supplies delicious vegetarian meals for all of us, three times daily. Staff, faculty, students and monks all share a common dining room. This “family ashram” environment provides opportunities for interaction with all ages, and meaningful conversations that can expand awareness of other’s realities. It’s not uncommon to share a table with a small child who has a parent living here, an older monastic member, a group of boarding high school boys who use one of our dorms, or some younger college students.

Sharing rides & cars together: Here, it’s an essential part of commuting, whether it’s down to Ananda Village (5 miles away), to town for errands or a night out, or a longer road trip. We all pile in one of our 3 vans or “large ride cars” and keep the cost down, the impact on the road less and the satsang (quality time spent with like-minded souls) higher. Some of us share a car (and it’s expenses) together. Some of us have our own cars. We’re all striving for simplicity and finding ways to live together in a supportive way.

Growing Our Own Food: We have a kitchen garden on site, which gives us fresh organic vegetables. We also recently designed and built (the students did this as a project in one of their classes) a unique passive-solar greenhouse that we’re beginning to use for growing more of our own food. You can see photos of this educational process within our website.

Common Meditation Gardens: We’re all within walking distance of the dining room, common lounges, dorms and bungalows, staff cabins, classrooms, offices, art studio, our meditation temple and beautiful gardens. Instead of each of us owning (and taking care of) our own small gardens, we have one large, beautiful garden that we all maintain together, with the help of our resident gardener. There are several small ponds and sitting areas for meditation and contemplation, shrines to saints of all religions, and an intriguing home for butterflies, birds, frogs, fish, and dragonflies.

Off-The-Grid Living: Here, we’ve been living simply for over 40 years, out of both necessity and the desire to keep a light footprint on the earth. Several years ago when California underwent a series of “power blackouts” we were un-touched. Our on-site “power-plant” kept us running. This is a great model for local self-sufficiency and the small communities solution.

Living Harmoniously with Nature: Our campus trees and gardens become a live aviary for migrating birds in the spring. We’re always happy to see (and hear) wild birds and animals in our forests. There are many miles of hiking trails nearby, and some beautiful hikes right within our own campus. We share the nearby forests with deer, wild turkeys, squirrels, raccoons, bobcats, skunks, coyote, foxes, mountain lion, and yes, even the occasional California black bear. If we do our composting correctly, the wildlife doesn’t become attached to us and is able to forage naturally.

Simple Living Within Our Means: As a small college within a spiritual cooperative community, our hope is to offer an alternative way of living that will inspire others to have the courage to discover new models of simple living and high thinking. We encourage student shopping in the nearby “Jewel in the Lotus” thrift store, run by the Ananda Living Wisdom School, our sister school for pre-school through high school. We support our local growers and merchants, and limiting unnecessary luxuries. We also encourage students to work hard and stay out of debt. A student living here will gain a new perspective in modeling communities of the future that will help our planet recover from many of today’s societal ills.

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