Talking Rainbows (1 of 2)

I personally know several people who’ve gone to Rainbow Family gatherings. The life they lead off the grid fascinates me although I’d be hard-pressed to step away from the net for the five or six weeks a full gathering experience would require. The magnitude of a disorganization that somehow generates its own occurrence independent of any one member just on its surface is such an aberration in the social order that discussing it publicly seems important. Freeman is the host of ‘The Freeman Perspective‘ on public access television in Austin, Texas who has described himself as something of a cross between David Icke and James Redfield. What follows is our discussion on the rhizomatic counter-public sphere that is the Rainbow Family of Living Light.

Wes Unruh:

You go by the name Freeman, you’ve been going by this name for years, and you’d consider yourself a part of the disorganization of the Rainbow Family as in, you’re an unofficial member of a disorganization. So what does that mean, that there’s non-members of a disorganization? What is this ‘Unhappening,’ what is this culture?

Freeman:

Yes, I am an unofficial member… that’s an interesting question. I don’t know if I can answer that. It was really a magical collective. I personally have never gotten directions to Rainbow, and nothing ever came and said ‘You should go to rainbow’ it just happened. So you got me stumbling there on that one.

To define Rainbow is a very difficult thing. It is a truly human experience. Once you get out to Rainbow and you start to recognize what humans are really like, instead of what we think they’re like from civilization… Now recognize that civilization in my dialog is a dirty word. For me, if you look at civilization, and most people don’t question what civilization is trying to accomplish. We just think that this is what has come of human progress, that this is the inevitable result of human activity. Here we are just working 40 to 60 hours a week, just slaving away for some unforeseen conclusion that nobody’s even thinking about, they just know they have to work.

And once you get out to Rainbow and you get to see what humans are really like.. first out at Rainbow everybody works very hard, but loves it. Everybody works for labors of love. There’s nobody out there getting paid, there’s nobody out there expecting a paycheck at the end of it, yet everybody is working and they love it. They do it because human beings love one another, and that’s just the way we are. We love to help one another. And so once you get out to Rainbow you get to see the contrast of what a human society is, and the inhuman civilization that we exist in.

WU:
It’s been described as a nomadic utopia, and it’s not just arranged around a nomadic lifestyle but one that’s completely off the grid. Wilderness areas in the middle of the summer, divorced from the standard technological apparatus of everyday life. It’s very natural, outside of standard monoculture. What are the reoccurring themes that run through the gatherings?

F:

Let me start off by saying that I have witnessed at almost every single gathering the release of anxiety in the body. And this is an amazing thing to witness, because the body will actually shiver and shake. I’ve seen teeth chattering, tears pouring, and these people don’t know what’s happening to them. They just sit there and their whole body is shaking and shivering. We have no idea of all the trauma that we actually deal with, with just sound and media, the constant barrage of noise in our brains and in our bodies and all around us. And when you get out to Rainbow, all of that’s gone. And not only is all the noise gone, but you are safe. You don’t have to think at Rainbow. I tell people you can go there naked, and you’d be perfectly okay.

I would recommend bringing a cup and a spoon, but other than that you don’t need anything. It’s true, you don’t need to form a thought, it’s just not necessary within the tribe.

Everything is there. A lot of people want to consider the Rainbow a festival, and that is not what it is. I mean sure there’s festivities going on at in Rainbow but the thing itself is not a festival it’s a gathering of humans. One of the biggest differences between Rainbow and the ‘real world’ is that when you’re in there, everybody is your friend.

When you walk out of Rainbow and you come back into civilization and all of a sudden nobody’s talking to you anymore. You walk into the grocery store and everybody’s looking down and nobody’s socializing and you don’t understand. Wait a minute now, I know all these people can speak! That really is the biggest difference, is the community of humanity.

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WU:

So you’re discussing is essentially a social network that is broad, diverse, and which spans the globe in terms of it’s reach. You’ve met hundreds of thousands of people now, in part because you’ve always been a cook. How many people do you think you’ve met, and fed?

F:

Within Rainbow, there are hundreds of kitchens, and everybody wants to be a part of something. And that’s the only way to experience Rainbow. If you go out there just to party and have yourself fed you’re not experiencing Rainbow. You’ve got to walk up and say ‘what can I do?’ And then you’ll find whatever it is you’re naturally inclined to do.

Some people like to dig shitters. I personally am not a shitter digger. But some people get great pleasure out of digging big holes in the ground. Now what you’ve got are a collection of tribes. My kitchen is known as Milliways, or the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, where everybody speaks with very bad British accents.

We have a lot of fun with that. And we’ll be sitting there cooking and just having the grandest time, and at one point we turned around and realized we actually had a full-on audience watching us cook. They thought we were putting on a show. It was just us, that’s just the way it naturally is, creative play is the state of the union there.

So what you have is multiple tribes all accomplishing different factions of reality. I think that you need them all. There are just so many people out there putting in and giving all that they have. As you start to walk around you won’t make it twenty feet. You might think that you’re going to do something, that you have some idea in your mind, and you’ll start heading in that direction and then you’ll run into somebody. Of course everybody says hello, everybody is friendly, and there are no downward eyes. Everybody’s making eye contact. So you’ll start talking to that person and next thing you know you’re walking wherever they were going. And they don’t really know where they were going either so then you run into the next person, and they start talking, and you end up going where they were going. And eventually you end up somewhere that was nowhere near what you were thinking you were going to do.

Towards the first of July when the official gathering begins, things do kind of break down because all of a sudden you’ve got a bunch of people who’ve come to the ‘festival’ which does not exist. And they don’t understand the way. And when these greenfoots, tenderfeet, greenbacks, whatever you want to call them, the green ones show up and things will start to go foul. Because they’ll start bathing in the creek and the springs, doing things in a way that shouldn’t be done. This is just ignorance, it’s just that they don’t understand how to survive in such a culture. They’re used to having their water treatment plants and whatnot.

On Thursday I’ll follow up with the second half of this interview. This is video from May 2007, Regional Rainbow Gathering in Mendocino State Forest:

Rainbow Family Glossary

Video clips via Welcomehere.org

Part Two of this Interview