Dear friends,
When architect Charles Durrett told me his cohousing community feeds 30 people for $90, I nearly fell out of my chair.
"Are they all breatharians?" I asked. "You're feeding them air?"
He laughed. Half an acre of garden provides 80% of their summer vegetables. One lawnmower serves 34 houses. They cook together, eat together four times a week, and somehow make community look easy in a world that's forgotten how.
Charles coined the term "cohousing" in 1988 after studying Danish communities. Now, 35 years and 55 designed communities later, he's witnessing something remarkable: children who grow up in cohousing report "no holes in their hearts." One high school student wrote that no kid raised in cohousing would ever use drugs—they're simply too connected, too seen, too held by community.
But it's his latest work that stopped me cold. In Iceland, at a place called Sólheimar, 45 people with autism or Down syndrome live alongside 45 neurotypical residents. When Charles asked one resident why he was always smiling, the man replied:
"I've only lived here two years, but I'm very engaged. I'm part of the choir. I love dancing in the evenings."
This from someone who'd never lived outside his parents' home, never had a job, had only an hour of peer interaction weekly—usually playing video games online.
The numbers are staggering. People with autism drown at 166 times the rate of neurotypical people—they simply don't know how to react when falling into water. Most spend the majority of their time isolated in their rooms. At Sólheimar, they're artists selling work internationally, actors performing at the State Theater, engaged community members measuring success in "smiles per half hour."
Charles shared something that haunts me:
"Community has been around since hominids walked the planet. You folks in single-family houses—you're actually the experiment."
At 86, watching our society fragment into deeper isolation, I see in Charles's work both diagnosis and cure. These aren't utopian fantasies. They're functioning communities where dinner costs $2.50 per person, where parents of autistic adults finally get respite, where the old anthropological truth reasserts itself: we are tribal animals who need each other to thrive.
If this interview goes viral, Charles jokes, there'd be a line of applicants from the East Coast to the West.
He's probably right.
Golden light,
Dr. Richard L. Miller
Links & Resources:
Charles Durrett's work: cohousingco.com
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Psychedelic Medicine at the End of Life: Dying Without Fear (release date: November 5)
Freeing Sexuality: Psychologists, Consent Teachers, Polyamory Experts, and Sex Workers Speak Out
Psychedelic Wisdom: The Astonishing Rewards of Mind-Altering Substances
Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca
Integral Psychedelic Therapy (co-edited with Jason A. Butler & Genesee Herzberg)
