Rats, Stones and the Goddess: A Conversation with Sabine Lichtenfels, Femspec Issue 9.1

By Batya Weinbaum

Batya Weinbaum interviewed Sabine Lichtenfels in July, 2005 when invited to participate in the seminar for Peace Journalists at Tamera. Tamera is an international intentional community in Southern Portugal. They openly maintain free love lifestyle to free up energy to liberate and change an oppressive society, along the lines of New Left thinkers influenced by Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Femspec Journal
• Release date: Mar 11, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310251696

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Femspec Issue 9.1

Rats, Stones and the Goddess : A Conversation with Sabine Lichtenfels

By Batya Weinbaum

Copyright 2015 by Batya Weinbaum

Smashwords Edition

(Ed. Note: I conducted this interview in July, 2005 when invited to participate in the seminar for Peace Journalists at Tamera, an international intentional community in Southern Portugal founded by leftists from Germany who had been persecuted and chased out for being too communal and experimental, especially in terms of practicing and advocating free love and living outside or beyond traditional marriage relationships. They openly maintain this lifestyle is frees energy to liberate and change an oppressive society, along the lines of New Left thinkers influenced by Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich. Every summer the community offers a short intensive Summer University in which lectures, art shows, concerts, study groups and seminars are given, attended largely by Europeans but also by progressives from all over the world, including political thinkers and leaders from places such as Turkey, New Zealand, Eritrea, India, Israel/Palestine, North America, Brazil, Australia, and Colombia. Together members are actively trying to create an alternative society on their stark desert land. They invite people from conflicted areas to live together to learn to live together in peace. The interview is with Sabine Lichtenfels, the spiritual leader of the group. She originally worked as a Christian minister but had difficulty as a single mother1 . She has led peace walks across Europe and through Israel, and writes and performs political theater. Not all her works have been translated, but she has written GRACE - Pilgrimage for a Future without War. The people of Tamera see themselves as a nucleus building a vibration to pave the way to the future. They eat communally, bathe in a communal pond, sing under a tent, paint together as a way to find their place in the community, and seem to have constructed in reality what some of us have read about as futuristic imaginations in literary works, which is why