Bill: We were a very difficult enterprise to get excited about in the early days.
We were very poor, we were very, very scruffy, I guess is the word.
We didn't look so great.
Claire: For a while, there were so many rumors about us.
We all had the same father, or we're all a bunch of crazies, or whatever.
John: We were called the shire people, for a while.
And we were called the dirt people? People didn't know much about us.
Ann: You know when we first came here, we were pretty isolated.
We were so young, it just kind of needed to establish itself.
And as it grew, we like to say that now we're kind of a teenager as a community.
Bill: We are in the small community of Ionia.
Which is part of Kasilof, down on the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska.
Ionia is an intentional community. We were very concerned with mental,
and emotional issues. And were realizing that the conventional ways,
of improving the quality of mental and emotional health, with drugs and therapy,
really weren't getting the job done.
And we were very strongly attracted to the notion that a whole different way of life,
that included everything. Family relationships, food, activity, community relationships,
would yield a healthier mental, emotional, and physical well being.
Now, in order to carry through with that experiment, we had to,
we found we had to make some fairly radical changes.
Claire: I kind of consider myself to be kind of like a trust fund baby,
without the trust fund.
We don't go to school, we're all home schooled.
And not having a rigid, kind of set of rules and regulations,
of you need to learn this, so you can do this.
You need to do this to be a good person...
It's just more about all of us, men, women, and children, kind of learning
what makes sense together, every day.
Ann: The food, the food is delicious. I feel like there's real food in our food.
If I break down the word macrobiotic, it means large life.
Food is such a nice way to be in control of one's life.
To create your own destiny with food.
How I'm gonna feel, how I'm gonna think, how I'm gonna respond to things
that are happening in the world. All of that is a part of food.
Claire: We're food obsessed. Yeah, it's very much the center of everything.
It all kind of started with the first generation interest in food,
and seeing how food affects you, with learning about macrobiotic.
Well we try to stick with whole foods.
In the summertime we have a lot of our own garden vegetables.
Sea vegetables, land vegetables, grain and beans, are the main things.
Bill: What keeps Ionia going isn't whether the books get kept well,
or the carpentry project happens. It's a spirit thing.
Fundamentally, there has to be a very strong want to be here.
And there were many, many moments where it would have been an easily defensible,
rational act to leave.
To say, the hell with this, I'm outta here, this doesn't make any sense.
Claire: I didn't start really realizing what it meant to grow up here,
until I got a little bit older, and I started making friends in town.
In more kind of traditional family settings.
I don't think we could have done this anywhere else.
Alaska was the only place that was really like, "Okay, do what you want, I don't care."
Alaskans are very understanding about alternate ways of living.
Ann: I didn't know it until I left, I really was like, why do we live in Alaska of all places?
But I went and I traveled and I lived in other places, and I saw the world,
and there's many wonderful places. But this was the right place for us.
Bill: What if we weren't doing Ionia? What would our life together be like,
and individually? I'm almost certain I'd be much more alone than I am.
The things that inspire Ionia inspire many people around the planet, I'm sure.
We're not the only ones playing around with the things we're playing around with.
I might have become involved in some of those other things.
It's just once having chosen this, I find it interesting to stick with that choice,
to see where it goes.
John: I'm most passionate about the simple life, that I struggle to be satisfied with,
on a daily basis. Happiness is, seems to me,
that's the wherewithal, and the ability to go after what's most important to you.
And having company in that, is a really nice perk.