Zukunft Sonnengarten

A new Dawn in Zukunft Sonnengarten

It’s been two weeks since I officially moved into my first community and I am thrilled. It feels similar to being lovestruck and I am definitely in the honeymoon phase of this new kind of relationship. Currently I am sat at a temporary desk in my room looking out the window facing south shortly after sunrise, enjoying the view of the trees around what used to be a pond and watching the birds fly by.

It’s been almost 2 years since I first heard of this project, and over 3 years since I quit my job and set out to rediscover myself and explore new possibilities of co-existence on this planet. On my path to figuring out what community living means to me I encountered many like-minded people during my travels. Especially in south Burgenland and Styria I met many people who, like me, were looking to build new communities. There were hours spent philosophizing on what community means to the individual and what it would take for a community to be successful and transcend enough interpersonal differences to become stable enough.

I researched all community platforms I could find in Europe, started making lists of potential communities, joined all the networking groups I could find and attended courses in community building. I ended up creating a 27-page concept on my ideal form of Ecovillage, inspired by my intense research into existing communities. I highly recommend the films “Vollkommen Frei”* I & II and “Ein Neues Wir”, as well as the Damanhur film for those researching into community life. And for those living in Austria, there is an online community podium every two months hosted by a collaboration of GEN Austria and INI-GBW, where projects can present themselves to community seekers. This is where I first heard of Zukunft Sonnengarten, in early 2022.

When I first heard of Zukunft Sonnengarten it triggered something in me that brought up resistance. They were talking about their vision of creating a place where people can come together and experience physical closeness with a range of practices. At that time I still had deep wounds regarding physical contact to others and I closed up to their concept. Through a number of experiences since, I have managed to heal myself in regards to physical contact and have discovered how nourishing it can be to experience unintentional contact with others, like hugging and stroking and that it is not necessarily connected to sexual behaviour. More likely this is our natural behaviour as humans, especially the contact from woman to woman. This helped me view the project with completely new eyes and eventually my interest in Zukunft Sonnengarten was rekindled in the summer of 2023.

More about Zukunft Sonnengarten in the coming blogs 😊

*I will be sharing useful links regarding communities and community building throughout my coming Community Blogs and will occasionally mention initiatives I have discovered along the way, which I feel have contributed greatly to the world of community and would benefit greatly from financial support.