Remembering Ronda I: A New Beginning?

If you are new to our blog, welcome. A story is being told here, in serial format.  If you have arrived here for the first time, we suggest that you actually begin by reading our “About Us” page, and then start with the post “Playing Catch Up.” To understand the greater context of our story and the world it takes place within, you will find an interview with me, Betsy, imbedded in the post, “Look up the word myth—and advice from Jean Houston.” We are sharing our lives and our journey through the frontiers of consciousness, as it unfolds. Thank you for joining us and sharing your thoughts and insights.

Ronda, Part I.:

It was November of 2014. I arrived for the four day media business residency, in Ronda, Spain, with the intention of starting fresh. I was a freelance film producer again; creatively on my own, after several years spent stewarding the dream of the creation of a transmedia storyworld franchise for Damanhur, the spiritual eco-community in Northern Italy, that my family and I call home.

The Ronda residency was populated mostly with filmmakers and video producers, eleven of us in total, who were interested in creating viable business plans for new media companies. Our mentors were successful European media company founders and business types who had committed to the four day workshop in this stunning Spanish village, perched high above the El Tajo gorge.

Before moving with my family to Italy, I had been an award winning screenwriter and film producer in Los Angeles. I still had projects that I had written prior to leaving LA that were virtually ready to package and I arrived in Ronda, determined to relaunch my film career in Europe.

Determined—in my head at least, my heart was connected to something very different. When I arrived in Ronda, my head and my heart were no longer communicating, at least not during the first three days of the residency.

In 2009, in answer to a non-rational “spiritual calling,” I had catalyzed the move of my family—my husband of three decades and our seven year old daughter—from Los Angeles, to Damanhur. Our new community was and is a completely alternative reality. The Federation of Damanhur is one of the world’s most celebrated spiritual eco-communities. Founded in 1975, Damanhur is a culture based on ethical and spiritual values. We are more than 600 citizens living a new form of society, with our own constitution, art, music, currency, schools and use of science and technology. Damanhur is most famous for our Community’s creation of a massive underground temple, referred to in the media as The Eighth Wonder of the World. The temple is dedicated to the story of Humanity as a unified soul force.

We were the first American family to immigrate to Damanhur. Here, I had unearthed a pandora’s box of story, that was unrivaled by anything I had previously found in my life, spiritual search or career, which has spanned the globe. Buried in the reserved esoteric archives of the community, I had found the most complete and complex history of Humanity that I have ever seen reflected.

In the years after arriving in the Community, my every waking moment and often my dreamtime, has been devoted to developing and implementing a strategy to effectively share the beautiful complexity of Damanhur with the world.

I had worked within the heart of the Community, in collaboration with Damanhur’s visionary spiritual guide, Falco Tarassaco, the King Guides (Damanhur’s elected leaders), the head of public relations, the founders and the community’s attorneys. The full scope of my skills and knowledge from a lifetime in the entertainment industry had been called upon as together we formed a Damanhurian media agency, and worked across multiple platforms to bring the knowledge and research of Damanhur to the outside world. I bridged the creation of partnerships with outside experts, produced a world-wide roll out strategy for the community’s technology facilitating interspecies communication between humans and plants, created the first outwardly facing fund raising initiative and attracted international support and collaborators who today continue to work to bring Damanhur into the world.

I had left the strategy work and the media company I had co-founded within Damanhur two months before Ronda. This was why I found myself in Ronda, as a lone film producer, with a slate of projects that were no longer my passion. The award winning screenplays that were under my arm, were no competition for the story that had wrapped itself around my heart. A story of humanity that transcends cultural, political, national, geographic, religious and spiritual boundaries. A story that represents Global Consciousness.

The development of this story had been at the center of the communication initiative that I had been stewarding for Damanhur. With a remarkable team of Damanhur’s most knowledgable leaders, we had been deeply in the development of this media initiative, which had come to be known as the “Transmedia Project.”

Then, on June 24 of 2013, Falco, the founder and inspiration behind Damanhur left his physical body. His death was a devastating loss to the Community and all who knew and loved him. With his passing, the core team I had worked with became responsible for transitioning the community into the next chapters that were destined to unfold after Falco’s death.

Over the year after Falco’s death, our team dispersed. The outside collaborations I had bridged became more and more difficult to maintain from within the transitioning community. The original vision of the project, which was to define the core mythology at the foundation of this new reality of Damanhur in order to give all of the stories, hand crafted products and alternative services of the community context, had been lost.

I was also exhausted and disheartened by the loss of our collaborative team and the battles that had erupted within it during the stress-filled time of Falco’s passage. In my head, my desire was to step away from the content of Damanhur, which had consumed my every moment for the past years, and go back to my career as a filmmaker. At least for a time. My stated intention was to step away for two years.

Nevertheless, this core mythology had continued to live on inside of my heart, like the vestige of an ancient Mission, for which I had been responsible for millennia.

It was in this state, that I arrived in Ronda.