Earthly Problems : Spiritual Retreat Ordered to Uproot Village of Temporary Shelters

For more than a decade, the Ojai Foundation has provided a pastoral retreat for seekers of truth and enlightenment on its 40-acre enclave in the upper Ojai Valley.

On a ridge overlooking the valley, the foundation has erected nearly three dozen tepees, geodesic domes and Mongolian yurts as meeting rooms for its New Age education center and as living quarters for staff and guests.

But the idyllic setting that has attracted artists and philosophers is being torn asunder by Ventura County officials. They have cited the foundation for numerous code violations and ordered the hillside encampment dismantled and vacated by Feb. 20.

Todd Collart, manager of the county’s zoning administration section, said the foundation was issued a permit for a single residential building, not for a campus of temporary structures.

“Either they go back and construct what was approved or level everything,” Collart said.

Foundation officials acknowledge that their hillside village was neither approved nor built to code. But the swiftness and severity of the county enforcement action threatens to undermine their programs for some time, they said.

“They want to uphold what’s environmentally sound by their definition,” said Sharon Gonzalez, 32, the foundation’s bookkeeper and a resident of the encampment since 1988. “We’ve tried to live the way we think is environmentally sound.”

“We would often walk the land, sitting silently in a circle, and again and again we would be turned away from building fixed structures up here,” said Jack Zimmerman, co-chairman of the foundation’s board. “It’s hard to imagine us teaching and gathering in an antiseptic, four-walled building.”

The county crackdown came in response to a neighbor’s complaint about a program held in late October. During the foundation’s largest-ever event, 350 men chanted and beat drums as accompaniment to readings of poet Robert Bly.

A couple whose property abuts the foundation site were disturbed by the unusual music and complained to the county Planning Department, which was considering a foundation request that it be allowed to build a parking lot.

“We understand that this was somehow therapeutic for those attending,” wrote Marsha Hall, who lives on Ojai-Santa Paula Road, “but I assure you that it was not therapeutic for those of us living in the area.”

In response, inspectors from four county departments were sent to the property, which the Ojai Foundation leases from the Happy Valley Foundation, a group that promotes kindred philosophies.

By early last month, inspectors from the planning, building, environmental safety and fire departments had swept through the compound. They cited the foundation for letting 13 staff members and their children live in temporary structures, for an unapproved kitchen, for discharging shower and sink water onto the ground and for not maintaining an all-weather access road.

Collart acknowledged that the grounds were orderly and well-maintained. But state laws do not allow people to live permanently in tents, no matter how well-constructed or remote they are, Collart said.

“Their alternate lifestyle was not part of the conditional-use permit,” said William Windroth, the county building official.

The Ojai Foundation was an outgrowth of Human Dimensions West, an organization formed in Ojai in 1975 whose members sought to explore the common ground of science and spirituality. Joan Halifax, a cultural anthropologist, took over that organization and moved in new directions.

The foundation sponsors seminars, retreats and travel-study programs in various disciplines, generally at a cost of about $200 for a weekend program. American Indian and Buddhist spiritualism figures prominently, but the offerings extend to ecology, meditation, wilderness studies, peaceful cultures and other less conventional disciplines.

The foundation’s 13 staff members and their four children live in the wood-floored canvas domes, tepees and yurts, circular-walled tents that have tepee-type tops and cost $2,500 to $5,000. Staff members earn stipends of $300 a month and up, along with free room and board.

The complex draws electricity from a solar generator and has a communal kitchen in a small wood-frame building, outdoor showers and bathtubs with running water, two toilets hooked to a septic tank and several portable toilets.

“What I am going to miss mostly is being able to sleep here and look up at the stars,” said Leon Berg, a foundation board member who has been living on the site since 1979. “I have a lot of my soul in this place.”

People also were allowed to live at the encampment as part of a work-study program, in which they pay $400 for room and board and work at the campus 20 hours a week.

Doris Bolyard, who lives in a 23-acre ranch adjacent to the foundation’s site, was one of three neighbors who complained to county officials about the foundation. But she said she did not intend to provoke such a swift and harsh response.

“It was like a hippie band at first, but now it’s a better class of people,” said Bolyard, who nonetheless said she supported the county action. “I say live and let live, as long as you live by the rules of where you’re living.”

Zimmerman said plans have been drawn for a $2-million complex of meeting rooms and housing for about 20 people, constructed of rammed earth in Santa Fe-style architecture. The foundation has raised nearly $390,000 needed to qualify for a $300,000 Rockefeller Foundation matching grant, Zimmerman said.

In the meantime, Zimmerman said, the foundation’s programs will have to be scaled back for several years. A mobile home for six people may be moved onto the site, but the other staff members “will be scattered throughout the community as of Feb. 20.”

“We’ve seen ourselves as stewards and stewardesses of the land,” said Zimmerman, a 59-year-old educator. “Even though we have not been in compliance with code, we have very much been in compliance with the land.”